There are many obstacles in life that we can predict, but others that we simply can’t.
We need to have ways to deal with both of these scenarios or we’ll end up using these circumstances as excuses to go back to our old habits and move away from our goals and true desires.
When you are trying to change a habit such as overeating, you want to plan ahead for difficult situations or events that might pose a challenge or be stressful and put you at greater risk of eating off your plan.
You want to anticipate that your unconscious brain will attempt to make you think you are going to die if you don’t eat certain foods in these situations.
The circumstance may be a party or wedding or an upcoming vacation or just dinner out with friends. Whatever it is, you want to have a plan in order to keep your prefrontal cortex in charge.
Think about the upcoming event.
What will be challenging about it?
What has typically happened in the past at this type of event?
What do you want to decide in advance?
What is your commitment and why?
How will you implement your specific plan?
What challenges do you anticipate?
Now visualize a scenario where you are challenged and you take the action you want to take.
What will you think/feel/do when it gets really hard?
Going through this exercise in advance may not seem like much, but it is everything when it comes to challenging situations that you will surely face and developing the ability to overcome them without reverting back to your old, hardwired, easy neural pathways.
We want to create new pathways and planning for these obstacles can help you do this.
What about when you face an upsetting event, something that you could not predict? What do you do then?
Just like with known, upcoming events, we often use upsetting events as an excuse to overeat.
We may feel really sad or angry or some other negative emotion and we turn to food as a buffer in attempt to reduce these unpleasant feelings.
When one of these unexpected events occur, this is the perfect time to do a thought download or thought dump that I first introduced on Day 4.
A thought download is where you take a short amount of time, maybe five to ten minutes, and just free write whatever comes to mind. In this case you are going to free write about the upsetting event. You don’t have to censor yourself or even use full sentences or punctuation. Just let it all out on the paper in front of you.
The next step is to look back at what you just wrote and pull out all the facts. This shouldn’t take long at all because what you’ll notice is that there are actually very few facts in your download. Most of what you write will be your thoughts.
Remember, a fact is totally neutral and everyone in the world would agree with it. If it is subject to any kind of debate, it is a thought and not a fact.
Once you have pulled out the facts from your download (you want to write these down or at least circle or highlight them somehow), ask yourself what you are making these facts mean. Why are these neutral facts a problem for you? This is where your thoughts will really come out.
Ask yourself how these thoughts make you feel.
What did you do as a result of these feelings? Did they make you want to buffer with food? Why or why not?
By asking these questions, you will begin to reveal the story you have created in your mind and see how it likely led you to buffer.
You can begin to ask yourself more useful questions such as how you want to feel and what would you need to think and believe about the event to feel that way.
You can ask yourself what you have learned from the event.
These questions will move you forward and help you more easily process these types of unexpected events in the future without the need to buffer.
(As a side note, I am NOT suggesting in any way that you have to change your thoughts or feelings about any circumstance or event. You ALWAYS get to choose what you want to think and feel. Death, for example, would be considered a neutral circumstance, a fact. Yet most people do NOT feel neutral about it, myself included. That’s totally ok. You can feel terrible about a circumstance. I personally WANT to feel terrible when a child dies for any reason, particularly when all they did was go to school. What I don’t want is to use the things in life I feel terrible about as an excuse to avoid my true feelings, not process my negative emotions, and instead buffer with food, alcohol, porn, shopping, work, you name it. All those things may help to numb my negative feelings temporarily, but they only add to my suffering and the general suffering of the world which is something I don’t want to do.)
If you would like to learn more about coaching to help you with both upcoming and upsetting events or other tools that I have mentioned in the past, schedule a free call with me at the link below or you can email me at mindfuldocmom@gmail.com.
