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There are three separate parts to a smoking habit. Two of the parts are mental, and only one part is physical.

Part A: YOU SMOKE FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.

When you were a little baby and you started crying, your mother would put a pacifier into your mouth to calm you down. You would get distracted, become calm, 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 fully grown, if you feel anxious or tense, you crave something in your mouth for relaxation and pleasure - a cigarette!

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 trigger the dogs to salivate.

When you pair smoking a cigarette with any other action, the other action will trigger cravings for a cigarette and a compulsion to light up. This is called a conditioned response.

For example: If you light-up when you see a cup of coffee, you will automatically get an urge to light-up 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 picture of the cigarette in the hand, and associates it to the cup of coffee. Thereafter, every time the person has a cup of coffee, her unconscious mind fills in the missing part of the picture. It flashes an image of a cigarette, and the smoker gets a craving for a cigarette.

You may be unaware of the mental picture 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 or something 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 have had the experience of working with several thousand people for smoke cessation and I give you my guarantee that the physical addiction to tobacco is the weakest part of the smoking addiction. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the smoking habit. I believe that 90% of the smoking 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 after you have eliminated the tension that compels you to smoke a cigarette to create relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and when you erase the conditioned response of feeling a compulsion 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 experiencing 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 people smoke for relaxation and pleasure. It's our thoughts that create feelings of anxiety. More specifically, people invariably play mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it brings about a feeling of tension. We can use various hypnosis and NLP techniques to train the mind to quickly and easily take those anxiety creating mental images, and quickly exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This manufactures relaxation and pleasure, and eliminates the anxiety that creates the oral cravings and compulsions for a cigarette.

Because of the elimination of feelings of tension, the smoker who is quitting doesn't 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 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 cravings for a cigarette?

There are stop smoking hypnosis, and stop smoking NLP techniques that can effectively erase those conditioned responses so that a smoker's subconscious 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

To summarize, when we utilize certain hypnotic and NLP techniques, it can be very easy to stop smoking without weight gain or having to suffer from withdrawal. And many of these methodologies do not even require post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on programming the mind to use the same mental processes that it is using to create the smoking habit, to eliminate the mental addiction.

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Alan B. Densky, CH established his practice in Neuro-Linguistic Programming and hypnosis in 1978. He has worked face-to-face with over 10,000 clients for hypnotic appetite suppression, hypnosis for weight loss, smoke cessation hypnosis, and other 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