Quitting smoking really is a necessity at this point in history, because smoking cigarettes has been banned from restaurants and other public places. And in fact, it is definitely the intelligent thing to do for more reasons than good health alone. This editorial explores the very best hypnosis and NLP methods that can be used to make it as painless as possible to break the addiction to cigarettes.
There are 3 individual parts to the addiction to smoking cigarettes. Two of the elements are mental, and only one part is physical.
Part A: YOU SMOKE FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.
When you were an infant and you got restless, your mother would put a nipple into your mouth to pacify you. You would get distracted, become calmer, and often go to sleep. That scenario 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 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, all he had to do was to ring the bell, and that would trigger the dogs to salivate.
When you associate smoking with any other action, the other action will trigger cravings for a cigarette and an urge to light up a cigarette. This is called a conditioned response.
For example: If you smoke when you see someone else smoking, you will automatically get an urge to smoke each time you see someone else smoking.
Here is exactly how this conditioned response gets programmed into your unconscious: If a person smokes a cigarette and simultaneously drinks a cup of coffee, the mind takes a snapshot of the cigarette in the hand, and ties 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 be unaware of the mental picture 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 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 . . .
I’ve worked face-to-face with several thousand smokers and I give you my guarantee that the physical addiction to tobacco is the weakest part of the smoking addiction. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the addiction to tobacco. I believe that 90% of the addiction are the mental and emotional parts! (Parts A and B).
HERE IS WHAT THIS MEANS TO A SMOKER WHO WANTS TO QUIT.
When you eliminate the feeling of tension that pushes a smoker to smoke a cigarette to create relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and when you erase the conditioned response of feeling compulsions for cigarettes when having a cup of coffee, driving, or finishing a meal, etc. (Part B) . . . then you can give up tobacco without needing willpower, and without having to suffer from withdrawal symptoms or weight-gain.
Hypnotism can help trigger a smoker to stop smoking. Hypnosis will make it easy to give up tobacco because it takes care of Parts A & B! Here is how:
Part A is where smokers light-up a cigarette for relaxation and pleasure. It’s your thoughts which create feelings of stress. More to the point, people persistently run mental movies in their mind’s eye. If the movie is negative, it causes a feeling of stress.
We can use different NLP and Hypnosis methods to program the subconscious mind to quickly and easily take those stress producing mental images, and quickly exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This instills relaxation and pleasure, and eliminates the stress that triggers the oral urges and compulsions for a cigarette.
Because of the elimination of tension, the smoker who is quitting does not experience the compulsion or need to substitute food in place of the cigarettes. So quitting without weight gain is possible.
Part B is where smokers 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 stop smoking hypnosis, and quit smoking NLP techniques that can quickly eliminate those conditioned responses so that your 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 summation, by utilizing certain NLP methods, it becomes very easy to stop smoking without withdrawal or weight gain. And many of these methods do not even require post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on programming the unconscious mind to use the same thought processes that the unconscious is using to create the addiction to cigarettes, to eliminate the mental addiction.