Hello and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Corey Miscara, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about the mindful way to work with urges.

More to come on that in a moment.

First, let's settle and together with the sound of the bells.

Okay. Okay, so the mindful way to work with urges. First, let's just talk about what an urge is.

Well, I'm defining this broadly. An urge can be any sort of sense of volition toward something, an impulse. I want to eat this food. I want to say this

thing. I want to do this instead of that. We experience these throughout the day many, many times and in many different contexts.

And a big part of personal growth, personal development, living a life in alignment,

living responsibly, even authentically, requires being able to manage these urges that might take us off our path

or cause us to do one small thing that's out of alignment that can become a snowball effect.

Or just manage different unhealthy urges throughout the day, such as wanting to eat that extra

piece of dessert when, yeah, I probably don't need it, but I just really want it.

It's often that feeling of like, I need to do this.

Then it could be in relationship to an addictive setting as well, such as for a cigarette or something

else that you struggle with on a day-to-day basis. So this is what I'm talking about when we're

talking about urges. And our usual way of thinking about working with urges is one of willpower and self-control.

We feel this urge in the body and then we try to override it.

The predominant feeling is like, okay, we engage the prefrontal cortex,

which is the newly evolved part of our brain.

We feel this primal urge and we say no to the urge.

We overpower it.

We grid our teeth and we just move on.

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