Breaking An Addiction To Smokeless With Hypnosis

The smokeless tobacco habit is easily as dangerous and debilitating as the addiction to smoking. In fact, many proclaim that it is even more insidious. It has been been glamourized by sports professionals. Many people who dip smokeless started as early as 9 years of age! And by the time that many of these children turn 18, they are overcome by mouth and throat cancer, and many are dying.

There is nothing quite as ugly as a face ravaged by tumors or cancer, except maybe how the victim's face looks after having surgery to amputate the jawbone, lips, or tongue. Unfortunately, in most cases the surgical massacre of the victim's face really doesn't matter, because they are dead within a year anyway.

The experts tell us that the physical addiction to Nicotine is broken after abstaining for seven days. However, the psychological addiction is much stronger and takes a lot more time and effort to overcome making it difficult to quit smokeless tobacco.

There are three distinct elements contained in a chewing habit. Two of the components are emotional/mental, and one part is physical.

Part A: YOU DIP FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.

When you were a tot and you got cranky, your mother would put a bottle into your mouth to pacify you. You would get distracted, become mellower, and often go to sleep. 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 a grownup, if you feel nervous or tense, you crave something in your mouth for relaxation and pleasure - chewing tobacco!

Part B: DIPPING TOBACCO IS A CONDITIONED RESPONSE.

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

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

For example: If you dip smokeless tobacco when you drive your car, you will automatically get an urge to dip smokeless tobacco each time you drive your car.

Here is exactly how this conditioned response gets programmed into your subconscious: If a person chews smokeless and simultaneously drives a car, the mind takes a snapshot of the smokeless tobacco in the hand, and associates it to the image of the steering wheel, dashboard, or view out the windshield, etc.. Thereafter, every time the person drives the car, his subconscious 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 image of the smokeless tobacco, because it may only be at the subconscious level of mind. Just as you are unaware 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 chewing tobacco.

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

I've worked one-on-one with several thousand people for tobacco cessation and I guarantee you that the physical addiction to smokeless is the weakest part of the addiction to smokeless. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the habit. I believe that ninety percent of the smokeless are the mental and emotional parts! (Parts A and B).

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

What this means is that after you have eliminated the anxiety that pushes you to dip smokeless to create relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and if you can extinguish the conditioned response of feeling a craving for chew when watching television, driving, or finishing a meal, etc. (Part B) . . . then you can break the addiction to chew without needing willpower, and without having to suffer 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 for relaxation and pleasure. It's our thoughts that create anxiety. More specifically, people invariably create mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it causes a feeling of tension.

We can use different NLP and Hypnosis methods to program the subconscious mind to rapidly take those anxiety creating mental images, and automatically exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This instills relaxation and pleasure, and obliterates the anxiety that creates the oral urges and compulsions for chewing tobacco.

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

Breaking the addiction to smokeless tobacco 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 index.

Part B is where you get cravings for tobacco because dipping smokeless 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 dips gets into that activity or environment, the mind flashes an image of smokeless, and the image of the smokeless triggers cravings for smokeless?

There are effective hypnosis methods that can effectively extinguish those conditioned responses so that a person's unconscious mind will lose the cravings for dip, and the compulsion to chew. As a matter of fact, you can even get a compulsion to reject dipping tobacco.

IN SUMMATION

In summary, by utilizing certain NLP techniques, it becomes very easy to stop dipping tobacco without withdrawal or weight gain. And many of these techniques do not even require post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on programming the unconscious mind to use the same thought processes that the mind is using to create the dipping tobacco habit, to eliminate the mental addiction.

Quitting the addiction to smokeless has become a necessity because the effects of chew can be devastating. In fact, it is the intelligent thing to do for far more reasons than health alone. This article reveals the very best self-hypnosis and NLP methods that a person can use to make it as painless as possible to break the smokeless habit.

Alan B. Densky, CH offers Hypnosis CDs to quit smokeless. He helps clients with stress related symptoms including weight loss hypnosis, and quit smoking hypnosis. He maintains a library of NLP & hypnosis articles, and offers FREE hypnosis & NLP newsletters & MP3s.

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