By Dina Aldabbagh

Our minds, man, they are extremely impressionable. You know that one hyperfixation you had last year that you were obsessed with for months and then out of nowhere, a year passed and you realized, “I haven’t had that in a while”? You probably don’t. You probably just forgot all about it, and will only remember if something triggers you to. Maybe this blogpost is triggering you to finally remember it. 

One of my favorite pastry shops here in Madrid has this pistachio filled croissant that is quite literally the best of its kind — it blows all competition out of the water. I will spend the rest of my life comparing all other pistachio croissants to this one; it is now the gold standard. Well, I like to have a bit of coffee with my pastries, but this place unfortunately has bad coffee. So, I went for a while just for the pastries. I’d go every weekend and get my favorite pastry from this place — it was a bit of a ritual for me for months. I’d crave it so hard all week. So much so, that I’d even go more than once some weeks just to satisfy this craving. Moral is: I love this croissant, and my body wants the pistachio cream filling pulsing through my veins…if anyone can figure out how to make that happen.

Somewhere along the way, I didn’t go one Sunday. I was craving high quality coffee more than I was that pastry that day, so I went somewhere else. Well, that was two months ago. I walk past this place every day and see my pistachio filled croissant in the window and think, “I gotta get back in there soon,” but I never crave it. I realized a couple weeks ago that it’s been as long as it has and I found it funny. From a mini obsession that I’d think about all the time to nothing but the memory of it. ‘I love this croissant,’ I thought. Why wasn’t I craving it?

It’s because I was craving something else. I’m currently on my hyperfixation of the week: chocolate napolitanas from Dia. My current fixation doesn’t take away from how much I love those pistachio croissants, it just changes my taste. Currently, my taste is for chocolate and a croissant-like baked good in the shape of a rectangle rather than a half-moon. No joke, I got Dia chocolate napolitanas everyday for seven days straight. If you asked me to choose one of the two desserts for the rest of my life, I’d choose the pistachio croissant. And yet, I never stop into the shop anymore. 

I wondered why this was happening and I realized something. My cravings aren’t dependent on how much I like something, they’re dependent on what taste was most recently left in my mouth. More specifically, what I most recently enjoyed. If I had something yesterday that I enjoyed, and therefore it delivered a dopamine hit to my brain, my brain registers that as a current, updated manner of delivering dopamine. And my wee dopamine seeking brain wants to take the most updated route to that destination she seeks. I absolutely love a DQ Blizzard, but I haven’t had one in a while. Thus, while my brain is calculating how to get her hit of dopamine from the food we’re about to eat, DQ Blizzards just don’t come to mind. It’s a bit outdated. We want the most updated route because that’s a safe and sure route to get to the deliverance of the hit we seek. 

You may think you can’t overcome your cravings because you just love that thing too much but really you just need to change what taste is currently in your mouth and therefore influence what you have taste for in the future. If you eat an apple every day for the next four days, and you like it, I promise you’ll start craving apples. 

Our brains want ease, and so do our nervous systems. Have you ever wondered why you’re so drawn to going to the same coffee shop or getting the same order every time, even though on a daily basis you pass by some new coffee shop or glance over the entire menu and think, “I’ve gotta try that one of these days!”? It’s because our nervous systems crave safety — and there’s assurance in the past. The past acts for our nervous system as a pool of evidence for the future. Rather than trying a new order and risk being disappointed, our nervous system would rather us get the same thing every time and feel safe in the fact that we’ll enjoy it. The devil you know is better than the one you don’t.

You may love a certain food so much, but if you were to just take a break from it and replace it with some other thing, you wouldn’t feel that same pull to have it. When traveling in Amsterdam, my friend recommended going to the market and getting stroopwafels. I went and bought a package of these wafels on night one, and liked them so much that I finished the whole package during the duration of my trip. Of course, I had to buy some to bring home. Currently, they’re sitting right in my eyeline, and while I remember how much I like them, I don’t feel a pull to open up the package and eat them. Not that I feel like I can’t, I just don’t crave them. They’ve been sitting in my house, relatively untouched, for a month now. Changing the taste of what you just had in your mouth puts distance between the bodily urge and the thing. You may consciously know you like it, and remember the enjoyment it gave you, but your nervous system may no longer crave it on a subconscious level.

Can I challenge you with something? Maybe you’re not as controlled by ice cream or whatever craving as you think you are. Maybe you just really like it, and eat it a lot — so the taste stays in your mouth — and you tell yourself that this thing is your “weakness” and you “can’t control yourself around it,” thereby affirming to your subconscious that this is a sure-fire way of releasing dopamine. Maybe you’ve just been telling yourself a story about this ‘thing’ that anchors its importance in your life. And maybe all you need to do is to stop making it so deep, and just take a break, just change what taste is in your mouth. I’m not saying trade out chocolate chip cookies for apples, I’m saying trade out the cookies for a brownie. Then next week trade it out for chocolate croissants. What you may realize after moving onto your next hyperfixation is that while you still love the cookies, you’re actually craving this other, more recent thing, more. 

Use this framework to hack your cravings so that your cravings are more in alignment with who you want to be. Your mind is malleable and you are the one who decides how it’s allowed to be trained.