The addiction to smokeless tobacco is easily as dangerous as the addiction to smoking cigarettes. In fact, many experts believe that it is even more insidious. Chewing has been glamorized by highly paid sports heroes who dip, and many have started their addiction as early as the age of nine. And by the time that many of these kids turn 18, they are devastated by throat and mouth 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 3 separate elements contained in a dipping addiction. Two of the components are emotional/mental, and one part is physical.
Part A: YOU CHEW TOBACCO FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.
When you were a toddler and you got cranky, your mother would put a nipple into your mouth to calm you down. 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: DIPPING TOBACCO IS A CONDITIONED RESPONSE.
Remember Pavlov? He rang a bell every time that he fed his dogs. After several repetitions, he could just ring the bell, and the sound of the bell would trigger the dogs to salivate.
When you pair chewing tobacco with any other behavior, the other behavior 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 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 subconscious: If a person chews smokeless and simultaneously drives a car, the mind takes a picture of the dip in the hand, and connects it to the image of the steering wheel, dashboard, or view out the windshield, etc.. Thereafter, every time the person drives the car, the unconscious fills in the missing part of the picture. It flashes an image of the dip 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 picture of the chewing tobacco, because it may only be at the subconscious level of mind. Just as you are not consciously aware of what you are seeing through your peripheral vision until something or someone 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 . .
I’ve worked face-to-face with several thousand people for tobacco cessation and I guarantee that the physical addiction to smokeless tobacco is the weakest part of the addiction to smokeless. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the addiction to tobacco. I believe that 90% of the smokeless are the mental and emotional parts! (Parts A and B).
HERE IS WHAT THIS MEANS TO A PERSON WHO DIPS SHOKELESS TOBACCO AND WHO WANTS TO QUIT.
What this means is that as soon as you eliminate the anxiety that causes you to chew smokeless tobacco for relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and when you erase the conditioned response of feeling a craving for smokeless when watching TV, driving, or finishing a meal, etc. (Part B) . . . then you can give up tobacco without the requirement of willpower, and without suffering from withdrawal symptoms or gaining weight.
Hypnosis will make it easy to break the addiction to tobacco because it takes care of Parts A & B! Here is how:
Part A is where you dip smokeless for relaxation and pleasure. It’s a person’s thoughts that create feelings of anxiety. Moreover, people always watch mental movies in their mind’s eye. If the movie is negative, it manufactures a feeling of anxiety.
We can use different NLP and Hypnosis methods to train the unconscious to instantly and automatically take those anxiety producing mental pictures and movies, and instantly exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This produces relaxation and pleasure, and obliterates the anxiety that creates the oral compulsions for dipping.
Because of the elimination of anxiety, the person who is quitting doesn’t experience the compulsion or need to substitute food in place of the dip. So quitting without weight gain is possible.
Breaking the addiction to smokeless 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 chew 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 a person who dips 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 chew smokeless tobacco?
There are efficient and powerful NLP and hypnosis technologies that can effectively extinguish those conditioned responses so that a person’s unconscious 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
To summarize, by utilizing certain hypnotic techniques, it can be very easy to quit chewing without weight gain or having to suffer from withdrawal. And many of these hypnotic techniques like video hypnosis and NLP do not even depend on post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on training the unconscious mind to use the same thought processes that the mind is using to create the dipping habit, to eliminate the mental addiction.
Alan B. Densky, CH offers NLP CDs to quit smokeless. He helps clients with stress related symptoms including weight loss hypnosis, and quit smoking hypnosis. He maintains a library of hypnosis & NLP articles, and offers FREE hypnosis & NLP newsletters and MP3′s.
