Break Your Cigarette Addiction With Hypnosis

Like it or not, quitting smoking is a necessity at this point in history, because cigarettes have been banned from restaurants and other public places. And in fact, it’s the intelligent thing to do for more reasons than good health alone. This article explores the very best hypnosis and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) techniques that can be used to make quitting your cigarette addiction as painless as possible.

There are three separate and distinct parts to the addiction to cigarettes. Two of the parts are mental, and one part is physical.

Part a: You Smoke for Relaxation and Pleasure

When you were a tot and you got cranky, your mother or father would put a bottle into your mouth to distract you from being upset. You were quickly distracted, became calmer, and fell asleep. That sequence of events was repeated hundreds 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 - 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 the sound of the bell would trigger the dogs to salivate.

When you pair smoking with any other action, the other action will trigger cravings for a cigarette and an urge that makes you feel compelled to light up a cigarette. This is called a conditioned response.

For example: If you smoke a cigarette when you drive your car, you will automatically get an urge to light-up each time you drive your car.

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 links it to the cup of coffee. Thereafter, every time the person sees a cup of coffee, the unconscious 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 image 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 draws your attention to it. But the image is there, creating a craving for a cigarette.

Part C: You Have a Physical Addiction to Nicotine, but . . .

I’ve worked face-to-face with several thousand smokers and I give you my guarantee that the physical addiction to cigarettes is the weakest part of the addiction. In fact, I believe that it is only 10% of the addiction. I believe that ninety percent of the addiction is the mental and emotional parts! (Parts A and B).

Here Is What This Means to a Smoker Who Wants to Quit

When you eliminate the anxiety that pushes you to light-up a cigarette for relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and if you can extinguish the conditioned response of feeling a craving for cigarettes when having a cup of coffee, driving, or finishing a meal, etc. (Part B) . . . then you can give up cigarettes without requiring willpower, and without having to suffer from withdrawal symptoms or gaining weight.

Hypnosis can help a smoker to quit. Self-hypnosis will make it easy to give up cigarettes because it takes care of Parts A & B! Here is how:

Part A is where people light-up a cigarette for relaxation and pleasure. It’s your thoughts which create feelings of tension. More exactly, people persistently create mental movies in their mind’s eye. If the movie is negative, it brings about a feeling of stress.

We can use various hypnosis and NLP techniques to program the subconscious mind to quickly take those tension creating mental pictures and movies, and quickly exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This creates relaxation and pleasure, and obliterates the tension that triggers the oral cravings 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 people 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 you get into that activity or environment, the mind flashes an image of a cigarette, and the image of the cigarette causes an urge to light-up?

There are effective and powerful hypnosis and NLP technologies that can effortlessly extinguish those conditioned responses so that a smoker’s unconscious 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.

What to Do Next

Explore the use of hypnosis as a way to achieve relaxation and stress relief. By using certain 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 thought processes that the subconscious is using to create the addiction to cigarettes, to eliminate the mental addiction.