Taking Back Her Brain from Urges

On today's podcast I am going to be talking about my favorite topic… Feelings…This week I want to talk about how important it is to feel our feelings, but not only our feelings but urges. Learning to allow urges. What is an urge? a strong desire or IMPULSE to do something…

I learned that in order for our brain to 1) increase pleasure, 2) decrease pain 3) conserve energy it provides us with - thought errors- these are thoughts or narratives that are not actually true BUT serves the primitive brains purpose to increase pleasure, decrease pain, or conserve energy

When our brain provides us with that thought error- we don’t even hesitate we just respond on autopilot. We don’t question that story, we don’t doubt it, we just instinctively indulge in that urge, or desire. That desire/ action increases false pleasure and we get a hit of dopamine.

We call it false pleasure because most of the time an urge is our brain's way of “getting out of feeling uncomfortable, or doing something that gives us instant pleasure but isn’t what our future self really would want. “

When it comes to urges our brain creates “false desire” - a desire we weren’t even thinking about but because it's there we do it, it's a false desire from our primitive brain that it goes against our intentional deeper desire for the results we actually want.

An urge- a false desire - is- doing something that “feels” good in the moment but doesn’t match the results we want in the long term.

Another sneaky thing about an urge is that most often we are unaware of what we are doing, because our brain has trained us to “react to the want” without thinking, without questioning. Sometimes we don’t even realize why we are doing what we are doing.

An urge is an emotion followed by an immediate reaction that has not always been thought through.