Words by Danielle Castillo; Photos from Pexels.com
Snickers was right. That annoying voice inside your head popping up from time to time, telling you to wolf down the BFF fries, to light the entire cigarette pack, to get wasted beyond belief, to sock your annoying relative in the face — that’s not you.
I was at the mall the other day, accompanying my family to get their prescription glasses. Since all of us, bar one, had poor vision, we spent a long time in the store. I was really bored — blame my short attention span — and opened TikTok. I was then met with a picture from ActionDash (a time tracking app) saying that I can't open it anymore as I had already spent over 2 hours on TikTok. I closed my phone and unlocked it again — repeatedly for almost fifteen minutes — before realizing what was happening.
Like an addict getting denied of their favorite drug, I was (digitally) pacing back and forth, antsy, anticipating, wondering if I should change the settings on ActionDash so that I can reaccess TikTok. It was then that I asked myself: do I really feel this way, or are these just harmful urges?
Urges: What are they?
The world can be a terrifying place, and all living beings on Earth know that. Our instincts are primed to help us survive. However, what do we do when our instincts —our urges — are the ones endangering us and hurling us towards harmful behavior?
Urges are signals sent by the lower brain (our animal brain, so to speak) to our higher brain (our “real” selves). One of the main functions of urges is to ensure our survival by getting us to act on our habits. For example, if we regularly eat three times a day at consistent times, the urge to eat during those times rings within us like an internal alarm clock.
Unfortunately, this function can also backfire on us by enforcing our negative habits. If emotional eating is repeated over a series of days and weeks, you will begin to feel an urge to eat when you feel a certain way. Urges are powerful; they can seem like your honest thoughts and feel like they’re representing your genuine wants.
This is why we feel so lost when we cannot do what we’re accustomed to doing. The urges in our brain feel so powerful that resisting them feels like a matter of life and death. In fact, if you are currently trying to stop an unhealthy habit, you might have experienced the seemingly out-of-body experience of your body doing something (on semi-automatic) and your brain screaming, rationalizing, telling you that you should stop because this isn’t good for you.
The good news is that urges are just that — signals from the lower brain. It is us (the higher brain) who choose to move, pick up the phone, eat, and act upon these signals. We always have a choice, even in times where we feel like we don’t. I have here a few strategies that worked for me while trying to fight harmful urges.
Before an urge: Put friction between you and the urge.
Convenience is a powerful motivation for action. Take shopping, for example. Do you really want/need the product that you are going to buy, or are you buying it just because it’s on sale/convenient? Another example is food. What are the chances that you will eat a sandwich in front of you, even if you’re not hungry, but just for the fact that they’re there and available?
But what if you need to go to the next mall a few blocks away to buy that one item that isn't on sale in this mall? What if the sandwich plate was placed in the canteen five floors down? Despite still being in the vicinity of the mall and the sandwich, you probably won’t go out of your way.
You might be surprised by how much friction and inconvenience affect our behavior. Habits mainly form around easy actions with satisfying results. Don’t put yourself in a situation where doing the wrong thing is easy.
During an urge: Let it pass.
Acknowledge the urge but do not act on it. Don’t argue with it or reason with it. The more you think about it, the more you will consider it and command your body to take action towards it. Take heed as well to not ignore this urge, for that will only make us yearn for it more in the future and make us rebound. Instead, see it for what it is — a reminder of a habit that once made life pleasurable but also made it unsustainable in the long run.
If you’re having trouble trying to visualize urges, try to think of them as the pets you have at home. You listen to them and watch out for their genuine wants and needs (e.g., food, affection, hygiene), but you don't give in to their short-sighted whims especially when you know it's bad for them or for you. You cannot reason with Bantay's pitiful whines on why chocolate cookies are bad for them nor can you argue with Mingming's angry yowls on why they need a shower. Instead, you let them experience these emotions, acknowledge it, let it pass, and proceed with your life.
While urges may have good intentions for you in the short run, it is largely innocent of the bigger goals you have and would lead you to ruin for temporary satisfaction.
After an urge: Celebrate and forgive.
Lastly, be proud of yourself whenever you succeed over an urge and forgive yourself when you don’t. Remember that healing is not a linear path. Life happens. There are ups and downs all the time. We overeat during the holidays. We watch too much TV when we’re sad. We can have days where we’re too tired to work. Sometimes we cave, and that’s okay. However, what’s important is we get back on track right after.
Urges, even the harmful ones, are natural parts of life. That's just your brain looking for an easy way out. Blaming yourself will only make you guilty, anxious, and stressed. And when it all becomes too much, guess what coping mechanism you will be urged to resort to?
Instead, reflect and look within yourself. Why am I feeling these urges? What part of me led me to harmful coping mechanisms and needs healing and attention? Stopping urges is one thing. Growing from those experiences is another.
Me and urges: Apply and reflect.
Going back to our story, I know that staying on TikTok isn’t good for my mental health. I spent 5 hours just mindlessly browsing the other day, and I can sometimes go from midnight to 8 am scrolling. I know that it’s taking over my life and that I should stop... but I keep coming back to it because of the powerful urges in my brain.
So at that moment, at the time when I really reflected and concluded that this urge was not me, right at the mall waiting for prescription glasses (a visit that was useless to me anyway as I had no sleep), I began writing this blog entry. I continued it days after in a coffee shop after losing to the urge to binge eat.
Everyone deals with urges differently, but it is unhealthy to constantly view them as signs of something being wrong with you. Sure, there are urges you should be indifferent to, but we also have a lot of healthy urges. Their general function is to make life in this world a little bit easier to handle. It’s our job to distinguish if the way they make life better now outweigh their consequences in the future.
So whenever you’re dealing with too many emotions and feeling the urge to do something drastic, remember the Snickers slogan. That’s not you.
How do you deal with harmful urges? Share your strategies with us in the comment section below.
Please also consider sharing and visiting my stack and my website for more articles like this in the future.