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

Part A: YOU SMOKE FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.

When you were a little baby and you got cranky, your mother would put a pacifier into your mouth to calm you down. You would get distracted, become peaceful, 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 mature, 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 would just ring the bell, and that would trigger the dogs to salivate.

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

For example: If you light-up 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 subconscious: If a person smokes and simultaneously drinks a cup of coffee, the mind takes a picture of the cigarette in the hand, and connects 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 a cigarette.

You may not be consciously aware 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 someone or 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 people who smoke and I give you my guarantee that the physical addiction to tobacco is the weakest part of the habit. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the addiction to tobacco. I believe that 90% of the smoking 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 if you can eliminate the feeling of tension that makes you light-up a cigarette for relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and when you erase the conditioned response of feeling a craving 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 having to experience withdrawal symptoms or gaining weight.

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 people light-up for relaxation and pleasure. It's a person's thoughts that create feelings of stress. Moreover, people invariably create 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 re-program the subconscious mind to quickly and easily take those anxiety producing mental pictures and movies, and automatically exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This produces relaxation and pleasure, and eliminates the anxiety that triggers the oral urges for a cigarette.

Because of the elimination of feelings of tension, the smoker who is quitting doesn't experience the compulsion or need to substitute food in place of the cigarettes. So quitting without weight gain is possible.

Part B is where people 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 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 smoke a cigarette?

There are efficient hypnosis techniques that can effectively eliminate those conditioned responses so that your 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 SUMMARY

In summary, by using certain hypnotic techniques, it becomes very easy to quit smoking without withdrawal or weight gain. And many of these hypnotic methods don't even require post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on training the subconscious 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 created his professional practice in hypnosis and Neuro-Linguistic Programming in 1978. He has worked face-to-face with over ten-thousand 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