Does chocolate sing to you? Do you hear a symphony whenever you
walk past the candy aisle of a grocery store? Do cookies scream your name? You
will probably always be tempted by the foods you crave most, but there is a way
to turn down the volume of those temptations.
The basic approach is to calm your emotional reaction to thoughts
of the foods you most often crave. You want to make those foods less exciting,
or even boring, to think about, so your thoughts are less likely to trigger
cravings. Here’s how you would use self-therapy to treat an addiction to
chocolate chip cookies. You can use the same steps for any food you find
particularly tempting:
1.
Visualize chocolate chip cookies in a situation that you frequently find tempting.
This might be, for example, a plate of cookies that a coworker has brought to
the office to share.
2.
To this mental image, add one thing that would make the cookies less
desirable.
This might be a hair sticking out of one of the cookies, or a bit of mold. Keep
your visualization realistic and don’t be overly dramatic. Your objective is to
make the cookies boring, not disturbing; less emotionally arousing, not more.
Also, imagine only one negative thing at a time. It’s important to keep the
mental image simple.
3. Hold this mental image in your mind for a
minute or two.
4.
Repeat steps one throught three at least twice each day for a week.
5.
Whenever you are in a real-life tempting situation with chocolate
chip
cookies, immediately imagine the hair or mold to make the real
cookies
less desirable.
Go through this entire process as often as you need to for any food
that you find particularly tempting. Each time you do, you are training
yourself to think about those foods without getting excited about them. It’s
the excitement that gets in the way of rational thinking and causes you to give
in to temptation.
No comments:
Post a Comment