Stop Smoking Hypnosis How Does It Work?
There are three separate parts to smoking addiction. Two of the parts are mental/emotional, and one part is physical.
Part A: YOU SMOKE FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.
When you were a little baby and you became upset, your mother would put a pacifier into your mouth to distract you. You would get distracted, become more peaceful, and often fall asleep.
That scenario was repeated thousands of times so that your subconscious 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, the old pattern kicks in, and you crave something to put into your mouth… A cigarette!
Part B: SMOKING IS A CONDITIONED RESPONSE.
Remember Pavlov and his dog?
He rang a bell every time he fed his dog. After a few repetitions, he could just ring the bell, and the dog would salivate.
When you associate smoking a cigarette with any other activity, the other activity will trigger cravings for a cigarette and a feeling of urgency to light up a cigarette. This is called a Pavlovian conditioned response.
For example, if you light up a cigarette when you watch a movie, you will automatically get an urge to smoke a cigarette each time you go to the movies.
If you light up when you drive your car, you will automatically get an urge to light up a cigarette each time you drive your car.
If you smoke a cigarette when you see someone else smoking, you will automatically get an urge to smoke a cigarette each time you see someone else smoking.
All these things which set off your cravings are called triggers. An essential part of quitting smoking is understanding your triggers and knowing how to tackle the cravings when participating in these activities.
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 sees a cup of coffee, the unconscious fills in the missing part of the picture. It flashes an image of a cigarette, and the smoker gets a craving for a cigarette.
You may be unaware of the mental movie of the cigarette, because it may only be at the subconscious level. 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, building a trigger.
Part C: THERE IS A PHYSICAL ADDICTION TO NICOTINE, BUT . . .
The physical addiction is the weakest part of the habit. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the addiction to cigarettes. I believe that 90% of the habit is the mental and emotional component! (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 feeling of tension that compels you to put cigarettes into your mouth for 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 break the addiction to cigarettes without having to suffer from withdrawal symptoms or weight-gain.
Self-hypnosis will make it easy to break the addiction to cigarettes because it takes care of Parts A & B! Here is how.
Part A is where smokers light-up a cigarette for relaxation and pleasure. It’s your thoughts that create feelings of stress. More specifically, people persistently run mental movies in their minds. If the movie is negative, it brings about a feeling of anxiety. But if it’s positive, it makes warm happy associations, often accompanied by thoughts of smoking a cigarette.
We can use various hypnosis techniques to reprogram the subconscious mind to instantly and automatically take those anxiety producing mental movies, and automatically exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This instills relaxation and pleasure, and obliterates the tension that triggers the oral cravings and compulsions for cigarettes.
Because of the elimination of feelings of tension the smoker who is quitting doesn’t experience the compulsion or need to substitute food in place of the cigarettes. So quitting without weight gain is actually quite easy.
Part B is where people smoke a cigarette 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 a smoker gets into that activity or environment, the mind to flashes an image of a cigarette, and the image of the cigarette triggers an urge to smoke?
There are quit smoking hypnosis techniques that can effectively extinguish those conditioned responses so that a smoker’s mind will lose the cravings for cigarettes, and the compulsion to smoke. As a matter of fact, you will even get a compulsion to reject the cigarettes towards the end of your quitting period.
Darren Williger is an over-caffeinated, low carbohydrate eating, non-smoking winemaking enthusiast who writes for SmokersWebsite.com, FitnessPad.com, and LifeSatori.com
