Cigarette Smoking Addiction With NLP
I'm including several articles on N.L.P. in general even though they are not *from* Tony Robbins, bear with me, there is a method to my ...ness.
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There are three separate components to a cigarette smoking habit. Two of the elements are mental, and one part is physical.
Part A: YOU SMOKE FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.
When you were a tot and you became upset, your mother would put a pacifier into your mouth to distract you from that upset. You would get distracted, become more peaceful, and often go to sleep. That scenario 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 nervous 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 the sound of the bell would trigger the dogs to salivate.
When you link smoking a cigarette with any other behavior, the other behavior will trigger cravings for a cigarette and an urge that makes you feel compelled 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 smokes and simultaneously drinks a cup of coffee, the mind takes a snapshot of the cigarette in the hand, and ties it to the cup of coffee. Thereafter, every time the person has 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 one.
You may not be consciously aware of the mental image of the cigarette, because it may only be at the subconscious level of mind. Just as you are not consciously aware 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've worked one-on-one with several thousand people who smoke and I give you my personal guarantee that the physical addiction is the weakest part of the habit. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the smoking habit. ninety percent of the habit are the mental and emotional parts! (Parts A and B).
HERE IS WHAT THIS MEANS TO A SMOKER WHO WANTS TO QUIT.
As soon as you eliminate the anxiety that pushes you to put cigarettes into the mouth for relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and when you erase the conditioned response of feeling compulsions for cigarettes when having a cup of coffee, driving, or finishing a meal, etc. (Part B) . . . then you can give up smoking without needing willpower, and without having to experience withdrawal symptoms or gaining weight.
Self Hypnosis can help trigger a smoker to stop. Self-hypnosis will make it easy to give up smoking 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 a person's thoughts which create feelings of stress. More exactly, people always watch mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it creates a feeling of anxiety.
We can use various hypnosis and NLP techniques to train the unconscious to automatically take those stress creating mental images, and automatically exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This produces relaxation and pleasure, and eliminates the stress that triggers the oral compulsions and cravings for cigarettes.
Because of the elimination of stress, the smoker who is quitting does not 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 light-up 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 triggers cravings for a cigarette?
There are effective hypnosis technologies that can effectively eliminate 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.
TO SUMMARIZE
To summarize, when we utilize certain NLP methods, it becomes very easy to quit smoking without withdrawal or weight gain. And many of these techniques do not even depend on post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on training the subconscious mind to use the same thought processes that the mind is using to create the smoking habit, to eliminate the mental addiction.
Alan B. Densky, CH established his practice starting in 1978. He offers Neuro-VISION Video Stop Smoking Self Hypnosis Programs and Audio Quit Smoking Self Hypnosis Programs. Visit his free library of original NLP & hypnosis articles or download FREE self hypnosis and NLP newsletters and MP3's.
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