Q&A 6 – Why do my cravings feel like life or death?

The pressure that comes from cravings can feel almost unbearable. It can be so powerful that it distracts us from other areas of our life. Is there a way to handle this? In this Q&A episode, Alexandra addresses this concern, talks about why it exists and what we can do about it.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. Transcript of episodeHello explorers, and welcome to another Q&A episode of Unbroken. I’m your host, Alexandra Amor. A reminder that I’d love to hear from you. I’d love to hear your questions about an overeating habit or another habit that you’re struggling with. You can submit that your you can submit your question to alexandraamor.com/question.The question today that I’m going to address is this: When I feel a craving, it feels like life and death. How do I stop that? So this, again, is a question from my struggle with overeating. And I hope it’s helpful for you to talk about this. When I experienced food cravings, they did really feel like life and death, they felt like I was possessed, it felt overwhelming in my body. Every once in a while, I would bump into someone really unkind who, if I was explaining that feeling, they would say something like, well just put your fork down, like, what’s the big deal? Just stop going to the fridge. But the driving feeling that I experienced, wasn’t one that obviously was that easy to deal with, to battle to set aside and just pretend that it wasn’t there. Now I know enough to know that that feeling is part of our divine design, and that it was trying so hard to get my attention. And that’s why the feeling felt so strong. And I’m grateful for it. I’m grateful for how strong it was. I’m grateful for how persistent it was because it finally did get my attention. As I began to explore this understanding, the Inside-Out Understanding, and began to see what those cravings were really about that’s when they began to fall away. Let’s go back to when they feel like life and death, which you may have experienced as well. I’ll just say a little bit more about what that felt like, in the hope that this might resonate with you. It felt like the craving, like it was on my mind and in my attention. If I was sitting watching a TV program and had a craving for potato chips, let’s say, I could think about very little else until I dealt with that, until I went and got the potato chips. I could try to ignore it. But it did take a lot of energy to do that. And it often felt like the other things that were going on in my life, the volume went down on them, because I was having to pay so much attention to the craving in me and trying to fight with it. And then eventually I would just give up, of course, it was too hard. It took too much energy. It really felt compulsive. And again, that’s for a reason that feeling is trying to get our attention. So I want to say a couple of things about this. One is that when we feel that driving need, it’s not a comment on our moral failing, or our lack of willpower, like I talked about in last week’s episode, or our inability to take care of ourselves. It’s not a comment on those sorts of things. And of course, that’s how we interpret them, right? We’re trying to get rid of the drive to overeat, we’re trying to stop it from coming around. We’re trying to circumvent it with all the tools and strategies that we use. And when we fail at doing that it can be really devastating. I know for sure that I had 30 years of feeling like a failure, feeling like I had this one task that I wanted to do which was just to stop my cravings or overpower them with my will.