About Urges
What is an urge?
An urge is an intense desire to eat when you're not physically hungry. These emotional urges are about wanting to eat to avoid feelings (like stress, boredom, anxiety) or to create feelings (like comfort, pleasure, distraction)
What types of urges does this feature help with?
This feature helps with all types of urges to overeat, including:
- Urges to eat when you aren't physically hungry yet
- Urges to continue eating past the point of comfortable fullness during meals
- Urges to eat foods outside of your planned meals
- Urges to snack between meals when not hungry
- Urges to eat larger portions than your body needs
Each of these urges can be tracked and processed using the same methods in this feature. The goal is to recognize any desire to eat that isn't driven by physical hunger.
How do I use this feature?
The Allowed Urges counter helps you track when you experience urges but don't act on them.
- When you feel an urge but choose NOT to act on it (you don't eat the unplanned food), tap "+" to add it to your counter
- Each number represents a victory – a time when you felt an urge but didn't give in
How do I know if I "allowed" an urge?
You allowed an urge when you:
- Felt a strong desire to eat something when you weren’t hungry
- Practiced the pause instead of immediately reacting
- Let the feeling be present without either fighting it or giving in to it
- Ultimately chose not to eat the food
What if I give in to an urge?
That's okay! It's part of the learning process:
- Don't add it to your Allowed Urges counter
- Fill out the Curiosity Form in your evaluation to learn from it
- Remember: progress isn't perfection – keep practicing
What if I have multiple urges in one day?
That's okay! It's part of the learning process:
- Each separate urge that you don't act on counts
- Add to your counter for each successful instance
- You don't need to fill out the Processing an Urge worksheet for every urge, but it's helpful for challenging ones
How does this connect to the Processing an Urge worksheet?
The Allowed Urges counter and the Processing an Urge worksheet are two separate tools that work together:
- The counter is a quick way to track your victories when you don't act on urge
- The worksheet is a more detailed tool to help you understand and work through urges
Think of the counter like scoring points in a game, while the worksheet is like your practice drills and strategy sessions. You don't need to complete a worksheet every time you add to your counter.
Use the worksheet when:
- You're struggling with a particularly strong urge
- You want to better understand what's triggering your urges
- You're building the skill of allowing urges
Remember
- The goal isn't to never have urges, but to become someone who can experience them without being controlled by them
- Each time you allow an urge without acting on it, you're strengthening a new neural pathway
- Urges are just vibrations in your body – they cannot hurt you, and they will pass
Need more help?
- Make sure you review the urges lessons in the main course
- Review the urges playlist in the Vibe Club App
- Review the help screen from the add urges module in the Vibe Club App