Hello and welcome back to the Quit Vaping Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Andrew Cipriano, and today we're going to talk about managing urges. Now before I get into all that today, I just want to offer, if you have not listened to episode 2 of this podcast, I'd recommend you do that because episode 2 is kind of where I break down my...

Um, my framework as a life coach and how I can help you quit vaping and the general, the general guidelines I use. Okay. So that's going to be beneficial for you to hear that before this episode. Um, and then we can get going. So welcome back if you're listening and welcome back if you've just got back from episode two.

All right. So today we're talking about managing urges and I want to offer that a lot of people are confused when they hear the word urge and urge. It's just a vibration in your body that compels you to act. That's it. A lot of people, when they hear the word urge, they think of like sexual urges or something like that.

And that's not what I'm referring to. An urge is just a general term for a vibration in your body. And what's very interesting is that I consider an emotion to be the exact same thing. Emotions and urges are vibrations in your body that compel you to act. Or to not act, but urges are always compelling you to act right to use whatever it is that the urge is compelling you to do, whereas some emotions like overwhelm actually encourage you not to act at all.

All right, so, um, they're both vibrations in your body and there's a couple of different ways we can deal with these. Now, why urges are so difficult for most people to manage and this can be with a food urge or a vaping urge or a, um, sexual urge is because we resist them. So I want to offer that if the only thing you take away from this episode is that resisting things.

makes them stronger, then you've walked away a very, a much more intelligent human being. Um, when you resist anything, it gets stronger. I don't really know why that is, but that's how it works. I don't know if you've ever heard the expression, what we resist persists, and that's how it works. Okay? Always remember that.

When you resist an urge or when you resist an emotion, remember they're both vibrations in your body. They get stronger. Now there's three other ways to deal with emotions and urges. We can either resist them. Like we've kind of talked about pushing it away, acting like it's not there acting like it shouldn't be there.

That's resisting. We can numb or we can react, which are pretty much the same things in terms of vaping. We, you know, when we have that emotion or urge, we're reacting to it or numbing it. Um, and then third is we can allow it in our bodies. Now, it's really important to understand the difference between resisting emotions and urges and allowing emotions and urges in our body.

Resisting emotion is like this, it shouldn't be here, I don't want to feel it, I hate myself for feeling it, it shouldn't exist, go away. That's resisting. Now, when it comes to allowing, what we're doing is taking a deep breath, with compassion, feeling the vibration in our body, inviting it in. And just being with it, right?

If you want to practice allowing emotions, it's going to help you with every single thing you do in your life ever. Because remember that everything you do or do not do in life, all of the actions you take and don't take are because of an emotion that's present or one that you'd like to get out of or one that you'd like to feel.

Right? So, in essence, emotions drive all of our action and so do urges. Which, again, remember, an emotion is an urge. And vice versa. So, if you want to master quitting vaping without using willpower, You're going to have to learn how to allow urges in your body without resisting them. And then the other part of that, remember, is getting rid of the beliefs that are encouraging you to want to use nicotine to begin with.

But when you're first quitting, there's about a five to seven day period where your body is so chemically addicted to nicotine and it's not a lot, right? Like five to seven days isn't that much time, but what's really going to help you is practicing the skill of allowing emotions and urges in your body.

Before it comes time to quit. And if you've already quit, obviously don't start up again. So you can practice the skill, but practicing the skills can make it much easier to quit because when you can practice allowing vibrations in your body without pushing them away, which is making them stronger or reacting to them.

Then life becomes really beautiful. And also what happens is that once you learn this skill with vaping, you're able to take the skill and apply it to overeating, and then you're able to take the skill and you're able to apply it to over drinking, and you can apply it to owning a business and stepping into uncomfortable emotions deliberately and being able to sit with them without running away.

In fear with your tail between your legs. Now, a lot of the reason why people gain weight after they quit vaping is 'cause they haven't done it by allowing the vibrations. What they're doing is they're resisting. They don't want to quit vaping, they're resisting it. They're using willpower. And then what happens is because they have not learned to process their emotions and their urges, they just turn from nicotine to food.

Remember that if you're overeating. The reason is because you're resisting emotions in your body. And when you resist them, you're using willpower, they get stronger, and then you end up reacting to them, right? You only have so much willpower. It's finite. That's why you have to learn to allow urges as opposed to resist them.

