There are 3 separate elements contained in a cigarette addiction. Two of the parts are mental, and only one part is physical.

Part A: YOU SMOKE FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.

When you were a toddler and you got upset, your mother would put a nipple into your mouth to pacify you. You would get distracted, become relaxed, and often fall 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 an adult, if you feel anxious 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 dogs would salivate.

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

For example: If you smoke when you drive your car, you will automatically get an urge to light-up a cigarette 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 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, the 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 be unaware of the mental movie 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 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 with several thousand people for smoke cessation and I can guarantee you that the physical addiction to tobacco is the weakest part of the smoking habit. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the addiction to tobacco. 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 if you can eliminate the feeling of tension that compels you to smoke a cigarette to create relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and when you erase 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 smoking without needing willpower, and without experiencing withdrawal symptoms or gaining weight.

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 smoke a cigarette for relaxation and pleasure. It's our thoughts that create feelings of tension. Moreover, people invariably watch mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it manufactures a feeling of tension. We can use different NLP and Hypnosis methods to re-program the unconscious mind to easily take those stress creating mental pictures and movies, and quickly exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This instills relaxation and pleasure, and eliminates the stress that triggers the oral cravings and compulsions for cigarettes.

Because of the elimination of anxiety, 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 creates an urge to light-up?

There are efficient and powerful hypnosis and NLP methods that can effectively erase those conditioned responses so that a person'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 SUMMARY

In summation, when we use certain hypnotic and NLP techniques, it becomes very easy to stop smoking without withdrawal or weight gain. And many of these methods do not even depend on post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on training the mind to use the same thought processes that the unconscious mind is using to create the addiction to cigarettes, to eliminate the mental addiction.

===========