This is an in-depth, super-practical guide to getting to the root of the issue of craving.

Lots of blogs on this topic provide superficial solutions to the problem. Not here! We’re gonna go deep.

This guide will help you to do three things:

Gain a deeper understanding of what is happening when you crave things
Understand what does not work (which a lot of people try to use)
Understand what does work

Important disclaimer: what I’m talking about here applies to everyday cravings, behaviour/process addictions and low to (possibly) medium substance addictions. For serious drug and alcohol issues please reach out for professional medical help.

The guide is divided into two major sections: theory and practice. The theory dives into what cravings are, why they exist and what happens when we crave. The practice explores what does not work, what does work and gives some interim coping tools. We finish with some top tips and common traps.

Additional dislaimer: we aren’t looking for perfection here. You won’t turn into a saint that gets up at 5am and only eats kiwis. Instead, we’re looking for a new way of relating to cravings that helps us to treat them and ourselves with greater kindness and thereby help them unravel in the long term. It’s a way of life, rather than a tool to get from A to B. But the freedom it offers in the long run is real.

Let’s jump in!

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PART ONE: WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?

In this part, we look at what cravings are, why we have them and how they work.

**What IS a craving?**

A craving is a powerful and sometimes overwhelming internal pull towards something outside of ourselves.

This can be towards:

Substances: alcohol, sugar, cigarettes etc.
Behaviours: sex, gambling, work etc.
Intangible objects: status, power, attention, approval, control, people-pleasing etc.
Mindsets and ways of thinking: ideologies, judgement, being right etc.
Emotions: we can actually get addicted to emotional reactions such as explosive anger or deep shame

What makes cravings stand out from a ‘normal’ desire is the sense of urgency.

The sense of urgency can feel like your pants have been specially prepared for maximum flammability with some kind of Satanic tincture and then mockingly ignited by Voldemort himself.

Our attention zones in on a single concern, which can feel like the only thing that matters. Other concerns tend to get overshadowed, often with crappy consequences.

Because they’re so powerful we find there is very little we can do to control them. And we dedicate much of our time and energy to unhealthy substances and behaviours that, deep down, we don’t really want to be doing.

But why do we crave things that are harmful? Why do we dedicate our limited life-energies to repeating behaviours we don’t really want to do? And how do we stop doing so?

There is an answer.

Why do we have cravings?

Cravings are an attempt to medicate pain, specifically, what I like to call ‘survival stress’.

Let me explain...

Humans (and animals) adopt certain patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving to help them survive threatening situations. We can call these ‘survival patterns’ and they are (generally) super helpful.

These survival patterns can take MANY different forms:

Beliefs we take on about ourselves (“I’m bad” / “I need to be the best!”), others (“other people don’t like me” / “other people are stupid”) or the world (“the world isn’t safe” / “the world is evil”);
Feelings such as being ashamed of ourselves, getting angry with other people, feeling afraid of doing certain things;
Behaviours, such as crying, freezing, hiding, fighting, binging.

Often they are some combination of all three.

So, for example, we feel ashamed of ourselves and try to work harder...because we want to avoid people thinking we’re stupid. Or we lie to someone because they might be angry with us if they find out the truth! Or we judge other people really harshly because it distracts us from our own self-hatred.

Importantly, these survival patterns have a certain lifecycle: we detect a threat, a survival pattern arises to respond and then, when we feel safe again, the pattern subsides, leaving no trace.

Let’s take an example of this lifecycle in action.

Imagine a little girl called Sally, who is playing with her friend Wally. She’s playing with her favourite toy, when Wally grabs it off her and runs away laughing! The cheek.

Her survival system immediately kicks into high gear to ward off the threat. You might think it’s just a toy, but to her system that represents powerful outside forces rendering her helpless and taking her resources!

Such helplessness is not conducive to survival, so she takes action: she begins to cry and scream and yell for mummy. A cunning and insanely powerful tactic.

Mummy comes over, holds her and asks her what’s wrong. After explaining, mummy sorts out Wally and the toy is returned, along with Sally’s sense of being able to control what happens to her.

When she lies in her mother’s arms with her toy she feels safe again. The threat is over and her survival system calms down. Things are as they were before.

