Breaking the smoking addiction is a necessity at this point in history, because cigarettes have been banned from eateries and public places. And in fact, it is the smart thing to do for more reasons than health alone. This editorial explores the very best Neuro-Linguistic Programming methodologies that can be employed to make it as painless as possible to break the addiction to tobacco and cigarettes.



There are three individual elements contained in the addiction to cigarettes. Two of the elements are mental, and one part is physical.

Part A: YOU SMOKE FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.

When you were a tot and you got cranky, your mother would put a pacifier into your mouth to distract you from that upset. You would get distracted, become relaxed, and often fall asleep. 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 an adult, if you feel anxious or tense, 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 that would make the dogs salivate.

When you connect smoking with any other activity, the other activity will trigger cravings for a cigarette and an urge that makes you want to light up a cigarette. This is called a conditioned response.

For example: If you light-up when you see someone else smoking, you will automatically get an urge to light-up each time you see someone else smoking.

Here is exactly how this conditioned response gets programmed into your unconscious: If a person lights-up a cigarette and simultaneously drinks a cup of coffee, the mind takes a picture of the cigarette in the hand, and ties it to the cup of coffee. Thereafter, every time the person has a cup of coffee, her unconscious fills in the missing part of the picture. It flashes an image of the cigarette, and the smoker gets a craving for a cigarette.

You may be unaware of the mental image 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 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 who smoke, I give you my guarantee that the physical addiction to cigarettes is the weakest part of the habit. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the addiction to tobacco. 90% 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 after you have eliminated the feeling of tension that makes you put cigarettes into your mouth for relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and if you can extinguish the conditioned response of feeling cravings 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 having to experience withdrawal symptoms or weight-gain.

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 you smoke a cigarette for relaxation and pleasure. It's our thoughts which create feelings of stress. More exactly, people constantly run mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it manufactures a feeling of anxiety.

We can use different hypnotic methods to program the subconscious mind to instantly take those stress creating mental pictures and movies, and instantly exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This produces relaxation and pleasure, and eliminates the stress that triggers the oral urges and compulsions for cigarettes.

Because of the elimination of tension, 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 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 smoke?

There are powerful NLP and hypnosis methods that can effortlessly eliminate those conditioned responses so that a smoker's unconscious 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 SUMMARY

In summary, by utilizing certain NLP techniques, it can be very easy to quit smoking without withdrawal or weight gain. And many of these hypnotic methods do not even require post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on training the mind to use the same thought processes that the mind is using to create the addiction to cigarettes, to eliminate the mental addiction.