When you hear the word craving, you might immediately think of a desire for a specific substance or something you’re addicted to. But I want you to set aside that narrow definition of craving for a moment. Craving is far more universal than we tend to realize.
So, Does It Go Beyond the Cycle of Addiction? What Exactly Is Craving?
Yes. Craving is the engine behind much of our behavior. We crave everything – not just drugs, food, alcohol, or pornography, but relationships, security, money, power, perfection, attention.
Other words that might help describe the feeling I’m talking about are: clinging, wanting, needing, seeking, desiring, attaching, controlling, longing for.
Craving is what helps drive us towards things, but the flipside is that craving anything is what turns a simple wanting of something into suffering.
Craving Leads to Suffering
One of the greatest gifts of knowledge that Buddha gave the world was the concept that the cause of suffering is really from our craving for pleasure. If someone wrongs us, that’s all it actually is. It doesn’t need to become a problem, or anger, or a feeling of being let down.
Those feelings and responses only set in when we have a craving to be powerful and never be put down, or a craving to stay happy and never be upset. Every part of life we think of as unwanted, and crave a change, is another part of life in which we’re imprisoned.
Cravings Are Weights That We Carry
And that suffering is relieved the instant we put the weight down. We always battle with this craving to stay or get better at everything – our looks, our desire to belong, our prestige, our health, our skills, our happiness… everything. It’s from these cravings that the world can feel painful.
Craving and Wanting Is What the Ego in Our Mind Is Always Doing
Not the ego that means we’re full of ourselves and arrogant. I mean the psychological meaning of ego, which is the part of the mind that always wants more – and not just more, but faster and better. It always operates.
The ego is like a huge engine that drives us to live and perform better, and make homes, and want to be liked, and seek perfection or look good.
It’s a great engine that’s a gift to have because we survive on it, but it’s that same ego engine that’s the cause of our suffering when we can’t notice it, and turn it off, or let it go.
Recognize That the Craving Engine Always Operates, but You Don’t Need to Attach to It
It’s always going to be there, working in the background of your mind. It’s just what the mind does. It always wants more, or better, or faster.
That’s okay, let that be. But start to pay attention to whether you really need to listen to it or not.
Let it have a voice in your mind, but that doesn’t mean you have to believe everything it says, or always listen to it. The truth is we don’t really need the ego to live well. The more you can trust that you’ll still be motivated to live well without it, the more you’ll be free from the suffering it creates.
Attaching to Cravings Hurts
Without craving, our emotions are very brief and appropriate. If something scares us, we get scared enough to respond, and then it’s done. Or if something saddening happens, we grieve a loss, mourn, and find meaning.
If we’re attacked, we get aggressive and defend ourselves, and whatever happens, happens. So we have emotions even without cravings, but very brief and appropriate ones.
Every time your emotional suffering stays and won’t go away (like staying anxious or depressed), it’s often because you’re actually craving the idea of having it easier or better.
Every Time You Crave Pleasure, You Create Suffering
When you have a craving to feel better is when the frustration and disappointments set in. It’s completely normal and okay to want and crave things, but the moment you attach to that craving is the moment you suffer. Our emotions are from our attachments to our ideas and expectations of ourselves or the world around us.
That then means that our emotions are the result of pressures we put on ourselves if we don’t process or rework the craving for pleasure. For example, when we’re sad, that’s actually OK. What causes depression to stay is when we crave happiness so much that we get irritated that we’re sad. If you resist and want to get rid of the sadness and crave immediate happiness, now you’ve done two things to yourself.
The first is that your resistance has just gotten in the way of allowing that sadness to exist, and then pass. And that resistance can interrupt the processing of sadness for as long as you crave happiness – I’ve regularly seen this last for a person’s whole life.
The second thing it does is create anger, actually. What so many people call anxiety or depression is actually the anger they have that they aren’t happy right now. So now you’re not only sad, but you’re angry about being sad too. You’ve doubled down on your original bad feeling, and also made it so it’s stuck. All this happens because of the ideas we carry that we should be able to feel happy all the time. That’s craving.
