Quit Your Smoking Addiction With NLP and Hypnosis

Quitting smoking may be a necessity today, because smoking has been banned from restaurants and other public places. In fact, it is the smart thing to do for more reasons than health alone. This commentary explores the very best hypnosis methods that can be employed to make it as painless as possible to break the addiction to tobacco and cigarettes.

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

Part A: YOU SMOKE FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.

When you were a toddler and you got upset, your mother would put a bottle into your mouth to calm you down. You would get distracted, become peaceful, 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 mature, if you feel nervous 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, he would just ring the bell, and that would trigger the dogs to salivate.

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

For example: If you smoke a cigarette when you see someone else smoking, you will automatically get an urge to smoke a cigarette 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, the unconscious mind 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 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 a cigarette.

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

After having worked with several thousand people for smoke cessation, I guarantee you that the physical addiction is the weakest part of the smoking habit. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the addiction to tobacco. The strongest parts 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 feeling of tension that compels a smoker to 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 tobacco without requiring willpower, and without suffering from withdrawal symptoms or weight-gain.

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

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

We can use various hypnotic methods to re-program the unconscious mind to rapidly take those stress creating mental pictures and movies, and quickly exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This produces relaxation and pleasure, and eliminates the stress that causes the oral cravings and compulsions for cigarettes.

Because of the elimination of tension, 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 you get cravings for cigarettes 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 an urge to light-up?

There are powerful NLP methods that can effortlessly eliminate those conditioned responses so that a person'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 SUMMATION

In summation, when we utilize certain NLP methods, it becomes very easy to quit smoking without weight gain or having to suffer from withdrawal. And many of these hypnotic methods do not even require post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on training the mind to use the same mental processes that the mind is using to create the addiction to cigarettes, to eliminate the mental addiction.