From the author: ...This letter is reproduced here in an abbreviated version. It was included as a separate chapter in my second book, “Strength as a Condition for Happiness.” The book comes out of print in the first ten days of November 2011. Sincerely, - Konstantin Es How to quit smoking, and also - Who are they who drink? (Letter from one person to another) ... I am not your doctor, friend, and I am not a healer ! I don’t know about conspiracies, I don’t know hypnosis. I’ll just say this: I drank terribly at one time. But this happened - I abandoned this business ten years ago. And it’s not that I can’t drink, because I’m afraid of breaking down, but I don’t want to. I can drink, and sometimes even allow myself due to different situations (cognac dilates blood vessels). But this thing has become boring to me and I have no desire for it at all now.... A conversation between you and I can work out and it can work out too. A useful conversation, of course. Not chatter...Only this is what I thought, my dear man, - if it is true that you are tired from your drinking to the point of dumbness and mortal melancholy, then adapt to my thoughts. Help yourself. And then I’ll help you. If the main one doesn’t fit in the troika, those attached to him are bad helpers... And here’s another thing: you and I will talk about drunkenness - there are no options. But a little... The main conversation will be about something else. You write that there is no happiness in life... But how is it? What a miracle it will be for you if you and I find it, huh? ))) I’ll start the letter with something else. As I recall, on that same visit to the Urals, which you yourself mentioned, you not only drank to the happiness of the working people, but also smoked shamelessly. So, to begin with my distant, but not complex thought about your problems, I don’t tell you at all I’ll tell you at length how I quit smoking after three decades of persistent addiction to this nasty habit. Then we will move on. Moving is important. Correct movement is life. Only three things can prevent us from achieving the desired result: cowardice, uncertainty and laziness. So let us be courageous, persistent and diligent! * * * ... I already told you above: I am not a doctor or a healer. Therefore, I will not tell you here that smoking is harmful. I’ll note something else - the grandfather of your fellow countryman I. R., as I know, died at 82, having smoked all his life without any fundamental and noticeable harm to his health. There are many who die from cancer caused by smoking at a very young age. And one more thing - don’t we from time to time come across a considerable number of cases when, in the midst of the full flourishing of vitality, for some reasons that are not always clear, absolutely healthy people die? I think there are some other examples. It’s not simple here, and I won’t waste time trying to pose as a specialist, especially since a specialist also needs statistics and its analysis, preferably with reference to the area and profession . Why should I, an amateur in medical matters, tell you what is harmful and what is not? Is it just because almost everyone talks about it and that it is a well-known fact? But this is stupid! - Just because it is harmful to one does not mean it is also harmful to everyone. Just as the opposite is true - what is good for many is not necessarily or not always useful for everyone. And yet it is worth talking about smoking for two reasons. For example, I did not immediately discover the desire to part with smoking. If you don't need it now, it might be useful in the future. This is the first reason for talking about him. The second is that the story about the method of quitting smoking that I invented is also indicative of many other habits that he is tired of, have become dangerous for him and which a person may want to give up. And it’s not just indicative, but easily applicable in practice - if you would like to use it! The model described below for getting rid of the smoking habit can well be used in similar situations. For example, in a situation with your same addiction to alcohol, as a big problem for you. Or - when overeating. In a word, in all situations when a person again and again steps on the samethe same rake, suffering from this, my method may be useful. But closer to the point. An ordinary person (with perhaps rare exceptions) does not think in principle that every habit is important, necessary and should be considered in connection with the entire human body (also a psychophysiological mechanism) and all sorts of invisible internal processes taking place in it. The reason is simple - an ordinary person already has something to think about in our difficult times. Moreover, he is not a specialist and knows little about how his body works. He can say that it hurts or doesn’t hurt, he can guess why, but that’s almost all. Therefore, only at first and very naive glance one can think