Breaking The Cigarette Smoking Addiction With Hypnosis

Breaking the smoking addiction may be a necessity today, because smoking cigarettes has been banned from restaurants and public places. In fact, it is the intelligent thing to do for more reasons than good health alone. This editorial explores the very best hypnosis methodologies that can be utilized to make it as painless as possible to break the addiction to cigarettes and tobacco.

There are 3 separate factors to a cigarette smoking habit. Two of the components are mental, and one part is physical.

Part A: YOU SMOKE FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.

When you were an infant and you became upset, your mother would put a nipple into your mouth to pacify you. You would get distracted, become calmer, and often go to sleep. That sequence of events was repeated dozens 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 fully-grown, 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, he could just ring the bell, and the sound of the bell would trigger the dogs to salivate.

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

For example: If you smoke when you watch a movie, you will automatically get an urge to light-up a cigarette each time you go to the movies.

Here is exactly how this conditioned response gets programmed into your subconscious: If a person smokes and simultaneously drinks a cup of coffee, the mind takes a picture of the cigarette in the hand, and links it to the cup of coffee. Thereafter, every time the person has a cup of coffee, the unconscious 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 image 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 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 one-on-one with several thousand people for smoke cessation and I give you my personal guarantee that the physical addiction is the weakest part of the habit. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the smoking habit. ninety percent of the habit are the mental and emotional parts! (Parts A and B).

HERE IS WHAT THIS MEANS TO A SMOKER WHO WANTS TO QUIT.

When you eliminate the tension that makes a smoker put cigarettes into the mouth for relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and when you erase the conditioned response of feeling a compulsion for cigarettes when having a cup of coffee, driving, or finishing a meal, etc. (Part B) . . . then you can stop smoking without requiring willpower, and without experiencing withdrawal symptoms or weight-gain.

Hypnosis can help motivate a smoker to stop smoking. Hypnosis will make it easy to stop smoking because it takes care of Parts A & B! Here is how:

Part A is where people smoke for relaxation and pleasure. It's your thoughts which create feelings of stress. More to the point, people constantly watch mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it brings on a feeling of tension.

We can use various hypnotic methods to train the unconscious mind to instantly take those anxiety producing mental images, and quickly exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This manufactures relaxation and pleasure, and obliterates the anxiety that causes the oral compulsions for a cigarette.

Because of the elimination of stressful feelings, the smoker who is quitting doesn't feel the compulsion or need to substitute food in place of the cigarettes. So quitting without weight gain is possible.

Part B is where people 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 a cigarette?

There are quit smoking hypnosis, and stop smoking NLP techniques that can effectively erase 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

To summarize, when we use certain hypnotic techniques, it can be very easy to quit smoking without withdrawal or weight gain. And many of these methodologies don't even depend on post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on programming the unconscious mind to use the same thought processes that the unconscious 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 Hypnosis DVD's and Audio Quit Smoking Self Hypnosis CDs. Visit his repository of hypnosis articles or download FREE NLP & self hypnosis MP3's and newsletters.

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