Hello everybody and welcome back to the podcast today. I want to talk to you about a cycle that a lot of us are in when we have a craving. We give in to that craving, and then we have this loop, right? So we call it the urge-reward cycle, and I’m gonna give you some tips on how to break free from that. When we have a trigger, either a food trigger, a smell trigger, or something, we have a trigger in our brain and we immediately have a craving or an urge, usually for food. Right? Mine used to be donuts. I used to have a donut problem. I have worked through it, but I would see a donut, or I would smell a donut, and immediately, whether I was hungry or not, whether I had just eaten, it didn’t matter. I would immediately feel an overwhelming urge and overwhelming desire, a craving for that donut, and it felt urgent, just like an emergency, right? It felt urgent, and it felt like something I could not resist. So an irresistible, urgent feeling after we’ve had some sort of trigger, and then I would usually give in. Right? So for me, it was donuts. It might be after a long day you find yourself reaching for a snack. Whatever it is, there is a trigger, almost always food. It could be stress, it could be just the smell, it could be the thought of food. Right? I start thinking about my Aunt Ronn's cookies. I have an urge for cookies. When we reward that urge, we complete a loop. Right? So if you go back to some of the stuff I’ve talked about and we talk about we have a thought and then a feeling and then an action, right? The thought is usually very fast with these trigger urges, right? So the thought might be, "Oh, that donut tastes really good," or "I love my aunt's cookies." Whatever. The thought might not even recognize the thought. It might happen so quickly we kind of just move right to the urge phase, the feeling phase, where we have this overwhelming desire for this food, and the action almost always is that we eat the food. Okay? This is just a loop that we get into, right? You know, I love talking about my thought errors, our loops that we get into. This is one of those. I’m gonna tell you what our brain does. Is that anything it can do automatically, anything it can make a habit, it is going to do it as fast as it can because it takes a lot less energy if we can just automatically do things. So when we get in a habit of "I see a donut, I want a donut, I eat a donut," the next time I see a donut, I want a donut, what’s my brain gonna want to do? It’s gonna want to eat the donut. We can interrupt this cycle anywhere along the process. If you think of it as we have a trigger, we have an urge, we have a reward, we can interrupt this loop, this cycle anywhere along the path. So if you’re just starting out, like wanting to lose a couple of pounds for summer, whatever it is, change your eating, not as much sugar. It might be worth it to remove the trigger temporarily, right? Till we get into some other habits. So if I’m always eating at the end of the day and I want to remove the trigger food that I usually eat, I’m totally fine with that. Do we want to get to a place where we can be around our trigger foods and not overeat them? Of course. While we’re learning a new way, if it feels better to you to remove the trigger, do it. It’s not—there’s nothing wrong with that. So we can remove the trigger. We can just make it harder to find the trigger or be triggered, right? We can put those cookies on the top shelf. We can put those donuts out of sight, out of mind, right? So we can move the trigger. We can interrupt the trigger. Just change the pattern. We can do some thought work about changing how we feel about the food. We can try and tell ourselves all the reasons we don’t really want to eat the donut. We can try and convince ourselves that the donut won’t taste as good as we think it will. This is the secret of done with cake, right? I know I’ve talked about I don’t eat cake anymore because every time I ate cake and it wasn’t quite as good as I wanted it to be, I made a mental note to really take that in, so I changed my thought. After the trigger, the trigger is the beautiful king cake that someone will bring into the hospital. Into the hospital. My thought used to be, "Oh, I want to try that." Right? Now the thought is, "It’s never as good as I want it to be." So I changed my thought. So I’ve changed the sort of that thought before the urge. So we can interrupt there by all different tricks, right? We can think of all different thoughts to interrupt before we get there, and when we get to the urge, we get all the way there, we want to learn how to just sit with an urge. So let me describe to you an urge. It’s kind of like a toddler at the grocery store, right? So my little one at the grocery store wanted a piece of candy and then throwing a tantrum, so we can just ignore that it’s happening, right? Which is kind of just sitting with it and know that it will pass. Like he’s gonna scream for candy, and then I can either give in to him screaming, and then next time he’ll probably scream louder because now I’ve trained him that he’s going to get what he wants if he screams. I can try and resist him, right? So this is where I’m maybe trying to hold him against as well while he’s screaming in the grocery store. That’s more like resisting it, and it feels different in your body. I’ll come back to this second, or I can just kind of ignore him and let him throw his temper tantrum. So these are my options. When I feel an urge about food, I can give into it. I can complete the cycle and give myself that reward. What’s gonna do is set me up for next time I’m probably gonna feel that urge more get louder instead of less because now it knows if it’s loud enough I’ll go ahead and complete the cycle. I’ll complete the reward. I can resist the urge and fight it right? It’s gonna be real unpleasant. It’s gonna feel really uncomfortable. It’s gonna feel really tight, and I don’t know that I’m training myself to do anything different next time, right? I think I’m training—like if you think of Owen in his screaming as this urge feeling, by holding him down and resisting him, I think he’s gonna do it just as much the next time. I haven’t really taught him anything new. The third option as I can just sit with it, and this is more