There are 3 distinct factors to the addiction to smoking cigarettes. Two of the components are mental/emotional, and one part is physical.
Part A: YOU SMOKE FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.
When you were an infant and you got cranky, your mother would put a bottle into your mouth to distract you from that upset. You would get distracted, become calm, and often go to asleep. That scenario was repeated thousands of times so that your unconscious mind was programmed: When something goes into your mouth, you get relaxation and pleasure from it.
Now that you are mature, if you feel tense or anxious, you crave something in your mouth for relaxation and pleasure - a cigarette!
Part B: SMOKING IS A CONDITIONED RESPONSE.
Remember Pavlov? He rang a bell every time that he fed his dogs. After a few repetitions, he could just ring the bell, and that would make the dogs salivate.
When you associate smoking with any other activity, the other activity will trigger cravings for a cigarette and a urge to light up. This is called a conditioned response.
For example: If you light-up when you watch a movie, you will automatically get an urge to smoke a cigarette each time you go to the movies.
Here is exactly how this conditioned response gets programmed into your unconscious: If a person smokes a cigarette and simultaneously drinks a cup of coffee, the mind takes a picture of the cigarette in the hand, and links it to the cup of coffee. Thereafter, every time the person sees a cup of coffee, the unconscious mind fills in the missing part of the picture. It flashes an image of a cigarette, and the smoker gets a craving for a cigarette.
You may not be consciously aware of the mental movie of the cigarette, because it may only be at the unconscious level of mind. Just as you are not consciously aware of what you are seeing through your peripheral vision until someone draws your attention to it. But the image is there, creating a craving for a cigarette.
Part C: THERE IS A PHYSICAL ADDICTION TO NICOTINE, BUT . . .
I have had the experience of working with several thousand people for smoke cessation and I guarantee you that the physical addiction to tobacco is the weakest part of the smoking habit. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the addiction. The strongest parts of the addiction are the mental and emotional parts! (Parts A and B).
HERE IS WHAT THIS MEANS TO A SMOKER WHO WANTS TO QUIT.
What this means is that as soon as you eliminate the feeling of tension that pushes you to put cigarettes into your mouth for relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and if you can extinguish the conditioned response of feeling compulsions for cigarettes when having a cup of coffee, driving, or finishing a meal, etc. (Part B) . . . then you can break the addiction to tobacco without requiring willpower, and without experiencing withdrawal symptoms or weight-gain.
Self-hypnosis will make it easy to break the addiction to tobacco because it takes care of Parts A & B! Here is how:
Part A is where smokers light-up for relaxation and pleasure. It’s our thoughts that create feelings of stress. More specifically, people invariably create mental movies in their mind’s eye. If the movie is negative, it brings on a feeling of tension. We can use different NLP and Hypnosis methods to train the subconscious mind to instantly take those anxiety producing mental images, and instantly exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This creates relaxation and pleasure, and eliminates the anxiety that creates the oral compulsions and cravings for cigarettes.
Because of the elimination of stress, the smoker who is quitting does not experience the compulsion or need to substitute food in place of the cigarettes. So quitting without weight gain is possible.
Part B is where smokers light-up because smoking becomes a conditioned response to many different activities and locations. Remember in the earlier example how smoking became unconsciously associated with other activities and environments so that each time smokers get into that activity or environment, the mind flashes an image of a cigarette, and the image of the cigarette triggers an urge to smoke?
There are efficient and powerful NLP techniques that can effectively eliminate those conditioned responses so that a smoker’s subconscious mind will lose the cravings for cigarettes, and the compulsion to smoke. As a matter of fact, you can even get a compulsion to reject the cigarettes.
IN SUMMATION
To summarize, when we utilize certain hypnotic and NLP techniques, it becomes very easy to quit smoking without weight gain or having to suffer from withdrawal. And many of these techniques do not even require post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on training the subconscious mind to use the same mental processes that the unconscious mind is using to create the smoking habit, to eliminate the mental addiction.
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Alan B. Densky, CH created his professional practice in Neuro-Linguistic Programming and hypnosis in 1978. He has worked face-to-face with over 10,000 clients for appetite, weight loss, smoke cessation, and stress related symptoms. He maintains a library of original hypnosis & NLP articles, and offers FREE hypnosis and NLP newsletters and MP3 downloads. He can be contacted through his website at www.Neuro-VISION.us
- Alan B. Densky, CH
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