Breaking The Addiction To Chewing Tobacco With Hypnosis and NLP

The smokeless tobacco addiction is every bit as devastating and dangerous as a cigarette addiction - possibly even more so. In fact, most proclaim that it is even more insidious. Part of the problem is that sports heroes have glamorized the use of chew. Many have started their habit as early as the age of nine. And by the time that many of these kids turn 18, they are devastated by mouth and throat 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 three distinct parts to the addiction to dip. Two of the elements are mental, and one part is physical.

Part A: YOU CHEW FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.

When you were a toddler and you got restless, your mother would put a nipple into your mouth to pacify you. You would get distracted, become calmer, and often go to sleep. That sequence of events was repeated thousands 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 tense or nervous, you crave something in your mouth for relaxation and pleasure - smokeless tobacco!

Part B: CHEWING TOBACCO IS A CONDITIONED RESPONSE.

Remember Pavlov? Every time that he fed his dogs he rang a bell. After several repetitions, all he had to do was to ring the bell, and the dogs would salivate.

When you link chewing tobacco with any other behavior, the other behavior will trigger cravings for chewing tobacco and a compulsion to chew tobacco. This is called a conditioned response.

For example: If you chew tobacco when you drive your car, you will automatically get an urge to chew tobacco each time you drive your car.

Here is exactly how this conditioned response gets programmed into your subconscious: If a person dips smokeless tobacco and simultaneously drives a car, the mind takes a picture of the smokeless tobacco in the hand, and associates it to the image of the steering wheel, dashboard, or view out the windshield, etc.. Thereafter, every time the person drives the car, her unconscious mind fills in the missing part of the picture. It flashes an image of the dip in the hand coming towards the mouth, and the dipper gets a craving for chewing tobacco.

You may be unaware of the mental movie of the chewing tobacco, 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 smokeless tobacco.

Part C: THERE IS A PHYSICAL ADDICTION TO NICOTINE, BUT . . .

I have had the experience of working with several thousand people who are addicted to tobacco 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 chewing habit. The strongest parts of the smokeless are the mental and emotional parts! (Parts A and B).

HERE IS WHAT THIS MEANS TO A PERSON WHO DIPS SHOKELESS TOBACCO AND WHO WANTS TO QUIT.

What this means is that after you have eliminated the anxiety that causes you to put dip into your mouth for relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and when you erase the conditioned response of feeling urges for dip when watching television, driving, or finishing a meal, etc. (Part B) . . . then you can give up tobacco without the requirement of willpower, and without having to suffer from withdrawal symptoms or weight-gain.

Self-hypnosis will make it easy to quit dipping because it takes care of Parts A & B! Here is how:

Part A is where dippers dip smokeless for relaxation and pleasure. It's your thoughts that create stress. Moreover, people persistently run mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it manufactures a feeling of anxiety.

We can use various hypnosis and NLP techniques to program the unconscious to easily take those stress producing mental images, and quickly exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This instills relaxation and pleasure, and obliterates the stress that triggers the oral compulsions and cravings for chewing.

Because of the elimination of tension, the person who is quitting doesn't feel the compulsion or need to substitute food in place of the dip. So quitting without weight gain is possible.

Breaking the addiction to smokeless tobacco is very similar to overcoming the addiction to food, cigarettes, and nail biting. I have many additional original articles on these topics in my article index.

Part B is where you chew because dipping 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 people get into that activity or environment, the mind flashes an image of smokeless tobacco in your hand, and the image of the smokeless tobacco in your hand triggers cravings for smokeless?

There are efficient and powerful NLP techniques that can effectively erase those conditioned responses so that your mind will lose the cravings for smokeless, and the compulsion to chew tobacco. As a matter of fact, you can even get a compulsion to reject dipping smokeless tobacco.

IN SUMMARY

In summary, by utilizing certain NLP techniques, it can be very easy to stop dipping smokeless tobacco without weight gain or having to suffer from withdrawal. And many of these methods like video self hypnosis and Neuro-Linguistic Programming don't even require post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on programming the unconscious mind to use the same thought processes that the subconscious is using to create the addiction to dipping smokeless tobacco, to eliminate the mental addiction.

Alan B. Densky, CH offers NLP CDs to quit chew. 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 and NLP newsletters & MP3s.