50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food (11 page)

• I want to travel to…
  
• I want to accomplish…
  
• The hobbies I want to try…
  
• The thing I’ve never done that I’d like to try…
  
• What I would do only once would be…
  
• I wish my family could…
  

Next, pick something from your list and start planning how to make it happen, even if you aren’t ready to do it immediately. For example, if you want to take piano lessons, look through the phone book for piano teachers. If you want to go scuba diving in Greece, look on the Internet for organized trips. Investigate where they go and how much they cost. This will not only distract you from thoughts about food, it will motivate you to start thinking about the steps you’ll need to take to make your goals happen.

If I didn’t have to work, I’d spend my day cooking, trying new recipes, and making batches of buttercream icing. I love to create new gourmet meals and to bake homemade bread. This passion doesn’t help my waistline. If I was ever going to get a handle on my eating, I had to find something that tapped into my creative juices just as much as cooking does.

—Joan

Joan was one of my best-dressed clients. Every week she’d come to therapy wearing an amazing outfit. I’d overhear the receptionist compliment Joan’s “look.” The secret to Joan’s style wasn’t expensive clothing. It was her homemade jewelry. Her necklace and earrings complimented the color of her shirt to perfection.

Joan didn’t wear her jewelry for the compliments. She was the first to admit that making the pieces was her favorite form of personal therapy. Creating a work of art that she could wear each week made her feel good about her body. She focused less on her weight and more on her style. The process of stringing little beads on a nylon strand kept her hands too busy to pick at food. Also, planning the patterns took a lot of mental energy that pushed food to the back of her mind.

Creating things stimulates your brain in new ways. Designing patterns or seeing a work of art come together is both invigorating and challenging. Working at a craft can help you feel more excited and motivated in ways that simply relaxing may not. You may even observe that when you share your creations with others, you feel like a more well-rounded and interesting person.

Ironically, many emotional eaters are fantastic bakers. Because they love food, they may spend a lot of time baking and cooking. Although the action of cooking can be very soothing, it’s also a recipe for a setup unless you focus on creating only healthy recipes! Very few cooks can prepare food without eating it. So instead of cooking to soothe yourself, try experimenting with some crafts.

~self-soothing technique~

Creative Soothing

• Create a craft nook in your home. Here are some of the crafts you can try out: jewelry making, painting, pottery, scrapbooking, candle and soap making, card making, sewing, and making homemade ornaments for holidays. You can use the time you would have spent on fixing and eating snacks for your creative time.
  
• Set up a routine time to do your creative pursuits. For example, you could designate every Saturday morning to mold clay or make soap. These creative endeavors can help you blow off steam and redirect your focus to something positive. You may start looking forward to Saturday mornings. Just thinking about the weekend approaching will be calming.
  
• Start a large, ongoing project. Have it be something that you can do a little at a time in your spare moments. For example, put together a family photo album. When you get the urge to snack mindlessly, try gathering and organizing photos instead.
  

I was so bored I didn’t know what to do with myself. The white chocolate macadamia cookies in the kitchen were beginning to call my name, loudly. If I didn’t do something soon, I’d inhale them all, like a vacuum cleaner, in a matter of seconds. So I sat down in front of my computer and started looking up all the random things that crossed my mind. I don’t have time to do this kind of investigation at work. This was the perfect moment to get lost in cyberspace.

—Betsy

If you struggle with boredom, your computer offers you an endless possibility of distractions, from e-mail and instant messaging to iTunes and the Internet. Many businesses have chosen to ban Internet searches precisely because they lose a significant amount of productivity every day due to employees surfing the Web.

If you don’t know where to start, try
www.google.com
and
www.yahoo.com
, which are two popular search engines. “Googling” has become known to many as a verb, as in one googles this or that topic. Searching the Internet will keep your mind and hands busy.

~self-soothing technique~

Type Away the Urge to Eat

• You could look up information about a person—someone you just met, the person you are dating, your neighbor, a high school classmate, your old college roommate, or your ex-boyfriend.
  
