[This is the first in a two-part series of posts on cravings. Please enjoy the series! To be in touch, drop me an email to [email protected]. To enjoy my latest book, Choose Your Life Purposes, please visit here.]
It’s easy to define “cravings.” A craving is an intense urge or desire, often accompanied by a physical sensation, an emotional pull, or a thought-driven compulsion. It typically arises when the brain perceives a need—whether real or conditioned—and pushes for immediate gratification.
That’s easy enough to say. But what’s so hard to do is to capture just how urgent a craving can feel in the body. Cravings are about an urgency that can make us lose our way, lose our balance, even override our principles and values. Cravings are that sort of thing.
It also pretty easy to say what “causes” cravings. They can be caused by physiological triggers like hunger, cellular addiction, and hormonal fluctuations. They can be caused by psychological triggers and psychological conditioning, for instance through learned associations. They can be caused by our need to relieve stress, to find comfort, or to distract ourselves from painful thoughts. They can also be caused by “good” impulses, for instance by the impulse to express ourselves or to solve a knotty problem.
Here too, though, something in our explanations seems missing. Cravings feel like they come from some very primitive, very animalistic place. It is their power that amazes us—and that can ruin us. The urgency, the primitiveness, the power of cravings is startling and really a little mind-bending. Why did nature endow us with something so powerful, so archaic, and so endangering as impulses? Maybe cravings had an evolutionary use once—but do they today?
We need to better understand cravings if we’re to effectively deal with our current epidemic of multiple addictions, with our violent impulses, with the ways that we can ruin what we’ve worked for by suddenly craving an adventure, an affair, or a risky behavior. Let me end this first post in this series with a question: how have cravings harmed you? Because I’m guessing that they have at one time or another.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
