The addiction to smokeless tobacco is easily as deadly as the addiction to smoking. In fact, many experts think that it is even more insidious. Chewing has been glamorized by sports professionals. Many people who dip tobacco started as early as 9 years of age! And by the time that many of these kids turn 18, they are overcome by mouth and throat cancer, and may be dying.

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.

There are three individual components to a dipping habit. Two of the parts are emotional/mental, and only one part is physical.

Part A: You chew tobacco for relaxation and pleasure.

When you were a little baby and you got restless, your mother would put a nipple into your mouth to calm you down. You would get distracted, become mellower, and often go to sleep. 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 – dip!

Part B: Chewing is a conditioned response.

Remember Pavlov? Every time that he fed his dogs he would ring a bell. After several repetitions, all he had to do was to ring the bell, and that would make the dogs salivate.

When you link dipping with any other action, the other action will trigger cravings for smokeless tobacco and a feeling of urgency to chew. This is called a conditioned response.

For example: If you chew when you play baseball, you will automatically get an urge to chew each time you play baseball.

Here is exactly how this conditioned response gets programmed into your unconscious: If a person chews smokeless tobacco and simultaneously drives a car, the mind takes a snapshot of the tobacco in the hand, and links it to the image of the steering wheel, dashboard, or view out the windshield, etc.. Thereafter, every time the person drives the car, her subconscious fills in the missing part of the picture. It flashes an image of the smokeless in the hand coming towards the mouth, and the dipper gets a craving for smokeless.

You may not be consciously aware of the mental picture of the smokeless, 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 smokeless tobacco.

Part C: There is a physical addiction to nicotine, but. . .


After having worked with several thousand people for tobacco cessation I can guarantee you that the physical addiction is the weakest part of the addiction to smokeless. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the addiction to tobacco. Ninety percent of the habit are the mental and emotional parts! (Parts A and B).

Here is what this means to a person who chews smokeless tobacco and who wants to quit.

What this means is that as soon as you eliminate the tension that pushes you to chew smokeless for relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and if you can extinguish the conditioned response of feeling urges for chew when watching TV, driving, or finishing a meal, etc. (Part B) . . . then you can stop dipping tobacco without needing willpower, and without suffering from 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 dippers dip smokeless tobacco for relaxation and pleasure. It’s our thoughts that create anxiety. More specifically, people constantly play mental movies in their mind’s eye. If the movie is negative, it creates a feeling of stress.

We can use various hypnotic methods to program the unconscious to quickly and easily take those tension creating mental pictures and movies, and instantly exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This creates relaxation and pleasure, and eliminates the tension that causes the oral compulsions for dipping.

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

Quitting the addiction to smokeless tobacco is very similar to overcoming the addiction to food, cigarettes, and nail biting. I have many additional original articles on these topics in my free hypnosis and NLP article repository.

Part B is where you dip tobacco because chewing 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 people get into that activity or environment, the mind flashes an image of smokeless, and the image of the smokeless triggers an urge to chew?

There are stop smokeless hypnosis, and quit smokeless NLP techniques that can effortlessly extinguish those conditioned responses so that your unconscious mind will lose the cravings for smokeless, and the compulsion to dip smokeless. As a matter of fact, you can even get a compulsion to reject chewing.

To summarize, when we use certain hypnotic techniques, it can be very easy to stop chewing without weight gain or having to suffer from withdrawal. And many of these hypnotic methods like video self hypnosis and Neuro-Linguistic Programming do not even depend on post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on training the unconscious mind to use the same mental processes that the unconscious is using to create the dipping tobacco habit, to eliminate the mental addiction.

Alan B. Densky, CH offers self-hypnosis CDs to quit chewing tobacco, which helps clients to bypass nicotine withdrawal. He maintains a library of hypnosis & NLP articles, and offers FREE hypnosis and NLP newsletters & MP3s.

http://www.neuro-vision.us/Products/Quit-Smokeless-Tobacco-Hypnosis-CDs.htm

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