Stress Eating Cycle + How to Break It
I don’t know about you but stress eating was a real thing in my life for many years. We all go through experiences and situations that hijack our nervous system and we enter this cycle of eating our emotions over and over again. Today, I want to teach you how to focus on addressing the underlying emotional issues that drive stress eating to break the cycle once and for all.
In this episode, I’ll dive into:
- How to recognize the cycle and understand the different triggers and emotions that lead to stress eating.
- A powerful practice named the RAIN technique. It involves recognizing, allowing, investigating, and nurturing your emotions.
- The importance of shifting your focus from obsessing over diets (and even healthy eating) in order to truly heal emotional/stress/comfort eating.
- How to embrace the healing process (while it’s not a quick fix, it’s SO WORTH IT to finally feel in control around food).
Remember, emotions are temporary, and by allowing yourself to feel and process them, you can break free from the stress-eating cycle. If you’re ready to break free from stress eating and create a healthy relationship with food, this episode is a must-listen.
Resources and Links:
- Make sure you register for my FREE Holiday Survival Workshop!
- I’d love to hear your thoughts…Drop me a DM on Facebook or Insta!
TIMESTAMPS:
00:01:09 Understanding the stress-eating cycle.
00:07:44 Understanding triggers and responses.
00:11:19 Emotional eating is complex and requires inner work.
00:15:12 Emotional eating is not the solution.
00:20:13 Recognize emotional triggers and respond.
00:28:54 Recognize, allow, and investigate emotions.
00:29:59 Emotions are like waves.
Full Episode Transcript:
Stress Eating Cycle + How to Break it.
Hello. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Hello Body Freedom Podcast. I’m your hostess with the most is Audra. It is super exciting to be here with you. As you are watching this on YouTube, you can see my background is not my usual background. I’m actually hanging out in Philly and this is my lovely basement part of the Airbnb that I’m hoping gets the best sound quality.
Freezing cold here. I’m not used to being in the cold. And for all of you that are like cold weather folks, you can laugh at me cause it is a little ridiculous, but I am really excited to talk about something super important today. The title of this episode is called stress eating, the stress eating cycle and how to break it.
And I’m hoping that was like a teaser to get you here because we want to go a little deep here. I really want to show you what that cycle is what it really takes to break it. The reason why probably you can’t break it because you’re focused on the absolute wrong things and I’m really excited to dive in.
So let’s just go ahead and dive in. First I want to talk about this concept of stress eating. All right. The reason I use those particular words are because so many people connect with that word. They connect with, Oh, I’m a stress eater. They can hear that and go, yeah, I get stressed and then I eat. But there’s so many other words that we can also use comfort eating, right? I feel a little lonely. I’ve had a hard day. Ooh, this food is going to comfort me. Anxious eating, mindless eating, bored eating, right? There are all of these ways. That we eat and we are defining them very particularly stress eating, comfort eating, right?
Bored eating all of these different ways But when you think about all of those words, they encompass the actual definition which is called emotional eating I have learned over the course of the last few decades of doing this work that Nobody really likes the word emotional eating very much. I know I did not When I would hear that word, I would be repulsed by it because I never thought of myself as an emotional eater.
And you’re going to understand why today most of us don’t even really allow ourselves to feel whatever the thing is we’re feeling because the food goes in so fast that we don’t actually have the feeling. So we don’t really ever think we’re emotional. This is why we like other words.
And we think of emotional eating as some girl crying, , in a tub of ice cream, because she’s going through a breakup or something like that. And yes, that is indeed emotional eating, but it is all the other things. Bored eating is a reason to eat that is not connected to physical hunger.
It’s a reason to eat because you’re bored and the eating is the thing that fixes it, even though that’s not the best solution. And so let’s go ahead and talk about what the cycle is. I call it in this episode, the stress-eating cycle, but it is any kind of cycle with any feeling.
If you have a feeling and then food follows after that feeling or some level, maybe you don’t even connect with whatever the emotion is, but you’re using food in a way that is not connected to physical hunger. That means that it’s very often connected to feeling a certain way in the body and that it is like a legitimate cycle.
