Why am I Craving? and What to Do About It
The CRAVE Cycle: The Ramp Stage
Once a cue has been observed by the brain (sometimes this happens subconsciously) you begin the process of craving/wanting. Craving feels like a dramatic increase in wanting something. It will start out simple with a casual “ping” sent to your brain and body. Over time that ping can feel like someone jammed a nail into your skull and the only way to get it out is by getting what you’re craving. It will feel like you are going up a ramp to launch yourself into the behavior. This craving can be helpful, like restlessness because you have not left for the gym yet. It can also be hindering; frustration because you have not eaten a sweet in a few hours.
The CRAVE Cycle is a powerful habit model that has been adapted from common habit frameworks to include how to deal with highly stimulating habits.
This is the second blog post in the CRAVE cycle series by Mito Coaching.
What Makes You Crave?
Craving is an important part of human survival. The desire to have something you do not currently have makes you pursue food, water, and many other important parts of life. Craving is caused by a decrease in dopamine levels below your baseline levels. This creates a pain that we know as craving. That craving then ramps up to you taking action to get the thing you need. The dopamine system was built for survival.
Our society has shifted from a hunter gatherer society to one of abundance. It is relatively easy to fulfill your basic needs compared to our ancestors. This craving system has not caught up to new times, meaning there is still a high drive to get high calorie foods, find mates, and gather other valuable resources. When these things are so readily available, the ability to slow down our impulse and craving becomes a more valuable skill than acting on it quickly. Our brains have not yet adapted to the abundant society we have created.
Craving will increase over time until the craving becomes powerful enough that your willpower can no longer stop it. Craving can follow one of three patterns:
1. Normal Craving with Habit: This is where you crave something and eventually that craving becomes too much. You then action on the craving.
2. Normal Craving With High Willpower: This is when a craving is not strong enough to overpower you willpower. When willpower wins you will feel the craving come on, hit it’s peak, and slowly disappear
3. Super Stimulus / Addictive: High reward activities that require very little effort. These behaviors are highly addictive because our brains will continue to crave it even after we get the reward, leading to continued use. Without continued use, withdrawal is bound to happen.
Each of these craving types is modelled below:
These different types of craving show that habits like drug-use are much easier to become addicted to and much harder to break than the habit of going to the gym. Super stimuli are behaviors that release a high level of dopamine into the brain during the craving and reward steps. Dopamine can be considered a measure for the addictive potential of a behavior or substance. The more dopamine released, the more addictive the behavior is.
So now that you understand the basics of craving’s impact on your habits, the question becomes: What do I do about it?
“Healthy habits are learned in the same way as unhealthy ones - Through practice”
-Wayne Dyer
Making Good Habits Exciting
When your cravings are ramping up the battle is really against pain. The pain of not having the thing that your previous cue represents. The goal with positive behaviors is to make that pain of not doing something as high as possible so you move into action. Some strategies to increase that craving for good habits are:
Try to steepen the ramp: This means make the time to reward shorter and/or make the reward more powerful. You can do this by attaching a superstimulating activity to the end of a better habit.
When you get the urge to scroll social media, you do 10 push-ups before your start. Eventually you will become more excited to do 10 push-ups because it means you get to scroll social media.
Just start: Sometimes the most difficult part of a habit or behavior is the first 5-10 minutes. Once you get going the activity is actually much easier than you thought. Make it a habit to dig in for the first 5 minutes of a difficult task, you’d be surprised at how quicklly that 5 minutes turns into 30 or 60. Similar to how social media can suck your minutes away without you noticing, you can have the same thing happen with reading or working out.
Find/Create a community: It is no secret that people are social creatures. Whether you’re an introvert or extrovert, you want to belong to a group. Finding a group of people who are already doing the behavior you would like to be doing is one of the best ways to form a habit.
