Allen Carr Audiobooks

A hundred cigarettes a day, for more than thirty years, and then nothing at all. Allen Carr (1934 to 2006) was a London accountant with a habit he had failed to break more times than he cared to count, until a hypnotherapy appointment in July 1983 produced an insight that had very little to do with hypnosis: that smokers are not giving up a pleasure, only escaping a trap they were sold.

He turned the idea into The Easy Way to Stop Smoking in 1985, then into clinics, then into an international business. The approach is deliberately contrary. No willpower, no scare tactics, no patches and no counting of days, but instead a patient dismantling of every reason a smoker believes they enjoy it, delivered in the reasonable voice of a man who had been there himself.

He died of lung cancer in 2006, a fact he never asked anyone to look away from, and the Easyway method he founded has carried on since under his name.

The place to begin is The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, read by Duncan Wells, which is the original argument in its cleanest form. Audio suits it particularly well, since the method works through repetition and reassurance, and being talked through it is closer to Carr’s own clinic than the printed page ever managed.

The Easyway titles that followed apply the same logic elsewhere. Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Quit Smoking, read by John Chancer, is the updated treatment, while Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Quit Vaping, with Helen Keeley, turns the method on a habit that arrived after his death. Get Out of Debt Now, narrated by Richard Mitchley, applies the same reasoning to money and spending.

One instruction he always insisted on: keep listening to the end. The selection is below.