that smoking consists of very simple things, namely, a cigarette, lighting a cigarette, taking a puff, inhalation and exhalation of tobacco combustion products, which we call cigarette smoke. In reality, this is a very complex process, the origins of which are hidden in the deep childhood of the smoker. Very far away, where he, still a foolish child, first saw people lighting a cigarette, then began to think about it. After some time, the thought begins to creep into his consciousness about how this actually happens, what kind of sensations arise during this, etc. So one day a person comes to his first cigarette, first glass, first lie, first nasty thing, first feeling that everything is allowed to him, etc. Everything “first” that has ever happened to a person is not the beginning; This is a continuation of what was once started. The very beginning is in the memory, where the image of what was once seen for the first time is stored. Even if we can't remember it, it's still there. Memory records in a certain sequence certain facts and events related to the bad habit. The first cigarette is just another brick in its huge building, which can be called not only smoking, as mentioned above, but also alcoholism, gluttony, drug addiction, computer and gaming addiction, etc. If you start to remember, or, more correctly, try imagine how this building was gradually built in your subconscious, you will definitely remember and definitely imagine that there, at the beginning of this “construction”, there were oh, what tasteless moments! And there were a lot of them, and I felt dizzy, and wanted to vomit, and I wanted to end it all, but suddenly it turned out that it somehow distracted me from other moments of life, which were usually unpleasant. Then the understanding came that all this was tolerable, that these moments of unpleasant sensations were temporary and tended to pass, that many people did this, that it could be done beautifully, and that at times there was even some kind of hidden or obvious pleasure in it... Pleasure in... displeasure...And then: smoking – isn’t this proof that you are already big, an adult; that you can do it dashingly, like in the movies? Further - more. The house of nightmare for your brains, lungs and heart, the construction of which once began with a simple glance at your uncle lighting a cigarette, one day inconspicuously turned into a gloomy and multi-story building, with narrow windows covered with thick bars of multiple reflexes rooted in your subconscious, and your desires leave all this heard weaker and weaker... Let's add to this the fact that you have become “cool”: you have money, you are 18 or more years old, you boldly go into a tobacco shop and buy cigarettes that you can smoke in public with impunity... Prison walls your vicious desires are becoming thicker and thicker. But you don’t notice it! And how can you notice that no one calls smoking a wild evil? And that’s exactly what it is! But you don’t notice this until today, if only because before me, no one ever told you about this building inside you. Yes, your mother may have scolded you for your smoking. Yes, most likely, your teachers told you about the dangers of smoking in class, and from the TV screens someone screamed again and again in weak, boring voices that smoking is terribly harmful. However, you pressed the remote control button and saw on another TV channel a cowboy on a horse and a lassoat the saddle. Or - a pot-bellied capitalist with a bow tie and a top hat with a thick cigar in his mouth, sitting in the back seat of a limousine. But what are words about the badness of a habit worth when the hand, obeying this habit, obediently reaches into a pocket and feels there for such a familiar pack of cigarettes, a lighter or Matchbox? Only a few seconds pass, and the lungs gasp from the usual dose, the brain becomes foggy, extinguishing the alarming sparks of various worries and doubts; you instantly forget everything you were warned about and what you were told about smoking! Moreover, in this case, the most important ally of both good and bad is also included in the work against you - His Highest Majesty Time! The longer you smoke, the stronger the walls of the building built inside you at the cellular level of your smoking habit become. Time is like water for sand and cement - it binds you and nicotine smoke together, making you a monolithic and indestructible whole. The habit becomes reinforced concrete, impenetrable, omnipotent. Can you feel this monolith? In fact, you are a weak mosquito against him. All you can do, like a mosquito, is sit quietly and bite painfully. But this monolith, having found you, with one bang will not leave you (I mean your good intentions to leave your habit) even a trace at the site of your bite. By bite I mean your attempt to quit smoking (or drinking, or drug addiction, or playing cards , or overeat, or be afraid, or... continue the list yourself). A