Your Friday Five: Break a Craving with One Question

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Transcript

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Welcome back to another, your Friday five. Today I wanna just talk about one. Simple question that you could ask yourself that can help you to break an urge that you're having. So urges and cravings are when we feel that we want to impulsively take an action I'm gonna just say within the context of food a craving is really you want, you're not hungry. It's not physical hunger driving it, but you want something very specific. So it's usually something salty, something sweet, something that has fat in it, like pizza chips, things like that. Candy. When this occurs. If we do not have a lot of practice letting this pass without directly doing the thing that we wanna do, this can be a real skill to learn how to do this. Now, this is actually a lot of what we do in 30 30. We actually, at the time when I'm recording this, we actually did an entire hour on a lot of different strategies and all throughout the months of being together, we work on this kind of stuff. But there was one little side comment that occurred to me in that session that I just thought was rather powerful, that would be helpful to share more broadly here on the podcast. So we were talking about, and I'm not gonna hear on the podcast, get into all of it, but I'll try to get Amy Adams, who is a licensed marriage and family therapist to come back on the podcast. She's come on before and she's amazing. She comes into the 30 30 program to help me run sessions, but she was doing. A session on IFS, which is Internal Family System. So just long story short, we have a lot of different parts of ourself, but there are all these different parts that show up. But then you do have the part that is you, that is yourself. So that self aspect, there are different things that if that's occurring, hey, this is probably me. It's not a part of me that feels shame, right? There's all these different parts and one way that you know that part is present, it's what this. This eight Cs. So you know if I'm calm, if I'm curious, if I have clarity, if I have confidence, if I'm courageous, if I find connection, if I'm creative, if I have compassion, typically that's who you actually are when you're in that energy. But I wanna just focus on the word curious. I want you to notice next time if you're able to slow it down enough, when you get that urge and craving. I want you to pause and to get curious why it's there. Why is this here? Do I every single day do the same thing? What do I think the food's gonna provide for me? What do I think's gonna happen if I don't have the food? What else could I use in its place? What would I tell a friend? You get really, really curious. Go ahead and ask yourself 10 questions. I'm gonna guarantee you that that urge and craving is gonna go down. You are dropping into an entirely different energy. It's a conscious energy. It's a calm, compassionate energy. When we are curious, we are typically not judging. Imagine when you have an urgent of craving and you say to yourself, I can't believe again, we want this, right? It's like this super negative energy that's coming up. But imagine instead of that, you say, interesting. Why is this happening right now? What do you think's going on that, that we normally have not struggled this much, but this week, 10 times a day, I'm on the struggle bus. What's going on? And you totally drop into curiosity. I'm gonna guarantee you. That urgent craving is going to subside. Number one, urges and cravings. Typically the peak emotion that's behind them doesn't usually last more than 90 seconds. So that intensity will go down, but then we have to break the pattern in some capacity. And getting curious is part of that. There's also a lot of other tips like physically changing your location, distraction, all these other kind of things. But I just wanted to talk about curiosity today. I wanna say in the future here, number one, if you're able to name when you're in an urge or a craving, say, I'm having a craving, I'm having an urge. You need to name it. Because a lot of the times, step one is it's already occurred and you're in the aftermath of it, and you're like, oh my gosh, how did that happen? That's step one. But eventually we need to get to a place where it's happening and before you take the action that you wanna take, that maybe wouldn't help you. So for example, if you're not hungry and you wanna go eat some chips, well that won't help you because you're trying to solve with food something that is not a physical hunger problem. Food will not solve it. It feels like it solves it, but it's actually solving for something else, and we never know what that is. If you're able to name, I'm having an urgent a craving right now, you can say it to yourself. You don't have to say it out loud, but I do think that's helpful. But if you name that, number one, and then number two, you drop into curiosity, ask yourself 10 questions. I want you then to check in. How am I feeling different now compared to before I named it and before I got curious. That's my little tip for you today. If you like stuff like this, I really wanna encourage you to join the January 30, 30 round. We do a lot more of that in there. We are able to get deeper. We have long calls. I bring in therapists. We are able to. I think reach a much deeper level in there compared to these little snippets that make it on the podcast. If you're planning on joining, I would do that sooner than later. Again, we are gonna be doing a January round this upcoming year in 2026, and then only again in September, the next one. Anyway, that's my little plug. I hope that you are able to implement this curiosity over the weekend. Get curious about everything. People that are curious. As long as you don't take it too far, are really fun to be around because people typically that are curious are not judging you. They're very open to hearing your perspective. They're wanting to learn from you. They're very collaborative. They're typically amazing people to be around majority of us I find can work on our curiosity, not only for others but with ourselves.'cause we might actually be very open to hearing what's going on for a friend or wanting to be there for others. But we need to have that same level of commitment to ourselves. I hope that this is helpful. Have a great rest of the week. Practice some curiosity this weekend and I'll see you Monday.