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Creating Motivation To Kick The Cigarette Smoking Addiction

There are two psychological states that must be satisfied before a person will willingly kick the smoking addiction. These fundamentals are called "Desire," and "Decision."

DESIRE: A want, crave or a wish for

DECISION: Making up of one's mind / a verdict or judgment

In order to quit smoking, you have to DESIRE to kick the habit. You probably want to quit smoking, at least some part of you does, or you wouldn't be reading this article.

In addition, in order to quit smoking, you have to DECIDE to quit. Since you haven't broken your smoking addiction, it simply means that you have not DECIDED to quit yet.

So what you need is to feel a strong motivation to make a "DECISION" to quit.

MOTIVATION, we all need it. The foundation of each of our motivations is what we accept as true. Give it some thought, if you didn't have a belief that you would be hurt if you stood in the path of an oncoming semi, you would not experience motivation to be careful. If you did not believe that the gnawing sensation in your stomach meant that you were hungry, you would not feel motivated to eat.

When it comes to giving up the smoking addiction, people who are addicted to cigarettes need to feel a great deal of motivation to make the DECISION to stop. Motivation is based on the ideas that we believe. So you will need to figure out exactly what thoughts will motivate you (when you start to believe them). Because when you feel powerfully motivated, you will quit smoking.

Thanks to NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) and self-hypnosis for motivation, it's much easier to learn how to believe these new ideas than you think. However, you do not believe the ideas that will motivate you to quit smoking at this point in time, or you would have already broken the smoking addiction.

For the purpose of this discussion, we need to define a few words.

DOUBT: Uncertain/distrustful/dubious - "maybe it's this way, and maybe it is not."

BELIEF: Trust/faith/tenet - A state of mind free of all doubt. In other words, belief means, "this is the way that it is."

HIGHLY VALUED CRITERIA: What is most important to you, as an individual human being.

When you believe that if you continue to smoke your highly valued criterion is jeopardized, you will feel the motivation that you need to break your addiction to cigarettes. We call this a negative motivator, because it's a belief that motivates you by providing you with dire feelings. Negative motivators are great for getting you to make decisions.

When you believe that if you do quit, that which is most important to you will become enhanced, then you will also feel the motivation that you require to quit smoking. This is a positive motivator, because it motivates you by promising good feelings if you quit.

The first chore is for you to figure out what the most essential aspects of your life are. Your most highly valued criteria are usually things that you cannot see. For example: Money would not be highly valued criteria, but the freedom, fun, or security that money can purchase could be. Write your list of highly valued criteria down on a piece of paper.

Next you need to DECIDE what you would need to believe to feel motivated to break the habit. Here is the good news, sort of: Logic has nothing to do with belief. Things don't have to be logical for anyone to believe them. As a matter of fact, they rarely are. So don't worry about logic!

The format for your negative motivator beliefs will be: "I believe that if I continue to smoke, something bad will happen to my most highly valued criteria."

Make sure that you frame your motivators in the positive. In other words, always state what you want or what will happen. Never state what will not happen. Eliminate the "not" word from the beliefs.

In this example we will say that your children's health is your most highly valued criteria.

WRONG: "I believe that if I continue to smoke, I won't be doing my kid's health any good."

CORRECT: "I believe that if I continue to smoke, my secondhand smoke will give my children cancer."

Next, create a list of positive motivators. "I believe that if I quit smoking: (something very important will be enhanced)."

WRONG: "I believe that if I stop smoking, I won't make my children sick."

CORRECT: "I believe that if I quit smoking, my children will be safer because I'll eliminate their exposure to the dangers of my secondhand smoke."

The next step is to change the computer codes in your brain to make yourself actually believe these motivational ideas. Now for a shocker: Your beliefs have nothing to do with real logic. Instead, your beliefs have everything to do with what your perception of reality is. In other words, it has a lot to do with the way that you see things.

Our belief systems are based in our unconscious mind. The unconscious is like a computer. Computers don't reason. The input controls the output. To demonstrate, I want you to think of anything that you already believe without the slightest bit of doubt. So come up with a belief that gives you a good feeling.

For instance, it's easy for most people to believe that they love their children. If that is true for you, make a mental image that makes you feel that feeling of love.

I'm going to ask some questions, and there aren't any correct or incorrect answers.

Is your mental image a moving picture, or a still?

Is it in color, or in black and white?

Is it close or far?

Is it focused or fuzzy?

Is it normally bright, overly bright, or dim?

Is there a border on it?

Is it borderless?

Is it a panorama?

It doesn't matter what your answers are just write them down on a piece of paper. These are the computer codes that your subconscious mind uses to indicate your feelings of belief. In this case they are the codes for positive belief, because you've chosen a belief that gives you a positive feeling. You have just calibrated your positive belief.

Every positive belief picture is bright and focused. If yours aren't, you probably don't really have total belief. An element of doubt is probably present. So find another belief from which to calibrate.

If you think of something that you are unsure of, and you make a mental picture of it, one or more of these computer codes will probably be different. Similarly, if you have a belief that gives you a bad feeling, (a negative belief): one or more of those codes will be different.

In Neuro-Linguistic Programming we call these particular computer codes visual submodalities.

Now you will need to calibrate a negative belief. So repeat the same exact process, but do so using an idea that you already believe, that makes you feel awful.

Once you have calibrated both your positive and negative beliefs, it's a simple matter to control what you believe so you can motivate yourself to DECIDE to break the smoking habit.

So, to summarize, using the above example: "I believe that if I continue to smoke, my secondhand smoke will ruin my kid's health."

1. Sense how motivated you feel to quit smoking.

2. Make a mental image that illustrates the above belief.

3. Adjust the codes (visual submodalities) of the image to make them match the mental codes from your calibrated negative belief image.

4. If you are right handed, move your eyeballs (and your image) up to your left and hold it there for five seconds. If you are left handed, go up to the right. This will help you to quickly memorize the belief.

5. Now become aware of how well motivated you feel to quit smoking. Do you feel more motivated? Do you feel less motivated? Or are your feelings the same?

By using this system you can make yourself believe almost anything by making an image in your mind that illustrates your new idea and then adjusting your mental image to match your calibrated belief pictures.

And if you have a belief that is holding you back, you can use the same technique to change that belief to doubt by changing one or two of the submodalities and memorizing it that way.

Now that you can motivate yourself to DECIDE to quit, you will quit smoking. A DECISION to quit means: I'm quitting no matter what I have to go through. If you are like most people, you will not want to suffer through withdrawal. The good news is that you will not have to suffer. Because there are several hypnotic and NLP techniques that can greatly reduce, or even completely eliminate the discomforts of withdrawal from the smoking addiction. And you can read about them in my hypnosis article library.

I also host a free entertaining video filled with quit smoking tips. It is titled "How To Stop Smoking The Easy Way." It is available both on my site as well as most of the Web 2.0 video sites.

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Alan B. Densky, CH offers hypnosis to quit smoking CDs for breaking the tobacco addiction. He developed the Neuro-VISION Video stop smoking hypnosis technology, which received a US Patent due to its efficiency. He can be contacted through the Neuro-VISION hypnosis site. www.neuro-vision.us/

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