*Sally breathes a sigh of relief. In some kind of subterranean lizard lair, for some reason.*

NOW THEN. This is all good. Except for the fact that sometimes these survival patterns get stuck!

So imagine the same scenario, but when Sally cries for help, mummy doesn’t come.

In this scenario, she cries and yells, but nothing happens. So she continues to feel helpless and unsafe. Not only that, the longer she is without support, the more helpless and unsafe it feels. Eventually, it’s so intense that she has to suppress her survival patterns, stop crying and start dissociating from her body and mind so she doesn’t get overwhelmed.

In this instance, the survival pattern hasn’t been able to complete its full lifecycle. If this happens young Sally gets partially ‘stuck’ or ‘frozen’ in a chronic survival state.

She may eventually return to a relative sense of safety when someone comes to help her, but this experience will have left its mark on her nervous system.

There is a small part of her that will now feel helpless to some degree and will chronically be on the lookout for threats.

This chronic survival state will remain (in some form) until the cycle finds completion.

These stuck survival patterns are what I am naming here survival stress.

It’s worth quoting trauma expert Peter Levine in his book Waking the Tiger here to help us understand further:

“[Survival stress] is a highly activated incomplete biological response to threat, frozen in time. For example, when we prepare to fight or to flee, muscles throughout our entire body are tensed in specific patterns of high energy readiness. When we are unable to complete the appropriate actions, we fail to discharge the tremendous energy generated by our survival preparations. This energy becomes fixed in specific patterns of neuromuscular readiness. The person then stays in a state of acute and then chronic arousal and dysfunction in the central nervous system.”

And this process of getting stuck or frozen can happen in MILLIONS of ways.

Perhaps a fear response we had when we were small was simply so utterly overwhelming that we had to repress it. Or our parents or caregivers couldn’t handle the intensity of our response so they shut us down. Or we were unable to escape the situation that caused the response. Or the threat was almost continuous (because we lived in a threatening environment). And a gazillion other reasons.

In summary: our body gets riled up to help us survive, but if we can’t discharge that survival energy, it gets ‘fixed’ in the body leaving us stuck in a painful state of ‘chronic arousal’, as if we were still under threat.

As we go through life we accumulate these stuck or incomplete survival patterns. At a deep, physiological level our body is holding many patterns that are responding to threats from the past.

This stuck survival stress is always operating in the background of our experience to a greater or lesser extent, even though we are largely unaware of it.

The result is that we live our lives with a constant background hum of suffering that is so normal to us we scarcely notice it: anxiety, depression, dissociation, irritation, neurosis and just a vague sense of unsafety, lack, ennui and blergh.

Now to bring it back to craving.

**Cravings are what your mind uses as an attempted solution for this chronic arousal, this frozen survival energy, this background hum of suffering.**

And this is why cravings are so powerful: your body’s entire survival system is behind them!

At this point I would like to introduce a razor-sharp pedagogical tool; a rhetorical blade that I will deftly wield to slice through the Gordian knot of craving:

The Survival Stress Mongoose.

Enter the Mongoose

In this ridiculous, but helpful, analogy, the survival stress mongoose is a manifestation of a single survival stress pattern.

*A fairly agitated survival stress mongoose*

When you encounter situations in life that your system perceives to be threatening (whether or not they are literally so), it will ‘give birth’ to a mongoose, so to speak. A survival pattern will arise to help you deal with the situation.

So you might have a mongoose that doesn’t express anger because it’s scared of upsetting people (which would threaten your social survival!).

Maybe there’s a mongoose that freezes when it doesn’t know what to do (helping you to not make a mistake that you can’t undo!).

Maybe there’s a mongoose that believes that everyone hates it and tries to hide as much as possible (trying to keep you safe from people who can hurt you).

Ideally, the mongoose will appear to help you out then, when you’re safe, disappear again without a trace.

But as we saw above, sometimes these mongooses get stuck. Frozen in time. They are stuck in your system, thinking there’s a threat (when there isn’t one) and playing out the same survival patterns over and over again.

And this is where it gets...interesting.

Because by the time you’re (say) 25 years old, you’ve got hundreds, if not thousands, of these flippin’ mongooses running around your system, stuck in threat-mode, just screeching and fighting and defecating all over the place.

