The smokeless tobacco habit is easily as dangerous and debilitating as the addiction to smoking. In fact, most experts think that it is even more insidious. Part of the problem is that highly paid sports heroes have glamorized the use of chew. Many have started their habit as early as the age of nine. And by the time that many of these children turn eighteen, they are devastated by mouth and throat cancer, and many are 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 tounge surgically removed. Usually the surgical butchering of the victim's face is all for nothing, because many die within a year or so anyway.

The experts tell us that the physical addiction to Nicotine is broken after abstaining for seven days. However, the psychological addiction is much stronger and takes a lot more time and effort to overcome making it difficult to quit smokeless tobacco.

There are three individual elements contained in a chewing habit. Two of the parts are emotional/mental, and one part is physical.

Part A: YOU CHEW FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.

When you were a little baby and you got cranky, your mother would put a bottle into your mouth to distract you from that upset. You would get distracted, become calmer, and often go to sleep. That scenario was repeated thousands 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 nervous or tense, you crave something in your mouth for relaxation and pleasure - dip!

Part B: CHEWING 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 the dogs would salivate.

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

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

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

You may not be consciously aware of the mental image of the chewing tobacco, because it may only be at the subconscious 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.

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 smokeless habit. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the chewing habit. Ninety percent of the dipping habit 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 after you have eliminated the tension that makes you chew smokeless tobacco for relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and if you can extinguish the conditioned response of feeling compulsions for smokeless when watching TV, driving, or finishing a meal, etc. (Part B) . . . then you can give up dipping without needing willpower, and without experiencing withdrawal symptoms or gaining weight.

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 people dip smokeless for relaxation and pleasure. It's a person's thoughts that create tension. More to the point, people persistently watch mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it manufactures a feeling of tension.

We can use various hypnotic methods to re-program the subconscious mind to instantly and automatically take those stress creating mental movies, and quickly exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This creates relaxation and pleasure, and eliminates the stress that creates the oral cravings for chewing tobacco.

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

Overcoming 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 index.

Part B is where people get cravings for tobacco because dipping 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 you 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?

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

TO SUMMARIZE

To summarize, by utilizing certain hypnotic and NLP techniques, it becomes very easy to quit dipping tobacco without withdrawal or weight gain. And many of these methods don't even require post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on programming the mind to use the same thought processes that the subconscious is using to create the addiction to dipping smokeless, to eliminate the mental addiction.

Author's Bio: 

Alan B. Densky, CH offers NLP CDs to overcome dip. He helps clients with stress related symptoms including weight loss hypnosis, and quit smoking hypnosis. He maintains a library of NLP & hypnosis articles, and offers FREE NLP & hypnosis newsletters & MP3s.