These are the cycles that clients come to me frustrated because they don’t feel like they can escape them. I remember one client when she came in, she talked about comfort eating And she’s I do it and it’s no big deal. I can comfort eat. It’s what it is. It’s, no big deal.
But then there are times when it, she feels like she literally can’t stop. And so if you can relate to that in any way, then you are definitely going to love what we have to say today. So let’s talk about that food-feeling cycle. Okay. It is a looping habit pattern in the body and it loops over and over again and it keeps us stuck.
It makes us feel like we’re out of control around food. It makes us feel like there’s something wrong with us. And then because we’re not feeling good, we just go eat food again. Okay. So the first thing that we want to understand about what the cycle is, there are three phases to the cycle. And when you can really understand this, it’s just going to be a whole lot easier for you.
The very first phase is something happens. Okay. And I like to call this it’s like a trigger, something, and it could be an inner trigger, but a lot of times it’s something that just happens without us even knowing, like it happens outside of us and boom, it triggers us. Okay. So again, it can be inner trigger or outer trigger, but I want to give you a bunch of examples so you can really see if you relate to any of these. Okay. So the first thing that happens is you get a call from someone, and it’s something that has some bad news in it. What does that do to your body? That’s a trigger.
You read a text. Maybe it’s a text that makes you feel really happy and giddy. Oh my God, this person. Or maybe it’s a text that just rubbed you the wrong way. Either way, it did something to your emotional experience, whether positive or negative in a real heightened way. What, again, this is the interesting thing here is it doesn’t matter if it’s negative or positive.
It really matters with the amount of comfort we can feel withholding whatever emotion that is there to be held. All right. Let me give you some more examples here. Ooh, this is one of my favorites. You get tagged in a picture on Facebook. So somebody tagged you at some office party and now it’s floating all over Facebook.
You’ve never asked to be tagged in this and you caught the picture and all of a sudden you’re like, Oh my God, do I look like that? Trigger getting on the scale. Trigger walking by a mirror and just getting a glimpse of yourself in an angle that all of a sudden Something about that angle something about your belief system and all the other stuff going on that is unacceptable trigger, right?
You can even get triggered when you’re eating something. That’s off limits. I Said I was gonna eat the salad, but I ate the burger instead triggered listening to the news and then worrying about the future. So listening to the news is this outer trigger that created some inner experience and then your own inner trigger of worrying and over-worrying about the future.
Remembering upsetting memories. That’s like an inner trigger. What else? Bad night’s sleep. Like you’re exhausted, don’t feel good. And then this is when my clients say I get a case of the fuck it fuck it, who cares? I’m gonna eat everything in sight. Also like time of days, right?
So I have a lot of clients who like at three o’clock or four o’clock, that is their red zone. There is just something that happens right then and there’s a strong habit, they go and eat, something triggers them there or nighttime eating. Those are two big ones. And so the point is that once the trigger happens, whether it’s an inner trigger or an outer trigger, that is the very first step in this three-phase process, right?
When this trigger happens, the next phase happens, you have an inner experience. This inner experience includes thoughts. Emotions and sensations happening in the body. Okay. It could be a mood shift. It could be something like that, but it is literally an inner experience that happens. And then we have a response.
So we have the trigger that creates something happens inside of our body, thoughts, emotions, sensations, response. Okay. And now these responses. This is when the urge to eat comes, the trigger happens, you are feeling something uncomfortable in your body, even if it is as simple as I’m bored, if that particular emotion sensation combo connected to the thoughts that you’re having, if that feels intolerable for you in that moment, then That’s your inner experience.
And then you will have a response to that. So a lot of the responses, what we’re working with today is that you will have an urge to eat, an impulse to eat. It has nothing to do with being hungry. You’re just going to eat anyways. You will likely eat too much, or you might eat foods that you didn’t really even want to eat.
You’ve been trying to avoid, so to speak like a lot of sugar foods, comfort foods, things like that. And so I also want to say that the responses can be a trillion other things, right? A lot of people, they have this inner experience that doesn’t feel good and they go grab a bottle of wine. They have an inner experience that doesn’t feel good, they go grab a credit card and go shopping. Maybe you can relate to all of these too. Now, obviously what we do at HelloBody Freedom is we work especially with food and also alcohol triggers or the inner experience of when we use that because that becomes the response to all of this, right?