It’s absolute mongoose mayhem.

*Rare shot of mongoose mayhem in the wild*

The mongooses are trying to keep you safe. But when they are STUCK trying to keep you safe in hundreds of different (often conflicting) ways, the result is chronic agitation, fear, anxiety, dissociation and neurosis.

The stuck mongooses also block our capacity for joy and love. They are too busy defending themselves against invisible enemies.

That’s why people (including you and me!) seem to behave a bit incoherently or irrationally at times. We are trying to balance the survival needs of a whole bunch of very sensitive and extremely picky survival stress mongooses that ‘live’ inside our bodies (so to speak) that are stuck acting out their particular survival pattern over and over.

And when we get into situations that especially trigger some of the mongooses, they will go bananas.

Now, we can see how this links to craving.

The mongooses are making a lot of noise. It’s very painful. So the mind throws up a solution to the problem: why not get some sex or Netflix or chocolate or something? That’ll calm them down.

Craving some external object is the body’s way of taming the mongoose within.

It’s a way of medicating the painful consequences of all these stuck mongooses.

Ya dig me?

Now that we’ve laid the groundwork, we can investigate in super slow-mo what actually happens when we crave.

This is critical, because we need to see what’s happening in our experience to be able to interrupt the habitual patterns of the body and mind.

What happens experientially
when we crave?

Any craving has two main parts: thought and sensation.

The thought is of what you want to escape to.

The sensation is what’s driving the craving (the survival stress [mongoose]), it’s what you want to escape from.

The thought is a word or image somewhere in your experience that depicts the object of your craving (an image of the beer aisle at the supermarket or for subtler addictions you might imagine yourself getting praise from someone or doing great at work or something).

We call this thought the ‘ghost image’. It’s really helpful to get good at noticing when this arises, because it’s a clear sign that your mind is trying to escape into some future moment.

Notice that the image promises something! Like relief or relaxation or distraction. Some kind of alleviation of suffering in one form or another.

But what do we want relief from?

That brings us to the next part: the sensation.

The sensation is the physical manifestation of the survival stress mongoose.

When we are seeking relief, it is always from some kind of survival stress (mongoose) in the body. ALWAYS.

No survival stress (mongoose)? No craving.

In your experience there will be some uncomfortable sensation, a tension, tightness, density or similar, that is a remnant in the present of some perceived threat from the past.

Together the ghost image and the mongoose sensation make up what we call a craving.

A Step-By-Step Explanation of the Process of Craving

Now we can put all the parts together to see how the whole thing unfolds.

1. Agitated Mongoose

One or more of the mongooses that are camping out in your system gets triggered (perhaps by an environmental cue or just because it wants some attention) and will start making a racket. Or maybe they are simply always triggered to some degree or other.

This is felt as some kind of (normally uncomfortable) sensation in the body. Because they are survival mongooses, there can be a sense of unsafety, which is painful and makes us uneasy.

2. Compulsion to Escape

The mind creates a solution to cope with the perceived threat and discomfort: escape!

The ghost image of an object in the future arises to help us find some substance or behaviour that will reregulate the nervous system (i.e. calm down the mongooses).

3. We Indulge the Craving to Get Relief

With an uncomfortable body and a planned escape route, our minds, fueled by all the survival stress, focus narrowly and almost robotically on satisfying the craving. This is so it can find safety and equilibrium again.

The pleasure/satisfaction from the object temporarily drowns out the noise from the mongooses, providing relief.

But eventually the calming effect of the object fades. And we are back to step one again!

The loop of craving we end up in looks something like this:

Mongooses > compulsion to escape > indulge > temporary relief > back to mongoose > compulsion to escape > indulge > and on and on.

Importantly, this whole thing happens almost instantly, generally way below the level of our awareness. We carry it all out automatically.

So one option here is to just carry out this cycle forever. That’s fine. But it’s tiring and painful.

What else can you do? How do we manage the mongoose?

Now we turn to the practical part of the guide.

PART TWO: WHAT THE HELL DO I DO?

How should we respond to the mongoose within?

