The addiction to smokeless tobacco is easily as dangerous and debilitating as the addiction to smoking cigarettes. In fact, many experts proclaim that it is even more insidious. Chewing has been glamorized by sports professionals. Many people who dip smokeless started as early as 9 years of age! And by the time that many of these youngsters 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 tongue surgically removed. Usually the surgical butchering of the victim's face is all for nothing, because many die within a year or so anyway.

The experts tell us that the physical addiction to Nicotine is broken after abstaining for seven days. But the psychological part of the addiction is far stronger and may take a much longer time and a lot more effort to overcome, which makes it very difficult to give up smokeless tobacco.

There are three individual factors to the addiction to chewing tobacco. Two of the parts are mental, and one part is physical.

Part A: YOU CHEW FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.

When you were a child and you started crying, your mother would put a bottle into your mouth to calm you down. You would get distracted, become more peaceful, and often go to sleep. That sequence of events 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 mature, if you feel tense or nervous, you crave something in your mouth for relaxation and pleasure - dip!

Part B: CHEWING IS A CONDITIONED RESPONSE.

Remember Pavlov? Every time that he fed his dogs he rang a bell. After several repetitions, he could just ring the bell, and that would make the dogs salivate.

When you associate chewing tobacco with any other behavior, the other behavior will trigger cravings for tobacco and a urge to chew. This is called a conditioned response.

For example: If you chew while you watch a movie, you will automatically get an urge to chew each time you go to the movies.

Here is exactly how this conditioned response gets programmed into your unconscious: If a person chews smokeless and simultaneously drives a car, the mind takes a snapshot of the tobacco in the hand, and ties it to the image of the steering wheel, dashboard, or view out the windshield, etc.. Thereafter, every time the person drives the car, his unconscious mind fills in the missing part of the picture. It flashes an image of the chew 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 picture 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 something or someone draws your attention to it. But the image is there, creating a craving for a dip.

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

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

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

What this means is that if you can eliminate the feeling of tension that causes you to chew smokeless tobacco for relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and if you can extinguish the conditioned response of feeling a craving for dip when watching TV, driving, or finishing a meal, etc. (Part B) . . . then you can stop dipping tobacco without requiring willpower, and without suffering from withdrawal symptoms or weight-gain.

Hypnosis will make it easy to give up tobacco because it takes care of Parts A & B! Here is how:

Part A is where dippers dip smokeless for relaxation and pleasure. It's our thoughts that create tension. More to the point, people always run mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it creates a feeling of tension.

We can use different NLP techniques to program the unconscious mind to easily take those anxiety producing mental pictures and movies, and automatically exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This produces relaxation and pleasure, and obliterates the anxiety that creates the oral urges for chewing.

Because of the elimination of tension, the person who is quitting doesn't feel the compulsion or need to substitute food in place of the chew. So quitting without weight gain is possible.

Stopping 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 NLP and hypnosis article repository.

Part B is where people dip smokeless tobacco 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 tobacco in your hand, and the image of the smokeless tobacco in your hand triggers cravings for smokeless?

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

In summation, when we use certain NLP techniques, it can be very easy to stop chewing without weight gain or having to suffer from withdrawal. And many of these hypnotic techniques do not even depend on post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on programming the unconscious mind to use the same thought processes that the unconscious mind is using to create the addiction to smokeless tobacco, to eliminate the mental addiction.