When You Have an Urge: Restricting vs. Allowing
Few amongst us like to be told that we cannot do or have or say what we want to. To be restricted, restrained, held back in our daily lives. And so often, what keeps us from living our lives as we most deeply desire are these internal voices screaming, “No,” whenever you have an urge.
That scolding voice that tells you you’re not good or healthy or right if you don’t place a set of unrealistic set of perfectionist restrictions on yourself. What you’re doing when you tell yourself no, no, no is creating the perfect storm of internal rebellion. And you’re telling your sweetest internal parts that they aren’t trustworthy without constant surveillance, and you’re linking your worth to the actions you take.
While I know none of this is your goal, my tender little kitten, it happens so easily and so often.
When I was seeing patients in clinic for all those years, practicing holistic and functional medicine, one of the main questions I got day in and day out was what foods should I restrict? What should I not eat in order to feel better?
And while yeah, there’s an argument to be made that modern American gluten, factory farmed dairy, GMO corn, processed sugar, that these things can be problematic for our health for sure. So many of my patients, myself included, feel so much better off of these foods.
My patients would hit an eventual and inevitable wall where these diets that made their bodies feel better, feel less pain, inflammation, more stable moods, digestion, sleep, no longer worked for their mental wellness.
Not because of what they were not eating or eating, but because they were coming at the project from an energy of and a place of restricting. The energy of restricting ourselves, our choices, versus allowing ourselves and trusting our bodies to know what’s best for us.
The central lesson here is this: you get to disentangle your choices from your self-worth.
You cannot become worthy by doing the right things, by your actions, by eating the thing or not, buying the thing or not, setting the boundary or not, saying the words or not.
You just are worthy of love and care. So these kinds of choices, to eat the gluten, to not eat the gluten, to buy the coat, to not buy the coat, they don’t have to be so loaded. They don’t have to be a referendum on your lovableness when you already trust that you are so lovable just as you are, just because you are.
And we so often tell ourselves that there is some right way to do anything and everything, from breathing to resting to journaling. All of those attempts to restrict and control are attempts to feel safe, but actually create more armoring tension and stress in our bodies.
And that is totally understandable and is so not aligned with the flow that most of us actually want. Whether we’re talking about nutrition and what we shouldn’t eat to be a “healthy” person, which is not even a concept I believe in. What does that mean?
Or if we’re thinking about shopping and what we should or shouldn’t buy, which for me in my 20s and early 30s meant never buying food or coffee out because my student non-profit worker budget was tight, sure. But it was really coming more from a place of not allowing myself comforts.
It came from a place of restricting. I worked all the way through school, I was a janitor at Oberlin, I was a teaching assistant, I worked through all of my graduate programs. I could have afforded a two or three dollar cup of coffee, but it was the not letting myself. It was judging myself for wanting to do something that I somehow for some reason decided was as frivolous as getting the occasional cup of coffee.
All of this and so much more comes down to the thought problem of restriction.
I should do this to be good and worthy, I shouldn’t do that to be good and worthy. And you know what that breeds in the human mind? Rebellion, pushback, a desire to do anything in this entire world other than the thing that your thoughts made so darn heavy.
The thing you’re thinking defines you, means something about you, tells the world and yourself the story of who you are and your worthiness as an animal, the moralistic framework of it being good to do one thing and bad to do another, so you must restrict yourself by controlling. So often leading you to feel buckets of guilt and shame when you don’t meet your own perfectionist fantasy goals for your own thoughts, feelings, and actions, and the result, it’s not cute.
It’s more self-judgment, self-doubt, anxiety, stress, and a strengthening of that internal nervous system based story that you are not trustworthy and reliable for yourself, or you may be totally exact that for everyone else in your world.
So you feel good about yourself if you eat the perfect diet and feel horrible about yourself if you eat one gluten-free cookie. And that is so much pressure, my darling.
Nerd alert. Think about the impact on your cortisol and the stress that’s flowing through your entire body when you’re putting this pressure on you to eat perfectly, spend perfectly, move perfectly, yoga perfectly, breathe perfectly, wife perfectly, partner perfectly, mother perfectly, daughter perfectly, son perfectly, sibling perfectly, on and on.
You’re just jacking your cortisol all day, my beauty. And that takes a toll on your adrenal health.
The remedy is allowing for what is, what’s real, and offering a loving alternative.
It’s normal and natural to have urges.
The inner rebel, that inner part that doesn’t feel safe while also feeling restricted, may take false comfort in the story that you are in control when you’re restricting yourself and then just actually screaming at yourself in your head.
And this whole concept, this concept of safety in the body, restricting or allowing, it’s so vital for the healing of codependency, perfectionism, and people pleasing because oh my goodness, do we sure know how to restrict ourselves.
In seeking external validation, approval, love, and care, we so often prioritize things other than our own wants and desires.
Other people’s financial needs over investing in ourselves, other people’s dinner preference over ours.
We also prioritize other people’s approval of our weight, our body, our clothes, our marriage, our partnership, our career choices, and for those humans who are socialized as women, that can be a thousand fold over.
While we’re so focused on other people and their approval of us, their validation of us, we can seek that false comfort of conformity and restriction as a way to attempt to feel safe.
We’re so used to being our own bully and victim, so used to the false safety of black and white thinking, which is typical for brains like ours when unmanaged, the restriction and rebellion seem like the only two options.
And so we eventually find ourselves acting against it all when it’s not built around our humanity. And the fact of having a brain. When it’s not authentic, when these restrictions we’re putting on ourselves are not aligned with our own true deepest wants or desires.
