Smokeless Tobacco - Break The Addiction

If you think smokeless tobacco is "up to snuff" and safe, think again. Whatever you call it - dipping, chewing or spitting - it is every bit as harmful as smoking. Many medical researchers think more so because people are not as aware of the dangers. Cancers of the lips, mouth, tongue and throat can quickly progress in people who use smokeless tobacco and leave debilitating and grotesque - even deadly - results.

Regardless of the dangerous and painful effects of smokeless tobacco, quitting with conventional ways is extremely challenging. A lot of people think the reason lies in nicotine, a natural, super toxic element found in tobacco that is the plant's guard against being eaten by bugs. Measuring equal quantities, nicotine is more deadly than strychnine or snake venom, and three times more lethal than arsenic.

When dipping, the nicotine makes its way to the brain in less than 10 seconds, where it generates a flood of dopamine, which brings about a relaxing feeling. Nicotine also promotes adrenaline production, so it both calms and energizes. However, the psychological part of smokeless tobacco addiction is much stronger and produces far more obstacles to quitting smokeless tobacco than nicotine.

A lot of users took their first dip as early as nine years old. In as little as a few months, using smokeless tobacco becomes an ingrained habit that yields reliable stress relief. In addition to the psychological conditioning, a social conditioning occurs, as images of many athletes dipping also attract young users.

Understanding that there are individual emotional and physical issues that play a role in a chewing habit makes it easier to create a plan to prevail smokeless tobacco addiction. Let's examine each element separately and look at effective methods to curb them.

Dipping for Relaxation and Pleasure: Just like using a pacifier to appease a restless baby, over the course of time, people who use tobacco products start to associate putting something in their mouths with satisfaction and relaxation. Curbing the effects of tobacco usage involves addressing all facets of the addiction.

Dipping Tobacco is a Conditioned Response: The classic illustration of a conditioned response relates to Pavlov and his dogs, which were trained to anticipate food - and thus began salivating - when a bell was rung. In relation, if, for example, you always chew tobacco after each meal, you will consequently acquire a desire to chew when you get finished eating.

In your mind, the images of pushing the plate away and laying down your napkin may be linked to using snuff, even though you are not conscious of it. Becoming aware of the situations or trigger images can help you overcome cravings.

The Physical Addiction to Nicotine, But … : Despite the powerful addiction, doctors maintain that the physical part of nicotine addiction is eliminated after people quit using tobacco for seven days. It's my strong belief that nicotine addiction comprises a scant 10 percent of smokeless tobacco dependency. As such, 90 percent of the fight to quit dipping involves overcoming the mental and emotional components. So what does this mean for people like you who would like to quit?

Quitting becomes much easier if you can:

A. Deal with and eliminate the anxiety and tension that compels you to use smokeless tobacco
B. Cancel the conditioned responses to chew in certain settings

But how does a person triumph over those issues?

Self-hypnosis offers a way to address the psychological and emotional components of the addiction while eliminating struggles, which will eliminate the symptoms of withdrawal. When we appreciate how self-hypnosis works, it makes the decision to quit dipping much easier to carry out.

When people dip for relaxation and pleasure, it is to calm feelings of stress. People often play the same images over in their minds, like a bad movie, which leaves them feeling anxious and tense. Using hypnosis and various Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) techniques, you retrain your brain to instantaneously and automatically stop stress-inducing images and substitute them with soothing images and mental movies. This produces satisfaction and relaxation while reducing cravings and oral compulsions. You elude the inclination to put the chew in your mouth, and you don't get any urge to substitute food in its place. This quells weight gain.

To resist the conditioned response of dipping smokeless tobacco, the NLP Flash technique erases the associations of dipping during certain activities or situations. This means your subconscious will no longer trigger the compulsion. Further, the Flash can even be used to create a compulsion to deny smokeless tobacco.

Employing specific and strategic NLP techniques makes the decision to stop dipping smokeless tobacco quite easy and painless by circumventing cravings, withdrawal and weight gain. The method is dependent on retraining the unconscious mind to follow the same thought patterns that create your mental addiction to smokeless tobacco in the first place, to eliminate the addiction.

Your brain is a powerful tool—far more powerful than an addiction. With dedication and the aid of self-hypnosis and NLP, you can quit smokeless tobacco forever.

Alan B. Densky, CH is a leader in the use of NLP stop smoking techniques. He now offers a potent Stop Dipping Tobacco program based on the same techniques. Learn more at his Neuro-VISION self hypnosis site where you can see Free hypnotherapy videos and articles.