Outrun it for ten minutes

A craving is energy with nowhere to go — restless, buzzing, looking for its old outlet. You can sit in it, or you can spend it. Right now, the fastest way through might not be stillness. It might be movement.

Walk around the block like you're late. Do push-ups until your arms complain. Take the stairs, clean something, put on one song and move. Exercise blunts cravings measurably — it burns the agitation as fuel and hands you back a different body chemistry than the one the urge showed up in.

There's something fitting about it, too: the old habit spent your body — your breath, your heart, your years. Movement does the opposite. The same urge that used to shrink your lungs can now be the reason you strengthen them. Let the craving be the trigger for the thing that heals you.

Ten minutes from now you'll be slightly out of breath, slightly proud, and — quietly, almost anticlimactically — not craving much of anything. The wave will have broken while you weren't watching it. That's not a trick. That's just how free people ride it out — thank God, on their feet.