What is a CRAVING? Why You Can't Resist Food, Alcohol, Scrolling, or the Person You've Been Crushing On...

SPEAKER_00: Hi, this is Shelley Treacher from the Binge and Overeating Recovery Podcast. Today I'm going to be talking about what a craving is and more about habits, about breaking habits and sustaining a new habit. But first, a comment and a question. She says, I am a lifelong comfort eater, and I want to stop, but I don't know how. How can I replace food with healthy things? I'm desperate to overcome this problem. This question will be partially answered today in my podcast, as in all of my podcasts, particularly the ones about what it'll take to give up comfort eating. But I also have a couple of specific things to add. Sometimes people suggest replacing a craved substance with another substance that satisfies you. We all hear of alcohol addicts who become sugar addicts after giving up alcohol. But what that does is reinforce a craving. Anything similar to the original cue can trigger a similar craving. I'm going to be talking today about what a craving actually is, but in general, awareness and intermittent reinforcement are where the stronger learning is. As I talked about in my habits podcast a few weeks ago, one way to change a habit is by giving yourself a reward that's different to the food. So to answer your question, you can only replace the food you crave with healthy food if healthy food feels like a reward that's big enough for you. Personally, I found this to be something that's grown on me. There's absolutely no way I would have imagined replacing chocolate or coffee with fruit or coconut at first. But through mindful attention of what I like, need and feel, both of these things now feel like a treat to me because they feel so good for my body. So let's start answering some questions about what a craving actually is. The Encyclopedia Titanica tells us that a craving is a passionate, impulsive desire, or desire for something, person, or food. It goes on to say the craving arises from the formation of mental images of objects, or a person, or food, that the human being knew in the past. The craving can come to mind through the association of the senses, such as the smell of an aroma, a sound, among others, that can lead the person to remember, form a visual image, and from that moment on have a craving for something. Raymond F. Anton, MD, in Talking of Alcohol Addiction says, the neuroadaptive model suggests that the prolonged presence of alcohol induces changes in brain cell function. In the absence of alcohol, those changes cause an imbalance in brain activity that results in craving. Neurobiological and brain imaging studies have identified numerous brain chemicals and brain regions that may be involved in craving. But how is that process set up? A craving is set up by feeling that you will get a reward. A reward is pleasure of some kind. You get a dopamine hit each time you get a reward from something or someone. So your body remembers that, seeks it out, or sets up a craving when you're reminded of that pleasure. This is a normal process that all of us have. We all get cravings. It's part of life. Especially in the world that we live in, where we're reminded of the pleasure that we could buy or have by every single business all the time, all day. The problem comes when the reward is harmful or detrimental in some way. Addiction may be defined as continued use of something, despite its adverse effects. The definition of addiction, according to the NHS, is addiction is defined as not having control over doing, taking, or using something to the point where it could be harmful to you. Here we start to see how we can forget ourselves for the sake of that dopamine hit and reward. I can't count the number of times that people have told me that they have to give in to an urge to eat or to drink or to smoke or to check their phone or to text a new love interest, because if they didn't, the craving would just get worse until it was satisfied and they'd end up doing it anyway. This is also what can make you irritable when you have a craving. Addictions can be stubbornly held on to, with reasons, excuses, and denial. Like, I've got to finish this, I'll start the diet tomorrow, or a refusal to see the adverse effects. According to Judson Brewer, the sea slug moves away from toxicity and towards what feels good. And so do we. We move towards and away from what feels good and what feels bad. We love scrolling on Instagram, food, alcohol, and attention from people because they all feel instantly good. We get that dopamine hit every time we get a compliment, that red heart fills out, and that chemical hits our system. The quicker a substance is delivered into your bloodstream, the more of a craving you're likely to get for it. So the addiction builds fast. As normal human beings, we have a lot of knee jerk responses. A knee jerk response takes only three cells to perform. That's exactly what's happening when we respond to a craving. It doesn't take much intelligence, just a quick, unconscious pathway of reward. The trigger reward system means that we're reminded of the substance or person that we got a reward from. We associate feeling good with it, so we want it. Just like all the experiments that have been done with dogs, rats, monkeys, where we observe that the animal goes towards the place of reward habitually and avoids areas of punishment. We are exactly the same. We go towards reward. A craving is as simple as this. The more we see it, the more we have a bias towards it. And this is how habit develops. For example, if you eat chocolate and it tastes delicious, in the future you're going to choose this against other substances that don't taste as good, given the choice. That's why sometimes, if I've got chocolate in the cupboard, my body will want that more than breakfast. We may have a chocolate bias, and we see the world with chocolate glasses. Especially if we found that reward when we were feeling upset about something. Just like dieting, this also sets up a dissatisfaction in life, where we constantly wonder what we could be doing to be happier. Craving a dopamine hit is part of this human daily experience. But addiction is when a drug is abused and it hijacks the dopamine reward system in the brain. This is so easily done and super common for humans. So what can you do if this has gone too far for you? One thing you can do is check your subjective bias and get to know your habit loops. You've got to work out what reward you're getting to know what it is that you need to give up. So draw this process for yourself. So for example, it starts pretty soon after I wake up for me. I will start looking for a reward to get me out of bed, as if I need something to look forward to to raise me from the pain of having to leave