We’ll first cover some common ideas that do not work, before turning our attention to what does work. Finally, I’ll include some interim coping measures as well as explore what a regular ‘craving’ practice would look like.

What DOES NOT Work

There are plenty of approaches that don’t really help and can even make things worse. Here are some of the most common.

1. Resisting

This is when you resist a mongoose by trying to push it away, telling yourself that you ‘shouldn’t’ have it, or pretending it’s not there.

This is tempting. But, as the saying goes, whatever you resist, persists! This is unfortunately all too true.

Whatever you push down does not go away. It will always squeeze out sideways in some unpleasant fashion, like a ball of playdough that you’re squishing down with your fist.

Perhaps you might be able to resist the craving for substance A, but it will have it’s way with you with behaviour B!

**By the way, the opposite of resisting a craving is not indulging a craving. The opposite of resisting a craving is welcoming a craving (more on that later!). I know, sounds awful right :D.**

(Note: there is a special trap here for people, in particular, who have a strong identity wrapped around not having cravings. So this could be that you strongly identify as someone who is sober or someone who has done a lot of healing work or similar. In this case, having a craving threatens your identity as someone who has ‘got it’ and should be ‘over it’, which can lead to resistance and repression of the craving (which will bite you in the ass eventually)).

2. Willpower

This is when you just try to whiteknuckle your way through the craving. You just let yourself get savaged by the mongooses and try to tough it out.

This can work for a while. Some people cling on for months or even years! But we all have limited stores of willpower. It is a finite resource and it will eventually run dry.

Plus, it’s really unpleasant moving through life using all your energy to hold a bunch of mongooses at bay. That becomes your sole focus and you have very little scope to broaden your awareness beyond your own individual struggle.

When such a struggle is going on there is no space for joy and love.

3. Talk Therapy

This is a slightly more controversial one. I’m not trying to poo-poo talk therapy—it has its place—but for this particular task it’s not the right tool for the job.

The issue with survival stress is that it is a physiological energy. It’s literally incomplete survival movements that are stored in your body as patterns of muscular readiness.

There is no combination of words that you will be able to utter that will help these cycles to complete themselves.

YOU CANNOT TALK YOUR WAY OUT.

As trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk says in his best-seller The Body Keeps the Score: “No matter how much insight and understanding we develop, the rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality.”

Talk therapy can be very useful as a stepping stone towards deeper somatic therapies. It allows people to dip their toe into exploring their issues and (hopefully) see that it is safe to do so.

But talk therapy is not enough by itself.

4. Thinking / Rationalisation / Rules / Beliefs

It’s tempting to try to think your way out.

Trying to convince yourself of the many reasons why you shouldn’t indulge in X, Y, Z. Writing lists of all the negative consequences. Setting up rules for yourself for what you are allowed and not allowed to do.

This is all fine. But none of it addresses the root of the problem: the mongooses!

AND THE MONGOOSES DO NOT CARE WHAT YOU THINK OR BELIEVE.

In fact, most of the time overthinking is a symptom of the problem. It’s an attempt to escape the mongooses in the present moment by jumping into some imagined future moment where we promise to behave ‘correctly’.

Not only that, the creation of these self-judgements and rules tends to create a lot of stress in the system. And stress is a major driver of addictive behaviour!

What DOES Work then?

Right. How the hell in the name of mongoose mayhem do you work with cravings, then?

**We need to pay attention to what is causing the craving: the background hum of survival stress (mongooses) that we have accumulated over the course of our lives.**

There is no single ‘trick’ or technique that just works. Instead, it’s more like there are a series of principles that you can learn over time to change your relationship to craving.

But if I had to summarise what works in one phrase it would be this: love the craving to death!

We have to learn to love the mongoose within.

It’s a question of being curious about what is driving us, finding that part of us that is causing the pain (the mongoose within!) and giving it the safe and supportive environment it needs to relax and unravel by itself.

With that said, let’s dig into the principles.

1. Notice the compulsion to escape

The critical moment is when the compulsion to escape first arises.

You have to notice that in one moment there was no craving and then, suddenly, in the next, you crave something.

The moment went from feeling complete (more or less) to feeling incomplete (you need something).

Try to notice both aspects of the craving: the thought and the sensation.