All right. So allowing an urge is like, it literally looks like this. Remember resisting is like, you shouldn't be there. You're pushing away. Allowing is like, okay, I can feel this. It's okay. Nothing has gone wrong. I feel like explain what it is to yourself. You can do this out louder in your mind. Like there's this buzzing in my chest.

Um, my feet have a lot of energy in them. My throat is heavy. Like it's, it's really compelling, you know, tell, tell yourself what it makes you want to do. I want to get up, hit my vape. I want to push it away. I want to resist the emotion, right? Like explain all that to yourself. And while you're doing this, it's very important that you're maintaining, uh, compassion.

And curiosity, because if you can allow an urge with compassion and curiosity, what's going to happen is that urge, that vibration in your body is going to naturally dissipate because urges and emotions are just energy. Remember their vibrations and energy just needs to be transferred. When you are resisting the energy transfer, it does not go away.

It gets stronger when you allow it in your body, then it goes away. And I want you to think of resisting an urge, like holding a, the example they always use in the coaching world is holding a balloon filled with air underwater. What happens? You're fighting it. You're fighting it. You're fighting it. You eventually lose willpower.

Then it smacks you in the nose, right? You've made this whole scene out of it when really all you had to do is just not hold it underwater and just look at it and then it would have just floated away without busting you in the mouth. Now, the next part of urges I want to mention is that urges come from thoughts.

Without thoughts, you don't have an urge. Just like without thoughts, you don't have an emotion. Right. So before you have an urge to hit whatever or to eat, you have a thought like, Ooh, I want to eat something. It could be a very simple thought like that, right? I want food urge to eat food. It makes sense, right?

It's logical. So that's what I offer when you're learning to allow urges. Another important step of doing that allowing process is trying to find the thought that found that originally created it. Because sometimes what you'll realize is that the urge. Was actually caused by a negative thought, and it can look like this.

You could be sitting in your desk at work, hating your job, frustrated, and you are like frustrated, right? And because you're feeling frustrated, your mind puts a thought in your head like, I need to vape, right? Because in the past you've associated frustration. And the end of it with vaping. And remember that vaping doesn't actually remove negative emotions.

It numbs over them, right? So I want to imagine like a negative emotion, like frustrations in your body, right? When you hit your vape, the reason why you feel less frustrated is because you've just released dopamine from hitting a vape. It doesn't remove the frustration. It covers it up. So what you're teaching yourself is that I need to, when I have an emotion, use nicotine.

To handle it. And remember, nicotine is not actually teaching you how to process the emotion, it's just numbing it. So you've made an incorrect correlation with nicotine and curing negative emotions. So I just want to offer that as something to understand is important, right? Frustration does not need to be covered up.

Frustration, just like an urge, can be sat in from compassion and curiosity, and it's a vibration, and the frustration will go away. And when you sit with emotions, you can find the thought that's causing them. And then you can totally either eliminate the thought or just sit with the emotion. Either one will help the emotion start to go away.

You do not need to cure for negative emotions. Nothing has gone wrong. Negative emotions are, they're not wrong. They're a normal part of life and everything's going to be okay. The same with urges, right? And I want to offer that if you have any other urges after the 5 to 7 day mark to hit nicotine, I would say after the two, the two week.

After two weeks, if you're still having urges to use nicotine, It's because you believe that nicotine is going to help you with an emotion. It's no longer a chemical urge from addiction. It's a emotional urge caused by your thought because somewhere along the line, you re you learned to associate nicotine with helping you with an emotion.

So naturally when you have an uncomfortable emotion in your body, you need to cover it up with nicotine. So I want to offer the urge. Cause by drug addiction only lasts like a couple of weeks at the very most anything else is you trying to get out of an emotion that you've conditioned yourself to get out of with nicotine.

It's important to understand the difference. So that is urges. Enjoy the episode. That's a lot of insight in such a little amount of time. So listen to it a couple times. If you actually understand this concept, it'll change your life. And I'm not just talking about quitting vaping. It'll change your life as in you're not going to overeat.

Right. You're going to actually have control of your emotions in any situation. You're gonna know how to process any emotion without running away, without numbing it, without resisting it, and just being with it. Cause remember an emotion is just a vibration and vibrations are energy and energy just needs to be transferred and it'll go away.

You transfer by allowing. by letting it vibrate. That's it. Super simple. Uh, most people are taught the complete opposite and that's why they are addicted to so many things overweight. Um, you know, alcoholics and all this crap. So like sit with your emotions. It is the cure. That is the key and it will change everything for you.

Have a good day. I will talk to you guys later.