A new client recently asked me why she wanted to eat all the time, even when she wasn’t hungry.
“It’s a coping mechanism,” I answered. “It’s a way to not feel your emotions. You eat and feel comforted or satisfied rather than sad, bored, or lonely.”
My client argued that she wasn’t feeling sad, bored, or lonely when she overate.
“What are you feeling?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
And that’s the problem. My client, like many of us, was unaware of the thoughts she was thinking and the feelings she was feeling.
“My guess is,” I told my client, “you have an uncomfortable feeling as a result of a negative thought and you look for a way to avoid feeling that feeling.”
“So how do I figure out what I’m thinking and feeling?”
There are two things I usually tell my clients to help them do this.
- Just stay with the feeling. Don’t eat (or drink, or work, etc.) just stay still and feel the feeling. Resistance to the feeling can make the feeling worse, but just sitting with it, knowing you don’t have to do anything about it, allows the feeling to come and go, as a wave on the beach does.
- Write down your thoughts. My friend, Brooke Castillo, calls this a “Daily Download.” You write down all the thoughts you are having, stream-of-consciousness style. Once you have done that, you can go back and look at each thought and ask yourself how each thought makes you feel. Some thoughts that look like they would cause positive feelings actually cause painful feelings. You won’t know until you check in with yourself. One person’s positive mantra is another person’s painful thought.
Both of these actions take a lot of effort. But, as with anything, practice makes progress, and the more you examine your thoughts the more aware you will be of your thoughts. Once you are aware of your thoughts, you can choose to believe them–or not.
The client I mentioned above tells me that she’s feeling better since she started trying to identify her thoughts and feel her feelings. She’s not overeating as much and she’s becoming more conscious of her thoughts.
So whatever you do to avoid your feelings (and we all do something), try not doing that thing and instead, feel the feeling. Once you can do that, try to identify the thought that caused the feeling. Do you believe that thought? Maybe a different, but still believable, thought would serve you better.