Even if you don’t care about your health, consider the money.

Patrick Hyland reckons he wasted $120,000 on cigarettes over 30 years.

These days, he doesn’t care so much about the lost cash, he’s just happy to have his life back. A few hours with Allen Carr’s Easy Way smoking cessation programme helped him do it.

“I was ashamed that I smoked, to be honest,” the 51-year-old said. “I didn’t want my children to know. I’d smoked since my late teens. I started because it was cool in those days in school, a dare at the back of the bike shed. The first time I felt so lightheaded, but it was a bit of fun and then it became a habit — but it was a cool habit.”

There was little education on the effects of smoking at the time. Packs of cigarettes didn’t then come with the skull and crossbones and the ‘smoking kills’ labels, and there were very few restrictions on where people could light up.

“Nowadays, there are far fewer people who smoke. It was ubiquitous in those days,” Mr Hyland said. “I smoked all through college and when I started work, we had ashtrays on desks; the place was a fog. I don’t expect my children to even see smokers now, but I was surrounded by them as a child — you could smoke on buses, trains, aeroplanes.”

About a decade ago he was certain he’d managed to break his addiction. But a year later, he was back to his pack-a-day habit.

“My wife was delighted,” said Mr Hyland, a UK national employed here by AIG. “We’d just had a baby and I was thinking it was a new start, let’s knock this on the head.”

A simple meeting with a smoker turned things around.

“I was in my office having a meeting with someone — it wasn’t a stressful situation,” he said. “But, he asked if we could continue the conversation outside while he had a cigarette. It wasn’t a big deal. I’d been going to bars with my mates and would go outside with them when they smoked, without having a cigarette.”

For whatever reason, his resolve failed him this time. When the man asked if they could stay for a second cigarette, Mr Hyland decided to join him.

He was still smoking six years later, despite family members’ repeated requests.

“My mum sent me Allen Carr’s book [Easy Way to Stop Smoking] two or three times and when I was young, offered me bribes — £100 if I quit for three months. [In the end my wife] Louise signed me up for the [2015 course here]. I spent six hours on a Sunday afternoon. I was ready. I’d been waiting to do it and I really didn’t want my children to see me smoke.”

Millions have permanently quit smoking after taking the Easy Way course, according to local organisers Open Airways. The charity claims the seminar has “the highest recorded success rate of any quit-smoking method — by far”.

Mr Hyland believes it worked for him because: “I wasn’t sceptical.”

“I’m a great believer that if you have a convincing enough argument, a rational person will be swayed by it. We had six hours with smoke breaks and, overall, it was a very convincing argument.”

Apart from the nicotine itself, there are many reasons why people have a difficult time quitting, the former smoker added.

“The first thing you’ve got to remember is it’s a perfect product. There’s something satisfying about holding a full pack of cigarettes. It fits in your pocket — the design hasn’t changed over 100 years — and it was designed to be [consumed as] one pack a day; 45 minutes of nicotine.”

For habitual smokers, cigarettes provide a means for their anxiety levels to return to normal, Mr Hyland said.

“As a smoker, you’re always on the lookout, you’re always planning how you will be able to smoke that next cigarette. Smokers are always more anxious than non-smokers and there’s always a level of anxiety about their next cigarette. When you have a cigarette, what it does is bring you back to the level of a non-smoker.

“I smoked about a pack a day, but more if I was out socialising. I’m so happy to no longer have that anxiety. [It’s for that reason] I believe you should never cut down, just quit. Cutting down is almost as bad as smoking because you’re stressing yourself thinking about the few cigarettes you’ll have.”