We investigated the possibility of reducing the giant flux creep in high-temperature superconductors by temporarily increasing the temperatureTabove the operating temperatureT0,afterthe critical state is created atT0.ThisTincrease leads to asupercriticalstate which decays rapidly so that, whenTis decreased back toT0, the superconductor is in the subcritical state. We have found that both the maximum persistent current and the relaxation rate are hysteretic and differ substantially from the corresponding quantities measured after flux annealing. ©1998 American Institute of Physics.