First, notice the ‘ghost image’ which promises satisfaction in the future. See it squirming away in the corner of your mind like a silvery squid.

Be curious about it. Notice it’s size, shape, colour and so on. Just notice. No need to judge or reject or indulge the thought.

Second, turn your attention to the body and see if you can notice the sensation that is driving the compulsion to escape. You could call this game ‘Spot the Mongoose’.

Look for any sensation that is not relaxed, is pushing or pulling you in some way, or that is uncomfortable. Again, just notice. No judgement. Let it be.

Objective: get better and better at noticing this moment and spotting the compulsion to escape as it arises.

2. Acknowledge the craving

The second step towards integrating cravings (after simply noticing them) is to put a name to them and acknowledge them.

Start by simply acknowledging that you are craving something. You could say “I am craving X right now.”

You can then even acknowledge the thought and sensation components of the craving: “I see an image of my ex who I want to text and I feel a tightness in my stomach”. The more specific, the better!

Objective: the simple act of acknowledging and labelling the craving helps to reduce resistance and stops you from repressing the craving (i.e. pretending on some level that it’s not there).

3. Welcome the mongoose

If you resist the mongoose, push it away and generally hate on it, it will dig its heels in even more stubbornly.

Instead, we have to befriend the mongoose. Welcome it and find out what’s bothering it.

Because the mongoose isn’t there just to piss you off and ruin your life. It’s a part of YOU that is trying to HELP you.

How do you welcome the craving? This means letting it be here exactly as it is.

Notice the mongoose. Acknowledge it. And then see if you can allow the mongoose to be here exactly as it is. Even for just a few seconds.

Then let it move how it wants. Shake your body if it wants to. Breathe deeply. Bounce up and down. Squirm and wriggle. Try to help this survival energy to unfold however it wants to.

There are a few techniques you can deploy here to reduce resistance. (These and many more techniques are in my Emotional Regulation and Emotional Sobriety Mega-Toolkit, see the section on Working with Resistance, in particular).

Say yes: literally just say ‘yes’ to the mongoose being here
The ‘Thank you’ phrase: feel it and welcome it with the words “thank you for arising. I love you, stay as long as you like”
Breathe into it: choose a breathing technique from my toolkit, then literally breathe into the area where you feel the mongoose
Metaphysical hands: take two imaginary hands and place them around the area where you feel the mongoose, as if you are cradling it. Then ‘dance’ with the sensation > if it moves, move with it, if it shrinks, your hands shrink with it, if it gets bigger, your hands move with it.

The aim is to be able to hold the energy of the mongoose without (much) resistance and to let it dance its dance as freely as possible. Support it to move and flow how it wants to.

Simply stay with it. Exactly as it is. That’s it.

Objective: over time, we can grow in capacity to be with our experience exactly as it is.

At this point, stay with the craving for as long as you want. Maybe it passes. Maybe it doesn’t. That’s not important. What’s important is that the mongoose is welcome.

And if things get a bit too intense, move onto number 4.

4. Resource the mongoose

Aight. This is the most powerful step, but can perhaps be a little harder to grasp.

The objective of resourcing is to help the mongoose feel safe. Because it will only chill out once it feels like it’s safe to do so! Makes sense, right?

I mean, would you relax if you felt unsafe? Neither will the mongoose.

We bring safety to the mongoose by creating a resource for it to draw on. A resource is an ‘island of safety’ in your experience, whether in the body or in the mind.

I have detailed instructions in the ‘How to Resource’ section of my toolkit, which you can check out HERE. I really recommend that you have a look, because I go into much more detail there.

But to summarise very briefly here are a few options for resourcing:

Find a place in your body that feels safe (or at least neutral)
Think of a person or place that made you feel safe
Imagine a place where you would feel safe (anything!)
Place your hands on your body in a way that makes you feel safe (this is a great option for cravings)
Move, shake and bounce your body in a way that makes you feel safe
Make sounds that make you feel safe (sigh, yawn, hiss, haaa, shhhh, anything!)
Use breathing techniques that make you feel safe
Be with a pet or animal that makes you feel safe!
Imagine some kind of loving Being(s) that loves you exactly as you are and makes you feel safe (angels, Jesus, God, mother nature, whatever works!)
Basically anything that makes you feel safe and supported at a physiological level

What does this look like? You might feel the solidity of your feet on the floor. Or recall how safe you felt when you visited your grandma. Or breathe deep and slow. Or imagine being on a beautiful beach listening to the quiet crash of waves. Or place your hands gently on your heart and belly. Or give yourself a hug and give a big sigh.

