My therapist shared a great tool with me called an Urge Jar which is a simple yet effective technique that can help you break bad habits or form new ones.

It works by creating a physical or virtual jar to hold your urges or cravings at bay. This technique has gotten me out of many sticky jams in the past. This allows you to take a moment to reflect on your actions and the reasons behind them. It also helps you to build self-control and discipline.

To create your Urge Jar, follow these steps:. Choose a container: You can use any container you like, such as a jar, a box, or a pouch. You can also create a virtual jar by using an app or a note-taking tool.

Identify your triggers: Think about the situations or emotions that trigger your urges or cravings. This could be stress, anxiety, boredom, or social pressure.

Decide on a strategy: Determine how you will use the Urge Jar. For example, you could write down activities and add them to your jar for every time you have an urge, and place it in the jar.

Activity examples: clean the dishes, do your laundry, go for a walk or walk the dog, yes even clean the toilet, wash the windows, whatever you can do to distract yourself from your Urges and Cravings.

Use the jar: Whenever you feel an urge or craving, take a moment to acknowledge it and then pull at random one of your activities from the jar.

You can also use the jar to track your progress and celebrate your successes. Craving Change® is offered under license with Craving Change Inc. Craving Change® Program Calendar no class Feb Family Day. ONLINE VIRTUAL CLASSROOM. A "VIRTUAL" Classroom. Workshops will be delivered using a password with a secure online videoconferencing tool to create interactive sessions.

Participants will be able to interact with the facilitators and other members of the group. They can choose whether to be on camera.

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Craving Change ® Craving Change® is a free, 4-week educational program that can help you develop a healthier relationship with food. Craving Change® will help you: learn how your eating decisions are influenced by your surroundings and what you learned while growing up understand why it is hard to change your eating habits tune into your thoughts and emotions that steer you off track use 16 "change and maintain" strategies and resources to change your eating for good maintain your healthier eating habits This program has 4 components: Why It's Hard to Change - understand how our society, your body and your learned behaviors influence your eating habits What Needs Changing?

February 1, 8, 15 and

Although there isn't one set definition to encapsulate all that a craving is, it can be understood as…. Every single person in recovery has experienced cravings early on, and may even face cravings from time to time later in their recovery.

When cravings happen, they can feel so incredibly overwhelming. Your mind can take you to the point where you feel you have no other choice but to use. You can experience relief from the craving, and have it pass you by without turning to drugs or alcohol.

When you learn how to manage your cravings, you set yourself up for long-lasting recovery from addiction. Cravings feel incredibly strong at the beginning of recovery. However, they become more manageable and lessen in intensity over time. After ongoing substance use, the brain rewires itself and associates the substance use with positive feelings.

Therefore, when the body is not getting the substance, the brain experiences an intense desire to have those substances in order to feel good. Of course, taking in the substance doesn't actually provide genuine good feelings.

Although cravings are one of the most difficult aspects of recovery, they can actually offer us a great deal of insight if we allow them to. This is because cravings are hardly ever random, and are usually prompted by something else.

In recovery, we often hear how important it is to stay away from specific people, places, and things, and that is due to the nature of triggers.

Triggers are incredibly unique to each individual person, but fall into several overarching categories:. The emotional, mental, and physical stages of relapse happen when we aren't vigilant about our thoughts and emotions. Learning how to manage your cravings will not only help you prevent relapse, but will give you more insight into the kinds of things that prompt you to want to use in the first place.

When you have a better understanding of the types of things that prompt you to want to use, you can focus on healing those areas and things that you can control. You can also learn how to adjust your environment to best support your sobriety. An important mental shift to make when you feel a craving is to accept that you are having one.

As previously mentioned, everyone in recovery has dealt with cravings, and it doesn't mean that you are messing up or doing something wrong. Acknowledging the craving is incredibly important because trying to push it away, or beating yourself up, will only make it worse.

When we can resist something, or try hard not to think about a thing, we inevitably think about that thing even more. When you're having a craving, even when it feels really intense, it's okay to accept what you are feeling. This doesn't mean it's okay to lean into the craving and to use.

It just means to acknowledge that you're experiencing the craving, which helps to give it less power. Even though it doesn't feel like it while it's happening, a craving doesn't actually last forever. By denying the urge power, escaping triggering situations, accepting the urge without judgment, and disputing irrational beliefs, individuals can reclaim control of their lives and continue steadfastly on their path to recovery.

The strength of SMART Recovery lies in these practical, science-based tools, designed to foster self-empowerment and independence in the face of addiction.

An awareness and understanding of urges is crucial to recovery. One way to understand urges is by recording them. After a few entries, participants may notice patterns and similarities about their urges.

The log then becomes a road map that will help them to anticipate situations and emotions that may trigger urges and plan ways to avoid recognized triggers or distract themselves from the urge until it passes.

In the realm of addiction recovery, the battleground is often not in the physical world but within the confines of our own minds. SMART Recovery, a program grounded in empowering individuals to break free from the chains of addictive behaviors, underscores the importance of mental liberation through the DIBs tool.

An acronym for "Disputing Irrational Beliefs," DIBs is a central pillar in the SMART Recovery approach, guiding individuals through the process of identifying and challenging irrational beliefs that fuel addictive behaviors.

This article illuminates the transformative power of DIBs in the journey toward sustainable recovery. Recovery from addiction is often visualized as a battlefield where one's inner demons are the foe.

These inner enemies come armed with deceptive allure, masquerading as friends or saviors, promising relief, pleasure, or escape. But, as anyone on the journey to recovery knows, yielding to these false promises leads only to more suffering.

SMART Recovery arms individuals in this battle with an arsenal of tools, one of the most potent being DISARM - Destructive Images and Self-talk Awareness and Refusal Method. The ABC Model is a good way of understanding how we can help change our feelings and behaviour by challenging our thinking.

This exercise may be done in the group setting but can also be very useful for participants to look at between meetings. It is our beliefs B ; our irrational self-talk. With emotional upset: The ABC Model can also be used to work with emotional upset or frustrations that may occur at any point in the recovery journey.

The ABCs allow us to discover our unhelpful beliefs which contribute to emotional upsets. Disputing helps us eliminate our irrational thinking so we can both feel better and do better.

By changing our thinking, we change how we feel. Identifying and Disputing Unhelpful Thinking. Disputing is a process of challenging the way we think about situations. Disputing unhelpful thinking can help us make more informed decisions about thoughts instead of just acting on them.

For many people, psychological tools, medications or surgery are the key for sustainable weight loss. Talking with a physician who specializes in weight management can help you get the treatments that are right for you… to find a physician near you who specializes in weight management, click here.

Get a weekly text to help you stay on track with your health goals! Click here to sign up. This article was sponsored by Novo Nordisk Canada.

All content is created independently by My Weight — What To Know with no influence from Novo Nordisk. Ten Tips to Calm Cravings. Poor sleep habits can disrupt normal fluctuations of appetite hormones leading to cravings and poor appetite control 8.

What are some other simple ways to manage cravings? Instead of opening a big bag of potato chips, create your own snack bags putting 15 chips in each. Keep them out of sight.