So we work with that, but the truth is that because what we do here in Hello Body Freedom is to work with these deeper things. And once you start to work with inner experience, , like I said, the response can be a million different things, but when we actually are doing the real work of working with what’s happening in the inner experience, then it often clears up a whole lot of things, right?
But we’re going to keep it mainly, obviously we’re going to keep it with food because this is what we do at Hello Body Freedom. All right. And so I want to keep going with this cycle because those are the three main things, trigger experience inside of myself, response before I even think about it, this experience is happening at an very often an unconscious or a subconscious level.
And then the food goes in my face so fast that I haven’t even able to think about it. There is no consciousness. Can anybody relate to that? And so now what we have is there can be a response to the response. It’s called a secondary response. And this is usually, Oh crap, I can’t believe I did that.
I said I wasn’t going to do it. This sucks. And now we are feeling a lot of difficult shit in the body and these difficult feelings because we were already feeling it. Something triggered us that made us feel something. Then from the response that we didn’t want to do. So, once you eat the food and you didn’t want to eat the food, then you might feel things like shame or guilt or frustration, right?
These tend to be the types of feelings that are incredibly difficult to hold and to tolerate and to work with in the body for most people. Okay. They are the negative emotions that, let’s just all be honest. Who wants to fucking feel shame and guilt? Like it’s like hard to feel right. And yet we are human with the human experience of having emotions and shame and guilt, serve a place in the emotional experience.
I’m just putting that out there. We’ll get to that in a second. Okay. And so when this happens, Now we are really stuck in the cycle again because now the strong urge to eat comes up even more and this is usually when the numbing out really starts. Now it’s the middle fingers are thrown up.
F it. Who cares? I’m just going to start on Monday again. Something like that. And so the cycle continues. And so that’s really is the cycle of emotional eating. Okay. And the thing is with the trigger we don’t really have a lot of control over triggers. We definitely don’t have control over outer triggers, right?
I can’t control. If somebody tag now, I can tell them to go untag me on that picture, dammit, don’t do that. If I didn’t want that. But if somebody did it. If the news happens to be on and I heard something that was distressing to work to me, that is a trigger and my body is going to do what my body’s going to do.
Inside of Hello Body Freedom, I want to use the example of getting on a scale. Or looking at catching a glimpse of yourself in the mirror, right? Our clients do a lot of work to neutralize that inner experience. So that way, eventually they get on a scale and it does not trigger them.
They see a picture of themselves, even if they’re not exactly where they want to be. Maybe they’re on a weight loss journey that it does not trigger them because they have a lot of skills to work with it. So it ends up not doing what it does to the body. But what you need to understand is that the trigger happens.
And then the response happens in the body. And it is what it is right in that moment. It takes time to untangle what’s going on in the body, but we have to understand that we don’t have really control over that trigger that will create what’s going on in the body in that moment. All right. And I’m saying all of this because that’s where we have to do the work because it’s what we are experiencing in the body that creates the automatic eating.
All right. And so we can’t control the triggers, right? But the most beautiful part about all of this, and this is what we do inside of hello body freedom is we spend our time working in the middle. We don’t also want to spend a ton of time working on the response. I’m not going to eat this. I’m going to tie my hands up.
I’m never going to leave food in the house. There are some strategies to help you in the moment with not choosing food as the answer, but really the real work to be done here is working with the inner experience, right? Working with the thoughts, the feelings, the sensations, the emotions.
Okay. And so the thing is that when you’ve learned that food is a solution to what you’re experiencing on the inside, that’s the response. I’m going to go eat based on what you’re experiencing on the inside. It doesn’t really work. And, when you’re eating for physical hunger, there really is a finite amount of food that can fix it.
I want you to think about that. If you are really, truly hungry, Okay. Okay. Like hungry, let’s say you didn’t have access to food. Let’s say you’re on a deserted Island and you’re like really hungry. Okay. Let’s just use a crazy example. Cause none of us, it’s probably not gonna happen to us. In that moment there’s no amount of meditation that can help you.
