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There are three distinct components to the addiction to tobacco. Two of the parts are mental, and only one part is physical.

Part A: YOU SMOKE FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.

When you were a baby and you became upset, your mother would put a pacifier into your mouth to calm you down. You would get distracted, become calmer, and often go to asleep. That sequence of events was repeated hundreds 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 anxious or tense, 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 sound of the bell would trigger the dogs to salivate.

When you connect smoking with any other activity, the other activity will trigger cravings for a cigarette and a urge to light up a cigarette. This is called a conditioned response.

For example: If you smoke a cigarette when you drive your car, you will automatically get an urge to light-up a cigarette each time you drive your car.

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 associates it to the cup of coffee. Thereafter, every time the person has a cup of coffee, his unconscious mind 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 be unaware 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 or 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 . . .

After having worked with several thousand smokers and I give you my guarantee that the physical addiction to tobacco is the weakest part of the smoking habit. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the addiction to cigarettes. 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.

What this means is that as soon as you eliminate the tension that makes you smoke a cigarette to create relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and if you can extinguish 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 give up cigarettes without needing willpower, and without having to suffer from withdrawal symptoms or gaining weight.

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 light-up a cigarette for relaxation and pleasure. It's our thoughts that create stress. More to the point, people constantly create mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it creates a feeling of stress. We can use various hypnotic methods to re-program the subconscious to quickly and easily take those stress creating mental pictures, and quickly exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This produces relaxation and pleasure, and eliminates the stress that triggers the oral compulsions and cravings for a cigarette.

Because of the elimination of feelings of anxiety, 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 light-up 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 triggers an urge to light-up?

There are effective NLP technologies that can quickly eliminate those conditioned responses so that a smoker's unconscious 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

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

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Alan B. Densky, CH started his professional practice in hypnosis and Neuro-Linguistic Programming in 1978. He has worked face-to-face with over 10,000 clients for hypnotic appetite suppression, hypnosis for weight loss, smoke cessation hypnosis, and other stress related symptoms. He maintains a library of original hypnosis & NLP articles, and offers FREE hypnosis and NLP newsletters and MP3 downloads. He can be contacted through his website at www.Neuro-VISION.us