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The smokeless tobacco addiction is every bit as debilitating as a cigarette addiction - maybe even more so. In fact, many experts believe that it is even more insidious. It's been been glamourized by sports professionals. Many people who chew tobacco started as early as 9 years of age! And by the time that many of these youngsters turn 18, they are devastated by throat and mouth cancer, and many are dying. There is nothing quite as ugly as a face ravaged by tumors or cancer, except maybe how the victim's face looks after having surgery to amputate the jawbone, lips, or tongue. Unfortunately, in most cases the surgical massacre of the victim's face really doesn't matter, because they are dead within a year anyway. Doctors tell us that the physical part of the Nicotine addiction is broken after abstaining for seven days. However, the psychological addiction is much stronger and takes a lot more time and effort to overcome making it difficult to quit smokeless tobacco. There are 3 distinct components to a chewing habit. Two of the parts are mental, and only one part is physical. Part A: YOU DIP FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE. When you were a child and you got cranky, your mother would put a nipple into your mouth to distract you from that upset. You would get distracted, become peaceful, and often fall asleep. That scenario 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 anxious or tense, you crave something in your mouth for relaxation and pleasure - dip! Part B: DIPPING IS A CONDITIONED RESPONSE. Remember Pavlov? He rang a bell every time that he fed his dogs. After several repetitions, he would just ring the bell, and that would trigger the dogs to salivate. When you associate chewing tobacco with any other behavior, the other behavior will trigger cravings for chewing tobacco and a feeling of urgency to chew smokeless tobacco. This is called a conditioned response. For example: If you chew smokeless tobacco when you see someone else chewing tobacco, you will automatically get an urge to chew smokeless tobacco each time you see someone else chewing tobacco. Here is exactly how this conditioned response gets programmed into your unconscious: If a person dips smokeless tobacco and simultaneously drives a car, the mind takes a picture of the dip in the hand, and connects it to the image of the steering wheel, dashboard, or view out the windshield, etc.. Thereafter, every time the person drives the car, her mind fills in the missing part of the picture. It flashes an image of the smokeless in the hand coming towards the mouth, and the dipper gets a craving for smokeless. You may be unaware of the mental picture of the smokeless, 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 with several thousand people for tobacco addiction and I can guarantee you that the physical addiction to tobacco is the weakest part of the addiction to smokeless tobacco. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the addiction to smokeless. The strongest parts of the dipping habit are the mental and emotional parts! (Parts A and B). HERE IS WHAT THIS MEANS TO A PERSON WHO DIPS SMOKELESS AND WHO WANTS TO QUIT. What this means is that after you have eliminated the feeling of tension that pushes you to chew smokeless for relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and when you erase the conditioned response of feeling urges for chew when watching television, driving, or finishing a meal, etc. (Part B) . . . then you can quit dipping without requiring willpower, and without having to suffer from withdrawal symptoms or gaining weight. Self-hypnosis will make it easy to give up dipping because it takes care of Parts A & B! Here is how: Part A is where you dip smokeless tobacco for relaxation and pleasure. It's our thoughts that create feelings of anxiety. More specifically, people always run mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it manufactures a feeling of stress. We can use various hypnotic methods to train the subconscious to instantly take those tension producing mental movies, and automatically exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This creates relaxation and pleasure, and eliminates the tension that creates the oral urges for chewing. Because of the elimination of stress, the person who is quitting does not feel the compulsion or need to substitute food in place of the chewing tobacco. So quitting without weight gain is possible. Breaking the addiction to smokeless is very similar to overcoming the addiction to food, cigarettes, and nail biting. I have many additional original articles on these topics in my free NLP & hypnosis article repository. Part B is where people chew smokeless tobacco because chewing 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 a person who chews gets into that activity or environment, the mind flashes an image of smokeless, and the image of the smokeless creates an urge to dip? There are powerful and effective NLP and hypnosis techniques that can effectively extinguish those conditioned responses so that your unconscious mind will lose the cravings for chewing tobacco, and the compulsion to dip smokeless. As a matter of fact, you can even get a compulsion to reject dipping smokeless. IN SUMMATION To summarize, when we utilize certain NLP methods, it becomes very easy to stop dipping smokeless without weight gain or having to suffer from withdrawal. And many of these methodologies don't even require post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on training the subconscious mind to use the same thought processes that the mind is using to create the addiction to tobacco, to eliminate the mental addiction.
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Alan B. Densky, CH offers NLP & Hypnosis CDs to overcome smokeless. He helps clients with hypnosis for weight loss, smoke cessation hypnosis, and stress related symptoms. He maintains a library of hypnosis & NLP articles, and offers FREE hypnosis newsletters and MP3's. www.neuro-vision.us/
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