person begins to feel this monolithic reinforced concrete for the first time only when he makes his fifth or tenth attempt to stop and return everything to where in the morning it was once not disgusting - foul tobacco taste in the mouth. A taste that cannot be knocked out or cleaned out by any toothpastes, which you somehow forget about day and evening and which you always encounter again and again in the morning, immediately after waking up. Nicotine, as the master of your entire body, as the ruler of every drop of your precious blood, has settled and stuck, entrenched, in every cell of your body. You can’t get it right away either with a Chinese stick or by picking with a pin; You can’t cut it out with a sharp hatchet or pick it up with a toothpick. And where is it, nicotine? You only feel it through the internal stench. But it is already familiar, it is already a part of you, it is you yourself, your aura invisible to the eye. Look at yourself - you no longer breathe the same way as you did when you didn’t smoke. And now you don’t sleep like that, you don’t think like that, you don’t live like that. You begin to noticeably feel and clearly understand that someone is in charge of your life without asking your permission. He impudently manages your time, manages the sequence of your desires. You would like to scream - either to him, or from helplessness, but to whom, where, about what? You become sad, even sadder, you start not caring and you... give up... You light a cigarette again and again... While lighting a cigarette, you think about the fleetingness of life, about the desire for love and happiness, images are drawn in your mind about a beautiful life or those sides of it that scare you. You make a small effort, open your lips, take the cigarette out of your mouth, take a breath, feel the smoke go inside, listen to the sensations, take a sip of beer, lazily look around at the bar’s visitors, you enjoy...What do you enjoy? Have you ever thought that what you feel during a puff is the pain of your lungs, this is their cry, this is their torment?...It’s too late to think. And why? Your eyes follow how your hand carefully carries the cigarette to the ashtray, how gracefully, tapping your index finger on its smoking white body. You break off the ash that has grown at the other end of the filter and again pull your hand to your mouth, take another drag, for a moment your consciousness freezes, your lungs tremble, straining and suffering, you exhale again.... The smoke falls out in clouds, glides in a light stream, slowly flies out in rings or just floats like a curly cloud... You are its owner... You are damn handsome... You are a cowboy, i.e. a boy herding cows... Nearby are the same cowboys and faithful to yougirlfriends...They also know how to smoke...You feel good together...I didn’t tell you very much, but enough for you to form the opinion that you have a very strong mechanism inside you, called in everyday life by the simple phrase “smoking”, “smoking habit” "This habit is a complex of reflexes. Not one reflex, but a whole complex! A reflex is the dependence of one process, one event in the body on another. Pavlovian dogs secreted gastric juice only after a bell or light signal. Their brains knew that after the signal, food would appear. Food needs processing. This requires gastric juice. Before you start smoking, you also first get signals. You don't think about them, you don't notice them. But take a closer look! Something always precedes smoking. It could be a vague inner languor, a thought about cigarettes, groping for a pack, the place where you prefer to smoke... Or - the slight smell of cigarette smoke from the window, a movie character from the film you are now watching... A boss' dressing down, a glass of vodka and a piece of herring that you just swallowed... A colleague who got up from his chair at his workplace, and you know for sure that now he will go smoke, because he picked up a pack of cigarettes from the table... Something always precedes lighting . It could even be an internal “biological clock”. This “something” necessarily provokes everything else - thoughts, sensations, or first sensations, and then thoughts. In turn, thoughts and sensations provoke you to take out a cigarette and put it in your mouth. The feeling of a cigarette hanging on your lip and pressed on top of another is a signal to get matches or a lighter. Or bury the end of your cigarette in the burning end of a smoker's cigarette... There are so many ways to light a cigarette, and how many types of cigarettes, and advertising, and discussion of the taste of cigarettes, and the annoyance that the cigarettes have run out. Oh, how we love then the neighbor who will help out and give a couple of cigarettes in reserve! And with this huge complex of relevant and actively working reflexes in us, a frivolous person decides to put an end to it when he declares: “That’s it! I’m quitting smoking!” He