There are 3 individual elements contained in a cigarette addiction. Two of the components are mental, and only one part is physical.

Part A: YOU SMOKE FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.

When you were a little baby and you got restless, your mother would put a nipple into your mouth to distract you from that upset. You would get distracted, become peaceful, and often go to asleep. 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 mature, if you feel upset, 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 could just ring the bell, and that would trigger the dogs to salivate.

When you pair smoking a cigarette with any other activity, the other activity will trigger cravings for a cigarette and a feeling of urgency to smoke. This is called a conditioned response.

For example: If you smoke a cigarette when you see someone else smoking, you will automatically get an urge to smoke a cigarette each time you see someone else smoking.

Here is exactly how this conditioned response gets programmed into your subconscious: If a person smokes and simultaneously drinks a cup of coffee, the mind takes a snapshot of the cigarette in the hand, and ties it to the cup of coffee. Thereafter, every time the person has a cup of coffee, his unconscious mind fills in the missing part of the picture. It flashes an image of a 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 subconscious level of mind. Just as you are not consciously aware 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 one-on-one with several thousand people for smoke cessation and I guarantee you 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 habit 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 if you can eliminate the tension that causes you to smoke a cigarette to create relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and if you can extinguish the conditioned response of feeling a craving for cigarettes when having a cup of coffee, driving, or finishing a meal, etc. (Part B) . . . then you can give up tobacco without needing willpower, and without suffering from withdrawal symptoms or gaining weight.

Self-hypnosis will make it easy to give up 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 a person's thoughts that create feelings of tension. More specifically, people always play mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it creates a feeling of stress. We can use different hypnotic methods to program the unconscious to instantly take those stress creating mental movies, and quickly exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This creates relaxation and pleasure, and eliminates the stress that triggers the oral cravings and compulsions for cigarettes.

Because of the elimination of feelings of anxiety, the smoker who is quitting does not 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 smoke 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 people get into that activity or environment, the mind flashes an image of a cigarette, and the image of the cigarette triggers an urge to smoke a cigarette?

There are quit smoking hypnosis, and quit smoking NLP techniques that can quickly erase those conditioned responses so that your unconscious 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

To summarize, when we utilize certain hypnotic techniques, it becomes very easy to quit smoking without weight gain or having to suffer from withdrawal. And many of these hypnotic techniques don't even depend on post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on training the unconscious mind to use the same mental processes that the unconscious mind is using to create the smoking habit, to eliminate the mental addiction.

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Alan B. Densky, CH created his practice in Neuro-Linguistic Programming and hypnosis in 1978. He has worked face-to-face with over 10,000 clients for stress related symptoms including weight loss hypnosis and appetite control, and quit smoking hypnosis. 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