Whether it’s joining a workout group or doing drugs. Peer pressure can work in marvelous or destructive ways. The first time you smoked was probably because a friend offered you a cigarette. You want to play video games because your older brother is. Your best friend dragged you to the gym one day and now you go all the time. Community and belonging are incredibly powerful for habit formation.
Do something different but also difficult: You probably procrastinate doing things that are mentally tough like studying or that big work project. To get yourself over the hump, you can do something physically difficult to boost baseline dopamine thus making the mental activity easier. You can do this with vigorous exercise and cold exposure. A couple of minutes in a cold shower and your mentally difficult task will be a whole lot easier to start.
When you begin to crave good habits you are on the path of becoming successful. Whether that success is health, riches, or a strong relationship.
How to Stop Craving
Dealing with bad habits when your cravings are ramping up is all about making that habit as unattractive as possible. Cravings act in a similar fashion to the bell curve, you feel it ramp up until it hits a peak then it subsides. The more unattractive you make the behavior, the less likely you are to participate in it before it subsides.
Extend the Ramp: Negative behaviors will often have very steep ramps and high rewards. You will feel the pain of the negative behavior cue come on strong and not leave you alone. Extending the ramp gives you more time to notice your thoughts and potentially curb the behavior.
You can extend the ramp by making the negative habit conditional on a positive one. Sometimes after doing 10 pushups or 5 deep breaths, the urge for the negative behavior becomes a little weaker. While not foolproof, this strategy offers an opportunity for you to slow down and delay the super stimulus for just a little longer.
Make the habit suck: To stop craving something, you have to make the consequences of the habit much higher than the reward. You can do this by committing to giving $50 to a charity you don’t believe in each time you do the habit. You could also wear uncomfortable clothes for 3 days after. Even make yourself sell your favorite piece of clothing or belongings. The idea here is to make doing the behavior so horrible that you won’t do it again.
This too shall pass: Resisting a negative behavior can be taxing and feel like someone is sticking tiny little needles into your brain. It can feel like the only way to relieve the pain is to do the behavior.
That is not the only way. With enough time passing, the craving will disappear on its own. It is truly a waiting game and if you sit in that pain for long enough, the urge will pass. With each win over the negative behavior you break the bonds that hold you to that behavior. So, if you can, sit with the craving with the knowledge that it will pass.
Celebrate yourself: Congratulations, you’re playing the long game. Habits are all about small wins stacking up over long periods of time. Find ways to celebrate your wins. Went to the gym 4 times this week? Splurge on a sauna or massage during your rest day. Keep your social media usage under 30 mins each day for a month? Throw a party with friends.
The idea is to celebrate yourself in a way that isn’t the behavior you are trying to get rid of. Do not celebrate a week of not using social media with a 8 hour scrolling binge. Oftentimes this will lead you to using the next day, and the next day. Try doing something social and in-person to really solidify your new habit of connecting in person.
A Word on Will-power
The ramp stage is a very important stage for us to build our lives in favor of good habits and build the proper awareness to curb bad habits. When we think about habits, it is quite normal for us to think about will-power. Will-power is our ability to curb our behaviors in the cue and ramp stage. It’s an internal battle that occurs when a craving starts to ramp up. This is an important part of stopping a bad habit but when you have to continually use will-power, it is a losing battle.
You wake up with a limited amount of willpower and every time you have to stop yourself from doing something it costs you some of that willpower. Eventually you can no longer stop yourself and your habit takes over. That is why making bad habits invisible is so important, the fewer times you have to use willpower, the stronger you will feel.
Willpower alone is not enough to form a new habit or change an existing one. When you set up your environment and life in a way that requires very little willpower, your habits will succeed.
Dopamine Coaching for Habits
Dopamine is the core neurochemical in habit formation. When it comes to managing dopamine things can be very difficult without expertise on how to influence our brains to make good behaviors feel better and bad behaviors feel worse. Having a professional coach support you through these major habit changes can make your life easier. A dopamine coach will build the right plan for you and help you execute it.