Perfect Ain’t Even Perfect
What we crave is around having more, or having things be better. I want to raise your attention to the idea that having things more pleasurable and perfect isn’t helpful, even if you got there. Let’s do a little thought experiment: think about the last time you got what you wanted. How good did that make you feel? And how long did that good feeling last for?
Usually, our wins or triumphs or rewards only make us feel better for a day – sometimes even just minutes. A promotion we wanted so badly may make us feel good for a few days, a paycheck may make us feel good that day, sex may only make us feel good for hours. The pleasurable feeling is usually quite brief, and not as intense as we’d hope for after all the wanting and craving we went through to get it.
There’s an interesting study that showed that lottery winners aren’t happier for very long after their win. This is because our wins don’t last very long. None of our pleasures do.
Close Your Eyes and Imagine for a Second That You Can Get Anything You Want Immediately
Fill your imaginary room with everything you desire and crave. If right now you feel like that would be the greatest thing ever and are laughing at me, that’s fine. Let that happen and keep imagining. Because if you continue to imagine long enough, at some point you’ll see that everything loses meaning.
Your relationship can’t be cherished if there’s no chance of losing it. Your health doesn’t matter if you never die or get old. You don’t have to treat anyone with respect or kindness if they’ll continue to love you no matter what. You can lie as many times as you wish if you can simply make anyone believe you. There’s no need to learn if you can always get all the help you need. No need for growth as a person because you never have to be alone or challenged.
If we have everything we desire and crave, it turns a life of meaning and significance into empty and meaningless. That’s the problem with how the ego works, but it doesn’t want to tell you that. If the craving of our ego actually got its way, life would have no consequences, no value… no nothing.
Perfect Looks Bad Too
We understand intuitively that perfectionism comes with rigid expectations and demands. For example, take the child of a seemingly perfect parent. It’s very common for their children to become quite neurotic, and turn to drugs or even anorexia, because they’re at a loss for how to uphold the standards expected by their perfect parents.
It’s easy to see in those circumstances how that pressure of perfectionism (to make a certain amount of money, have a certain degree or career, marry by a certain age, live on your own by a certain age, have kids, stop an addiction)… it actually backfires when that perfectionism is excessive.
Or the child becomes entitled and thinks they can do or have anything. This happens because even if that perfect role model doesn’t force people around them to be perfect, usually those people around them still feel pressure to be more perfect, and feel guilty if they’re not. We look at perfect people and come away with the message, whether they say it or not, that we won’t be accepted by them if we’re not perfect too. So even if you could be perfect, it can actually become a characteristic that’s horribly pressuring to everyone around you. You also become the target of jealousy and resentment.
It’s Not Really Perfection That People Admire, but Their Honest Efforts… That’s What People Admire Most
We don’t admire a businessman who had a perfect life and is worth ten million dollars. We admire the struggle of a factory worker who tolerated challenges, made mistakes, but slowly got more responsible and grew into his role as a factory manager and makes a decent living now.
That’s why I’ve never seen a movie where everything starts and ends well without a challenge anywhere in the middle. How horribly dull and insignificant. It’s not that we want people to fail, it’s that we all inherently appreciate honest efforts.
Enjoy the journey to perfection, however it happens, but without a desire to even ever get there. That might sound surprising to you, but it’s actually one of the secrets to a happy life. To try for things, but be at peace however you are at any moment. You can have cravings, but don’t attach to them.
Want to Understand More About Cravings and the Root Causes of Addiction?
Self Recovery is the journey of healing from within, without labels, shame, or superficial fixes.
It’s about understanding the root causes of emotional pain, cravings, and patterns that keep us stuck. Instead of just treating symptoms, Self Recovery offers tools for deep self-awareness, lasting change, and true inner peace. Discover more!
