Do You Beat Yourself Up After Overeating? Curiosity Helps.
Curiosity is a tool that allows you to pause before reacting to an urge or avoiding an uncomfortable emotion that results in overeating.
That pause is essential for building awareness around our habits.
Our habits make up 40% - 45% of our daily activities.
Habits are so automatic that they feel like they happen to you, but in actuality, habits are choices we make.
Habits are our brain’s short-cut.
For example, as you become aware of your reoccurring habitual thoughts that create desire like, “I’ve had a hard day so I deserve chocolate cake,” instead of reacting and eating the cake, you can become curious about the thought.
Ask yourself questions like:
· What is a “hard day?”
· What does “hard day” mean?
· Why do I believe chocolate cake is the solution to my “hard day?”
· Is that even true?
Also reflect inward on what desire feels like in your body.
Get curious and ask yourself these questions:
· What does desire and the urge for chocolate cake feel like in my body?
· Where is the feeling located?
· Is the feeling hot or is it cold?
· Is the feeling moving? If yes, is it moving fast or slow?
· Does the feeling have a color?
· Does the feeling have a texture?
Curiosity and compassion open us up, and expands us.
Openness and expansion correlate with positive, helpful emotions while closed and tightened correlate with negative, unhelpful emotion.
Feelings are our fuel for action.
With that, it’s important to be in touch with your feelings.
Self-judgement and shame in the form of beating ourselves up often times is our go-to action when we don’t show up for ourselves in ways that support our goals.
We think that beating ourselves up is useful to fill the gap for pushing ourselves to follow through.
However, when you think about how you feel when you beat yourself up and judge yourself…maybe you feel shame, hopelessness, discouragement, or disgust, what kind of action do you take next?
What you do next—your actions matter.
Usually it leads to overeating and self-sabotage.
The antidote to beating ourselves up and self-judgement is curiosity and compassion.
Self-judgement and beating ourselves up closes us off, and constricts us.
It’s an additional layer of pain we inflict on ourselves.
In addition to asking yourself the questions above, Judson Brewer, MD, PhD offers in his book, Unwinding Anxiety, another useful way to get curious.
Dr. Brewer suggests, “Whenever an urge to do a habitual behavior comes up--or even when you’re in the middle of the behavior, try “hmmm” to shift into being present.”
Dr. Brewer explains, “If you noticed that by being curious you just gained even a microsecond of being able to be with your thoughts, emotions, and body sensations more than you have in the past, you’ve just taken a huge step forward.”
Small wins over time compound into BIG results.
Allow yourself to be human.
This means no self-judgment, beating yourself up, and no comparing yourself to others.
If your actions don’t align with your goals, check in with what you’re thinking and feeling.
If you have trouble accessing the feeling in your body, scan your body for any sensation.
Once you find any sensation, turn your focus to it and get curious.
There is no destination or right way to explore your thoughts and feelings.
Be patient and compassionate with yourself.
As you gain awareness of your thoughts and feelings, you will move from noting behavior after it happens to catching it while it’s happening, and finally, you will catch it BEFORE it happens.
From that place, you will gain the control to think on purpose, and live a deliberate life…the life you choose!