like ignoring that anything is happening. I can just feel it all that stinks tantrum, right? It stinks that I’m having an urge, like it’s a little uncomfortable, and I don’t really want to give in right now. And that’s what we wanna do. That’s if we had to pick one to do, that’s the one we wanna do. We want to just sit with the urge and feel it. We don’t want to fight it. We don’t want to give in. Now we can distract ourselves. We can do some more tricks with ourselves, but I really recommend you feeling an urge to just be mindful and just set a timer for like 90 seconds and just sit for 90 seconds and do like a full body scan. What is this urge feeling like? What’s going on for me? Why was I triggered? Go through all the things. I want you to do, and this is the sort of trick that I want you to do. We need to give our body, our brain, some type of reward, right? So we had a thought, we had an urge, normally rewarded with whatever it was urging for, whatever it was craving. So now we need to create some other type of reward for our brain to complete that loop. So there’s some unusual things we can do, right? We can do something mindful. We can be thankful that we could sit with an urge, do some mindful movement. We can visualize success. We can play some music, or we can do something to sort of soothe our brain, give ourselves a reward. Unusual, the ones I really like are something that gives us more of a visual reward. I think this is some of the habit trackers and things like that. We can give ourselves some type of reward to get that dopamine release. It can be a social reward, physical, something you can feel, something for your brain, or something just kind of fun, right? So this is where something like an urge jar comes into play. So I’ve—I’ve worked with these with my clients. My one of my mentors uses an urge jar. He basically takes a jar of marbles—jar in a bucket of marbles, however you wanna do it—and every time you were able just to sit with an urge and not give in, we put a marble in the jar. And so then we start to collect these marbles, and it becomes this visual representation of how many times we’ve resisted an urge, and our brain really loves a visual representation, right? So this could be—and then we can have some sort of reward when we fill our jar, right? Maybe we go do something exciting or fun, we take a staycation, whatever it is, whatever you want your reward to be or nothing, I guess. But I love rewards, right? In the moment, reward is going to be the visual representation of how much better we’re getting at resisting, at not resisting, how much better we’re getting at sitting with urges, not rewarding our urges. I love the number 100. Start with 50 online and looked up to see if there were any like counting bracelets or anything like that that would help keep track of us, and there are some. There’s some on Etsy. There’s some other places that you can look, and there are like counting bracelets. So if you’re at work and that’s where you’re getting triggered a lot, you’re probably not going to have an urge jar, like the supplies in your pocket, but maybe you can have something on your wrist. And these kind of trackers you like move, move a bead over or something like that. Interestingly, they were stroke trackers on Etsy. I don’t know why. Had nothing to do with healthy habits or anything like that, but you look up trackers or golf counting. You’ll see some of these bracelets I’m talking about, just slide over so you can keep track of that during the day on a bracelet or some something like that, an app on your phone, whatever you wanna do, and then you can put your marbles in the jar at the end of the day. That might feel really good. We just wanna do something where we have this visual system where we can look and see how much better we are becoming. Okay? So we can do a marble jar or a pebble jar. We could do a sticker chart. No one’s too old for stickers. We can do this on our app. We can do like a progress bar or something or color something in to reach our goal of 50 or 100 or whatever it is and see how it feels, like how much better am I at not rewarding an urge if I can just do 10 times? Right? So I wanted to give you this hack. The visual part is important because you do want to complete the cycle. You wanna give your brain some type of reward, but we don’t wanna reward the urge for food for trigger. Now let me backpedal by saying if you’re hungry, we wanna honor our body and eat. That’s usually not what’s going on here, right? This is usually we are not hungry. This is habit or just a food trigger, favorite food, a smell of something. Okay? So that’s what I’m not talking about. We’re hungry and we need to give our body some nourishment, talking about we have a trigger. We feel this urgent need to eat it. And what we can do with that. Lots of times who will tell me I could just do better and stick to my plan if I didn’t have such these urges, these intense cravings, so this is my hack for you to get through those intense cravings is don’t resist them. Don’t reward them, just sit with it for a second, and then reward yourself for doing that because it’s not that easy, but you will get better at it with practice. Every time you do this, the next time you have that trigger and that urge, the next time your little Owen is screaming at the checkout line, it will be less, every time you do this and sit with the urge and don’t give in, it will be less intense the next time, and eventually goes away. I can promise you this because I have none of that for donuts anymore, and that used to be a huge trigger for me, and I absolutely could not resist, and now I’m not even triggered by them anymore, and all I had to do was this practice I’m telling you right here, which is appreciate that I had an urge for, appreciate that I had a craving, nothing was wrong with that, of course I loved donuts, of course I want that donut, but I’m just gonna sit with it and see how I feel in a couple of minutes, and then a couple of minutes I didn’t want it anymore, and then I could give myself, and then I could give myself a bigger reward with my jar. I hope this has been helpful. Please share with someone who you think could use this, and until next week, have a wonderful, wonderful week. Bye.