Then you go back and forth between the felt sense of the mongoose and the resource. This is how we bring safety to the mongoose.

So place your attention on the mongoose sensation (e.g. tightness in the belly) for a while then, before it gets to intense, move to your resource (for example, noticing the solidity of your feet or grounding into the feeling of imagining your grandma giving you a big loving hug!). By moving back and forth, you signal to your nervous system that it’s safe and OK to be with this mongoose. Then the mongoose can start to relax!

There’s an art to this. It’s hard to explain in such a short space. I would recommend sending me an email if you want to know more (ben@drunkenbuddha.net).

Objective: the point is to create an island of safety/love/support in your experience somewhere. And then to hold the mongoose in that sense of safety.

5. Find the origin / Listen to the mongoose

Sometimes the mongoose won’t relax until you’ve found out why it’s there. Where it came from. What it needs.

We do this by asking the mongoose some questions directly (literally put your attention on the craving sensation and ask these questions directly, then stay open for an intuitive answer from the heart/gut):

Where do you come from?
Why are you here?
What do you want to say?
What do you need?

Or you can ask yourself some questions:

Is this sensation familiar? When was the first time you felt this sensation?
Are there any memories or thoughts associated with this sensation?

Stay open to whatever might emerge. Beliefs. Memories. Other sensations.

This process may take you back in time to when the mongoose was ‘born’.

When this happens see if you can discern what the deepest emotional component is: fear, shame, anger.

Then go through the same above process with it: notice it, acknowledge it, welcome it.

Objective: to find out why the mongoose is here, where it came from and what it might need from us.

6. Do what you want: no shame, self-control, beliefs, rules (unless you really want to)

Then after you’ve noticed, acknowledged, welcomed, resourced and listened to the mongoose...you do what you want.

If you want you are free to indulge in the craving without shame. Or if you want you can set a strict rule to never indulge the craving. Or anything in between. It’s entirely up to you.

It’s not ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ to medicate your nervous system or to want relief from the mongooses! Nor is it bad or wrong to set up rules around certain behaviours.

And trying desperately to avoid doing so (repressing, white-knuckling, resisting) creates a huge amount of stress in the system that only gives rise to more cravings further down the line.

This is very counter-intuitive and contradicts what a lot of recovery folk say. But I hope with everything I’ve explained so far that you can see why it is important.

Keep the focus on the mongooses, not your behaviour!

Objective: do not shame or blame yourself for your behaviour, particularly when mongooses are involved!

How to Work With Cravings Day-to-Day: The Way of the Mongoose

Alright, so what the heck does this look like on a day-to-day basis?

Imagine that you’re pootling about the house, doing some chores. Suddenly, you find yourself moving towards the cupboard with all the chocolate in. You’re reaching up to open the door when...BAM! It hits you. It’s fucking happening! This is it. Craving.

You execute the Way of the Mongoose. You can repeat something like this whenever you notice a craving emerging.

You don’t have to do this every time (that would be pretty exhausting) but you need to do it regularly to notice the impact.

Notice the compulsion to escape
Acknowledge the craving
Welcome the craving
Resource the craving
Find the origin / Listen to the craving
Do what you want!
Repeat.

What will happen if you do this?

Your cravings won’t magically disappear overnight. What you are doing here is giving the mongooses the kind of environment in which they can relax by themselves over time bit by bit.

You should notice that your cravings diminish over time and/or that the object of your craving changes (to something less intense and harmful, so from sugar binging to watching too much YouTube, for example).

Sometimes we do just need a way of handling an intense craving in the moment. Here are some interim coping strategies.

Interim Coping Strategies

These are things you can do to manage very intense cravings on a day-to-day basis, while you work on healing your nervous system (calming the mongooses) over the long term.

These won’t help you in the long-term, but they can serve to get you through a tough day.

