A Simple-Yet-Powerful NLP Technique for Quitting Smoking (The Power of Associations)

Today I want to share with you a simple Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) technique that proved very powerful in changing the way that I thought about cigarettes and ultimately helped me decide that I never wanted to smoke another one ever again.

Before I share it with you, however, there’s something you should know:

This may make you feel sick. It may make you feel disgusted. It may even make you want to retch.

That’s a good thing.

Why?

Because for many of us, we still have positive associations with smoking.

We still think of cigarettes as being the one thing that changes the way we feel for the better — making bad situations good and good situations even better. We still think of cigarettes as the thing that makes us less stressed, or that makes us feel good after a great meal or great sex.

No wonder so many of us find it so difficult to quit if we’ve become so hardwired to associate cigarettes with such positive things.

Notice how I say we’ve become hardwired. We weren’t born this way. We weren’t born pre-programmed to see cigarettes as a positive thing.

In fact, I distinctly remember being a child, seeing adults smoking around me and promising them that I would never become a smoker because of how disgusting it was. Yet I still ended up smoking and, because I eventually learned to create positive associations with smoking, I developed a 40-a-day addiction.

Eventually, I used the NLP technique I’m about to share with you today to unlearn those positive associations and re-programme my mind. I learned to link smoking to negative associations, so much so that simply thinking about a cigarette would make me quite queasy, and actually having one would make me feel quite ill indeed!

The more ill I got, the less I wanted to smoke, or even think about smoking because hey, why would I purposefully want to do something that makes me feel bad?

In other words, this is a powerful technique which, used correctly, can make a big difference in our effort to quit smoking.

I’ve shared many times that my last ever cigarette made me feel so ill that I threw up all over my kitchen floor. Though I can’t give this technique 100% of the credit, I will say that it played a big part in it.

How Does it Work?

Simple:

By associating cigarettes with all the horrible, nasty things you can think of.

We’ll build up lots of negative, horrible feelings and associate them with the simple act of smoking so that when you start to smoke, you will automatically find yourself feeling quite disgusted.

At the same time, we’re going to create another anchor — this time on your left hand- so that whenever you squeeze your thumb and middle finger together, you’ll find yourself feeling quite repulsed by the idea of smoking.

Ready to dive into it?

Here is the five-step technique:

THE POWER OF ASSOCIATIONS

1: Think of a smell that you find totally disgusting. You need to be able to remember or imagine it vividly for this process to work well.
For example, you might think of a dirty diaper, rotten fish, manure, or anything else that makes you feel completely disgusted.

2: Now, imagine or remember that awful smell — what you notice as you breathe it in and how disgusted you feel. As you keep remembering this, squeeze your thumb and middle finger together on your left hand. Repeat this process as many times as you need until you feel utterly disgusted.

3: Next, think of a taste that you find utterly disgusting — it can be a food, drink, or anything at all.
You need to find something that makes you feel really quite sick (for example, imagine drinking out of a spittoon filled with big lumps of phlegm, or mixing rotten meat with sour milk.

Remember — you need to find something that’s totally repulsive in order for this process to work. Once again squeeze your left thumb and middle finger together and imagine swallowing that disgusting substance. Keep doing this over and over again until you feel ready to retch!

4: Now, as you squeeze your left thumb and middle finger together, remembering how disgusting that smell and taste are, imagine taking a little drag from a cigarette, then a little bit more, and a little bit more, gradually increasing the amount of cigarette smoke.

Imagine that each time you inhale from a cigarette, a little bit more of that disgusting taste and smell gets mixed in with it.

5: Keep repeating this process until you can no longer find anything but repulsion in the idea of smoking a cigarette.

If you practice this over and over, you’ll start to find that even just thinking about a cigarette makes you feel quite uncomfortable, if not outright sick.

That’s good news! It means it’s working. You’re reprogramming your mind to associate cigarettes with negative things that ultimately make you not want to smoke them.

Finally, I should say that I originally learned this technique from Paul McKenna’s wonderful book Quit Smoking Today Without Gaining Weight.

In the following video, you can hear me guiding you through the exercise as he originally outlined it. This video also contains some quite strong visuals that might help you in associating cigarettes with disgusting things.

If you’d prefer to get an MP3 download of this exercise so that you can take it with you wherever you go, that’s available from my new Patreon page.