Breaking the smoking habit may be a necessity at this point in history, because smoking has been banned from restaurants and public places. And in fact, it's the intelligent thing to do for more reasons than health alone. This article explores the very best Neuro-Linguistic Programming methods that can be utilized to make it as painless as possible to break the addiction to cigarettes.

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

Part A: You Smoke For Relaxation And Pleasure.

When you were a child and you started crying, your mother would put a pacifier into your mouth to distract you from that upset. You would get distracted, become more peaceful, and often fall asleep. That scenario was repeated thousands 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 an adult, if you feel upset, you crave something in your mouth for relaxation and pleasure - a cigarette!

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 the dogs would salivate.

When you link smoking a cigarette with any other activity, the other activity will trigger cravings for a cigarette and an urge that makes you feel compelled to smoke. 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 smokes and simultaneously drinks a cup of coffee, the mind takes a picture of the cigarette in the hand, and links it to the cup of coffee. Thereafter, every time the person has a cup of coffee, the mind fills in the missing part of the picture. It flashes an image of the cigarette, and the smoker gets a craving for one.

You may be unaware of the mental movie 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 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 . . . 

After having worked with several thousand people who smoke, I guarantee you that the physical addiction is the weakest part of the smoking habit. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the addiction to tobacco. The strongest parts 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.

As soon as you eliminate the feeling of tension that compels a smoker to smoke a cigarette to create 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 break the addiction to cigarettes without requiring willpower, and without suffering from withdrawal symptoms or weight-gain.

Hypnosis can help trigger a smoker to quit smoking. 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 smokers smoke for relaxation and pleasure. It's a person's thoughts which create feelings of stress. More exactly, people persistently play mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it creates a feeling of tension.

We can use various hypnosis and NLP techniques to re-program the unconscious to instantly take those anxiety creating mental pictures and movies, and quickly exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This produces relaxation and pleasure, and obliterates the anxiety that creates the oral compulsions and urges for cigarettes.

Because of the elimination of stress, 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 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 smokers get into that activity or environment, the mind flashes an image of a cigarette, and the image of the cigarette creates an urge to light-up?

There are powerful and effective hypnosis techniques that can effortlessly extinguish those conditioned responses so that a person'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 summary, when we use certain hypnotic techniques, it can be very easy to quit smoking without withdrawal or weight gain. And many of these methodologies don't even depend on post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on programming the subconscious to use the same mental processes that the subconscious mind is using to create the addiction to cigarettes, to eliminate the mental addiction.

Alan B. Densky, CH established his practice starting in 1978. He offers Quit Smoking Self Hypnosis Programs to help you stop smoking. Visit his free library of original hypnosis & NLP articles or download FREE self hypnosis and NLP MP3's.

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