does this without seeing his enemy, without recognizing him, without understanding that he is inside, that he has grown into his consciousness and tearing him out of there or killing him there is not curing a tooth! That's why I quit smoking many times and it didn't end in anything. There are people who can do it right away. But here, as I said above, that only one could do it, it is not a fact that everyone else can do it. I could not! But it was exactly what I couldn’t, but really wanted, that led me to the realization that the habit of smoking is a whole complex of actual reflexes that you can’t take over, you can’t overcome with words alone, you can’t destroy right away. Induced (due to a cause ) a complex of actual reflexes (let's call it for short - ICAR) called “smoking” requires thoughtfulness, calculation and persistent actions that exhaust the enemy exactly until the enemy weakens, runs and disappears, being completely defeated. And now I will share exclusively my experience, how I did it. He's next. After repeated attempts to quit smoking, I again and again returned to the place where I tried in vain to leave! This continued exactly until I realized the prison trap built inside my brain for my own illusions, called the bad habit of smoking! Then I began to understand that the enemy was not just strong, but very strong, extremely strong. I needed tactics because the strategic goal was known - I wanted to give up my addiction to tobacco. This tactic was the tactic of giving up the first cigarette... It was this that was important. Studying the complex of my reflexes, one way or another tied to smoking, I came to the conclusion: it all begins after the deafening slam of the front door when I go to work in the morning. Even if at that moment someone comes towards me, the door is open, and I have already moved ten meters further, I hear him! He is a signal for me! I came out of the front door and heard clappingdoor and reached into his pocket - there were cigarettes and a lighter. I take them out and the process is started. Here is the first puff. Time has passed. The day has begun. Now everything will be as it always is. And it always happens like this: I get to the metro, dive into it and go to my station, get up and light up again. The distance between the first and second cigarette is the distance from the front door of my house to the metro station. The station where I get off to go to work. Thus, two points (the first and second morning cigarettes) and the distance between them is not so much and not only spatial, but also temporal (not everyone takes the metro) - this is the first , what you need to clearly define for yourself. The second and most important thing is to stop saying to yourself “I’ll quit smoking!” A meaningless and even harmful expression. Because a person who has firmly decided to give up a bad habit will definitely give it up - the only question is the timing! But the unnecessary excitement of the entire ICAR “Smoking” as a whole and driving it into rage with this command (“I’ll quit smoking!”) forces the entire complex of reflexes inside to tense up and consolidate. Anyone who has tried not to smoke for at least a day, giving up this crappy business, knows how hard and difficult it can be. And how insidious and merciless are the blows of ICARA “Smoking” when a person does not smoke, for example, a week, two, a month? At first the person feels good. How great he feels; he is the Winner! And now - a holiday, a meeting, a table, fun, the first glass, the second, the third... Guests go to the balcony, there is talk about this and that... “Oh,” our hero decides, “I’ll smoke one for the company...” A new morning is coming. It is unusual - this is the morning of reckoning, this is the day of execution. At first the hero doesn’t believe what happened, but then he got up and, together with his colleague, goes out to the smoking room, embarrassed, asking for a treat. The colleague is generous - he himself has been in such situations a million times, he does not judge. He understands, he’s kind. At lunchtime you go to a buffet, store or the nearest stall and buy a pack of your favorites there. So the second thing is not to tell yourself “I’ll quit smoking!” On the contrary, the subconscious is important and needs to be calmed down! It’s important for him to say: “I’ll smoke, but later: oooooh there – away!” Don’t worry, my body, we will definitely smoke!” And don’t deceive him! I always told mine the truth! I was leaving the front door. A heavy door slammed behind me. I touched the pack of cigarettes in my pocket and said to myself: “I’ll smoke before entering the subway!” So my first cigarette began to move away from me for the first time. I walked to the subway and lit a cigarette there. Then I lit a cigarette, already leaving the subway. Two weeks passed. Approaching the metro one day, I said to myself: “I’ll smoke on the way out!” and went down into the