Hypnosis & NLP For Motivation Is The Key To Breaking The Cigarette Smoking Addiction

There are two states of mind that must be fulfilled before anyone will freely quit smoking. These fundamentals are called “Desire,” and “Decision.”

DESIRE: A want, crave or a wish for

DECISION: Making up of one’s mind / a verdict or judgment

In order to break the smoking habit, a person must have a DESIRE to quit. You probably want to break the smoking habit, at least some part of you does, or you wouldn’t be reading this article.

In addition, in order to break the smoking habit, you have to DECIDE to quit. Since you haven’t stopped smoking, it simply means that you have not DECIDED to break the smoking habit yet.

So what you need is to feel an incitement to make a “DECISION” to break the smoking habit.

MOTIVATION, we all require it. The foundation of each of our motivations is our beliefs. Think about it, if you didn’t have a belief that you would be hurt if you drank poison, you would not feel motivated to be alert. If you did not believe that the gnawing sensation in your stomach meant that you were hungry, you would not feel motivated to eat.

When it comes to giving up an addiction to tobacco, people who smoke need to feel a lots of motivation to make the DECISION to break the smoking addiction. Motivation is based on the ideas that we believe. So you will need to DECIDE what ideas would motivate you if you believed them. Because when you feel powerfully motivated, you will break the smoking habit.

Thanks to NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) and self-hypnosis for motivation, it is a lot easier to learn how to believe these new ideas than you think it is. However, you don’t believe the ideas that will motivate you to break the smoking habit at this point, or you would have already broken the habit.

For the purpose of this discussion, we need to define a few words.

DOUBT: Uncertain/distrustful/dubious - “maybe it’s this way, and maybe it is not.”

BELIEF: Trust/faith/tenet - A state of mind devoid of all doubt. In other words, belief means, “this is the way that it is.”

HIGHLY VALUED CRITERIA: What is most important to you, as an soul.

When you totally believe that if you continue to smoke your highly valued criterion is jeopardized, you will feel the motivation that you need to break your cigarette addiction. We call this is a negative motivator, because it is a belief that motivates by giving you dreadful feelings. Negative motivators are great for getting you to make changes.

When you believe that if you do break the smoking habit, your highly valued criteria will become enhanced, then you will also feel the motivation that you require to break the smoking habit. This is a positive motivator, because it motivates you by promising good sensations if you break the smoking habit.

The first assignment is for you to DECIDE what the most essential things in your life happen to be. Your most highly valued criteria are usually things that you can’t see. For example: Money would not be highly valued criteria, but the freedom, fun, or security that money can provide could be. Write your list of highly valued criteria down on a piece of paper.

Next you need to figure out what you need to believe to feel motivated to stop smoking. Here is the good news, sort of: Logic has nothing to do with belief. Things don’t have to be logical for you to believe them. As a matter of fact, they rarely are. So don’t worry about logic!

The format for your negative motivator beliefs will be: “I believe that if I continue to smoke, something apalling will happen to my most highly valued criteria.”

Make sure that you frame your motivators in the positive. In other words, always state what you want or what will happen. Never state what will not happen. Eliminate the “not” word from the beliefs.

In this example we will say that your children’s health is your most highly valued criteria.

WRONG: “I believe that if I continue to smoke, I won’t be doing my kid’s health any good.”

CORRECT: “I believe that if I continue to smoke, my secondhand smoke will make my children sick.”

Next, create a list of positive motivators. “I believe that if I break the smoking habit: (something very important will be enhanced).”

WRONG: “I believe that if I stop smoking, I won’t make my children sick.”

CORRECT: “I believe that if I break the smoking habit, my kids will be safer because I will eliminate their contact with the dangers of my secondhand smoke.”

The next step is to make changes to the computer codes in your brain to make yourself actually believe these new ideas. Now for a shocker: Your beliefs have nothing to do with logic. Instead, your beliefs have everything to do with your perception of reality. In other words, it has a lot to do with the way that you see things.

Our belief systems are based in our unconscious. The uncouscious mind is like a computer. Computers don’t reason. The input to a computer controls the output from a computer. To demonstrate, I want you to think of something that you already believe without the slightest bit of doubt. So come up with a belief that makes you feel good.

For instance, it’s easy for most people to believe that they love their kids. If that is true for you, make a mental image that lets you feel that feeling of love.

I’m going to ask some questions, and there aren’t any correct or incorrect answers.

Is your mental image a moving picture, or a still?

Is it in color, or in black and white?

Is it close or far?

Is it focused or fuzzy?

Is it normally bright, overly bright, or dim?

Is there a border on it?

Is it borderless?

Is it a panorama?

Whatever your answers are, just write them down. These are the computer codes that your subconscious uses to indicate your feelings of belief. In this case they are the codes for positive belief, because you’ve chosen a belief that gives you a positive feeling. You’ve just calibrated your positive belief.

Every positive belief picture is bright and focused. If yours aren’t, you probably don’t really have total belief. An element of doubt is probably present. So find another belief to calibrate.

If you think of something that you doubt, and you make a mental picture of it, one or more of these computer codes (which we call submodalities) will probably be different. Similarly, if you have a belief that gives you a negative feeling, (a negative belief): one or more of those codes or submodalities will be different.

In NLP we call these particular computer codes visual submodalities.

Now you will need to calibrate a negative belief. So repeat the same exact process, but do so using an idea that you already believe, that makes you feel terrible.

Once you have calibrated your positive and your negative beliefs, it is a simple thing to control what you believe so you can motivate yourself to DECIDE to stop smoking.

So, to summarize, using the above example: “I believe that if I continue to smoke, my secondhand smoke will make my children sick.”

1. Become aware of how motivated you feel to break the smoking habit.

2. Make a mental image that illustrates the above belief.

3. Adjust the codes (visual submodalities) of the image so that they match the mental codes from your calibrated negative belief.

4. If you are right handed, move your eyeballs (and your mental image) up to your left and hold it there for five seconds. If you are left handed, go up to the right. This will make you quickly memorize the belief.

5. Now sense how motivated you feel to break the smoking habit. Do you feel more motivated? Do you feel less motivated? Or are your feelings the same?

By utilizing this proceedure you can make yourself believe almost anything by making a picture in your mind that illustrates your new idea and then adjusting your mental image to make it match your calibrated belief pictures.

And if you have a belief that is holding you back, you can use the same technique to change that belief to doubt by changing one or two of the submodalities and memorizing it that way.

Now that you can motivate yourself to DECIDE to quit, you will break the smoking habit. A DECISION to quit means: I’m quitting no matter how much it hurts. If you are like most people, you will not want it to suffer from the pain of withdrawal and you don’t have to. Because there are several hypnotic and NLP methods that can greatly reduce, or even completely eliminate the discomforts of withdrawal from the cigarette addiction. And you can read about them in my hypnosis article library.

(c) 2007 By Alan B. Densky, CH. This document may be re-printed as long as it is not altered and the author’s name and clickable web address are retained.

Alan B. Densky, CH. offers NLP CD’s for help to quit smoking. He is the inventor of the Neuro-VISION(r) Video quit smoking hypnosis technology. It received a US Patent because of its uniqueness and effectiveness. Mr. Densky can be reached through his Neuro-VISION web site.

- Alan B. Densky, CH