Various Articles

There are 3 separate components to a chewing addiction. Two of the parts are mental, and only one part is physical.

Part A: YOU CHEW FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.

When you were a baby and you started crying, your mother would put a pacifier into your mouth to calm you down. You would get distracted, become more peaceful, and often fall asleep. That scenario was repeated many, many 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 tense or nervous, you crave something in your mouth for relaxation and pleasure - chew!

Part B: CHEWING TOBACCO IS A CONDITIONED RESPONSE.

Remember Pavlov? Every time that he fed his dogs he rang a bell. After several repetitions, he would just ring the bell, and the dogs would salivate.

When you connect together chewing tobacco with any other activity, the other activity will trigger cravings for tobacco and a feeling of urgency to chew. This is called a conditioned response.

For example: If you chew while you watch a movie, you will automatically get an urge to chew each time you go to the movies.

Here is exactly how this conditioned response gets programmed into your unconscious: If a person chews and simultaneously drinks a cup of coffee, the mind takes a snapshot of the chew in the hand, and links it to the cup of coffee. Thereafter, every time the person sees a cup of coffee, the subconscious mind fills in the missing part of the picture. It flashes an image of the dip, and the dipper gets a craving for smokeless tobacco.

You may be unaware of the mental movie of the smokeless tobacco, 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 someone 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've worked one-on-one with several thousand people who are addicted to tobacco and I guarantee you that the physical addiction to smokeless is the weakest part of the addiction. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the addiction to tobacco. I believe that ninety percent of the smokeless tobacco addiction are the mental and emotional parts! (Parts A and B).

HERE IS WHAT THIS MEANS TO A PERSON WHO CHEWS AND WHO WANTS TO QUIT.

What this means is that as soon as you eliminate the feeling of tension that makes you chew smokeless for relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and if you can extinguish the conditioned response of feeling cravings for smokeless tobacco when having a cup of coffee, driving, or finishing a meal, etc. (Part B) . . . then you can give up dipping without needing willpower, and without experiencing withdrawal symptoms or weight-gain.

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

Part A is where dippers dip for relaxation and pleasure. It's our thoughts that create anxiety. More exactly, people constantly watch mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it brings on a feeling of stress.

We can use different hypnotic methods to re-program the subconscious to quickly take those anxiety producing mental pictures, and quickly exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This instills relaxation and pleasure, and obliterates the anxiety that triggers the oral urges and compulsions for dipping.

Because of the elimination of feelings of anxiety, the person who is quitting does not experience the compulsion or need to substitute food in place of the smokeless tobacco. So quitting without weight gain is possible.

Part B is where you get cravings for smokeless tobacco because chewing 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 a person who chews gets 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 creates an urge to dip?

There are efficient hypnosis and NLP technologies that can effectively eliminate those conditioned responses so that a person's subconscious mind will lose the cravings for smokeless, and the compulsion to chew smokeless. As a matter of fact, you can even get a compulsion to reject dipping.

IN SUMMATION

To summarize, when we utilize certain NLP methods, it becomes very easy to quit dipping without withdrawal or weight gain. And many of these methods don't even depend on post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on training the subconscious to use the same thought processes that the unconscious mind is using to create the smokeless habit, to eliminate the mental addiction.

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Alan B. Densky, CH started his professional practice in Neuro-Linguistic Programming and hypnosis in 1978. He has worked one-on-one with over 10,000 clients for hypnotic appetite suppression, hypnosis for weight loss, smoke cessation hypnosis, and other stress related symptoms. He maintains a library of original hypnosis & NLP articles, and offers FREE hypnosis and NLP newsletters and MP3 downloads. He can be contacted through his website at www.Neuro-VISION.us