subway... Third. Having refused the usual first cigarette, moving it away from the front door to the exit of their metro, I was surprised to find that I had time to think about something that I had not thought about before. For example, about ICARs in general. I unexpectedly came to the conclusion that every person is an ICAR, having his own name - Ivan Ivanovich Sokolov, Pyotr Dmitrievich Semenov, Dasha Sizova, Katya Pertseva, Anton Gromoboy... Having looked closely, I saw that I am a collection of various ICARs. These are ICAR “Man”, and ICAR “Husband”, and ICAR “Structuring Specialist”, and ICAR “Citizen”, and ICAR “Drunkard” (I was still drinking then!). I’m ashamed to admit, but I discovered in myself such ICARs as “Boor” (I was capable of being rude: in a drunken disgrace it was easy and even somewhat pleasant) and “Household brawler.” I also had ICARs “Lover of Esoteric Literature”, “Admirer of the Weaker Sex”, “Everyman” in me. , “Victim”, “Weakling”, “Coward”, “Bloon”, and also - “What a guy!”, “Adept of Castaneda”... In my mind’s eye, moving all this away from me, I saw that all ICARIES are united into one big ICAR, whose name is “I”. Very slowly, but I still began to think and reach the point that at each specific moment of time and the circumstances corresponding to it, a certain special complex of reflexes that is relevant for this situation is used. I clearly realized that the relevant complex works outside of myconsciousness. Slowly, but enslavingly, the idea of ​​Eric Berne about social roles, and the ideas of K. Stanislavsky about getting used to the role, and the concept of the “assemblage point” of Carlos Castaneda began to come together... Haven’t you read all this? – Well, that’s not at all necessary! – If you now understand that the reflexes that are relevant to you (for example, the reflex “I want and can do this!”) can be consciously induced, filling them with the energy of your desire, formalized by a goal, which is a psychological attitude for a person, then all this can be avoided read. All the same, you will come to what I am now telling you about, namely, to the understanding that each of the living is an ICAR, regularly inducing derivative-applied ICARs, correlated with a specific situation and used in an actual, specific situation. This is especially good for professional actors. Knowing what the expected circumstances are, they, using the power of their imagination, choose the image they need (ICAR) and this image, covering the entire sphere of the subconscious, turns them into ICARs of Hamlet, Prince Myshkin or Napoleon, Gogol's Chichikov or Akaki Akakievich... These reflections became possible mainly precisely in the segment between my first and second cigarette (between entering and exiting the subway). People in the subway are busy with different things - someone is talking with an acquaintance, someone is dozing, someone is listening to music, someone is reading the Bible or a newspaper...I was just thinking. I had a whole 25 minutes of time for this. Speaking about the third, I do not encourage you to think. Talking about the third, I want to say only one thing - when the body is not busy with smoking and processing its results, you need to give it another job: replace the harmful with the useful. Reflection is just an option. Other options could be the thousands of different things that make up a person's life. Choose what is closest to you - music, watching the sky, women, deep breathing, relaxation, cinema, seeds, sex... Choose something that will make your first cigarette irrelevant for you! Next - give yourself time. This is the fourth! A week or two will pass, or maybe a month will pass until you realize that your first cigarette (it used to be the second, third, fourth) is becoming further and further away from you. For me, this distance increased in the following sequence: the first cigarette was first at the front door, then in front of the entrance to the subway, then at the exit from the subway. Then, in turn, there were entrance to the office building, morning tea, minutes before lunch, minutes after lunch, end of the working day, entrance to the metro at the end of work... The most interesting thing is that on weekends I smoked significantly less than on weekdays. On the weekends I just relaxed. I was in no hurry. I didn't have a constant rush mode. Understanding that haste was working against me was also an important point in quitting smoking. I started to slow down. I began to tell myself every day: “Stop! Let’s check the route and speed!” The experiment fascinated me so much that I decided to complicate my task. Having made sure that I now had my first cigarette in the evening, I gave up smoking on days when there were feasts - family or corporate occasions. This was perhaps the most valuable experience. On such days, I told my subconscious: “After the first drink and then today, you and I don’t smoke, but try something tasty - either