Mabton Smoke Shop

If you think smokeless tobacco is “up to snuff” and not dangerous, think again. Whatever it is called – spitting, chewing or dipping – it is every bit as harmful as smoking. A lot of doctors think more so because people are unaware of the threats. Cancers of the mouth, lips, tongue and throat can swiftly grow in people who use smokeless tobacco and leave grotesque and debilitating – even deadly – results.

Despite the painful and dangerous effects of smokeless tobacco, quitting with traditional techniques remains very difficult. A lot of people think the reason lies in nicotine, a natural, super toxic substance found in tobacco that is the plant’s defense against being eaten by bugs. Looking at equal amounts, nicotine is more deadly than snake venom or strychnine, and three times more lethal than arsenic.

When dipping, the nicotine travels to the brain in under 10 seconds, where it generates a flood of dopamine, resulting in a relaxing feeling. Nicotine also accelerates adrenaline production, so it both calms and energizes. However, the mental component of smokeless tobacco addiction is much stronger and creates many more impediments to quitting smokeless tobacco than nicotine.

A lot of users had their first dip as young as nine years old. In as little as a few months, using smokeless tobacco becomes a fixed habit that produces reliable stress relief. In addition to the psychological conditioning, a social conditioning transpires, as images of many sports celebrities dipping also attract young users.

Knowing that there are individual emotional and physical reasons that play a role in a chewing habit makes it easier to create a plan to overcome smokeless tobacco addiction. Let’s examine each component separately and look at effective methods to curb them.

Dipping for Relaxation and Pleasure: Just like using a pacifier to calm an anxious toddler, over the course of time, people who use tobacco products start to associate putting an object in their mouths with satisfaction and relaxation. Curbing the effects of tobacco usage means addressing all components 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 – after a bell was rung. In relation, if, for example, you always chew tobacco after each meal, you will consequently develop a craving to chew when you get finished eating.

In your mind, the images of folding the napkin and pushing the play away may be connected to using snuff, even if you are not conscious of it. Developing awareness of the trigger images or situations can help you defeat cravings.

The Physical Addiction to Nicotine, But … : In spite of the powerful addiction, doctors say that the physical component of nicotine addiction is eliminated after people quit using tobacco for a week. It’s my strong belief that nicotine addiction comprises a mere 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 wish to quit?

Quitting becomes much easier if you can:

A. Address and eliminate the anxiety and tension that compels you to use smokeless tobacco

B. Cancel the conditioned responses to chew in certain situations

But how does a person triumph over those issues?

Self-hypnosis offers a way to tackle the emotional and psychological elements of the addiction while eliminating impediments, which will eliminate the withdrawal symptoms. When we comprehend how self-hypnosis works, it makes the decision to quit dipping much easier to assume.

When people dip for relaxation and pleasure, it’s to quiet stressful feelings. People often play the same images over in their minds, like a bad film, which leaves them feeling tense and anxious. With self-hypnosis and various Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) techniques, you retrain your brain to immediately and automatically stop stress-inducing images and substitute them with calming images and mental movies. This creates satisfaction and relaxation while eradicating cravings and oral compulsions. You elude the craving to put the chew in your mouth, and you don’t get any desire to substitute food in its place. This suppresses weight gain.

To resist the conditioned response of chewing smokeless tobacco, the NLP Flash technique removes the associations of dipping during certain activities or situations. This means your subconscious won’t trigger the compulsion. Further, the Flash can even be used to create a compulsion to deny smokeless tobacco.

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

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