• Look up yourself. One of my clients calls this “egosurfing.” See whether there is any interesting information about you on the Web, or find someone who shares your name.
  
• Look up new equipment for your favorite hobby.
  
• Find travel sites.
  
• Look up the meaning of a word that you don’t know.
  
• Try out
  www.youtube.com
  . Look for viral videos.
  Viral videos
  are the video clips that are so popular, they are sent around the world quickly—hence the name. Typically, they’re pretty entertaining.
  

Whenever I get into a bad mood, I skip right past the candy I have tucked away and head straight for my old Beatles’ albums. In a matter of moments, I’m singing along, totally wrapped up in the music. Even if I was fighting some major cravings, they are gone as soon as I’ve played a song or two. There are certain songs I play when I’m down, like “Yesterday” and songs to pick me up, like “Love Me Do.” A good song can make me feel better than a massage.

—Judy

Certain songs can turn sadness to laughter, frustration to calmness, and anger to joy in only a matter of minutes. Lyrics contribute to the medicinal power of music. Think of a time when you heard a song that summed up perfectly how you were feeling. It’s nice to know that someone has felt the same way that you have and has understood exactly how you feel. Music can also interrupt negative thoughts. Happy songs, for example, steer your mind in a more positive direction.

Music doesn’t just calm your mind, it also impacts your body. Music has many therapeutic benefits because it affects the brain in so many complex ways. Certain types of music have been shown to enhance memory, calm mood, manage stress, alleviate pain, and improve communication. If you find a song soothing, you will know it by your breathing, which will slow down. Music therapists have also found that the movements of the heart muscles tend to synchronize to the beat of music. The rhythms of classical music are often similar to the average resting heartbeat of approximately 70 beats per minute. So listening to soothing music can help slow down a heart beating too rapidly, which may occur when you are anxious. Faster compositions stimulate your heart rate and sometimes they can actually speed up your entire nervous system.

~self-soothing technique~

Kick Back to a Soothing Melody

• Play some recorded music for at least twenty minutes. Or keep it on in the background to soothe you throughout the day. Don’t know what kind of music to choose? Listening to your favorite music (or classical music) has been shown to reduce negative emotional states and physiological arousal much better than if you have no music playing or you are listening to heavy metal (Labbé et al. 2007). If you’re a heavy metal fan, you may want to avoid it when feeling stressed. Aside from that, choose your favorite type of music to listen to when you are tempted to stress eat. It will provide you with a good distraction.
  
• If you are a musician, that’s great too. If you are tempted to eat when you’re not really hungry, play your instrument instead of reaching for food.
  
• Make a CD or an iPod playlist. Typically, premade CDs alternately mix fast and slow tempos. You may find it more helpful to keep the tempo the same, so that you don’t feel calm during one song and ready to run a race when the next one comes on.
  
• If you want to be more mindful of how you feel, try listening to instrumental music without lyrics. Such music can help you be calmer and more contemplative. Song lyrics sometimes can get in the way of hearing your own thoughts.
  
• Energizing music is great for boredom eaters. Dance and get your body moving.
  

Digging my hands into the dirt is so therapeutic. I work in an office, so I never get a chance to get dirty or to sit in the sunlight. Pulling out weeds feels so cathartic and rewarding. When I want to gobble up food, I go into the garden and start digging. It’s harder to mindlessly chomp away at French fries when I’m reminded of how long it takes to hoe one row of potatoes.

—Diane

If you know someone with a green thumb, probably you’ve already heard about the therapeutic nature of gardening. Gardening has a number of soothing benefits that just might be what you are looking for.

Gardens bring forth your nurturing qualities. Flowers and vegetables require frequent care and tending. Maintaining a garden directs a person’s awareness toward the notion of adequate care. Too much or not enough water can be harmful, just like eating too much or too little food. You must get to know your garden well to water it exactly the right amount. You also have to pay attention to the environment. After too much rain, you respond by reducing the amount of watering you do. Think about how similar this is to learning your own needs and to feeding your hunger appropriately. You too must continually adjust how much you eat.