There’s no amount of trying to untangle your feelings. There’s no amount of hugs or affection or taking a nap. These are all great resources, but in the moment that you were legitimately physically hungry, food is the answer. If a baby is physically hungry, you can try to hold them and coddle them and do all the things. But the only thing that’s going to actually solve the problem is food because food is the best solution for that moment for physical hunger, right? That is super important to know because when you are not hungry.
But we keep trying to use food as an answer. Now we’ve got ourselves a different kind of problem because again, there is only a finite amount of food that fixes physical hunger. You’re physically hungry, you eat the food, you have enough, you feel satisfied, fixed, done, you move on with your day. But when you are not hungry, I want you to think of it like you have like an itch somewhere on your back and what is the answer to having that itch somewhere on your back?
It’s to scratch it. It’s to reach back there and just, Oh, and it feels so good. But what we do just to use this as an analogy is we can’t figure out like it’s, let’s all be honest. Like whenever we have an itch somewhere on our body and we can’t get to it to actually scratch it, it doesn’t feel comfortable. There’s distress. There is an experience in the body that doesn’t feel good. And so if we use that as the analogy of what we’re doing with emotional eating. I have an itch that needs scratched, but you know what I’m going to do, I’m just going to eat this food.
I’m going to eat this food. I’m going to eat this food. And the reason why emotional eating is so painful and so challenging is because it is an infinite amount of food that you can eat because it never solves the problem. It’s not actually the right solution. You need to go get a back scratcher or go get a friend or somebody to just get their claws in you and just scratch your back.
And then all of a sudden, the feeling it’s like sweet relief, right? Isn’t just Oh, that’s exactly what I needed. And that’s exactly what your emotions need. This inner experience, it definitely needs something. You need something for this inner experience of discomfort going through your body.
But food is just very often not the best solution. Okay. What’s really important to hear is that there’s no healing of anything at this inner level until we actually can feel it, okay? If we do not feel what needs to be felt, there will be no healing as a result of that.
Okay. All of us have issues. All of us have feelings. And the truth is that the better that we understand and connect with our feelings, the easier our lives are going to become. And the longer and stronger we ignore what we’re feeling. We fight it, we shove it down, we throw it in the closet, we shove it under the rug.
The longer we do that, the more pain and suffering we are just gonna keep having over and over again. Okay. It doesn’t make life better. It makes it harder. Feeding a feeling with food, using food to try to pacify the feeling, it does not make the feeling go away. All right. I just want you to take that in.
I know for a minute or two, it’s like sweet relief. The cookie is something else to think about it. You get a dopamine hit. The sugary thing is delicious. Oh my God, that’s so good. But then what happens is usually the feeling just comes right back stronger than before. All right. Because the truth is that feelings are here; emotions, feelings, all the things, they are here to provide us with information. Okay. And if we do not listen and pay attention, they’re just going to get louder and louder. All right. The more that you ignore your feelings, the more that you try to shove them away, y’all, the louder it gets.
I literally want you to think about a toddler. There’s a screaming, crying toddler. Okay. If you ignore the toddler, you try to throw the toddler in a closet. I obviously don’t do that, but you get my point, right? We do this with our feelings and emotions. We shove it away. We try not to feel it. Do you think that toddler is going to get quieter or louder?
That toddler that is throwing a temper tantrum, throw it in a closet, see what happens. Okay. It’s not the answer. All right. And I think that the worst part is that when we use food to cope, to manage difficult emotions, to manage these unpleasant, uncomfortable kind of situation in our body, emotion, sensation, thoughts, that whole thing that doesn’t feel good.
The worst part of it is that you are literally missing a very wonderful, beautiful, powerful opportunity to actually work through an important issue in your life. All right. What I think that our issues, they do not stop causing us trouble, the big stuff until we actually pay attention and at least make some effort to work through them.
All right. And so think about that. Throw a toddler in a closet, toddler gets louder, toddler gets crazy. You’ve traumatized the toddler. Now you’ve got a shit show for the rest of your life. Like bad choice, right? You hold that toddler. Come here, baby. Like what’s going on. You start to give that toddler what that toddler needs.
