So here’s something I do when I’m craving something (peanut butter, chocky biscuits, the contents of the snack cupboard in general) and sometimes it helps. It doesn’t take long, but it does take your attention. Pause the movie you’re watching, put your book down, turn off the TV during a commercial break. Take a moment.
Part 1: before you stick your nose in the cupboard.
(If you’ve already got the goods in your hands, put them back and close the cupboard door for this step.) Say hello to your craving.
Hello there, craving. Welcome to my house. I can see you’d like me to eat something, but before we do that, I’d like to have a chat, first. Don’t worry, it won’t take long, and if I still really want to eat, I can.
It’s always a good idea to greet cravings, urges and unpleasant emotions. It keeps you from pretending they’re not happening and letting your autopilot run you into satisfying them. Now, ask the craving an important question.
Pretend we’re in the biggest supermarket/restaurant in the world. What exactly do I want to eat?
I find specific cravings can be dealt with more easily than general ones. If you’re craving something really specific, you can negotiate and have just a little, or propose to have some at dinnertime or whatever. If the answer to this question is “Anything! Food! Om nom nom!” You’re dealing with a general hungry ghost craving. They are harder to deal with, because they don’t care what you eat so long as it’s a lot.
Once you know what kind of animal you’re dealing with, see if you could just sit with it.
What if I don’t try to get rid of you? What if it’s OK for me to have cravings? What if we could just live together? What would be the advantage of that?
Cravings are uncomfortable. They drain your energy, which is a pain especially if you didn’t have much to start with. But sometimes it’s not just the craving that hurts; the guilt and pride and sense of control issues make everything that much worse. Try to take the edge off simply by saying: “Wow, I really want some biscuits right now. That’s OK. Wanting to eat biscuits doesn’t make me fat, and it doesn’t make me a bad person. I could just sit here and want biscuits.”
When you’re left with just the craving itself, see what else is needed.
All right, craving, you’re here, you’re welcome, I acknowledge your right to exist, but I don’t want to eat what you suggest, because [enter your best reasons here]. Is there anything else I can do that would make you feel better?
Note that this skips the introspective rabbit hole of asking, what am I really craving? Am I feeling lonely? Am I still upset about what my boss said to me? Was I not hugged enough as a child? There’s a time and a place for this kind of questioning, but when you’re in the middle of hurt it can be more useful to ask for a solution rather than digging deeper into the problem.
Maybe your craving offers suggestions at this point, things that don’t involve eating but that would help soothe whatever’s upset inside you. Maybe it won’t. Maybe it will just throw a tantrum and insist you go out for fried chicken right this second. It’s worth asking, just in case there is something you can do.
If there is nothing that would make things better, if you’ve tried sitting with it and it’s just too much, if your craving is unwilling to negotiate its terms, you can decide to give it what it asks for.
The outcome of this process isn’t always that you feel at peace with your craving and forget all about it in the next ten minutes. That could happen, but it might not. Sorry. Sometimes you decide not to eat but continue to feel uncomfortably snacky. Sometimes you go through the process and still end up with the biscuit tin on your lap.
That’s how it is. If I had a fool-proof, no-effort, works-every-time way to dissolve your cravings, I would not be sitting here in a dreary office in Bristol, would I? No.
I don’t have a no-effort miracle cure. I do have some-effort-involved techniques that make things significantly better. And in part 2, which will be up on Friday, I will go into the questions to ask if you do decide to eat something.
{ 5 comments }
Hey Willie . . .
Just want you to know I’m here, lurking around in the background. I subscribed to your feed and get posts via email, but it doesn’t give me the option of commenting. I love your mindfulness practices around food! All of your thoughts are fascinating!
Best,
Heather
I find saying to myself that if I still want said thing by, say, Friday night, or the weekend, then I’ll have it. This kind of soothes the craving for the time being, and means that I don’t just knee-jerk react to every little craving for food I get.
But if I’m still craving something for several days I pretty much know that I need to just have that thing and get it off my mind :S (that doesn’t happen very often tho, I find most cravings for me are just my body going ‘I’m tiiired and streeessed and I want heaps of food waah!’ – if I can put the craving off a little, then it tends to get forgotten ^^ )
Of course as you say it doesn’t work all the time tho ^^;
In the past, I found that any snack-like eatable thing present in my house would occupy my mind until it was eaten. I also suffer from the ‘finish the package’ syndrome. Therefore, the only thing that works for me is not having a cupboard filled with stuff to crave, not even for ‘unexpected visitors’ (which never come anyway). When I have a craving, I have to go out and get it. My dislike for heading out to get something usually wins, and if it doesn’t I’m allowed to have the something, preferably a small package. So, instead of making an effort to stop a craving, I have to make an effort to fulfill it. Not fail-proof, but it works most of the time.
The dangerous place for me is the supermarket: if I get a craving while I’m there, I might take it home and eat it. I mostly avoid the inner lanes of the supermarket, where the prepackaged snacks reside, or fill up my stomach with a piece of fruit or a carrot before I run through the food shop.
Not sure why it never occurred to me that it might be OK to have a craving without filling it! I really like this idea, thanks for the ongoing wisdom and hard thinking you’re doing around the subject. xo
Hi Heather, good to know you’re here. ^__^
Wikivic and Inge: excellent additions. Thanks.
Chicsinger simone: sometimes the drama you put on yourself for having a desire/feeling/thought is as bad as the desire/feeling/thought itself. Mindfulness really helps for smacking that kind of nonsense on the head. (Non-violently smacking, of course.)