There are 3 individual elements contained in the addiction to smoking cigarettes. Two of the parts are mental, and one part is physical.

Part A: YOU SMOKE FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.

When you were an infant and you became cranky, your mother would put a nipple into your mouth to calm you down. You would get distracted, become relaxed, and often go to asleep. That scenario was repeated hundreds 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 tense or nervous, 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 would just ring the bell, and that would make the dogs salivate.

When you connect smoking with any other behavior, the other behavior will trigger cravings for a cigarette and a compulsion to light up. 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 associates it to the cup of coffee. Thereafter, every time the person sees a cup of coffee, the unconscious 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 not be consciously aware of the mental movie 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 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 with several thousand smokers and I can guarantee you that the physical addiction to tobacco is the weakest part of the habit. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the habit. I believe that 90% of the smoking 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 smoke a cigarette to create relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and if you can extinguish 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 stop smoking without needing willpower, and without having to suffer from withdrawal symptoms or gaining weight.

Hypnosis will make it easy to stop smoking because it takes care of Parts A & B! Here is how:

Part A is where smokers light-up for relaxation and pleasure. It's a person's thoughts that create stress. More to the point, people persistently play mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it causes a feeling of tension. We can use different NLP techniques to program the subconscious to quickly take those tension producing mental images, and quickly exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This produces relaxation and pleasure, and eliminates the tension that creates the oral urges and compulsions for a cigarette.

Because of the elimination of stressful feelings, 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 a cigarette 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 smoke?

There are effective hypnosis techniques that can quickly eliminate those conditioned responses so that a smoker'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 SUMMARY

In summation, when we use certain hypnotic and NLP techniques, it can be very easy to quit 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 programming the subconscious mind to use the same thought processes that the subconscious is using to create the smoking habit, to eliminate the mental addiction.

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Alan B. Densky, CH opened his practice in hypnosis and Neuro-Linguistic Programming in 1978. He has worked one-on-one with over 10,000 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