Allen Carr With Damian O'Hara

Damian O'Hara is a former chain smoker who after countless miserable attempts to quit, finally did so successfully using Allen Carr's Easyway method. The early part of his career was spent working at international advertising agencies but today he is the President of Allen Carr North America where he heads up the US and Canadian arm of a global organization dedicated to helping smokers quit. Over the past 25 years Allen Carr's Easyway books and seminars have helped an estimated 10m smokers quit successfully. For more information visit www.theeasywaytostopsmoking.com

Guest Blogger Damian O'Hara:

I smoked my first cigarette as an eleven year-old to try to be one of the cool kids. Little did I know that cigarette would spark an addiction that would come to dominate the next thirty years of my life.

As a young man I had been an athlete of some talent. I boxed, ran and played rugby, soccer and squash competitively to a high level. But as my smoking took a stronger hold of me in my late teens, I began to struggle to complete the daily training regimes required to succeed at the highest level, and my love affair with sports fell by the wayside. My sports career was over before it had even really started due to my new ‘friends’, Mr. Benson and Mr. Hedges. By my mid-twenties I was smoking between two and three packs a day.

Over the years I tried absolutely everything to stop smoking. I saw hypnotherapists and acupuncturists. I used patches, gum, and nasal inhalators. I lost count of the number of times I tried to quit using willpower. I never made it to a single day smoke-free using any of these methods; in fact my quitting history was so miserable that I had almost given up trying to give up. Then, as a last resort, my wife booked me into an Allen Carr Easyway seminar. I had heard of many people who had quit easily using the Allen Carr approach, but I knew that I was different to other smokers. Reading a book or attending a seminar might be OK for those lightweights, but not for a hardcore heavy smoker like me.

The Allen Carr seminar was like a breath of fresh air. At last, here was someone who really understood smoking from a smoker’s perspective. No lectures on lung cancer and heart disease. No scare tactics, no guilt. At the seminar it was explained to me why I had struggled to quit in the past. As a smoker I believed that smoking had certain benefits – it helped me relax, cope with stress and control my weight. Because I did not challenge these beliefs, when I tried to stop smoking I still had a desire to smoke. This meant that I needed to use willpower to try to overcome that desire. This created a conflict; part of me wanted to smoke, but part of me wanted to quit. It was this mental conflict – not physical withdrawal – that had created the symptoms of panic and anxiety that made quitting so miserable, unpleasant and difficult.

For the first time I saw smoking as a non-smoker might see it and it was then that I realized that what I had perceived for years to be the main ‘benefits’ of smoking were illusions. If smoking relieved stress, then why was I the most stressed person I knew? If smoking was an appetite suppressant, then why was I 60lbs overweight? Halfway through the seminar, I realized that there was truly nothing to ‘give up’ and from that point on not only was it easy to stop, the very thought of smoking became laughable.

I walked into that seminar a terrified smoker and walked out five hours later a happy non-smoker. That was nine years ago and I have never once had the slightest desire to smoke since. Today I am privileged to work as an Allen Carr seminar facilitator, trying to help others make this wonderful, empowering life-changing transformation.

BackStory: Allen Carr, world-renowned stop smoking guru, was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer in the summer of 2006. It seemed probable that the years he spent curing smokers in smoke-filled sessions at his clinics must have contributed to this illness. Allen said “Given that I am informed that I have cured at least 10 million smokers on a conservative estimation, even if that is the case, it’s a price worth paying”.  He himself was at one time at hundred-cigarette-a day smoker, until he found the Easyway to Stop Smoking.  Allen Carr's books and DVDs have sold more than 10 million copies worldwide.  His smoking clinics, the first founded in London, are operated by trained therapists and have a 90% success rate measured by their money back guarantee.

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