50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food (3 page)

When your self-soothing skills are not well developed, this can be a major problem. Life is full of little hiccups and major hurdles. You have to find a healthy way to cope. If turning to food to alleviate stress sounds like you, don’t worry. Practicing by using the tools provided in this book will help you begin to turn this around.

The beginning is the most important part of the work.

—Plato

Okay, let’s get ready. The urge to stress eat can hit at any time—today, tomorrow, next week. You have to get yourself prepared before it happens. Even when you know what to do when you’re feeling blah, sometimes it’s hard to get the ball rolling. Getting up off the couch or closing a box of cookies can be tough, even when you are fully aware that it will help. If this sounds like your current challenge, you can think about approaching this task in three different ways: you can mindfully change, take very small steps, or take a leap of faith. You can even combine these ways in a pattern that suits you.

You can observe a lot, just by watching.

—Yogi Berra

A mindful approach is a good way for most people to start a new behavior because it doesn’t take a lot of effort. At first, you don’t even have to change your behavior. Because of this, many people can easily commit to starting by using a mindful approach. Before you begin, remember that looking for nonfood alternatives to soothe yourself is an ongoing process. There is no pressure or hurry. Go at your own pace.

The first step is mindful observation. During this phase, don’t try to avoid or cut down on your comfort eating. Your only task is to place all of your attention on your eating patterns and habits. For at least a week (or longer if you need extra time), just observe and keep track of what prompts you to seek food for comfort. Write down the signals that prompt you to eat. You can do this in a variety of ways, but the best way is to keep a journal while you’re reading this book.

What circumstances make you the most vulnerable? Are there specific feelings? Do you do it at the same time each day? Simply watch yourself. Begin to understand your patterns. Think deeply about what you learn about yourself. You may be amazed that just by watching yourself closely, you can cut down on your emotional eating. This isn’t really surprising. Think about how much harder you work when your boss is in the room with you. When no one is watching—even yourself—you may be less likely to utilize 100 percent of your efforts.

Once you have a better sense of why you seek food for comfort, it will be time to move on to the next phase: to live with more awareness. Pay close attention to your emotions and your body from moment to moment. As soon as you feel the urge to comfort yourself with food, gently acknowledge this feeling. Observe it without necessarily obeying it. Be sure to record the urge in your journal. Then read the mindfulness exercises in this book.

The mindful approach is helpful to many. Another way to get started is to ease into it with small steps.

We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once.

—Calvin Coolidge

Shaping is another way to approach behavior change. The method is to take baby steps toward the behavior you wish to adopt. For example, let’s say that when you feel the need to emotionally eat, it would be helpful to pick up your journal and write about what’s bothering you. You already know that using a healthy coping skill would be a better option than gobbling up snacks. But you just don’t feel motivated to do it. You know what you want to do, but for some reason you can’t seem to make it happen.

In such a situation, you may want to consider motivating yourself by shaping your behavior.
Shaping
is a behavior modification technique. It helps you adopt a new behavior by rewarding gradual steps that bring you closer to fully adopting the desired behavior. First, just focus on a behavior close to journaling. For example, pick up a scrap of paper. Jot down a few notes. You don’t need full sentences. A few words or phrases will do. Any thoughts are a great start. You can always paste the scrap of paper into your journal later. You could even jot a few words down on your calendar.

After you do this small bit of writing, you may want to give yourself a small, nonfood reward. Rewarding yourself can be very reinforcing.
Reinforcement
is an effective way to increase a desired behavior. You don’t always need a tangible reward, such as a new lipstick, a magazine, or a cup of coffee. For instance, you can give yourself permission to sleep in ten more minutes in the morning or to relax in a bubble bath. Sometimes effective reinforcement comes from feeling good about just starting to work on a goal.

Right now, the important point to understand is that you don’t have to do any of the self-soothing methods perfectly. Just do something close to the behavior you want to acquire to get the ball rolling. If taking baby steps is too slow for you, try the approach described next, taking a leap of faith.

Stop talking. Start walking.

—L. M. Heroux

A leap of faith is the jump-right-in approach; it means to fully engage in the desired behavior right off the bat. You don’t do it gradually. You do it all at once. The idea is that the more you expose yourself to the new skill you want to acquire, the more you become habituated to it; that is, the more you get used to it. It becomes less foreign, more comfortable, and easier to do when you need to practice it.

In the case of self-soothing, jumping headfirst into a new soothing behavior may be the best option for many people. We often wait too long for something to feel right, when actually it will feel comfortable only after we’ve done it for a while. So at first it may feel unnatural or uncomfortable using the new ways to soothe yourself described in this book. In fact, it may feel just plain weird.

Let’s return to the journaling example mentioned above. But in this case, instead of slowly easing yourself into writing, you get out your journal immediately. Then you commit to writing for ten minutes—even if you don’t feel like it. Most of the time, after you get started, you’re glad you did. Exercising is often described this way. Many people say that they never feel like going to the gym. Nevertheless, after an hour of working out, they feel great and are happy they went. With time, using your new ways of soothing yourself will become a routine habit, like exercising.

