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When we have an unwanted habit, what action should we take to deal with it? The answer may surprise you.
You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.
Resources Mentioned in this Episode
- Book: It’s Not About the Food
- Submit your question to be answered on a future episode using this form
- Free video series: Finding Freedom From Overeating and Other Habits
Transcript of Episode
Hello, explorers, and welcome back to this Q&A episode of Unbroken Podcast. I’m very glad you’re here. I’m Alexandra Amor and these are the shorter episodes on Mondays where I answer your questions.
Given that this is a brand new show, and as I said last week, I don’t have any followers yet to submit questions, what I’m going to do is search back in my memory and ask the questions that I would have asked all those years ago, or several years ago.
If you have a question that you’d like to submit, I’d love to hear it. Submit it to alexandraamor.com/question, and I’ll have a look at those and answer them on upcoming Monday episodes.
Today, I want to answer the question:
What should I do about my cravings?
This was something that I was, of course, really interested in and have been interested in for the last 30 plus years until I found this understanding. As I mentioned in last week’s episode, it might be good to go back to that first Q&A episode, I talked about how when we have unwanted habits, we tend to use a lot of management strategies to deal with them.
They really feel like a problem. And we really try to get our arms around them and our big intelligent brains and manage those habits. So suppress them, control them, use willpower, use whatever tactics and strategies we can to control them and deal with them. I talked about how this exploring this understanding takes a completely different approach than that. So anything that we’ve tried in the past, a diet or measuring and weighing our food, or distracting ourselves, or anything like that is really a management strategy, and we’re looking in a completely different direction.
So, given all that, the short answer to the question, What should I do about my cravings is nothing. There’s actually nothing you need to do about your cravings, about your over eating, about any maybe binge eating episodes that you’re having. They’re not a problem. And that’s why there’s nothing for you to do about them.
The first thing I want to say, though, is that we are divinely designed, although hardly anyone points this out to us. But we are divinely designed to return ourselves to a state of equilibrium or peace, or calm, whatever word you want to use to describe that feeling of being peaceful, being calm, being in a state of feeling very centered, and grounded. All of that stuff is innate within us. We don’t have to do anything to get ourselves back to that state. So even when we’re really riled up, feeling disregulated, feeling really upset or jangled, or like we really want to lean into using our habit, because we’ve had a really hard day, or whatever it is, it turns out, there’s actually nothing we need to do, in order to come back to a place that feels really good within us come back to a very calm, quiet, peaceful state.
We are designed for that to happen automatically, our within our bodies and within our minds as well. So when our minds get really stirred up, they too are designed to automatically and without any interference from us return to a state of equilibrium.
Conversely, what’s happening when where thinking about our habit and about how to control it, how to deal with our cravings, we’re adding more thinking to what’s already there. We’re stirring the pot up, shaking up the snowglobe, though we’re doing that innocently. We’re adding another layer of busy thinking sped up thinking to a situation that is already like that. So it sort of heightens that.
What we actually end up doing is making our interaction with the habit, even worse than it was perhaps at the beginning.
I’ll use myself as a personal example. For 30 years, I tried to fix my overeating habit using all the self help tactics and strategies that you can mention. I mean, name something and I’ve tried it. And in fact, the other the other day, I realized one of the only things I didn’t try was acupuncture. But I tried hypnosis, I tried diets, I tried meditation, and mindfulness and emotional freedom technique, and EMDR, which is that thing that you do in therapy, I held two paddles, and it supposedly does something to your brain. Talk therapy, and just on and on and on.
All these what I would consider to be healthy strategies to try to curb my over overeating habit. And it only ended up getting worse. Sometimes I saw a tiny bit of improvement. But the willpower approach to trying to not eat my favorite foods just never worked for more than a few days, maybe four or five at most. And, again, I was doing this innocently. I was I was taking an approach that was the only thing I knew how to do, as maybe you can understand, maybe you’ve been in that position yourself.
Now, looking back, I can really see that what I was doing was adding a lot more thinking to the busy, heightened sped up, really stirred up thinking that was already there. And the more I bounced from one strategy to another, the more that situation got sped up stirred up even more. Think of when you’re having a really heavy rainstorm, and you think, wow, it can’t really get much heavier than this. And then it does. That was what it was like, inside me with all the information that I had about how to manage my overeating.
And then every time I failed, that too added more thinking to the whole situation. I think I say in my book, It’s Not About the Food that it was like trying to get out of a hole by digging it deeper. That’s what it felt like. And it really seems that way to me now that I’m looking back at it.
So that’s one reason that my answer to this question, what should I do about my cravings, is nothing. There’s actually nothing you need to do. And let me say, I know that that answer is super, super scary. Because I’ve been there, I get it. What I would think if someone had said that to me as an answer to this question, I would have said, You’re out of your mind.
If I let go of the tight control that I have over this craving, or my eating habits, and just let it be whatever it wants to be I’ll weigh 600 pounds by the end of next Tuesday. That answer would not have worked for me at all. And so I really get it, I really understand if you’re having an objection to that. And so what I would say is, just listen, at this point if that answer is completely freaking you out.
There’s nothing that you need to do. You don’t need to change anything. At the moment, I would really say just keep listening to the people who are talking about this understanding, don’t feel any pressure at all to change anything that you’re doing. Because what’s going to happen if you if you continue to learn about this understanding is that you’ll start to have insights.
One of the reasons that cravings aren’t a problem, and maybe I’ll get into this deeper in the next Q&A episode, is that they’re actually a part of our divine design. So we don’t need to control them or manage them. We just need to see them for what they are and the way that you’ll see that is insightfully
Something will occur to you, some fresh thinking. And the more that you stay in this conversation, read books by people who are exploring this understanding, listening to podcasts like you’re doing right now. Chatting with other people maybe who are part of this understanding, joining Facebook groups or whatever feels good to you. Eventually, you’ll see things insightfully.
It’s not just going to be one big giant insight, like a bolt of lightning out of the sky. My experience has been that it’s a series of smaller insights. Once that starts to happen, then you’ll realize that you can ease off the control that you have of your unwanted habit. And that doing nothing about it actually is the answer. But as I say, there’s nothing you need to do about that right now, today. Listening is your best option at this moment.
So I think that’s about all I have to say about that today, right now for this Q&A episode. Next week, I think what I’ll talk about is why we can be friends with our cravings, and how, for me that was the big game changer when it came to letting go of an overeating habit.
I’ll leave you there for now. If you have an interest in this understanding and want to explore it a little bit further, I encourage you to go to my website and sign up for the Freedom From Overeating and Other Habits video series that I’ve got there. It’s free. It’s a series of five videos. It’s over 90 minutes of learning material. You can find that at alexandraamore.com/start.
I’ll leave you there. Take care. I’m sending you lots of love, and I’ll talk to you next week. Bye.
Feature image photo by Food Photographer | Jennifer Pallian on Unsplash
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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