Craving

A patient of mine told me he could resist anything in his kitchen until about a quarter past ten at night.

Then something shifted.

He was careful about the distinction. He wasn’t hungry. He’d eaten dinner, a reasonable dinner, and he didn’t feel deprived. What he described instead was something more specific — a kind of turning of the mind toward a particular food he knew was there. Salt and vinegar chips, in his case. Same cupboard. Same time. Same sequence.

He ate them standing up, with the lights dim. The bag was finished within minutes. Afterwards, he said, the feeling wasn’t satisfaction so much as quiet. The thing that had been calling had stopped.

I hear variations of this often enough that it no longer feels incidental.

We tend to treat these moments as failures of discipline.

But that explanation has never quite matched what I see.

Hunger behaves differently. It is broad. When you are truly hungry, almost anything will do. A craving is narrower. It asks for something specific, often at a predictable time, in a predictable setting, with a familiarity that suggests recognition rather than need.

Over time, I’ve come to think of cravings less as signals of deficiency and more as traces of learning — the brain anticipating something it has learned to expect.

Most people try to solve cravings the wrong way.

I wrote more about this including why the thing you crave is often less satisfying than the craving itself on my Substack: The Great Feast