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What do you do when you are feeling an uncomfortable feeling?
Do you find yourself in the pantry scrounging for comfort in a bag of chips (potato or chocolate have been my go-tos!)?
What are you looking to find in that food?
Why are we humans uncomfortable with the feelings we deem *hard* or *scary*?
Coach Nancy dives into what is going on in these times and offers some steps for relief.
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Hey there. One of the common things that we hear around Nourish Your Lifestyle is “I’m afraid to feel my feelings, I don’t want to feel them,” and people find themselves in the pantry, or in the refrigerator, or with a fork in their mouth before they even know it. As soon as they begin to feel a feeling that they don’t want to have, the idea is rushing to the kitchen will do something about that, will solve for it.
Well, I’m here to tell you that that’s not true! If food is not the “problem,” then food is not the solution. Now, I want to be cautious when I say that; I’m not saying that feelings are a problem, but we tend to think that. And what I mean by that is resisting feeling.
I was at a table the other night with some friends and one of the gals was upset and she was talking about a story of loss and grief and she said “oh, I don’t want to cry,” and I just wanna very gently and very lovingly say: it is perfectly okay to feel feelings. As a matter of fact, that’s a very human thing to do is to feel our feelings. And this is something that we work on in the Eat to Live Family which is our group coaching program – our private membership – we do coaching in groups, and we do coaching via written coaching read in the group, so we do a lot of working with feelings, and thoughts, and what’s going on in people’s lives, and a lot of times – 99% of the time even – feelings get pushed away, they’re resisted.
And so that’s the biggest tip that I can give you about processing emotions rather than eating them, and that is: stay aware. Stay awake and aware enough to recognize when there’s something amiss. Like if you’re just not feeling good, you’re feeling off – just be aware of that. Pause, and notice what’s going on inside of your body; I call it the interior landscape – that’s where we have feelings, they’re in our bodies; energy in motion – you’ll have sensations, maybe some pressure, or some heaviness, or a lightness, or just tingly feeling – some sort of feeling inside of your body will key you into you’re having some feelings, some emotions that are going on.
When you notice that just pause, and rest in that experience; rest in the emotion. And that’s the opposite of resisting and saying “no, I’m not having that,” because you’re going to have it anyway, it’s there. And even if you eat the thing, you’re going to have a full belly and maybe some remorse and feel bad, or some sugar hangover the next day, or whatever it is, and you’re still going to have the emotion there; it’s still going to be there because you’ve not just allowed it to process on through. You’re doing everything you can to resist it, so it will persist.
Stay playful about the emotions, stay curious about “wonder what’s going on here?” When I say playful I’m like, if I’m feeling stressed or anxious it’s like, “Hello, stress. I see you. Yep, of course you’re here – I’ve got this going on, and yep,” and sit with it, and have a little dialogue with it if you want to. That’s the curiosity part; that’s the playful part.
And what if that feeling comes and goes? It ebbs and it flows – it does! The lifespan of an emotion, experts like Dr. Joan Rosenberg say, is 90 seconds. So 90 seconds, but your feeling is there and it can dissipate and go on out if you don’t tense up around it and resist it and make it up into something that it’s not.
So staying playful about it, noticing that “okay, the feeling is gonna come and it’s going to go,” and then and tell yourself – remind yourself: you’re not going to feel this way forever because it does come and go. You don’t need to do anything about an emotion – you certainly don’t need to eat because of it – you don’t need to do anything but sit with it and allow it to be there and realize that you’re a human being.
If you want some more help around this, if this all sounds weird to you, or you’re intrigued – either one – come join us in the Eat to Live family when we open up our membership next week. Click on the button and you’ll get notified just as soon as we’re taking new members in, and we would love to work with you in the Family with emotions. Until next time, I’m coach Nancy.
The above is a transcript from this week’s YouTube video. Click here if you’d like to see the video.
