Renata wrote in from Denver, Colorado, and her question is one I hear in a hundred different shapes every week. "Hi, Rick. I don't even know if this is a real question or just me venting, but here goes.
Every day around three fifteen, right in the middle of the afternoon slump, I open my desk drawer where I keep a stash of chocolate. I'm not hungry. I ate lunch two hours earlier,
but I feel this pull, like my hand knows where that drawer is before my brain has decided anything, and I eat two or three pieces without really tasting them.
I've tried moving the stash to my car, so it's less convenient. I've tried telling myself I'll wait fifteen minutes. Some days, that works.
Most days, it doesn't, and I'm just standing there at three twenty with a wrapper in my hand wondering what happened. I guess my actual question is, what's the best way to actually stop a craving?
Not manage it, not distract myself for twenty minutes and give in anyway. Stop it. Is that even possible?"
Renata, I read your letter twice, and both times I stopped in the same place, the last paragraph. Almost every letter I get about food is asking me for a better way to hold the line. Yours asked how the thing works.
That's a different question, and it's the one that has an answer. So here's the answer. Start with what nobody told you.
Every piece of advice you've been handed so far, wait fifteen minutes, move the stash to the car, find something else to do with your hands, runs on the same broken assumption, that the craving is an opponent, and your job is to outmuscle it.
That's the suppression lie. It's why you've spent however many months in a standoff with a desk drawer. Somebody gave you a fighting strategy for something that was never a fight. A craving is an event.
It has a peak and an ending, and it reaches both with or without your permission. Look at what's actually going on in you at three fifteen. A craving is chemistry running on a schedule.
Blood sugar dips after lunch, or a meeting sits on your chest and won't get off, or your brain reads the clock, recognizes a pattern it has run a thousand times, and gets out in front of you.
Dopamine hits the wanting system. Wanting and liking are two separate circuits, and that one fact explains your whole letter.
A researcher at the University of Michigan named Kent Berridge spent years pulling them apart, and they don't share wiring.
The circuit that generates the pull has no opinion whatsoever about whether the chocolate is any good, which is why you eat three pieces and can't tell me what they tasted like.
The part of you that wanted them was never the part that enjoys them. Two departments, two jobs, terrible communication between them, and that surge has a lifespan.
Ellen Malet, the psychologist behind the urge surfing work, put the acute window at roughly three to five minutes.
Your entire afternoon feels like it's being held hostage by something that, timed on a clock, is shorter than a phone call to your mother, which is why wait fifteen minutes half worked. The waiting was right.
The fighting you did while you waited is what broke it. Try holding a beach ball underwater. You can do it. Your arms are strong.
Your motivation is high on a good day, and for a minute or two you're winning, but that ball is pushing back the entire time. Constant, no letup, and your arms are on a clock too.
When they go, and they go, the ball doesn't drift up politely. It launches, carrying every bit of force you spent holding it down. That's physics. Nothing to do with your character.
White-knuckling a craving is holding a beach ball underwater and calling it discipline. Some days you win. Most days, it's three twenty, and there's a wrapper in your hand. So we stop fighting the ball.
We interrupt the circuit instead, which is something almost nobody teaches, partly because there's no money in a fix this cheap.
Years ago, I built a tool for this exact minute and called it the circuit breaker because that's the job. A circuit breaker doesn't argue with electricity. It cuts the power before the surge does any damage.
It just interrupts. There's no strength anywhere in the design. Picture it, your desk, three fifteen, the pull just showing up, your hand still on the keyboard.
Stop first, and I mean with your body, hands flat on the desk, both feet on the floor. It sounds far too small to do anything. It isn't. Most of what carries you from urge to draw is momentum.
Your body already halfway there while your mind is still finishing an email. Kill the momentum, and the whole thing stalls. Then name it. Out loud if you're alone, silently if you're not. I'm having a craving.
Those words, not I need chocolate. Naming it opens a small gap between you and the thing. You go from being inside the craving to standing next to it, watching. Third, breathe.
In for four, hold for four, and out for six. That's a psychological override.
Slow, controlled breathing pulls your nervous system out of the reactive state that's driving the urge, and the thinking part of your brain comes back online. Calm is beside the point here.
What you're after is the decision going back to the part of you that's equipped to make it. Fourth, feel it. This one sounds backward, so stay with me.
You stop running, drop underneath the noise, and ask your body one honest question. What does this actually feel like right now physically? Most people are floored by the answer.
Half the time, the unstoppable food craving turns out to be a tight chest and a restless, wrung-out tiredness with nowhere to put itself. The chocolate was never the point.
Your nervous system reached for the fastest tool within arm's reach, and at three fifteen in an office, that's a draw. Fifth, ask what you actually need. Sometimes the honest answer is food. Fine. Eat it.
No negotiation, no penance afterward. But often, once you've stopped and named it and breathed and felt it, the answer has nothing to do with chocolate.
Water, air, ninety seconds of talking to another human being, and the craving, now that you've looked straight at it, has already lost a good chunk of its size.
Then you choose, awake, with the craving demoted from an order to a request. Stop, name, breathe, feel, choose.
It takes less time than it took me to say it, and every piece of it is available to you at three fourteen, one minute before the pull normally lands. You've heard me say you're the ocean and not the wave.
This is where that earns its keep. The wave is the craving. It rises, it crests, it breaks, and it does all three whether you brace against it or not. You're what's underneath,
the same before it and after it. Your job was never to stop waves. Oceans make waves. Your job is to remember, mid-crest, which one you are. Let me be precise about what this gives you, because I don't sell comfort.
It won't make the craving vanish the second you use it. Some days, the wave is big, and you'll feel all five minutes of it. What it gives you is a gap,
five seconds between the pull and the draw that have never existed for you before. That gap is the whole game, Renata.
Every version of you that you're trying to become lives inside five seconds you can build tomorrow afternoon, and the stakes are higher than a drawer of chocolate.
Treat this as a willpower problem, and you'll win some days and lose others, and on the losing days, you don't just eat the chocolate. You take an identity hit along with it.
You walk off thinking you have no self-control, and you always fail at this, that you're just a person who can't be trusted around, around a desk drawer. That belief doesn't stay at your desk.
It follows you into everything else you're trying to change, and it compounds quietly, one three twenty at a time, long after you've forgotten what was in the drawer.
We're scientists here, not judges, so don't walk away from this treating it like a test you can fail. Some days, you'll run all five moves and eat the chocolate anyway. That's data. Ask what was different about that day.
What was sitting underneath it? Then run it again tomorrow at three fifteen. A scientist doesn't abandon the experiment because one trial came back messy. She runs it again with better notes.
One thing before I let you go, and it's the only thing I'll ask of you.
Tomorrow, somewhere around three o'clock, before the pull shows up at all, put your hand flat on your desk and notice that you're not craving anything yet. That's it. That's the whole assignment.
One moment of noticing ahead of time that the water's flat. Do that once on purpose, and you've already started building the case that you're someone who catches this pattern ahead of someone the pattern catches.
Three fourteen, Renata, Denver time. This is the Weight Loss Mindset. I'm Rick Taylor. The door is open. [singing] You've been told to eat less, move more, try harder, want it more.
You've been told the problem is discipline, the problem is you. You've been lied to. The diets didn't fail because you're weak, they failed because they were designed to fail.
Willpower was never the answer, shame was never the fuel, and your body was never the enemy. This is the way out. Oh, oh, oh-oh-oh. This is the way out. Oh, oh, oh-oh-oh. This is the way out.
Oh, oh, oh-oh-oh. It's the way out. It's the way out. Oh, oh, oh-oh-oh. This is the way out. Oh, oh, oh-oh.