Distraction

Simply distracting yourself is a totally legitimate strategy.

And it’s pretty effective as well. Get into bed and refuse to move. Watch TV. Whatever works for you.

Harm Reduction

If you’re craving something unhealthy or damaging, see if there’s a less damaging alternative that would at least help to see you through the day.

Nervous System Regulation

There are loads of techniques from breathing to movement to meditation to writing and so on that you can use to regulate your nervous system in the short term.

I’ve collected about the biggest compilation of these techniques that you’ll find for free on the internet in my Emotional Regulation and Emotional Sobriety Mega-Toolkit, which you can find here.

I find breathing and movement techniques in combination to be particularly effective.

Top Tips and Common Traps

Finally, here are my top tips for success over the long haul with minimum suffering.

Only follow the Way of the Mongoose if you want to!

I’m not suggesting here that you should do any of this. Do what you want! Only that, if you want to address the root of your cravings, in my experience, this is the way to go!

Do not expect perfection, you will be disappointed!

As I said at the beginning, the point here is not to become some sort of saint who gets up at 5am and only eats kiwis. The point is to slowly change our attitude to cravings, welcome the pain that is driving them and to support it to unwind by itself over time.

Don’t try to ‘fix’ every single craving, you will die of exhaustion

Don’t try to act perfectly with every single craving that arises. Just pay regular attention to the mongooses when it feels right and it will all come out in the wash ;).

Focus on the mongoose, not the substance/behaviour

In the long term you will only transform your relationship to craving by working on what’s driving it: the survival stress mongooses.

Give them your attention and the substances/behaviours will tend to fall away over time (maybe a long time, but they will eventually!).

Do not underestimate HALT (hungry, angry, lonely, tired)

When you are any combination of hungry, angry, lonely and tired, you will be extra susceptible to mongoose activity.

It makes a MASSIVE difference. Cravings are much more powerful under these circumstances.

You can learn to notice when you are HALT and to take action before cravings arise: have a snack, take a quick break to breath, ring a friend, have a nap.

Understand the difference between repressing, coping and healing

This is so important. Most of the recovery world is focused on repressing and coping. But healing is what makes the difference over the long term.

Repressing: this is when we push something away. Trying to be ‘positive’, hiding the fact that we have cravings and so on. Repression always comes out in some other unpleasant way.

Coping: this is when we use nervous system regulation techniques to help us calm down in the moment. It works in the short term but it has very little impact in the long term.

Healing: this is when we get to the emotional wounds at the root of craving and help them to feel safe enough to unwind and unravel. This is the only way to go in the long term.

Use somatic therapies to heal deep wounds

When it comes to things like learning how to notice and acknowledge aspects of your experience, building a powerful resource, working with resistance and generally cultivating the skill and safety to be able to hold and contain painful mongooses, having support from someone who knows what they are doing can be indispensable, particularly at the beginning.

Bottom-up somatic therapies are all about retraining our nervous system through breath, movement, touch and awareness. It’s about bringing a sense of safety to the mongoose within.

I’m a bit biased but my personal favourites are Embodied Processing and The Kiloby Inquiries. But there are loads out there, the most famous of which is probably Somatic Experiencing.

Cultivate The Understanding

The Understanding is an insight that can occur about the nature of craving. It’s possible to intuitively grasp at deeper and deeper levels that what is best for your happiness and satisfaction in the long term is NOT indulging the craving, but helping the survival stress to discharge and learning to be with your experience as it is.

You see clearly that indulging the craving is a loop that will continue FOREVER. And you see clearly that if you can welcome the mongoose and sit with it...on the other side of that lies real freedom.

It’s a deep insight about the nature of happiness, ultimately. True happiness does not come from indulging our momentary desires (for temporary relief) but in learning to be with our experience exactly as it is without the need to change it.

This is terrifying to the mind, but it is true. I encourage you to explore it for yourself.

Final Thoughts

Well, wasn’t that fun?

Let me know how you get on in the comments below or ping me an email if you have any questions (ben@drunkenbuddha.net).

Good luck learning to love the mongoose within!

Love,

Ben

How to Stop Cravings: Learning to Love the Mongoose Within

Pssst.