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There are three individual components to the addiction to chew. Two of the components are emotional/mental, and one part is physical.

Part A: YOU CHEW FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.

When you were a toddler and you became cranky, your mother would put a pacifier into your mouth to pacify you. You would get distracted, become peaceful, and often go to sleep. 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 nervous or tense, you crave something in your mouth for relaxation and pleasure - dip!

Part B: CHEWING TOBACCO 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 associate chewing tobacco with any other behavior, the other behavior will trigger cravings for tobacco and a urge to chew smokeless tobacco. This is called a conditioned response.

For example: If you chew smokeless tobacco when you see someone else dipping tobacco, you will automatically get an urge to chew smokeless tobacco each time you see someone else dipping tobacco.

Here is exactly how this conditioned response gets programmed into your subconscious: If a person chews smokeless and simultaneously drinks a cup of coffee, the mind takes a picture of the tobacco in the hand, and links it to the cup of coffee. Thereafter, every time the person sees a cup of coffee, her subconscious fills in the missing part of the picture. It flashes an image of the smokeless, and the dipper gets a craving for chewing tobacco.

You may be unaware of the mental picture of the chewing 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 someone or something draws your attention to it. But the image is there, creating a craving for smokeless.

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

I've worked face-to-face with several thousand people who are addicted to tobacco and I can guarantee you that the physical addiction to smokeless is the weakest part of the smokeless habit. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the chewing habit. I believe that 90% of the smokeless are the mental and emotional parts! (Parts A and B).

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

What this means is that when you eliminate the tension that causes you to dip smokeless to create relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and if you can extinguish the conditioned response of feeling compulsions for chew when having a cup of coffee, driving, or finishing a meal, etc. (Part B) . . . then you can give up dipping without the requirement of willpower, and without suffering from withdrawal symptoms or gaining weight.

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 dippers dip tobacco for relaxation and pleasure. It's a person's thoughts that create feelings of stress. More to the point, people invariably run mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it creates a feeling of anxiety.

We can use various hypnotic methods to train the mind to quickly and easily take those anxiety producing mental images, and automatically exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This produces relaxation and pleasure, and eliminates the anxiety that causes the oral compulsions for chewing.

Because of the elimination of stressful feelings, the person who is quitting does not feel the compulsion or need to substitute food in place of the chewing tobacco. So quitting without weight gain is possible.

Part B is where you get cravings for smokeless because chewing 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 tobacco in your hand, and the image of the smokeless tobacco in your hand triggers an urge to chew tobacco?

There are quit smokeless hypnosis, and quit smokeless NLP techniques that can effortlessly erase those conditioned responses so that a person's subconscious will lose the cravings for smokeless tobacco, and the compulsion to chew smokeless tobacco. As a matter of fact, you can even get a compulsion to reject dipping.

TO SUMMARIZE

To summarize, by using certain hypnotic techniques, it becomes very easy to quit dipping without weight gain or having to suffer from withdrawal. And many of these methods don't even depend on post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on training the mind to use the same thought processes that the subconscious is using to create the addiction to chewing tobacco, to eliminate the mental addiction.

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Alan B. Densky, CH opened his practice in hypnosis and NLP in 1978. He has worked face-to-face with over ten-thousand clients for appetite, weight loss, smoke cessation, and 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