The addiction to smokeless tobacco is easily as dangerous as the addiction to smoking cigarettes. In fact, most experts think that it is even more insidious. It has been been glamourized by sports professionals. Many people who chew smokeless tobacco started as early as 9 years of age! And by the time that many of these kids turn eighteen, they are overcome by throat and mouth cancer, and many are dying.

While a person with lung cancer can look normal, the face of a victim of mouth cancer can be an awful sight. Imagine how a face looks after having a jawbone cut out, or the lips or tounge surgically removed. Usually the surgical butchering of the victim's face is all for nothing, because many die within a year or so anyway.

Doctors tell us that the physical part of the Nicotine addiction is broken after abstaining for seven days. However, the psychological addiction is much stronger and takes a lot more time and effort to overcome making it difficult to quit smokeless tobacco.

There are 3 distinct components to a dipping addiction. Two of the elements are emotional/mental, and only one part is physical.

Part A: YOU CHEW TOBACCO FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.

When you were a little baby and you started crying, your mother would put a nipple into your mouth to pacify you. You would get distracted, become calmer, and often go to sleep. That scenario was repeated many, many 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 fully-grown, if you feel upset, you crave something in your mouth for relaxation and pleasure - chewing tobacco!

Part B: DIPPING TOBACCO IS A CONDITIONED RESPONSE.

Remember Pavlov? Every time that he fed his dogs he would ring a bell. After a few repetitions, all he had to do was to ring the bell, and that would trigger the dogs to salivate.

When you connect dipping tobacco with any other action, the other action will trigger cravings for chewing tobacco and a compulsion to dip. This is called a conditioned response.

For example: If you dip when you drive your car, you will automatically get an urge to dip each time you drive your car.

Here is exactly how this conditioned response gets programmed into your unconscious: If a person chews and simultaneously drives a car, the mind takes a picture of the dip in the hand, and associates it to the image of the steering wheel, dashboard, or view out the windshield, etc.. Thereafter, every time the person drives the car, her subconscious mind fills in the missing part of the picture. It flashes an image of the dip in the hand coming towards the mouth, and the dipper gets a craving for smokeless tobacco.

You may not be consciously aware of the mental image of the smokeless tobacco, 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 chewing tobacco.

Part C: THERE IS A PHYSICAL ADDICTION TO NICOTINE, BUT . . .

I have had the experience of working with several thousand people for tobacco addiction and I guarantee you that the physical addiction to tobacco is the weakest part of the smokeless habit. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the addiction to smokeless. I believe that ninety percent of the habit are the mental and emotional parts! (Parts A and B).

HERE IS WHAT THIS MEANS TO A PERSON WHO CHEWS SMOKELESS AND WHO WANTS TO QUIT.

What this means is that when you eliminate the feeling of tension that causes you to chew smokeless tobacco for relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and when you erase the conditioned response of feeling urges for chew when watching television, driving, or finishing a meal, etc. (Part B) . . . then you can quit chewing without requiring willpower, and without experiencing withdrawal symptoms or weight-gain.

Self-hypnosis will make it easy to give up dipping because it takes care of Parts A & B! Here is how:

Part A is where people dip smokeless for relaxation and pleasure. It's a person's thoughts that create stress. More specifically, people persistently create mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it brings on a feeling of anxiety.

We can use some very powerful NLP or Hypnosis techniques to re-program the unconscious to easily take those anxiety creating mental movies, and quickly exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This manufactures relaxation and pleasure, and obliterates the anxiety that causes the oral cravings and compulsions for chewing.

Because of the elimination of feelings of anxiety, the person who is quitting does not feel the compulsion or need to substitute food in place of the chewing tobacco. So quitting without weight gain is possible.

Breaking the addiction to smokeless is very similar to overcoming the addiction to food, cigarettes, and nail biting. I have many additional original articles on these topics in my free hypnosis article repository.

Part B is where you dip smokeless because chewing tobacco 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 a person who chews gets into that activity or environment, the mind flashes an image of smokeless, and the image of the smokeless creates an urge to chew smokeless tobacco?

There are effective hypnosis and NLP techniques that can quickly extinguish those conditioned responses so that your unconscious mind will lose the cravings for smokeless, and the compulsion to chew smokeless tobacco. As a matter of fact, you can even get a compulsion to reject chewing tobacco.

TO SUMMARIZE

In summary, by utilizing certain hypnotic and NLP techniques, it can be very easy to stop chewing tobacco without withdrawal or weight gain. And many of these hypnotic techniques like video hypnosis and NLP do not even require post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on programming the mind to use the same thought processes that the subconscious mind is using to create the dipping habit, to eliminate the mental addiction.

------------------ Author's Bio ------------------ Alan B. Densky, CH offers NLP & Hypnosis CDs to quit dip. He helps clients with hypnosis for weight loss, smoke cessation hypnosis, and stress related symptoms. He maintains a library of hypnosis & NLP articles, and offers FREE NLP and hypnosis newsletters and MP3's.