Break Your Smokeless
Tobacco Addiction
Hypnosis & NLP Will
Make It Much Easier
By Alan B. Densky, CH
The addiction to smokeless tobacco is easily as dangerous and debilitating as the addiction to smoking cigarettes. In fact, many believe that it is even more insidious.
Part of the problem is that sports heroes have glamorized the use of dip or chew. Many who chew tobacco started as early as nine years of age! By the time many of these children turn eighteen, they are dying from throat and mouth cancers.
While a person with lung cancer can look normal, the face of a victim of mouth cancer can be an awful sight. Imagine how a face looks after having a jawbone cut out, or the lips or tongue surgically removed. Usually the surgical butchering of the victim's face is all for nothing, because many die within a year or so anyway.
Doctors
tell us that the physical part of the Nicotine addiction is
broken after abstaining for seven days. But the
psychological part of the addiction is far stronger and may
take a much longer time and a lot more effort to overcome,
which makes it very difficult to give up smokeless tobacco.
How To
Break The Smokeless Habit
There are three distinct
factors to a chewing habit. Two of the factors are
emotional/mental, and one is physical.
Part A: YOU DIP FOR
RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.
When you were a toddler and you got cranky, your mother
would put a pacifier into your mouth to distract you from
that upset. You would get distracted, become calmer, and
often go to sleep. 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 - dip!
Part B: DIPPING TOBACCO 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 connect together dipping with any other behavior,
the other behavior will trigger cravings for chewing 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 chews
smokeless tobacco and simultaneously drinks a cup of coffee,
the mind takes a picture of the tobacco in the hand, and
connects it to the cup of coffee. Thereafter, every time the
person has a cup of coffee, his mind fills in the missing
part of the picture. It flashes an image of the dip, and the
dipper gets a craving for smokeless tobacco.
You may not be consciously aware of the mental image of the
smokeless 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
After having worked with several thousand people for tobacco
addiction I give you my guarantee 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 to tobacco. I believe that ninety percent of the
smokeless tobacco addiction are the mental and emotional
parts! (Parts A and B).
HERE IS WHAT THIS MEANS TO A PERSON WHO DIPS AND WHO
WANTS TO QUIT.
What this means is that after you have eliminated the
tension that causes you to chew smokeless for relaxation and
pleasure (Part A) . . . and when you erase the conditioned
response of feeling compulsions for chew when having a cup
of coffee, driving, or finishing a meal, etc. (Part B) . . .
then you can break the addiction to chew without requiring
willpower, and without having to experience withdrawal
symptoms or weight-gain.
Self-hypnosis will make it easy to break the addiction to
smokeless because it takes care of Parts A & B! Here is
how:
Part A is where you dip for relaxation and pleasure. It's
your thoughts which create feelings of stress. Moreover,
people invariably play mental movies in their mind's eye. If
the movie is negative, it creates a feeling of stress.
We can use different
NLP techniques to train the mind to instantly and
automatically take those tension creating mental images, and
quickly exchange them for relaxation producing mental
pictures and movies. This manufactures relaxation and
pleasure, and obliterates the tension that creates the oral
urges and compulsions for chewing.
Because of the elimination of feelings of tension, the
person who is quitting doesn't feel the compulsion or need
to substitute food in place of the smokeless tobacco. So
quitting without weight gain is possible.
Part B is where you dip smokeless tobacco because dipping
smokeless 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 people get
into that activity or environment, the mind flashes an image
of smokeless tobacco in your hand, and the image of the
smokeless tobacco in your hand causes an urge to chew
smokeless tobacco?
There are efficient and powerful hypnosis methods that can
effectively erase those conditioned responses so that your
subconscious will lose the cravings for chew, and the
compulsion to dip. As a matter of fact, you can even get a
compulsion to reject chewing.
IN SUMMATION
To summarize, when we utilize certain NLP methods, it
becomes very easy to stop chewing without withdrawal or
weight gain. And many of these hypnotic methods do not even
depend on post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on training
the unconscious mind to use the same thought processes that
the subconscious mind is using to create the addiction to
dipping smokeless, to eliminate the mental addiction.
© 2007By Alan B. Densky, CH. This document may NOT be re-printed without permission. All Rights Reserved. We are happy to syndicate our articles to approved websites.