Cravings? 7 ways to kill them

Hypnotherapy is often used successfully to change habits such as over-eating, drinking or smoking. But can it also help to stop cravings?

In this article, we'll explore how hypnotherapy works to help you resist urges and stay on track with your goals.

What are cravings?

A craving is a strong desire for something. We feel it most strongly when the thing we're craving is unavailable or we're trying to avoid it.

For example:

• A craving for sugar when cutting back on sweets. 
• The urge to smoke or vape after quitting cigarettes.
• A sudden desire for alcohol while trying to reduce drinking.

Cravings are often cited as reasons for the failure of diets or attempts to change our habits.

Is it a thought or a feeling?

A craving may start as a thought or an idea such as ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have a glass of wine right now’. Or it may be felt as a sensation such as ‘I really need something sweet’. With many people, the thought or feeling translates quickly into action. The sensation of wanting something and the strong associations you might have from when you’ve satisfied it previously means that you find yourself repeating the behaviour.

So a craving has multiple dimensions – it is a thought, it can be a feeling, it may appear as a picture in your mind, something you tell yourself or something you ‘just do’.

How can hypnotherapy help?

It can help to slow things down. So giving in to the craving doesn’t become something you ‘just do’ very quickly. Here are seven ways that hypnotherapy can make a difference.

1. Stop cravings by detachment

A hypnotherapist using a mindful approach can help you to be aware of the craving in an objective or detached way. Through a mindfulness practice, you would pay close attention to what you are directly experiencing, such as thoughts and body sensations. 

Mindfulness will help you to see uncomfortable thoughts and feelings such as cravings as transient experiences that are separate from you and from your mind. You can learn to observe them without getting caught up or identifying with them. As you pay attention to the pure sensation what can you notice about it? Simply by paying attention and noticing some of its qualities, you may notice it start to change and weaken or disappear.

2. Change the message to stop cravings

You can learn to change your internal dialogue to kill the craving. The reason we experience cravings as something negative is often due to what we are telling ourselves when we feel them. For example, we tell ourselves that we are being deprived of something and ‘need it really badly’. We may feel a degree of discomfort because we don’t have the thing we usually use to comfort ourselves.

Hypnotherapy can help you change the message you are giving yourself. Instead of focusing on being deprived, you can instead tell yourself something positive – that you are re-educating your taste buds to enjoy cleaner tastes, or smaller portions.

3. Change the picture to stop cravings

Because a craving can often start as a picture in the mind, hypnotherapy can use NLP techniques to change the pictures. For example, a hypnotherapist may use the Swish technique to change your mental picture of a cake into a picture of something that you want to create, something that represents your goal, like a picture of your new slimmer body. Once experienced in a hypnotherapy session, this could be something you are able to practise yourself to increase your motivation.

4. Stop cravings by distracting yourself

A craving is actually something quite fleeting, lasting only a short time. Of course, it might seem to last an unbearably long time if you keep focusing on it and telling yourself that you really need that extra piece of cake or cigarette or whatever it is. So one of the main ways of dealing with a craving is to distract yourself onto something else.

This is where the suggestions to ‘keep busy’ can be helpful, perhaps taking up a new hobby to help occupy yourself. Hypnotherapy can help you to reinforce a habit of distracting yourself by moving the mind on to focus on something else that you find infinitely more interesting. By the time your mind comes round again, often the craving has disappeared.

5. Stop cravings by creating new habits

Cravings are often the result of long-standing learned associations. For instance, if you always have a drink after work when you’re winding down for the evening, your mind has come to expect that. When you try to stop, you may feel discomfort initially. When you change your behaviour so that you substitute drinking for exercise or relaxation, for example, you will be creating a new association which can eventually become just as strong as the old one. The old habit will eventually fade through disuse. Hypnosis can help to motivate you and reinforce the behaviour change.

6. Embrace change to stop cravings

The period of experiencing cravings is a limited one. As we are changing habits, the old ‘program’ that the mind has been following might rear its head occasionally for a period of time, but the ‘cravings’ will get weaker and less frequent as time goes on until you fail to notice them at all. Hypnotherapy can help to instigate this idea and to reinforce the message that change is in progress.

After all, that’s what a craving is – it’s a sign of change. The mind and body are in a state of change, and until the organism feels comfortable with the change, you might experience an occasional craving for the old life.

7. Prepare for the future

There are also cravings that might come out of the blue, long after you have changed the habit. This might result, for example, in a return to wanting to smoke after successfully stopping for many months. A hypnotherapist can also prepare you in advance for this situation. They could forewarn you of what might happen and the ways to prevent it, to ensure your long-term success.

Through my hypnotherapy practice, I have helped people with all aspects of habit change including dealing with cravings. I also offer BWRT (Brain Working Recursive Therapy), which is very successful in changing habits, even with more deep-seated problems such as addictions.