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This week’s post examines urges, an interesting phenomenon resulting from our primitive brain seeking immediate gratification.
Urges are the reason many of us cannot overcome specific actions that give us certain results.
Addressing urges allows us to move past instant indulgence to achieve outsized outcomes. Before we discuss that in a future post, we need to get the low-down on urges themselves.
Enjoy!
Urge to Splurge
An urge is simply an unintentional primeval emotion caused by our thoughts that prompts us to take an action that may not be in our best interest, but generally feels good at the time.
Apparently, it’s also the name of a 2016 American thriller that was pretty much straight to DVD?
Anyway, an urge is a tool our primitive brain uses to obtain what it wants most: a “quick fix” of dopamine.
Did someone say “dopamine?”
All Shapes and Sizes
Urges can come in many forms, some more easy to identify than others. For example, the urges to smoke tobacco, eat a late-night snack, or pound a few brewskis are straightforward and clear to most, including those succumbing to these urges.
Other examples are less clear. I have constant urges to watch bad movies (just added Urge to the list!) and to tell dad jokes—it’s pretty much the only reason I had children. (Hmm? What was that? What do you mean I could have told them without having children!? Blasphemy!)
Dad joke aside (so meta, right?), other sneakier urges include the desire to people please and check our cell phones frequently.
Wait, What Just Happened!?
Interestingly, some urges are so well conditioned in our brains that they go unnoticed. In the late-night snack example, you may find yourself thinking about how your day went and stop by the pantry and grab a bag of potato chips with nary a thought about eating.
Next thing you know, there’s an empty bag of potato chips lying next to you. You stare aghast with no idea how you ate the entire bag. But the grease on your fingers and crumb trail from the bag to your mouth highly suggest you committed the act.
I Want It Now!
Acting upon an urge produces an immediate reward, albeit one that is temporary and fleeting.
The immediacy of the reward reinforces the utility of the urge in our brain, thereby perpetuating the thought underlying the urge.
The brief dopamine hit your brain received from the salty deliciousness you just consumed is short-lived. But the neural pathway lives on with a boost of evidence that that pathway is one the brain wants to keep for the good feels!
Your brain wants this pathway to be the default, inevitable pathway.
"I Like (False) Pleasure Spiked with Pain"
We often feel an urgency in regards to urges—the urge needs to be addressed right away. This occurs because of the discomfort of the urge feeling, which is frequently a desire or longing.
If we give in to the urge, we not only get a shot of pleasure, but we also eliminate the discomfort. For some, the latter is the driving force more than the former.
Unfortunately, similar to the fleeting nature of the reward, the elimination of the discomfort is also temporary. Thus, the urge will return, over and over.
The neocortex puts up a fight to prevent giving in to urges. Ultimately, the neocortex always makes the decision, but with urges it is being beleaguered by primitive brain neural inputs too strong to overcome.
The short-lived dopamine or reprieve from discomfort never moves us forward. In fact, it always has a net negative impact on our lives in propagating the urge-desire-reward cycle.
Often, we rely on a maladaptive process called buffering, where we use external things or activities to change how we experience feelings we don’t like.
Next week’s post will take a closer look at buffering! Time to go watch Urge!
I hope this post demonstrated how our primitive brain specifically uses urges to convince us to satiate our dopamine reward pathway. Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.
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