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There are 3 distinct factors to a smoking addiction. Two of the elements are mental, and one part is physical.

Part A: YOU SMOKE FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.

When you were a little baby and you got cranky, your mother would put a nipple into your mouth to distract you from that upset. You would get distracted, become relaxed, and often fall asleep. That scenario 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 an adult, 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, all he had to do was to 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 a compulsion to light up. This is called a conditioned response.

For example: If you smoke when you see someone else smoking, you will automatically get an urge to smoke each time you see someone else smoking.

Here is exactly how this conditioned response gets programmed into your unconscious: If a person lights-up a cigarette and simultaneously drinks a cup of coffee, the mind takes a snapshot of the cigarette in the hand, and links it to the cup of coffee. Thereafter, every time the person has a cup of coffee, her subconscious 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 unconscious level of mind. Just as you are not consciously aware of what you are seeing through your peripheral vision until something or someone 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 smokers and I can guarantee you that the physical addiction is the weakest part of the smoking addiction. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the habit. The strongest parts 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.

What this means is that as soon as you eliminate the anxiety that pushes you to smoke a cigarette to create 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 quit smoking without requiring willpower, and without suffering from withdrawal symptoms or weight-gain.

Self-hypnosis will make it easy to quit smoking 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 feelings of anxiety. More exactly, people persistently create mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it brings on a feeling of tension. We can use various hypnotic methods to train the subconscious mind to easily take those stress creating mental movies, and instantly exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This instills relaxation and pleasure, and obliterates the stress that creates the oral cravings and urges for cigarettes.

Because of the elimination of stressful feelings, 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 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 you get into that activity or environment, the mind flashes an image of a cigarette, and the image of the cigarette creates an urge to smoke a cigarette?

There are effective 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, when we utilize certain NLP methods, it can be very easy to stop smoking without withdrawal or weight gain. And many of these techniques 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 opened his practice in NLP and hypnosis in 1978. He has worked face-to-face with over 10,000 clients for