Maybe that toddler needs a hug, needs a nap, needs to know that you’re there, needs to just cry it out, needs a snack, right? If it’s physically hungry, right? The point is paying attention to that toddler is the answer. It’s what’s going to make that toddler’s life a lot easier.
IE your life a lot easier. Okay. And then I’m done with the toddler analogy. I want to now bring it, this to the, what we normally do, which is shove away the emotions and we shove it with food, but we also do it by completely deflecting and focusing on eating healthy food and going on a diet. And it’s dude, you’re focused on the wrong things.
You’re sitting here obsessively focused on your weight. Focused on going on a diet, focusing on I’ve got to eat healthier food. I’ve got to go to the groceries. I’ve got to follow this perfect recipe. And in my opinion, it is an absolute distraction. You are taking the focus away from what you actually need to be paying attention to.
Which are the underlying emotional issues, the underlying stuff that’s just hard to deal with y’all. And most of us just don’t know how to deal with it. And that’s why that we just have learned, unfortunately, from, unevolved parents and an unevolved culture and an unevolved society, let’s just shove this under a rug, but no, it doesn’t work that way.
Okay. We have to start working with that third phase, the trigger we can do nothing about mostly. But when we work with what is going on here, what is happening in our inner world, we have all the control over that. And then that will change the response. That will change the response. We do have agency and autonomy over working with what’s going on inside the body and what our actual response On the other side of it is, and so I want to leave you today with a little practice cause I think this will help and yeah, this is how I would start.
So for instance, I’m teaching my food and feelings course. We’re doing a whole revision of it. Untangling food and feelings and I’m going to be teaching this exact practice on Friday inside of the course, right? So this is an example of something that we do inside of Hello Body Freedom.
So let me walk you through it because when you finally get to the point where you realize I’ve really got to deal with this, how the hell do I do it? I want this podcast to be a resource for you. All right. So the very first thing we want to do, and this is usually where I have all of my clients start.
And the reason why it’s important to start this way, I think, there’s maybe different ways that you can, but this has, in the decade I’ve been working at this level with clients, it has just been amazing because remember there’s a trigger and then we don’t have a lot of consciousness of what is feeling that inner experience that we’re feeling.
We just have an automatic response. So much of what happens after that trigger hits is just completely unconscious and then we don’t realize it till after we’re like, a bucket into a giant tub of ice cream or, the giant package of kettle popcorn or whatever. And we just ate three bags of it or something like that.
And then we’re like, Oh shit. So this is going to help you actually move through so you don’t end up in that situation. So the very first thing we do with our clients is we work on Getting them in touch with physical hunger and enough and doing everything, doing the best that they can with eating inside of those parameters.
If I’m physically hungry, that’s a very good reason to eat. And I’m going to eat until like enough. And then now we’re learning what I like to just simply call a normal relationship with food. And the reason why this is such a great place to start is because one, it’s a normal relationship with food, but two, Is that you’re practicing more consciousness, right?
You’re practicing being more aware. Am I even hungry? Okay, then I can hold off and wait. Oh wait, I am hungry. Awesome. Let’s eat. It’s this cool way to learn how to be in better relationship with food, but here’s the real work. This is why I really love this is because if you are an emotional eater, which 90 percent of us are,
I’m not making any jokes here. Let’s be real is what I mean to say. What’s going to happen is you’re going to have awareness around eating only when you’re hungry and you’re going to go, Oh my God, like I’m realizing I’m not hungry, but I am having a major impulse to eat something right now.
That’s usually how we first come to realize that we are triggered, that we are having an inner experience. So I love that first step. So practicing the process of eating when you’re hungry, stopping at enough. And ultimately what will happen is you won’t be able to stay only in those parameters because you have the tangled web of habits around not being able to feel what’s going on and then using food is that coping strategy? Okay, so that’s the first thing if you can bring that level of awareness to your day-to-day you will likely be able to do the actual practice once it happens. Okay. So now here we are, we recognize I’m I have this urge to eat.