And thus, the example of my client Tabitha, who recently put herself on a very strict no sugar diet, and then found herself unable to pause when she felt a massive desire, an urge to eat a whole bag of cookies in one go, which in turn made her feel really, really sick for days.
Now, you know me, my sweet nerd. I am never demonizing any choices. I’m never judging the cookies or the desire to nom them. Cookies are delicious. But rather, I’m just pointing out that in that moment, because she had restricted her food, her wants, her desires, her thoughts, feels, actions, and results so harshly, so intensely, that inner rebel came running to the fore. In that moment, she felt so deeply out of control, outside of herself, she said, which again, makes a lot of sense.
The moment you tell yourself your worth hinges on your choices and thus, you must always not have an urge or desire for the cookies, the alcohol, the rest, the TV break, the water, whatever, you turn it into a sea of potential rebellion by making the strict either or that your self-worth and self-love rests on.
And of course, that mental gymnastics will keep you from doing the things you want to do, whereas starting from a place of self-love, a belief that you are inherently worthy regardless of whether or not you eat the bag of Oreos can give you the space to make these choices more thoughtfully because they’re less emotionally loaded.
When your brain’s habit is to be mean to you, to expect you to fail, and to think of that failure as a very bad thing that you’ll be mean to you about and so many of my clients have this habit because it’s a cornerstone of codependency, perfectionism, and people pleasing, your brilliant brain will seek the path of less pain because that’s a human biological imperative. To avoid suffering and to seek pleasure.
My beauty, it all comes back to you being a human animal and reacting the way mammals do because science.
Remember, the more you restrict, the more powerful your urge to do the opposite is.
So what are the remedies here? Well, one option is to eat everything you ever want, even though it makes you sick.
That’s 100% available to you.
Alternately, the plan I like more for you is to find the middle ground.
For me, that looks like allowing my urges and desires to do the things that don’t serve my best wellness, honoring that I’m a human.
That means that I will have urges.
So what does it mean to allow an urge?
It means to sit with the discomfort of it and to hold space for it. Meaning to put aside your judgment, criticism, and critique of that sensation within you and to accept it as part of the human condition.
It does not mean that you follow what the urge within is saying necessarily, but rather you just notice it.
Awareness.
You give it love and be realistic, noting I am a human having a natural human urge, born of restriction, acceptance, and then deciding with your prefrontal cortex that perhaps today you’re not following that particular urge.
Action.
I think many, even most of us have felt urges and not followed them, so we have evidence for being able to do this.
For example, you get cut off in traffic and you feel the urge to speed up or to yell at the person or do something else dangerous. Hopefully you do not follow that urge.
Allowing the urge, feeling it, all goes hand in hand with recognizing that you are making a choice. You truly have the choice to eat 473 cookies, to yell at someone, to never shower, to hit people, to spend all your money the second you have it, to never invest in yourself, in your mental or physical health, to burn your own house down.
These are all choices you can make, but likely don’t because you don’t like the result or outcome. And you can apply the same framework to all the things you’ve been restrictive about and can see how you do have choice. You have agency.
By restricting or allowing, you’re making a choice either way.
Dropping the story that you’re good or bad, worthy or not, a better person if you do or don’t eat something, do or don’t buy something, do or don’t adhere to restriction, well, dropping all that takes the edge off the urge. So you can ride that wave instead of feeling pulled under by it.
This goes hand in hand with building internal trust. You don’t have to be a meany-pants with yourself to trust that you’ll do what serves you most. You can just put the black and white thinking, the rulebook down, and can start to listen into that quiet voice within that knows what you truly need. Your intuition, that gut feeling.
The more you decide to listen to it and learn to trust it, to discern what is the voice of intuition versus the voice of anxiety, fear, worry, the more powerful that voice will be. And while you’re working on that, on building that internal capacity for trust, consider starting with allowing and seeing where it lands you.
Allowing the urge, the desire, means giving yourself space to recognize that you have the ability to make a choice for yourself from your self-love and not your rebellion.
Step one:
Recognizing our critic that’s telling you you’re wrong or bad or in danger if you make a choice outside your restriction, and recognize that staying within the restriction or rebelling against it is a choice either way.
Step two:
Recognize the urge and allow it. Sit with it with love versus jumping to buffering to attempt to make it go away.
Step three:
Take a look at your restrictions. Ask yourself why you are putting these stories, these rules, this potential harshness on yourself. What is the goal? Is it aligned with your self-love? Is it aligned with true health or with a story like “thin equals healthy,” which the science shows is not true by the way?
Take a look at those restrictions and where they’re coming from so you can ask yourself in addition to this shift towards allowing, towards intuition, maybe you can just let the restrictions go because they’re not actually truly in alignment.
Step four:
Take a slow deep breath in, long slow breath out. Connect in with your body. Notice the sensations that arise when you feel this urge. Breathe in through your nose, another long, slow out, and bring curiosity and self-compassion in.
Remind yourself that you’re not bad for wanting something, it’s not bad to have an urge, and that you get to be loving with yourself always. You always get to choose that, my darling. And I’ll invite you to ask yourself, what’s going on for me right now?
What is this urge trying to tell me?
What else is going on for me energetically, mentally, physically? Is there something I need that is neither restriction nor rebellion?
Remind yourself that you can sit with this sensation and can make the most loving choice for your whole self from your whole self, and not as an act of rebellion.
Step five:
If the urge to do something that you know doesn’t serve you shows up, like eating a food you’re sensitive to, spending money you don’t have for a thing that doesn’t move your life forward, offer yourself a loving alternative.
A way to embrace the fact that you are a human with wants and desires, needs, urges, without making a choice that will harm you.
Thank you for taking the time to read Feminist Wellness. I’m excited to be here and to help you take back your health!
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