What does it mean that craving identification?

Before designing a habit ask what craving you are trying to satisfy.

Example: A product manager launches three simultaneous habit-building projects in January: a morning meditation app, a lunchtime gym routine, and an evening journaling practice. She picks rewards she finds generally pleasant — a fancy latte after meditating, a new playlist after the gym, a square of dark chocolate after journaling. By February, all three are dead. She never asked what craving each habit was supposed to serve. When she finally sits with the question, she discovers that her actual craving is not relaxation, fitness, or reflection — it is a sense of control over days that feel dictated by Slack messages and stakeholder demands. The moment she reframes all three habits around the craving for autonomy — meditating before checking any messages, lifting weights with no phone present, journaling about decisions she made rather than tasks assigned to her — two of the three stick without effort. The craving was the same across all three domains. She had been treating the surface behavior as the variable when the underlying need was the constant.

Try this: Pick one habit you are currently trying to build or have recently abandoned. Set a timer for ten minutes. Write at the top of a page: "What am I actually craving when I feel the urge to do (or avoid) this behavior?" Then write continuously without editing. Do not censor yourself. After ten minutes, read what you wrote and circle the three most surprising or emotionally charged phrases. For each phrase, ask: "If this craving were fully satisfied, would I still need this habit?" If the answer is no for any of them, you have likely found the real craving. Now compare this craving to the reward you have been using. Write one sentence describing the gap between the craving and the reward. That gap is why the habit is not sticking.