Understand the true nature of your cravings for alcohol or drugs

Understanding my cravings and urges

It’s very common to experience cravings when we first quit. Cravings can be
triggered by particular places, people, music, sights, or smells.

Cravings are just our body’s way of telling us we’re withdrawing or
detoxing. But they can be really uncomfortable. They can lead to powerful
urges to lapse, to relieve our distress.

What can be frightening is the idea that once we quit, our cravings and urges
might go on and on. Or that we may never be able to feel "right" or "normal"
again. And we may fear that our cravings and urges will stay very intense, like
they might be when we first stop.

But none of this is true. In reality, we may get cravings and urges quite often at
first. But they’ll feel like waves that come and go. And as long as we don’t give
in to them by lapsing, we’ll find that after a while they’ll start to become less and
less intense. The time that passes between them will get longer and longer.
Eventually, we realize they’re happening only rarely or not at all. With time they
fade away completely.

When we succumb to our cravings and urges by lapsing, we prompt new
cravings and urges to follow. And this is what can keep us locked in the trap
of dependence — not to give us pleasure, but just to relieve our distress.

So we need to learn to ride out our cravings and urges by surfing them,
especially in the early stages after we first quit. We need to remember that
every time we overcome our cravings by riding them out rather than giving into
them, they’ll become weaker and we’ll become stronger.

Eventually, they’ll lose all their power. And they’ll no longer have any impact
on us. Because we’ll have conquered them and escaped the dependence trap
once and for all!

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