Cravings and addictions

• Are you battling addictive cravings for cigarettes, alcohol, coffee, sugar and other junk foods, or drugs?
• Do you struggle to control your spending, gambling, or internet usage?
• Does your spouse say you’re a workaholic, or addicted to the gym?
• Have you quit before, but you just keep going back to it?

Read on… help is at hand!

There is a huge variety of substances and processes that have the potential to become addictive. The characteristics of addiction are:

• You feel out of control around that substance or process;
• Once you start the behaviour, you just can’t stop;
• You try to quit but keep lapsing back into it;
• You use it more and more over time;
• You continue using the substance or performing the behaviour, even though you know it’s bad for you and you want to stop.

Addictions can have a profoundly negative impact on both mental and physical health, and on relationships. Many take a serious financial toll as well.

The cycle of addiction – experiencing problems as a result of the addiction; swearing off it; then relapsing back into it – is incredibly destructive to the addict’s self-esteem and self-efficacy (the sense that you have control over yourself and your life).

Common misconceptions around quitting include:

• If you WANT to stop badly enough then you’ll be able to; and
• You just need more will-power and then you’ll be able to quit.

In reality, most people who experience addictive cravings really do want to stop. If you’re reading this page, you’ve probably struggled with your cravings many times. Over and over again, you’ve been frustrated by the inability of your will to withstand the insatiable urge to engage in your addiction. You may have managed to quit for a while, using sheer force of will, but then found yourself slipping back into your old behaviour.

If so, you’ll know by now that will-power is a poor match for addictive cravings. There’s a far more effective, gentle and long-lasting answer to addictive cravings: resolve the feelings that drive the craving, using EFT.

"Hi Robyn - I just wanted to let you know I'm having great success so far with what we worked on last time. I'm not getting cravings for sweet food much at all, especially chocolate. After dinner I'm fine too and not feeling like I'm missing out. It's amazing."

Lisa (by email)

- Lisa, Sydney

Postscript: a few weeks after this, Lisa’s family’s travel plans were thrown into chaos by the volcanic eruption in Iceland, and two of her teenage children were stranded for several days, away from Lisa and her husband. She emailed me to say:

"The chocolate treatment we did is still working and thank god coz all the recent stress would have had me eating truckloads of the stuff! I've since made a list of all the things I want to work on with EFT and can't wait to get started."

-

Eating (especially sugary, salty and/or fatty foods), smoking, drinking, taking drugs, shopping, gambling and the many other behaviours and processes that can become addictive, all have one thing in common – people engage in those behaviours to blot out, swallow or distract themselves from difficult or painful feelings.

At first, you notice that when you have ‘that feeling’, you can make it go away by engaging in your addiction. After a little while, you start ‘doing’ your addiction in case the difficult feeling comes up. And then you forget what the difficult feeling you were dodging was in the first place – only now, if you try to stop the addictive behaviour, you feel terrible.

By doing EFT as soon as the craving comes up, you can not only vapourise the craving; more importantly, you can get to the root cause of the addiction – the painful feeling, limiting belief or traumatic memory that drove the craving in the first place.

Like my client Ruben, you’ll find that after doing EFT properly and thoroughly on your craving, it simply vanishes without a trace!

"Since our last EFT session I have had this strange reprogrammed feel. As if I am a different person. I really no longer feel interested in those foods! I was in Yeshivah this morning and of course there was all that free white bread that they always have for us. But I didn't even notice it.

I feel a bit weird though as if I am supposed to want it, and my mind tells me, 'hey Ruben you're supposed to want that so why don't you?' And I honestly think that it looks gross. Really really weird. I really don't want it.

Anyway, thank you!"

- Ruben, Melbourne

I devote 3 whole modules of my 6 week intensive for overcoming emotional eating, food addiction and poor body image, The LEAN Program, to teaching you how to use EFT… not just for beating food cravings, but for uprooting self-sabotage patterns, changing limiting beliefs, and cultivating the mind-set shifts you need to make in order to finally attain and maintain your ideal, healthy weight.

Click here for all the details.