Why Your “Bad” Desires Aren’t Actually Bad (and What They’re Trying to Tell You)

Hi friend,

Last week I wrote about quitting vaping, and how much more difficult and uncomfortable it’s been than I ever could have imagined. 

Today I want to explore something that has felt even stranger, harder to articulate, and deeply disorienting for me:

Struggling to trust my own desire. 

Historically, I’ve understood desire as a crucial part of our individual map for personal fulfillment and thriving as humans, and I’ve built a lot of my work, and my life, around the idea that our desires are meaningful. I’ve always seen our cravings, longings, and other desires as important information about where we’re supposed to go, which needs to be trusted, honored, and respected. 

I understood, of course, that not all desires were meant to be taken literally, and that most people have experienced desires at some point in their lives that were incompatible with their core values, goals, and priorities. (Not to mention desires that have just felt straight up toxic, unhealthy, compulsive, or out of control!)

But those desires still made sense to me. Not necessarily as a direct and literal signal for action, but as a sort of misguided cry for help from our inner selves. In my experience, if we can get curious enough, compassionate enough, and nonjudgmental enough, we can always follow our desires down to their roots and find something deeply true and important there.

When someone feels the desire to eat until they feel numb and uncomfortable, for example, I don’t see a lack of willpower— I see deprivation, overwhelm, or safety-seeking.

When someone feels the desire for validation through people-pleasing, self-objectification, or risky behaviors, I don’t see dysfunction—I see a deep longing for connection, for being seen, for feeling valued.

When someone feels the desire to run away from intimacy, self-sabotage, or lash out, I don’t see a bad or broken person—I see fear, or shame, or a nervous system that doesn’t feel safe.

So I developed this internal framework for understanding desire that felt really solid to me, along the lines of: the details of a particular longing might not be literal or correct, but all longings are a valid and meaningful signal for action. 

After all, our desires often contain multiple layers, don’t they?

The more surface-level desires tend to be the ones that are the most reactive, distorted, or shaped by context. (Ie: This is like how you might want to yell at your kid when their carelessness leads to a big spill or broken item.)

But if you keep going deeper—if you stay curious, if you stay compassionate, if you don’t shut anything down—you’ll eventually reach something that feels grounded, clear, and aligned. Something that, when followed, expands your life rather than constricts it. (Ie: Underneath your kneejerk desire to yell at your kid, you might feel a deep true longing for more support, more alone time, more autonomy, more capacity, or more validation/appreciation for how difficult parenting is.)

I’ve generally been pretty good at working with my desires in this way, peeling back the layers as needed, to get to the true thing underneath. 

If I noticed I was going through a period of constantly craving sugar, for example, I wouldn’t restrict myself or try to keep my sugar intake “in check.” Instead, I would respect the urge and give myself permission to eat as much sugar as I felt I needed, but at the same time I would try to stay present and curious:

• What might this craving be signaling, or covering up, or directing me toward? 

• What was I really wanting, on that deeper layer underneath the sugar-craving?

• 
  

With this combo—giving myself permission to indulge, and acknowledging/addressing the deeper issues—my seemingly “unhealthy desires” have pretty much always resolved fairly quickly, and this is a strategy I have helped hundreds of clients adopt over the years as well!

This applied even when the urges were what we tend to call “bad habits,” too. 

If I ever noticed I wanted to escape into something—alcohol, food, shopping, doom-scrolling, whatever—I didn’t shame myself for it, I just assumed positive intent and treated it as information. And because I wasn’t creating scarcity or panic, it rarely spiraled, and this strategy worked incredibly well for me, for a very long time.

Until I quit vaping.

Vaping does not seem to follow the same rules. 

I can approach my cravings with compassion, assume positive intent, get curious about what’s underneath, and stay present with the sensation of wanting without judging it. But something is different here, because it’s not resolving. 

I do wonder sometimes if the difference is about the fact that I can’t grant myself that full conscious permission to act on my desires while figuring out what’s underneath them, the way I would with any other habit. 

A huge part of what made my previous approach so effective was the absence of restriction. I felt safe in the knowledge that I could have something if I truly wanted it, and there was no actual scarcity, rules, or sense that “I can never have this again.”

With vaping though, even when I try to tell myself “you can still do this anytime you want,” my nervous system doesn’t fully buy it. It knows there’s a line I won’t cross here, due to the monstrously addictive nature of nicotine, so there is no feeling of spacious freedom around this one.

But I suspect the real reason this situation feels different has more to do with the fact that I haven’t (yet) been able to fully acknowledge and address the deeper layers to this longing.

When I notice I’ve been compulsively drinking or scrolling more often than usual, I’m typically addressing a pretty short-term and straightforward issue which can be resolved within a few days or weeks, because all I need to do a little inventory of what was going on with me a few weeks ago (or whatever) when that desire first started showing up. 

Why do I feel the urge to shop so much lately? →  Oh, it’s probably because I’ve been dragging myself through this stressful and boring work project, so I’m reaching for a “reward.”

Why do I want to drink so badly right now? → Oh, I’m in the luteal phase of my cycle and just feeling uncomfortable in my skin, so I’m just reaching for ways to try to feel better.

These little mysteries are laughably simple and easy to sort through, compared to the vast and complex landscape of emotional roles, reasons, and replacements that lurk under my years of vaping.

What needs were going unmet for me before I started vaping, and what did vaping go on to become for me after a while? What did it allow me to do and be, what did it protect me from, and who did it stand in for? What new cycles did it create, and what new backlog of wounds and needs did it create?

The truth is that I don’t fully know yet, and that is most likely the real reason why I can’t stop thinking about it.

I certainly have some solid ideas about what the emotional needs hidden underneath my desire to vape really are, but my investigation right now is messy and complicated and ongoing.

There’s just a lot going on under the surface of this one, and I’m only a few months into the process. It’ll probably take a while for me to sort this all out, let alone to make the needed changes to address that deeper stuff! 

With that all in mind, I imagine I most likely won’t experience a significant decrease in obsessive nicotine cravings for a while.

And that’s uncomfortable, but I try to take comfort in the belief that my original framework of desire still applies, even when this one particular desire feels utterly broken and out of control.

Because this is a question that people ask me all the time as a coach:

What do we do when our desires seem to be leading us in the wrong direction?

And the truth is that all desires are just information—morally neutral information—and we simply have to get curious about them and make sure we’re interacting with them on the deepest and truest level, rather than letting ourselves get drawn into the distracting drama of the superficial (and often distorted or misguided) details. 

Some desires arrive complete and accurate, and don’t require any deeper investigation, like your desire to eat Thai food for dinner tonight, or your desire to apply for that cool new job.

Other desires arrive in inaccurate and misleading packaging, and require us to take a deeper look.

We tend to think of these desires as bad, wrong, toxic, unhealthy, invalid, or out of control, but our judgment and rejection of them don’t make them go away. (Quite the opposite!)

In my book, there are no “bad” desires, only desires requiring further investigation.

And while that means we may sometimes have a lot of extra work to do (hi, it’s me), it also means we never have to feel shame, fear, or moral judgement about our own urges, longings, cravings, needs, or desires… 

And that’s actually a very important part of body neutrality and self acceptance!

Now I’m curious about your relationship to desires, longings, cravings, and urges, and how that relationship impacts you— feel free to hit reply and share your thoughts!

Big hug,

Jessi