There are 3 distinct parts to the addiction to chewing tobacco. Two of the elements are mental, and one part is physical.

Part A: YOU CHEW FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.

When you were a baby and you became cranky, your mother would put a bottle into your mouth to pacify you. You would get distracted, become calmer, and often fall asleep. 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 a grownup, if you feel upset, you crave something in your mouth for relaxation and pleasure - smokeless tobacco!

Part B: DIPPING IS A CONDITIONED RESPONSE.

Remember Pavlov? Every time that he fed his dogs he would ring a bell. After several repetitions, all he had to do was to ring the bell, and the sound of the bell would trigger the dogs to salivate.

When you connect chewing tobacco with any other action, the other action will trigger cravings for smokeless tobacco and a urge to dip. This is called a conditioned response.

For example: If you dip when you watch a movie, you will automatically get an urge to dip each time you go to the movies.

Here is exactly how this conditioned response gets programmed into your unconscious: If a person chews smokeless and simultaneously drinks a cup of coffee, the mind takes a picture of the dip in the hand, and links it to the cup of coffee. Thereafter, every time the person sees a cup of coffee, the unconscious mind fills in the missing part of the picture. It flashes an image of the dip, and the dipper gets a craving for chewing tobacco.

You may not be consciously aware of the mental movie of the chewing tobacco, because it may only be at the unconscious level of mind. Just as you are not consciously aware 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 . . .

I've worked face-to-face with several thousand people for tobacco cessation and I guarantee that the physical addiction to smokeless is the weakest part of the addiction to smokeless. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the addiction to smokeless. 90% of the smokeless tobacco addiction are the mental and emotional parts! (Parts A and B).

HERE IS WHAT THIS MEANS TO A PERSON WHO CHEWS SMOKELESS AND WHO WANTS TO QUIT.

What this means is that as soon as you eliminate the feeling of tension that causes you to dip smokeless to create relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and when you erase the conditioned response of feeling a craving for chew when having a cup of coffee, driving, or finishing a meal, etc. (Part B) . . . then you can give up dipping without requiring willpower, and without experiencing withdrawal symptoms or weight-gain.

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 dip tobacco for relaxation and pleasure. It's a person's thoughts that create stress. More specifically, people persistently run mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it creates a feeling of anxiety.

We can use various hypnosis and NLP techniques to re-program the mind to easily take those tension producing mental pictures, and instantly exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This produces relaxation and pleasure, and obliterates the tension that causes the oral compulsions and cravings for dipping.

Because of the elimination of stress, 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 people chew smokeless tobacco because dipping smokeless tobacco 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 creates an urge to chew?

There are quit smokeless hypnosis, and quit smokeless NLP techniques that can effortlessly extinguish those conditioned responses so that a person's subconscious will lose the cravings for dip, and the compulsion to chew. As a matter of fact, you can even get a compulsion to reject dipping smokeless.

IN SUMMATION

In summation, when we use certain hypnotic and NLP techniques, it becomes very easy to quit dipping smokeless without withdrawal or weight gain. And many of these hypnotic methods 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 dipping habit, to eliminate the mental addiction.

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Alan B. Densky, CH created his practice in hypnosis and NLP in 1978. He has worked face-to-face with over ten-thousand 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