In other words—the more we worry about smoking, and the more we try to exert will power to defeat the habit, the less chance we have for achieving success.

Dr. Knight Dunlap, who made a lifelong study of the learning process—and was outstandingly successful in assisting patients to cure themselves of nail biting, thumb sucking, and other more serious habits—contended that there's one big deterrent to breaking a bad habit or learning a new one: effort.
And Dr. James S. Greene, founder of the National Hospital for Speech Disorders, said much the same thing when he made this comment about people who stutter: "When they can relax, they can talk."

I began to realize that will power would never enable me to give up smoking; and worse still, that I'd probably never be able to give up cigarettes permanently until I found some new habit to substitute for the old.

Unfortunately, there's no emporium where you can shop for new habits.
But there are ways in which you can learn about them.

One evening, while I was reading a book on habit formation, I came across a reference to a number of experiments conducted by Professor Anton J. Carlson. He was investigating ways to undo old habit formations.

In the classical experiments conducted with dogs by the Russian physiologist, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, a signal—such as the ringing of a bell—was repeatedly coupled with the presentation of food. Ordinarily, when you set a dish of food in front of a dog, the dog salivates. Soon, Pavlov learned, he could stimulate this salivation process simply by ringing the bell, without offering food. It became habitual for the dogs to salivate when they heard the stimulus of the bell.

Well, said Professor Carlson, let's assume that habit formation requires a stimulus; if so, then the reverse— lack of stimulation—will break the habit.
I tried to apply this theory to smoking. It isn't hard to recognize situations that stimulate the desire for a smoke. In the theatre an actor lights up and inhales— blppp! you want a cigarette, too. You sip your breakfast coffee—blppp! out shoots your hand for matches and cigarette. Your husband says, "Honey, the checkbook doesn't balance"—and blppp! you rush for a cigarette.

But how on earth can we avoid such stimuli? Answer: Not even in a spacecraft 700 miles above the earth.

HOW DO WE IGNORE THESE SITUATIONS?

Nevertheless, I continued to think about Professor Carlson's theory. There's something appealing about 'lack of stimulation" to a fellow who's basically lazy. Now I realize that when a psychologist uses a phrase like "lack of stimulation," he's referring to the absence of such things as "conditioned stimulus," "Type-S conditioning," "reinforcement," and so on, whereas when I roll such a phrase around in my mind, what I think of is "relaxation." A script editor on the phone, bellowing because an assignment is a wee bit late—that's "stimulation." Flat on my back on a sunny beach, away from such grating "stimulants"—that's "relaxation."

I knew that the vocabularies of Professor Carlson and Jack Heise were different—but suddenly it seemed to me that this made no difference whatever. If, somehow, I could keep myself from responding to a stimulus that triggered the desire to smoke—if I remained relaxed, rather than impelled to reach for a cigarette— if there were a "lack of' reaction—wouldn't that do the trick? Suppose one of Pavlov's dogs had been deaf —would the poor pup have salivated when some lab technician tinkled a bell?

No. Well then, suppose I could remain "blind" and "deaf" to the things that stimulated my desire to smoke?
Suppose I could achieve this by relaxing, instead of reacting? Wouldn't that work?

Sure. It sounded fine. But so does perpetual motion. Then, weeks later, while I was reading a few paragraphs written by Sigmund Freud, I came upon the answer I'd been seeking:

"Psychologically, every human being lives on the basis of the pursuit of happiness," Dr. Freud wrote. "This is the desire of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

"To thwart this, the subconscious must learn to find imaginary happiness in unhappiness.

"The only pleasure one can derive from displeasure is to subconsciously make that displeasure a pleasure."

A psychiatrist, reading this paragraph, would think of its implications for the sadist or masochist; he'd think of "repression," and of the "pleasure and pain principles."

COULD FREUD'S THEORY BE APPLIED TO SMOKING?

I could think only in terms of smoking. Freud, I remembered, was a devotee of cigars. And his life had been cut short by a tragically painful cancer of the mouth and the throat.

"If only he'd applied his ideas to smoking," I thought to myself. "If only he'd somehow considered the pleasure of cigars an unpleasant, nasty thing—and the displeasure of abstinence from tobacco a good and pleasing thing—his Me might have been longer."

It would be nice to note for posterity that I thereupon leaped from my seat, shouted "Eureka," and Stopped Smoking Forever. Actually I thought about all this while rummaging through my desk for a cigarette. But I did begin to follow this line of thought to its logical conclusion. Could we reverse our feelings about smoking?

Could you, for example, be psychologically pleased by giving up cigarettes? Could I somehow be displeased by the taste, smell, and ritual of smoking? Could we find "happiness" in "unhappiness"?

If we could, then we'd have psychological law on our side.
BUT YOU CANT PULL THE WOOL OVER YOUR OWN EYES