from the table, or... from a group of girls. Well, really, why not flirt a little today with this lady from the economic department, Tamara Tsaritsyna?” - I tasted and flirted. This was the fifth important moment in this protracted game with my ICAR “Smoking”. In total, it took me about three months to do everything. And all three months I told myself one thing: “I will smoke, but a little later...” and mentally determined the place. The time came when I, having smoked my first cigarette in the evening, felt that it was disgusting to me. Two puffs showed me that I didn't like this thing. A week passed almost without smoking. I enjoyed the fresh air and thought more and more about whatwe need to stop drinking too. When the understanding of the second came, I already knew for sure that the smoker had gotten rid of me. It came untied on its own. It was as if it had fallen off. Like a dried out sore... As a conclusion, I can say the following about this moment in my life. Each ICAR is a clot of energy. Energy does not disappear without a trace. It is always important to redirect it somewhere. In my case, it was thoughts, books, work, interest in productive and life-affirming ideas... And now, my dear friend, when you know that your bad habits have grown into your brain, you still naively believe that they can be pulled out in one moment, like a rotten tooth? Those. to suddenly take and easily destroy what has been built? You seek help and ask him: “How to stop drinking?” You are a child, my friend! The brain will not simply give away anything of its own that it has acquired. Even if this “his” is nicotine, alcohol or a drug for him, he will defend it all! This is how the body works, this is how the brain works. Everything in it is intertwined and interconnected. Interconnected energetically. All his ICARs are a bunch of the finest threads, magnetized to each other by colossal cosmic energies. Nothing comes off by itself. Nothing disappears anywhere, even if our consciousness decides to get rid of it. For the energy involved in retaining the numerous ICARs dormant in a person, the path to other ICARs - useful for the person - must always be clearly indicated and created. Therefore, it is important not to stop drinking, but to behave in a certain way so that the alcohol leaves you on its own. How? I told you about my experience of quitting smoking. He also helped me with vodka. True, this did not happen in one day. But the process was interesting. I still know that I can drink at any time and not fall into a drinking binge. Because alcohol is not prohibited for me. I am no longer waging war with my subconscious. And the most important thing is that the subconscious itself no longer wants to drink. The energy of drinking, which took place in the past, is now involved in something else. The subconscious now prefers fresh air and the tone that makes me different, transforming my whole life... Your ICAR “drunkenness” is your challenge! Whether you accept it or not is your business! And your personal responsibility! Neither mine, nor the responsibility of the government of the country or the United Nations, nor the wife who left you, nor the colleague, nor the stars rising above your head, nor the Lord God! The responsibility is personal to you! And if you accept this challenge, then accept this for support from me advice - don’t be a thick-headed martinet! Become and be a hunter of personal power, who hunts for it inside you and outside in order to make it your ally in everyday life. Find another ICAR in yourself - ICAR “Personal Power”. Start taking care of it. Think about this power constantly as you plan your day in advance. Determine which glass is your first, which is your second, and which second you can make first, moving it away from you in the morning or afternoon... Work hard! Work tirelessly every day, every hour, every moment... And in the evening, before going to bed, forget about everything except that your battle continues and that sleep is precious minutes of rest, given to you by the Universe so that by the morning you gain new strength. Continuing, you will soon notice that another building is growing in you, another frame that transforms you, making you different...* * * So that the above does not seem like lyrics to you, I will say a few words about Polina Dobrolyubova’s material “Woe from Wit, or Leave the Drinking Men at rest”, published in the “Parlamentskaya Gazeta” (No. 160 dated 08/24/02). The newspaper material is an interview with a correspondent with a doctor of medical sciences, professor of psychiatry, head of the department of psychotherapy and psychological counseling of the Novosibirsk State Medical Academy, vice-president of the All-Russian Professional Psychotherapeutic League (OPPL), psychotherapist of European registration Vladimir Yuryevich Zavyalov, who devoted more than thirty years to studying the most acute problem of alcoholism for our country....