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There are 3 separate parts to a smoking habit. Two of the elements are mental, and only one part is physical.

Part A: YOU SMOKE FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.

When you were an infant and you got cranky, your mother would put a pacifier into your mouth to calm you down. You would get distracted, become peaceful, and often go to 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 an adult, 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, all he had to do was to ring the bell, and the dogs would salivate.

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

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

Here is exactly how this conditioned response gets programmed into your unconscious: If a person smokes 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 sees a cup of coffee, his unconscious mind fills in the missing part of the picture. It flashes an image of the 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 unconscious 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 smokers and I give you my guarantee that the physical addiction to tobacco is the weakest part of the addiction. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the addiction to tobacco. 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 when you eliminate the anxiety that pushes you to light-up a cigarette for relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and when you erase the conditioned response of feeling an urge 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 experiencing withdrawal symptoms or weight-gain.

Hypnosis will make it easy to give up tobacco because it takes care of Parts A & B! Here is how:

Part A is where smokers smoke for relaxation and pleasure. It's your thoughts that create tension. More to the point, people persistently watch mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it causes a feeling of tension. We can use various hypnosis and NLP techniques to re-program the subconscious mind to automatically take those anxiety producing mental pictures and movies, and instantly exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This creates relaxation and pleasure, and obliterates the anxiety that causes the oral cravings and urges for cigarettes.

Because of the elimination of anxiety, 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 smokers get cravings for cigarettes 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 quit smoking hypnosis, and quit smoking NLP techniques that can effectively eliminate 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 SUMMATION

To summarize, by utilizing certain hypnotic techniques, it can be very easy to quit smoking without withdrawal or weight gain. And many of these methods don't even require post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on programming the subconscious mind to use the same thought 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 professional practice in Neuro-Linguistic Programming and hypnosis in 1978. He has worked one-on-one with over 10,000 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