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

Part A: YOU SMOKE FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.

When you were a toddler and you became cranky, your mother would put a bottle into your mouth to pacify you. You would get distracted, become mellow, and often go to asleep. 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 a grownup, if you feel nervous 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 that would trigger the dogs to salivate.

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

For example: If you light-up a cigarette when you drive your car, you will automatically get an urge to smoke 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 sees a cup of coffee, his subconscious mind fills in the missing part of the picture. It flashes an image of a cigarette, and the smoker gets a craving for a cigarette.

You may be unaware of the mental picture 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 face-to-face with several thousand smokers and I give you my personal guarantee that the physical addiction is the weakest part of the addiction. 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 when you eliminate the feeling of tension that pushes you to put cigarettes into your mouth for relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and if you can extinguish 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 give up tobacco without requiring willpower, and without having to suffer from withdrawal symptoms or weight-gain.

Hypnosis will make it easy to give up tobacco 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 that create feelings of anxiety. More specifically, people always watch mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it brings on a feeling of anxiety. We can use various hypnotic methods to re-program the mind to automatically take those anxiety producing mental pictures, and instantly exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This manufactures relaxation and pleasure, and eliminates the anxiety that causes the oral cravings for cigarettes.

Because of the elimination of feelings 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 people smoke 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 smokers get into that activity or environment, the mind flashes an image of a cigarette, and the image of the cigarette creates cravings for a cigarette?

There are powerful and effective hypnosis and NLP techniques that can quickly erase those conditioned responses so that a smoker's 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

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

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Alan B. Densky, CH opened his practice in Neuro-Linguistic Programming and hypnosis in 1978. He has worked one-on-one 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