The addiction to smokeless tobacco is easily as dangerous and debilitating as the addiction to smoking cigarettes. In fact, many believe that it is even more insidious.

Part of the problem is that sports heroes have glamorized the use of dip or chew. Many who chew tobacco started as early as nine years of age! By the time many of these children turn eighteen, they are dying from throat and mouth cancers.

While a person with lung cancer can look normal, the face of a victim of mouth cancer can be an awful sight. Imagine how a face looks after having a jawbone cut out, or the lips or tongue surgically removed. Usually the surgical butchering of the victim's face is all for nothing, because many die within a year or so anyway.

Doctors tell us that the physical part of the Nicotine addiction is broken after abstaining for seven days. But the psychological part of the addiction is far stronger and may take a much longer time and a lot more effort to overcome, which makes it very difficult to give up smokeless tobacco.

How To Break The Smokeless Habit

There are three distinct factors to a chewing habit. Two of the factors are emotional/mental, and one is physical.

Part A: YOU DIP FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.

When you were a toddler and you got cranky, your mother would put a pacifier into your mouth to distract you from that upset. You would get distracted, become calmer, and often go to sleep. That sequence of events was repeated dozens 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 fully-grown, if you feel upset, you crave something in your mouth for relaxation and pleasure - dip!

Part B: DIPPING TOBACCO IS A CONDITIONED RESPONSE.

Remember Pavlov? He rang a bell every time that he fed his dogs. After a few repetitions, he could just ring the bell, and that would trigger the dogs to salivate.

When you connect together dipping with any other behavior, the other behavior will trigger cravings for chewing tobacco and a urge to chew. This is called a conditioned response.

For example: If you chew when you drive your car, you will automatically get an urge to chew each time you drive your car.

Here is exactly how this conditioned response gets programmed into your unconscious: If a person chews smokeless tobacco and simultaneously drinks a cup of coffee, the mind takes a picture of the tobacco in the hand, and connects it to the cup of coffee. Thereafter, every time the person has a cup of coffee, his 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 not be consciously aware of the mental image of the smokeless tobacco, 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 draws your attention to it. But the image is there, creating a craving for chewing tobacco.

Part C: THERE IS A PHYSICAL ADDICTION TO NICOTINE, BUT

After having worked with several thousand people for tobacco addiction I give you my guarantee that the physical addiction to tobacco 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 DIPS AND WHO WANTS TO QUIT.

What this means is that after you have eliminated the tension that causes you to chew smokeless for relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and when you erase the conditioned response of feeling compulsions for chew when having a cup of coffee, driving, or finishing a meal, etc. (Part B) . . . then you can break the addiction to chew without requiring willpower, and without having to experience withdrawal symptoms or weight-gain.

Self-hypnosis will make it easy to break the addiction to smokeless because it takes care of Parts A & B! Here is how:

Part A is where you dip for relaxation and pleasure. It's your thoughts which create feelings of stress. Moreover, people invariably play mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it creates a feeling of stress.

We can use different NLP techniques to train the mind to instantly and automatically take those tension creating mental images, and quickly exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This manufactures relaxation and pleasure, and obliterates the tension that creates the oral urges and compulsions for chewing.

Because of the elimination of feelings of tension, the person who is quitting doesn't feel 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 dip smokeless tobacco because dipping smokeless 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 people get 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 causes an urge to chew smokeless tobacco?

There are efficient and powerful hypnosis methods that can effectively erase those conditioned responses so that your subconscious will lose the cravings for chew, and the compulsion to dip. As a matter of fact, you can even get a compulsion to reject chewing.

IN SUMMATION

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

Alan B. Densky, CH created his professional practice in NLP and hypnosis in 1978. He is the inventor of the video hypnotherapy technology. He has worked one-on-one with over 10,000 clients for stress related symptoms including weight loss hypnosis and appetite control, and quit smoking hypnosis. 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