There are three distinct parts to a cigarette smoking addiction. Two of the components are mental/emotional, and only one part is physical.

Part A: YOU SMOKE FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.

When you were a tot and you became upset, your mother would put a pacifier into your mouth to distract you from that upset. You would get distracted, become mellow, and often go to asleep. That scenario was repeated dozens 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 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 could just ring the bell, and that would trigger the dogs to salivate.

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

For example: If you light-up when you see a cup of coffee, you will automatically get an urge to light-up each time you have a cup of coffee.

Here is exactly how this conditioned response gets programmed into your unconscious: If a person lights-up a cigarette and simultaneously drinks a cup of coffee, the mind takes a picture of the cigarette in the hand, and ties 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 one.

You may not be consciously aware 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 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 have had the experience of working with several thousand people for smoke cessation and I can guarantee you that the physical addiction to tobacco is the weakest part of the addiction. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the addiction. 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.

What this means is that after you have eliminated the feeling of tension that compels you to light-up a cigarette for relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and if you can extinguish 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 break the addiction to cigarettes without needing willpower, and without suffering from withdrawal symptoms or gaining weight.

Self-hypnosis will make it easy to break the addiction to cigarettes because it takes care of Parts A & B! Here is how:

Part A is where you smoke a cigarette for relaxation and pleasure. It's your thoughts that create feelings of tension. More specifically, people invariably create mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it brings on a feeling of tension. We can use different hypnotic methods to program the subconscious to rapidly take those tension producing mental images, and instantly exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This produces relaxation and pleasure, and obliterates the tension that triggers the oral cravings and urges for cigarettes.

Because of the elimination of feelings of anxiety, 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 you smoke 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 triggers an urge to smoke a cigarette?

There are efficient and powerful NLP and hypnosis techniques that can effortlessly extinguish those conditioned responses so that a smoker's 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 summary, by using certain NLP techniques, it becomes very easy to quit smoking without withdrawal or weight gain. And many of these hypnotic methods do not even depend on post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on training the subconscious mind to use the same thought processes that the unconscious 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 NLP 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