I’m feeling things that’s going on. Something’s going on. I know I’m not hungry. Wow. What do I do with all this? Okay. And so I’m going to give you the acronym, which I did not make up. This is from mindfulness meditation 101. You can go listen to any mindfulness meditation teacher teaching this, but I’m going to give it to you specifically around our behaviors and our relationship with food.
So it’s called the RAIN technique. It’s a rain meditation you can do. And it’s recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture. That’s what it stands for. And so the very first step is to recognize, and this is where it’s so important to recognize I’m not physically hungry. And then when you realize you’re like, I’m like not hungry, you’re then you’re like, Oh crap.
But there’s this urge to eat. So now you’re recognizing, Oh my gosh, I have an urge. Oh, now I’m recognizing something doesn’t feel good or I feeling uncomfortable in my body. I’m having all these thoughts, right? The recognition of this, which is the like awareness, nothing changes until we have this.
And so being able to catch the thoughts to really know that this is happening in the body. Okay. And I have a few tips on recognize. So I’d say first you’re catching the thoughts and you’re catching and paying attention to what you’re feeling in the body. And then the next thing we want to do, and this part’s really important.
You want to neutralize the whole experience. Because probably what’s happening is you’re having some really shitty thoughts and you’re saying some not nice things to yourself and then you’re making what you’re feeling in your body. You’re making it feel wrong. And the truth is we’ve got to get to neutral.
So I like the idea of the way that we recognize is we catch the situation and we catch it, we bring the awareness, that’s the recognizing. And then we’ve got to neutralize the situation. We’ve got to realize, okay, I’m not the first person that’s ever felt this way in my body. Everybody feels feelings.
Every other human on this planet has likely felt at some level of what I’m experiencing right now. This is normal. I’m neutralizing this. I’m not making it right. I’m not making it wrong. Just trying to do that. Back and help make the next parts a little easier. And then the other one I have with recognizing it, the other like trick with that is you got to pause.
Because here’s the thing, from the moment the trigger happens until the food is in your mouth, you’ve completely missed the middle part. And remember how I said, we have to work on that middle part. And that middle part is that experience with the body, the thoughts, the emotions, the sensations. If you cannot pause, Long enough to even do this, then nothing is going to change, right?
This is why meditation is so good. We learn how to sit with discomfort. We learn how to sit still. We learn how to pause. This is why not like overcomplicating our lives and making ourselves super busy all the time. That’s just another trauma response to not being able to feel what you’re feeling, right?
That’s what keeps us eating. Let’s learn how to recognize our AI and recognize, ah, and part of that for me is okay, just pause. One of the fastest ways and most helpful ways to pause is to take big inhales and exhales, but do it slow. Just slow the breathing down and make it bigger. Even if it’s just one or two breaths that often can just be enough to pause.
Okay. So there’s the recognize phase and now is the next phase. It’s called allow. And it’s very important because what you have learned how to do for a lifetime is you have learned how to Make it absolutely wrong that you feel the way that you feel you have an unconsciousness inside of you that basically is scared to death to feel what you’re feeling.
And so there’s a reason why you’re throwing it under the rug or throwing it in a closet because you’re so scared of it. And there’s a ton of judgment around it. We negative self-talk herself into shit. And so once we get to the place, we’re able to catch it, and we slow it down a little bit. We pause the next piece of allow matters.
I don’t think you’re going to get through to the other side of processing this until you get to a place where you can say, I might not want to feel this way. This might not be the best moment in my life, given how I’m feeling my state, this discomfort in my body. But am I willing to go ahead and allow this to be here?
Not because I like it, but because it is the truth. of this exact moment in my life. It is the truth and reality of my existence right here and right now. That is it. You don’t have to like it. It does not have to be comfortable, but you do have to take an inhale and an exhale and go, I can allow this to be here.
Even though this is hard to feel right now, I know I can simply allow this, even though I wish this wasn’t here, I’m going to honor the fact that I have a part in me that doesn’t love feeling anxious or depressed or lonely or scared, whatever it is, or stressed, but it is the truth of my moment. It is the truth and reality.
