The smokeless tobacco habit is easily as dangerous and debilitating as the addiction to smoking cigarettes. In fact, many believe that it is even more insidious. It has been been glamorized by influential sports heroes who chew, and many have started their addiction as early as the age of nine. And by the time that many of these youngsters turn eighteen, they are devastated by throat and mouth cancer, and may be dying.

There is nothing quite as ugly as a face ravaged by tumors or cancer, except maybe how the victim's face looks after having surgery to amputate the jawbone, lips, or tongue. Unfortunately, in most cases the surgical massacre of the victim's face really doesn't matter, because they are dead within a year anyway.

Doctors tell us that the physical part of the Nicotine addiction is broken after abstaining for seven days. However, the psychological addiction is much stronger and takes a lot more time and effort to overcome making it difficult to quit smokeless tobacco.

There are 3 separate factors to the addiction to tobacco. Two of the components are mental, and only one part is physical.

Part A: YOU CHEW TOBACCO FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE

When you were an infant and you got cranky, your mother would put a pacifier into your mouth to pacify you. You would get distracted, become mellower, and often fall asleep. That sequence of events 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 fully-grown, if you feel upset, you crave something in your mouth for relaxation and pleasure - smokeless tobacco!

Part B: CHEWING IS A CONDITIONED RESPONSE 

Remember Pavlov? Every time that he fed his dogs he rang a bell. After a few repetitions, he would just ring the bell, and the sound of the bell would trigger the dogs to salivate.

When you connect chewing tobacco with any other activity, the other activity will trigger cravings for tobacco and a urge to chew. This is called a conditioned response. 

For example: If you chew when you drive your car, you will automatically get an urge to chew each time you drive your car. 

Here is exactly how this conditioned response gets programmed into your unconscious: If a person dips smokeless tobacco and simultaneously drives a car, the mind takes a picture of the dip in the hand, and links it to the image of the steering wheel, dashboard, or view out the windshield, etc.. Thereafter, every time the person drives the car, her mind fills in the missing part of the picture. It flashes an image of the chew in the hand coming towards the mouth, and the dipper gets a craving for chewing tobacco.

You may be unaware of the mental movie of the chewing tobacco, 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 draws your attention to it. But the image is there, creating a craving for chewing tobacco. 

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

I've worked one-on-one with several thousand people for tobacco cessation and I give you my personal guarantee that the physical addiction is the weakest part of the smokeless habit. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the addiction. The strongest parts of the smokeless tobacco addiction are the mental and emotional parts! (Parts A and B). 

HERE IS WHAT THIS MEANS TO A PERSON WHO CHEWS SMOKELESS TOBACCO AND WHO WANTS TO QUIT.

What this means is that as soon as you eliminate the anxiety that makes you chew smokeless for relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and if you can extinguish the conditioned response of feeling compulsions for dip when watching television, driving, or finishing a meal, etc. (Part B) . . . then you can quit dipping without needing willpower, and without experiencing withdrawal symptoms or gaining weight.

Self-hypnosis will make it easy to give up smokeless tobacco because it takes care of Parts A & B! Here is how:

Part A is where you dip smokeless tobacco for relaxation and pleasure. It's your thoughts that create feelings of tension. More to the point, people always run mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it brings on a feeling of anxiety.

We can use some very powerful NLP or Hypnosis techniques to program the subconscious mind to easily take those tension creating mental images, and quickly exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This creates relaxation and pleasure, and eliminates the tension that causes the oral compulsions and cravings for dipping.

Because of the elimination of stress, the person who is quitting doesn't experience the compulsion or need to substitute food in place of the chewing tobacco. So quitting without weight gain is possible.

Breaking the addiction to smokeless tobacco is very similar to overcoming the addiction to food, cigarettes, and nail biting. I have many additional original articles on these topics in my free hypnosis article library.

Part B is where people 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, and the image of the smokeless creates an urge to chew tobacco?

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

IN SUMMARY

In summation, by using certain NLP methods, it becomes very easy to stop chewing tobacco without withdrawal or weight gain. And many of these hypnotic techniques like video hypnosis and NLP don't even depend on post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on programming the unconscious mind to use the same mental processes that the unconscious is using to create the smokeless tobacco habit, to eliminate the mental addiction.

Alan B. Densky, CH offers NLP & Hypnosis downloads to overcome chew. He helps clients with hypnosis for weight loss, smoke cessation hypnosis, and stress related symptoms. He maintains a library of NLP & hypnosis articles, and offers FREE NLP & hypnosis newsletters & MP3s.

This document may NOT be re-printed. All Rights Reserved. However . . .

Unique "spun" versions of my hypnosis articles are available for publication directly on your website without charge, as long as the byline and the links back to Neuro-VISION are kept intact.