When you pass up the opportunity to soothe yourself with food, give yourself as much praise as possible. You may even want to tell a friend, a family member, or anyone who will ooh and aah over your newfound skills. You might consider rewarding yourself for doing the right thing. Remember, you are working on diminishing the emotionally rewarding aspect of eating.

To help turn the techniques into habits, make a chart with a list of the self-soothing tips you would like to try. Keep track of your successes. Write down praise for your efforts. If you are someone who needs something more tangible than words, paste a little sticker next to your new behavior each time you engage in it.

Jumping right in will help you to see that new ways of comforting yourself are not as bad as you might have thought they would be. And your list will aid you in turning them into new habits. Trying to think in these ways can help you to stop avoiding.

Which approach will work best for you? That depends. To answer that question, you must know yourself well. If you aren’t sure, this section will help you figure it out. And even if you do know what will work for you, it’s important to get organized, just as if you were packing for a trip. Investing a small amount of time in preparing to use the self-soothing techniques in this book will help the process go smoothly. There are two important steps:

1. Check in with yourself.
   If you are currently struggling with emotional eating, every morning when you get up, take a minute to check in with yourself and do a self-soothing forecast for the day. This is a bit like getting the weather report and using it to choose your clothing for the day. If it’s cold, you’ll bring a sweater. If it’s likely to be a stormy day, you need to bring the right rain gear to deal with the difficulties you will meet. If the forecast for self-soothing looks rough, toss your journal into your bag. Bring along the phone number of someone you may want to call later. Take this book to read as a quick pick-me-up or to strengthen your motivation.
   
2. Take an inventory.
   Before you get started, take an inventory of your current self-soothing skills. It’s likely that you’ve developed some methods naturally that succeed in calming you down. For example, instead of eating, you might take a nap or spend some time alone doing a self-soothing activity.
   

Take a moment now to list your strengths and most successful soothing activities. Sometimes we get too focused on the skills that we lack and forget about those we have. If you aren’t sure of what your self-soothing skills are, remember the last time you had a bad day. What did you do to make yourself feel better? Write down all the non-food-related ways you use to cope with a bad mood. As you read this book, keep in mind how you can capitalize on or enhance your natural skills. Perhaps you will weave the new skills you’ll learn in this book into some of the techniques you’re already using.

is it emotional or physical hunger?

How to Tell the Difference

If you aren’t sure whether you want to eat because you’re truly hungry or because your emotions need calming and soothing, do a quick self-check before starting to eat. Ask yourself if any of the following statements describe your hunger. Then add up how many times you agree with these statements. Observe whether you agree with more statements under emotional hunger or belly hunger.

Emotional Hunger

Emotional hunger is characterized by some or all of the following behaviors:

• Your desire to eat comes on quickly and intensely like an on/off switch. Your degree of hunger can go from zero to ten in a matter of moments.
  
• You are very open to suggestion (for example, a coworker says she’s going out for a donut, and suddenly a donut sounds very good to you).
  
• Your hunger increases with certain feelings, particularly stress.
  
• You can’t think through your options. Your feeling of hunger is so intense that you don’t care what your options are—until after you have eaten something.
  
• Your hunger is such that it urges you to engage in mindless eating—that is, not really tasting your food or eating it in an automatic, mechanical way (for example, mindlessly popping a packet of M&M’s into your mouth one by one).
  
• You crave a particular kind of food, like chocolate or fast-food; something that would be merely filling just won’t do.
  
• A sense of satisfaction is hard to reach, and it seems unrelated to how full or how empty your stomach is.
  
• You often have the fleeting thought before you begin eating that you may feel guilty after you’ve eaten. Also, you often experience guilt after you finish eating.
  

Belly Hunger

True physical hunger is related to blood sugar levels. Therefore, your physical need for food is based on what and when you ate last.

• You notice that your need for food grows gradually in accordance with the time and the number of meals you ate. For example, between breakfast and lunch your hunger increases at a slowly rising rate.
  
• You are looking for something filling, and you’re open to many different options to fill that hunger, rather than craving a specific taste.
  
• You experience distinct physiological hunger cues, like a rumbling stomach. In the extreme, you may feel grouchy or even get a headache.
  
• You tend to quit eating when you are full.
  
• Your awareness of your body’s changing sensations as you move from hunger to satiety while you are eating, creates a sense of satisfaction.
  
• You know that feeding your physical hunger is essential as the fuel that nourishes you and keeps you going.
  
• You can wait a while to eat, instead of needing to eat compulsively at the very moment you feel the urge or desire to eat.
  
• Your hunger is not in any way associated with guilt. You know that you need to eat and you feel okay about eating.
  

If you agreed with more statements under emotional hunger than under belly hunger, then you would benefit more from a self-soothing technique than from reaching for a snack.

Mindful meditation techniques are great for helping you get through strong urges to emotionally eat. Note that these skills don’t completely erase the craving or emotional discomfort. Unfortunately, such erasure is impossible. If you were able to banish all food cravings from your life, you would have already done so. However, mindfulness skills can help you ride the urge out until the desire to emotionally eat fades or goes away.

