Breaking The Smoking Addiction With Hypnosis and NLP

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

There are three separate factors to the addiction to tobacco. Two of the components are mental/emotional, and only one part is physical.

Part A: YOU SMOKE FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.

When you were a baby and you got restless, your mother would put a bottle into your mouth to pacify you. You would get distracted, become mellow, and often go to sleep. That sequence of events 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 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 could just ring the bell, and that would make the dogs salivate.

When you pair smoking a cigarette 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 light-up a cigarette when you watch a movie, you will automatically get an urge to smoke each time you go to the movies.

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 associates it to the cup of coffee. Thereafter, every time the person has a cup of coffee, the subconscious mind fills in the missing part of the picture. It flashes an image of the cigarette, and the smoker gets a craving for one.

You may not be consciously aware of the mental movie 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 someone 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 face-to-face with several thousand people for smoke cessation and I guarantee you that the physical addiction to cigarettes is the weakest part of the addiction. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the smoking habit. I believe that 90% of the smoking addiction are the mental and emotional parts! (Parts A and B).

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

If you can eliminate the anxiety that causes a smoker to put cigarettes into the mouth for relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and when you erase 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 suffering from withdrawal symptoms or gaining weight.

Self Hypnosis can help trigger a smoker to stop. Self-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 light-up a cigarette for relaxation and pleasure. It's your thoughts which create stress. Moreover, people always create mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it manufactures a feeling of stress.

We can use different NLP and Hypnosis methods to re-program the unconscious to rapidly take those stress producing mental pictures and movies, and automatically exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This manufactures relaxation and pleasure, and eliminates the stress that creates the oral urges and compulsions for a cigarette.

Because of the elimination of stress, the smoker who is quitting does not 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 smoke 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 people 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?

There are efficient NLP and hypnosis techniques that can quickly eliminate those conditioned responses so that a person's subconscious 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 summary, when we utilize certain NLP techniques, it can be very easy to quit smoking without withdrawal or weight gain. And many of these hypnotic techniques don't even depend on post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on training the mind to use the same mental processes that the unconscious mind is using to create the smoking habit, to eliminate the mental addiction.