If you keep plants inside your home or at your office, you are increasing the amount of oxygen in the air around you. The plants take in carbon dioxide and use it (with sunlight) to sustain life. Then they expel oxygen back into the atmosphere.

~self-soothing technique~

Mending and Tending Your Mood

• Gardening is an ongoing process. If it isn’t the right time of year now, do some homework and plan your garden. Investigate seeds. Check out the varieties of vegetables in the grocery store and determine what you want to grow.
  
• Once you’ve got a garden, when you get the urge to eat, head outdoors and weed the garden. This work can be very soothing, particularly when you are stressed or angry.
  
• If you don’t have room for a garden, try keeping a plant on your desk. When you feel the urge to eat, get up and water your plant first (if it needs it). Try taking care of its needs before your own. By the time you get back to your desk, observe whether your urge to eat has changed a little.
  
• Try growing an herb garden small enough to sit on your windowsill.
  
• Think about gardening in a symbolic way. Imagine pulling your negative thoughts out like weeds.
  

I love the taste of potato chips. I could munch away on them all day long. Mindless eating pushes me into this weird mental twilight zone. I don’t really taste the chips. Nor do I think about how many I ate. When I’m sufficiently relaxed, I wake up from being zoned out and freak out about how much I ate. I try to just lie down instead of eating, but I get bored and feel lazy when I’m not doing anything. Recently, I’ve found other calorie-free ways to unplug. I’ve become addicted to puzzles!

—Ariel

Ariel was about to take a test to become a certified dental assistant. If she didn’t pass it, she wouldn’t be hired by the local dentist who had promised her a job. She was feeling terribly worried. After hours of studying, she couldn’t concentrate any longer. She couldn’t stop thinking about what would happen if she didn’t pass. Many disastrous scenarios raced through her head. She was very tempted to reach for the box of crackers on the desk. She could make them disappear in a heartbeat if she let herself.

Instead, Ariel took a mini mental break. She flipped through a puzzle book she’d bought at the magazine stand down the street. Ariel had picked it up only because her sister was obsessed with puzzles. She’d wondered what the attraction was. She chose a puzzle for beginners and got started. In a few minutes, she was completely immersed in the puzzle. She completely forgot her anxiety. The upcoming test vanished from her mind. When she’d finished the puzzle, she felt an huge sense of accomplishment. This gave her the needed boost to start studying again with a fresh mind. Puzzles are like exercise for the brain. They help develop new connections and use parts of the brain that are not always operating. Wouldn’t it be nice to access more parts of your brain so that they can logically talk you out of stress eating?

~self-soothing technique~

Calming Mind Games

• Try puzzles like Sudoku and crosswords. You can print them from the Internet for free. Make sure to pick one at your level. If it is too easy, you will get bored quickly. Puzzles or games that are too difficult can cause great frustration, which doesn’t help. Try to choose those exactly at your skill level.
  
• Print a few puzzles and keep them handy in the kitchen or in your desk. Place them anywhere tempting foods are kept or at your favorite places for mindless eating.
  
• Try easy computer games like solitaire, which is a card game you can play alone. Or get a jigsaw puzzle. It can keep you busy for hours.
  
• If you don’t like games, try finding something else that might challenge your mind a little. Read an article from a magazine or listen to National Public Radio (
  www.npr.org
  ).
  

~self-soothing technique~

Magnet Notes

It’s likely that you have plenty of magnets on your refrigerator. We mostly use these helpful little gadgets in very functional ways—to hang little reminder notes and photos. Often, these magnets are the only things standing between you and opening the refrigerator. So why not use them to your full advantage? Buy a set of letter or word magnets. You’ll find large collections on wordmagnets.com and thinkgeek.com. When you are tempted to open the refrigerator, spend a few minutes making up a sentence or poem. You’ll be surprised at how addicting this action can be.