Quitting smoking is a necessity at this point in history, because smoking cigarettes has been banned from restaurants and public places. And in fact, it is definitely the intelligent thing to do for more reasons than good health alone. This editorial explores the very best NLP methods that can be utilized to make it as painless as possible to break the addiction to tobacco.

There are three separate factors to the addiction to tobacco. Two of the parts are mental/emotional, and one part is physical.

Part A: YOU SMOKE FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.

When you were a little baby and you got cranky, your mother would put a pacifier into your mouth to distract you from that upset. You would get distracted, become peaceful, and often fall asleep. That sequence of events 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 an adult, 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, all he had to do was to ring the bell, and the sound of the bell would trigger the dogs to salivate.

When you link smoking with any other activity, the other activity will trigger cravings for a cigarette and a compulsion that makes you want to smoke. This is called a conditioned response.

For example: If you smoke when you see a cup of coffee, you will automatically get an urge to smoke each time you have a cup of coffee.

Here is exactly how this conditioned response gets programmed into your subconscious: If a person lights-up a cigarette and simultaneously drinks a cup of coffee, the mind takes a snapshot of the cigarette in the hand, and associates it to the cup of coffee. Thereafter, every time the person sees a cup of coffee, the subconscious 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 movie 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 . . .

I've worked with several thousand smokers and I give you my guarantee that the physical addiction 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.

What this means is that as soon as you eliminate the anxiety that compels you to light-up a cigarette for relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and when you erase 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 quit smoking without requiring willpower, and without suffering from withdrawal symptoms or gaining weight.

Hypnosis will make it easy to quit smoking because it takes care of Parts A & B! Here is how:

Part A is where smokers smoke a cigarette for relaxation and pleasure. It's our thoughts which create stress. More exactly, people always watch mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it brings about a feeling of stress.

We can use different NLP and Hypnosis methods to train the subconscious mind to instantly take those anxiety producing mental pictures and movies, and quickly exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This instills relaxation and pleasure, and obliterates the anxiety that causes the oral cravings and compulsions for cigarettes.

Because of the elimination of tension, the smoker who is quitting does not feel 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 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 causes an urge to light-up?

There are quit smoking hypnosis, and quit smoking NLP techniques 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.

IN SUMMARY

In summation, when we use certain NLP methods, it can be very easy to quit smoking without weight gain or having to suffer from withdrawal. And many of these hypnotic techniques don't even depend on post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on training the subconscious mind to use the same thought processes that the subconscious mind is using to create the smoking habit, to eliminate the mental addiction.