It is what Byron Katie says. Loving what is you? It is what it is. This is your reality and true. So many of us try to escape reality. This is what we should have food in our face all day long, but it doesn’t work. Will not actually help you heal at this level. Okay. So recognize, allow. And then the next one is investigate.
And this one now, like now that your guard is down a little, because you’ve at least surrendered to the answer of, yes, I can allow this. Now there is room to actually investigate, to actually go, okay. What’s really going on here? Okay. And this is where you can bring some curiosity. This is where you want to be like what is the sensation?
Is this tightness? Is it stabbing? Is it heavy? Is it pulsation? Is it butterflies? Is it tension? Is it relaxation? What is going on? Is it hot? Is it cold? Oh, and interesting. Wow. Look at these crazy ass thoughts going on in my head. Woo. That was a mean one, right? Notice that when you can investigate what you were literally doing is you were separating yourself.
Now you’re not like lost in it. You’re not like twirling and lost in the wave of the emotion. Now what you’re able to do is witness the emotion, witness the wave, witness the sensation. Okay. One of my favorite ways to think about working with this investigation is thinking of emotions like waves.
So if you’ve ever been in the ocean and a wave has clamped down on you and you lost your footing and you’re like in like a washing machine Twirling around and it feels a little crazy and scary because the ocean just grabbed you. That’s what it feels like when you’re just lost in your emotions. But when you can learn how to surf and ride the wave, ride the emotional wave you are now like In alliance with it, you’re not denying it, but you’re able to ride the wave of it.
You’re able to write the speed, the fear, whatever the bumps, whatever might come up with it. And I love this analogy because I do surf not great, but I’ve attempted in my life and catching that wave is scary. It’s fast. And it’s like, what do I do? And you become one with the wave, right?
And the wave doesn’t last. This is the most important thing for you to cognitively understand tonight or today, whenever you’re listening to this. Emotions don’t stay forever, especially if we allow them, especially if you stop shoving them in closets and underneath rugs. Okay. They do not stay forever.
They are like a wave and like a wave, especially if you can surf it and ride the wave in, you might just ride it all the way into shore and just walk off your surfboard and then go about your merry way, right? They do not stay forever. And so this investigation part of you just being with it and allowing it and writing it and knowing that it will shift and change and morph and feeling into the sensations of your body.
Oh, what a gift. What a gift. And then the last part is nurture. Nurture is, quite frankly, what we’re talking about here is uncomfortable situation in the body. Fear, anger, stress anxiety, grief. Emotions are hard to be with. So then the nurturing part is like, how can I take care of myself?
Given the fact that this is not like the most comfortable thing I’ve ever done, I’m learning a new skill. This is not easy. How can I attend to my needs? What do I need? Do I need a nap? Do I need to call my coach? Do I need to call a therapist? Do I need to call my BFF? Do I need to go for a walk? Do I need to be out in nature?
Do I need to, grab my, dog and go for a walk? Do I need to grab my cat and snuggle? If your cat lets you do that, some of them don’t, but what do you need? This part is learning how to resource. So using external resources, people, nature, events using internal resources, how can I take good care of myself?
This is a mindfulness technique. This is the RAIN technique. It is recognizing what is going on. It is allowing it coming to a real place of surrendered allowance. It is investigating it with curiosity and kindness and compassion, and it is giving yourself what you need. It is nurturing. And let me tell you, if you walk through that whole thing while you are in the midst of this discomfort, emotions and sensations stick around for 30 to 90 seconds, 30 to 90 seconds.
Unless we loop a horrible shitty thought and we just keep it going. But if we can really get in and follow this mindfulness technique, you are going to feel better. So this is one technique of a trillion that we use inside of Hello Body Freedom. And I think that if you are watching this live, you can see that there’s a little ticker going down right there.
So you can get to HelloBodyFreedom. com slash food and feelings course. And you know what? You can come in and you can see what it’s all about and maybe you can start working on this. All right, my friends. I hope that this was helpful for you. I had a blast. I’m really having a blast refining and teaching this again.
And so it would be great to have you in there if that feels something you were being called to take care of finally. All right, my friends have a beautiful rest of your day. And take good care of yourself till next time.