my comfortable cozy bed. Something to transition comfortably from the soft, perhaps vulnerable, but safe space that I sleep in, to the social, action-oriented world of responsibility. This kind of loop is so useful for me to observe, because it gives me back choices and makes me see that my reaction is to make something negative that I perceive go away, and to seek immediate gratification. But really, if I think about it, there's nothing negative about getting up for me. It just might be the way that I do it. When we feed the wound with a substance, we don't allow the wound to heal. But we can, if we don't scratch that itch. Succumbing to a craving is so common. It's just like scratching an itch. We all do it. My partner actually had an allergic reaction this weekend, and I kept hearing him scratch his hand. It's impossible not to, isn't it? But as I've been saying, this reward means immediate reinforcement of the craving. It's just gonna keep on coming. This is why one drink, one bite of something tasty, or one scratch itch, or even just one cat video, leads to just another one. A second thing you can do is to think about times when you were unable to satisfy your craving. I dunno, maybe you were on a journey and you couldn't get hold of the thing that you really wanted. What actually happened? Did it eventually go away? Eventually it does go away. The craving gets triggered, it rides higher, but then it stops and goes away on its own. Brewer quotes research into this where cravings continue for those who continue to feed it, and where it drops after a while for those who don't. Over time that dopamine hit or the need for it gets less. A third thing you can do, each time you eat, drink, scroll or text that hottie, you reinforce the cravings or addiction. It feels like a relief for a split second, but then you want more. In the case of becoming hooked on a person, your latest crush, it may also be relieving anxiety about being liked, as I talked about last time. But it does go away if you don't feed it, especially if you use that feeling of craving. If you join it, if you stay with it and breathe through it, join it rather than try to get away from it. Be interested in it and use it as a navigation tool. Give up trying to get anywhere other than being present. Learn not to be so caught up in your mind patterns. What I'm describing here is mindfulness. Brewer shows us that the most effective strategy he used with people when he conducted his research was Tara Brack's rain process. This is a process where you recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture whatever comes up for you in the moment. Interesting to me, my most popular podcast was one a few weeks ago about breaking habits. That's partly why I'm talking about this again today. But what's even more interesting to me is that one of my least popular podcasts is the one about mindfulness. So I know that you may have a natural resistance to the word even and the concept of staying present. It sounds like hard work, doesn't it? But it is the number one tool, and it has been for me in being able to feed myself well and to sustain this habit of not eating sugar. So you may want to be curious about what it is you're seeking when you get interested in a podcast about habit breaking versus one about mindfulness. Is it that quick fix and craving that you're responding to? Are you looking for a quick fix from my podcasts? As you know, I've weaned myself off coffee and sugar by becoming acutely aware of what I was actually getting from it. I'm still not eating refined sugar or drinking coffee. I do get cravings for them, but I don't have them because I don't want it really. I remember how it makes me feel. Sugar gives me an uncomfortable rush and sometimes makes me feel sick, and coffee keeps me awake for far too long. Both of them make me feel physically unwell with heart palpitations, dehydration, and tension, and neither of them actually taste delicious to me anymore. But I also stay aware of it being just a craving, which I don't want to be duped by again. I feel more mindful, more often than I did before, about being more present in my life, which has led to a lot of satisfaction for me. So target your craving by turning towards it. I can tell you that one of the most intense times I remember doing this was when I was hooked on an unavailable man many years ago, I'm glad to say. I had both a craving for contact from him, but also to ease my anxiety with junk food. This is called cross addiction when two cravings come at once. In that instance, I repeated over and over and over again this cycle of noticing my craving, knowing it was just my history and my biology, craving a dopamine hit, staying with the sensation of it, and letting it pass, feeling the relief of not having given in to this harmful behavior again. Sometimes it's true that you'll have to run through this cycle many times in succession, but like a wave, it does come and go and fade in its intensity. Your body learns that it's not going to be satisfied in this way, so it stops seeking this reward, which helps you to see more clearly what's good for you and what you really want. I don't really want to be with this man. He is actually now my dance partner and friend to this day, which is exactly where he should be in my life. So, to sum up, what I've talked about today is becoming less intoxicated by directly observing what reward you get and what your craving is. We think dopamine is happiness, it isn't. The anticipation of a reward is not happiness. When we respond to a craving, we're looking for happiness or love in all the wrong places. Thank you for listening today. Next week, I'm gonna start a series on talking about COVID and the effects that that's had on us, on how we feel and on our comfort behaviours. I also want to warn you that my brand is changing. The name of my business is going to be changing to Underground Confidence. Because that's what I do. I help you find the confidence that you already have deep inside you. So the podcast name will be changing too in the next couple of weeks. Please don't be alarmed, I'm still going to be talking about comfort eating and all the emotional psychological issues that lie underneath comfort eating. It's just that I'll be packaging this differently. If you want to go further, if you want to understand what's going on for you in love and relationship, if you want to understand the blocks that you have and make progress towards finding a loving relationship, please be in touch with me. I would love to hear from you because I'm running my next program on how to find love very shortly. I do respond personally to every message that you send me, so please do keep your inquiries, your comments, and your questions coming in. Thank you. I'll see you next Wednesday.