Quitting smoking is a necessity at this point in history, because cigarettes have been banned from restaurants and other public places. And in fact, it is the smart thing to do for more reasons than good health alone. This commentary explores the very best NLP methodologies that can be used to make it as painless as possible to break the addiction to tobacco.
There are three individual factors to a smoking addiction. Two of the parts are mental, and one part is physical.
Part A: YOU SMOKE FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.
When you were a toddler and you became cranky, your mother would put a nipple into your mouth to calm you down. 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 tense or anxious, 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 make the dogs salivate.
When you connect smoking with any other action, the other action will trigger cravings for a cigarette and a feeling of urgency that makes you want to smoke. This is called a conditioned response.
For example: If you light-up a cigarette when you see a cup of coffee, you will automatically get an urge to light-up a cigarette each time you have a cup of coffee.
Here is exactly how this conditioned response gets programmed into your subconscious: If a person lights-up a cigarette and simultaneously drinks a cup of coffee, the mind takes a snapshot of the cigarette in the hand, and connects it to the cup of coffee. Thereafter, every time the person has a cup of coffee, her subconscious mind fills in the missing part of the picture. It flashes an image of the 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 subconscious 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 people who smoke and I give you my guarantee that the physical addiction 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 ninety percent 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.
After you have eliminated the anxiety that pushes a smoker to smoke a cigarette to create relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and when you erase the conditioned response of feeling an urge 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 weight-gain.
Self Hypnosis can help motivate a smoker to quit. 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 your thoughts which create feelings of tension. More exactly, people constantly watch mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it manufactures a feeling of anxiety.
We can use different NLP and Hypnosis methods to program the subconscious to automatically take those anxiety producing mental pictures, and instantly exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This produces relaxation and pleasure, and obliterates the anxiety that creates the oral compulsions and cravings for a cigarette.
Because of the elimination of stressful feelings, the smoker who is quitting doesn't feel the compulsion or need to substitute food in place of the cigarettes. So quitting without weight gain is possible.
Part B is where people 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 causes cravings for a cigarette?
There are powerful NLP and hypnosis methods that can effortlessly eliminate those conditioned responses so that a person's unconscious 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.
IN SUMMATION
In summary, when we use certain hypnotic techniques, it becomes very easy to stop smoking without weight gain or having to suffer from withdrawal. And many of these hypnotic techniques don't even require post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on training the subconscious mind to use the same mental processes that the subconscious is using to create the addiction to cigarettes, to eliminate the mental addiction. |
