Smoking – Becoming Socially Unacceptable

Breaking the smoking addiction has almost become a necessity at this point in history, because cigarettes have been banned from eateries and public places. And in fact, it’s the intelligent thing to do for more reasons than health alone. This commentary explores the very best hypnosis and NLP methodologies that can be utilized to make it as painless as possible to break the addiction to tobacco and cigarettes.

The Three Elements of Cigarette Addiction

There are 3 distinct elements contained in a cigarette addiction. Two of the parts are mental, and only one part is physical.

Part A: You Smoke For Relaxation And Pleasure.

When you were an infant and you became cranky, your mother would put a pacifier into your mouth to distract you from that upset. You would get distracted, become calmer, and often fall asleep. That scenario 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 a grownup, if you feel agitated, 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 the dogs would salivate.

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

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

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 sees a cup of coffee, the subconscious mind fills in the missing part of the picture. It flashes an image of a cigarette, and the smoker gets a craving for a cigarette.

You may not be consciously aware of the mental picture 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 have had the experience of working with several thousand people who smoke and I give you my guarantee that the physical addiction is the weakest part of the addiction. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the smoking habit. I believe that ninety percent of the addiction are the mental and emotional parts! (Parts A and B).

Here Is What This Means To A Smoker Who Wants To Quit.

After you have eliminated the feeling of tension that makes a smoker light-up a cigarette for relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and when you erase the conditioned response of feeling an urge for cigarettes when having a cup of coffee, driving, or finishing a meal, etc. (Part B) . . . then you can give up cigarettes without requiring willpower, and without experiencing withdrawal symptoms or gaining weight.

Hypnosis can help trigger a smoker to quit smoking. Self-hypnosis will make it easy to give up cigarettes 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 anxiety. Moreover, people persistently run mental movies in their mind’s eye. If the movie is negative, it brings on a feeling of tension.

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

Because of the elimination of feelings of anxiety, 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 smokers get into that activity or environment, the mind flashes an image of a cigarette, and the image of the cigarette creates cravings for a cigarette?

There are stop smoking hypnosis, and stop smoking NLP techniques that can effectively extinguish those conditioned responses so that a person’s subconscious 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.

To Summarize.

In summary, by using certain hypnotic techniques, it can be very easy to stop smoking without weight gain or having to suffer from withdrawal. And many of these techniques don’t even depend on post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on programming the subconscious mind to use the same thought processes that the unconscious mind is using to create the addiction to cigarettes, to eliminate the mental addiction.

Alan B. Densky, CH opened his practice in 1978. He offers Neuro-VISION Video Quit Smoking Self Hypnosis DVD’s and Audio Stop Smoking Self Hypnosis Programs. Visit his free repository of original hypnosis & NLP articles or download FREE self hypnosis and NLP newsletters and MP3′s.