The addiction to smokeless tobacco is easily as debilitating as the addiction to smoking cigarettes. In fact, most experts proclaim that it is even more insidious.

Part of the problem is that sports heroes have glamorized the use of dip or chew. And by the time that many of these youngsters turn 18, they are devastated by mouth and throat cancer.

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.

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 chewing addiction. Two of the elements are emotional/mental, and one part is physical.

Part A: YOU CHEW FOR RELAXATION AND PLEASURE.

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

Part B: DIPPING IS A CONDITIONED RESPONSE.

Remember Pavlov? Every time that he fed his dogs he rang a bell. 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 chewing tobacco and a feeling of urgency to dip. This is called a conditioned response.

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

Here is exactly how this conditioned response gets programmed into your subconscious: If a person chews smokeless and simultaneously drinks a cup of coffee, the mind takes a picture of the smokeless tobacco in the hand, and ties it to the cup of coffee. Thereafter, every time the person sees a cup of coffee, his unconscious mind fills in the missing part of the picture. It flashes an image of the smokeless, and the dipper gets a craving for chewing tobacco.

You may be unaware 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 someone or 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 . . .

I've worked face-to-face with several thousand people for tobacco addiction and I give you my guarantee that the physical addiction to tobacco is the weakest part of the smokeless habit. In fact, I believe that it is only ten percent of the chewing habit. 90% of the habit 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 if you can eliminate the anxiety that causes you to put dip into your mouth for relaxation and pleasure (Part A) . . . and when you erase the conditioned response of feeling compulsions for smokeless when having a cup of coffee, driving, or finishing a meal, etc. (Part B) . . . then you can dipping without requiring willpower, and without experiencing withdrawal symptoms or weight-gain.

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 chew smokeless for relaxation and pleasure. It's our thoughts that create feelings of anxiety . More specifically, people invariably play mental movies in their mind's eye. If the movie is negative, it creates a feeling of tension.

We can use different NLP techniques to program the unconscious mind to instantly and automatically take those stress producing mental movies, and automatically exchange them for relaxation producing mental pictures and movies. This instills relaxation and pleasure, and obliterates the stress that creates the oral compulsions and cravings for chewing tobacco.

Because of the elimination of feelings of tension, 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.

Part B is where people dip tobacco because dipping 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 chews 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 triggers an urge to chew?

There are efficient and powerful hypnosis methods that can effectively extinguish those conditioned responses so that a person's unconscious mind will lose the cravings for dip, and the compulsion to dip. As a matter of fact, you can even get a compulsion to reject chewing.

TO SUMMARIZE

To summarize, when we utilize certain hypnotic and NLP techniques, it becomes very easy to quit chewing without weight gain or having to suffer from withdrawal. And many of these hypnotic methods don't even require post-hypnotic suggestions. They depend on training the subconscious to use the same thought processes that it is using to create the dipping tobacco habit, to eliminate the mental addiction.

Author's Bio: 

Alan B. Densky, CH started his professional practice of Neuro-Linguistic Programming and hypnosis in 1978. He is the inventor of the Video Hypnosis technology, which received a United States Patent for its effectiveness. He offers hypnosis CDs that can effectively extinguish a person's cravings for dip, and the compulsion to dip . He maintains a library consisting of original hypnosis & NLP articles , and FREE newsletters and MP3 downloads. Contact him through his Neuro-VISION Video Hypnosis & NLP website .