Cravings are like an itchy mosquito bite. You feel the itchiness and want to scratch. However, if you give into your desire to scratch the bite, it doesn’t get better. It becomes worse. The more you scratch, the itchier it becomes.
The same applies to cravings. The more you give into them, the stronger they get.
Why is it like this?
It is because of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that is responsible for pleasure, motivation, movement, action and striving towards anything we get pleasure from.
Getting what we want and consuming it releases dopamine. It can be food, alcohol, drugs, sex, social media, video games, emails, messages, TV shows, etc.
However, the human body always strives towards balance. Once the dopamine level increased the body tries to bing it back down and dopamine starts dropping again. It is the drop in dopamine we experience as cravings. We want to get more of the thing that gave us pleasure and bring dopamine back up.
BUT! We have to resist. Because by giving into cravings we act against body’s natural mechanism to restore balance.
If we repeatedly boost dopamine, because we can’t resist our cravings, over time, we will need more and more of the substance/activity that brings us pleasure - aka. we may develop addictive behaviour.
To make it worse; if we don’t give the body the chance to restore its balance and boost dopamine every time we get cravings eventually our dopamine levels drop below baseline (the dopamine level we initially had). This way we can get into a dopamine depleted state, lose motivation and feel unhappy.
What to do?
You have to resist cravings. Resist the impulse to get more of the substance or activity that gives you pleasure. You have to let your dopamine level go back to the baseline before you boost it again.
How to do it?
Set limits - for time and quantity.
e.g. you are allowed to have only 3 cubes of chocolate as your afternoon snack. In contrast to snacking on chocolate every time it comes to your mind.
e.g. you’re allowed to watch 2 episodes of your favourite series every evening. Not as many as you feel like ending up binge watching it all night.
Strengthen your mental muscle - don’t give into impulsive behaviour
In the modern world it is challenging to resist impulses. Ever time we see a new notification on screen we have to check our phones. Every time we get a question we instantly grab the phone to google it. Every time a thought of tempting food comes into our minds we can actually get it almost instantly - the fridge isn’t too far away, if not the fridge, then the shop at the corner or in the emergency case, we can just grab the phone and order the food we want. We don’t even need to leave the house.
Giving into these impulses causes the same dopamine dilemma described above. Thus, train resisting.
Suggestion of how you can train it: Commit not checking your phone for at least 1 hour, for example. Not acting upon any impulsive thought you get.
This way, you train your mental resilience, your mental muscle, which will also help you to resist cravings.
You are stronger than you think!
If you need help getting your habits back on track and get back on the healthy lifestyle and healthy eating wagon, I’d be happy to help you. For more details click here.