Breaking the smoking habit may be a necessity in our times, because smoking has been banned from eateries and other public places. In fact, it is the intelligent thing to do for more reasons than good health alone. This commentary explores the very best hypnosis and Neuro-Linguistic Programming methodologies that can be used to make it as painless as possible to break the addiction to tobacco and cigarettes.
There are 3 distinct parts to a smoking habit. Two of the elements are mental, and only one part is physical.
Part A: YOU SMOKE FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.
When you were an infant and you became upset, your mother would put a nipple into your mouth to distract you from that upset. You would get distracted, become more peaceful, and often fall asleep. That sequence of events was repeated hundreds 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 an adult, if you feel upset, you crave something in your mouth for relaxation and pleasure - a smoke!
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 would just ring the bell, and that would trigger the dogs to salivate.
When you connect smoking with any other behavior, the other behavior will trigger cravings for a cigarette and an urge that makes you feel compelled to light up. This is called a conditioned response.
For example: If you light-up when you drive your car, you will automatically get an urge to light-up each time you drive your car.
Here is exactly how this conditioned response gets programmed into your subconscious: If a person smokes a cigarette and simultaneously drinks a cup of coffee, the mind takes a snapshot of the cigarette in the hand, and ties it to the cup of coffee. Thereafter, every time the person has 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 one.
You may not be consciously aware of the mental image of the cigarette, because it may only be at the subconscious level of mind. Just as you are not consciously aware of what you are seeing through your peripheral vision until someone or something 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 . . .
After having worked with several thousand people for smoke cessation, I guarantee you that the physical addiction to tobacco is the weakest part of the smoking addiction. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the addiction. I believe that ninety percent of the smoking habit are the mental and emotional parts! (Parts A and B).
HERE IS WHAT THIS MEANS TO A SMOKER WHO WANTS TO QUIT.
As soon as you eliminate the tension that pushes a smoker to smoke a cigarette to create relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and if you can extinguish the conditioned response of feeling urges for cigarettes when having a cup of coffee, driving, or finishing a meal, etc. (Part B) . . . then you can give up tobacco without needing willpower, and without having to experience withdrawal symptoms or gaining weight.
Hypnotism can help trigger a smoker to quit smoking. Hypnosis will make it easy to give up tobacco because it takes care of Parts A & B! Here is how:
Part A is where you smoke a cigarette for relaxation and pleasure. It's your thoughts which create feelings of stress. Moreover, people constantly watch mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it brings on a feeling of stress.
We can use various hypnotic methods to program the unconscious to easily take those anxiety creating mental pictures, and automatically exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This produces relaxation and pleasure, and eliminates the anxiety that causes the oral cravings for a cigarette.
Because of the elimination of stress, the smoker who is quitting doesn't experience the compulsion or need to substitute food in place of the cigarettes. So quitting without weight gain is possible.
Part B is where you light-up a cigarette 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 you get into that activity or environment, the mind flashes an image of a cigarette, and the image of the cigarette creates an urge to light-up a cigarette?
There are effective NLP technologies that can effectively extinguish those conditioned responses so that a person's subconscious 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.
TO SUMMARIZE
To summarize, by using certain NLP techniques, it can be very easy to quit smoking without weight gain or having to suffer from withdrawal. And many of these techniques don't even require post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on training the unconscious mind to use the same thought processes that the subconscious is using to create the addiction to cigarettes, to eliminate the mental addiction.
The Author ---------- Alan B. Densky, CH established his practice in 1978. He offers Neuro-VISION Video Stop Smoking Self Hypnosis DVDs and Audio Stop Smoking Self Hypnosis Programs. Visit his repository of original NLP & hypnosis articles or download FREE self hypnosis and NLP MP3's.