As discussed in the introduction,
being mindful
is a way of thinking. Basically, it is being very aware of the present moment in an open and nonjudgmental way. Many people are drawn to food for unconscious reasons. When they slow down and really pay attention to whatever triggers their craving for food, especially when they aren’t hungry, they get a better handle on how to deal with their cravings.

Your task in this chapter is to use the power of your mind to become very aware of your urges to eat—in new ways. Stop mentally pushing your cravings away and beating yourself up for using food as a tranquilizer. Instead, embrace your yearning for food. Get to know it. Investigate it in a curious but uncritical way. This may sound counterintuitive. But when you do this, you will understand why you need comfort. Only then can you choose the precisely right calming activity that will soothe you just as well, if not better, than food.

Sometimes I am so busy rushing from one thing to another that I am not even aware of what I am doing or feeling. I unconsciously pop chocolate kisses or M&M’s into my mouth. Later, after it’s too late, I realize I was nibbling on food because I was worried and upset. When I’m mindful, I enjoy life more because I am really present as things are happening, not just analyzing things later. Being more aware has also taught me how to recognize when I am mindlessly eating simply to comfort myself.

—Kelly

Kelly mindlessly munches on a bowl of potato chips. It’s her Sunday night ritual. Thinking about Monday morning and the rest of her upcoming week leads to half an hour of stress eating. Time flies by as she nibbles and slips into a trancelike state. Suddenly she jolts out of it and realizes that she has polished off the entire bowl. But she didn’t really taste one bite. Eating automatically in a robotic way is a familiar act for her and it creates a familiar feeling. Sometimes Kelly gets so caught up worrying while she’s driving that she heads to work instead of to the grocery store as she had intended. The same kind of zoning out happens when she thinks about her kids while she reads a novel. She can’t remember anything she just read.

For emotional eaters like Kelly, routine activities, such as eating, provide a prime opportunity to slip into a different state of consciousness. Focusing only on your thoughts and tuning out other sensations happening in your body can make you very vulnerable to stress eating. You are likely to lose track of why you are eating or how much you plan to eat. Emotional eating may have become such a habit in your daily life that you might find yourself slipping into it without even realizing that you are doing it.

The antidote to doing things on autopilot whether it is reading, driving, or stress eating is to do all of your activities with full awareness. Be mindful of your body and its sensations at all times, instead of allowing your mind take over. If you are driving, notice how the steering wheel feels in your hands. If you are reading, listen to the sound of the page as it turns. To avoid stress eating, be in the moment. If you feel at risk of engaging in stress eating, play close attention to what your body is doing. For example, direct your attention to the placement of your hands. How do they feel? Are they cold? Where are they resting? Noticing your sensations you will help you to stay engaged with what your body is feeling and doing rather than allowing your hand to grab food automatically for comfort.

Practice bringing mindfulness to the routine activities you do every day, such as brushing your teeth, washing the dishes, or riding a bike. It’s likely you do these things so often that they are done automatically. Instead of doing these activities in an automatic way, bring your full awareness to them. Notice the bubbles and scent of the soap as you wash dishes. Focus on your hands’ circular motions. Be mentally present and focused on every action and sensation.

How can you step away from thoughts that keep urging you to eat? The mindful answer is to direct your focus away from your thoughts and onto your body. Place your attention on whatever your body is doing and feeling—like walking or stretching, or how the warm dishwater feels on your hands. The following exercise will tell you more specifically how to do this.

~self-soothing technique~

Stop and Mindfully Smell the Roses

It’s likely that an ordinary walk would be a helpful activity to substitute for stress eating. But you might want to try taking a mindful walk. Not only will this get your mind on something other than food, it will also help you to calm down and center yourself.

How does a mindful walk differ from an ordinary walk? Well, as you stroll, notice the scenery. Look around. Don’t power walk. Bring your attention to the feeling of your feet hitting the ground. Close your eyes for a moment. Turn your attention to what you hear. Then open your eyes and look closely at everything around you. Use all of your senses. Observe what you see as if you were describing the scene to someone who was blindfolded. Tune in to your body and what it does during this walk. Can you feel your heartbeat? How is your breathing? When you quiet the chatter of your mind and focus on your sensations, you will become a little calmer. The next time you have the urge to emotionally eat, don’t just go for a stroll—go for a mindful walk.

~self-soothing technique~

Count on Your Senses 5-4-3-2-1

When you have trouble clearing your mind of thoughts of food, try focusing on your senses.

1. State one scent you can smell.
   
2. Name two sounds you can hear.
   
3. Describe three sensations your body is feeling, such as temperature, the texture of your sweater, your feet against the ground.
   
4. Identify four colors that you see.
   
5. To yourself, begin by naming five things you see in front of you.
   

When you finish doing this, it’s likely that you will be thinking about nothing, not even food—unless there’s food directly in front of you. If you are still thinking about food, repeat each step until you notice that your thoughts are less clouded by food cravings.

Food. Food. Food. I think about food a lot. When I start thinking about all of the desserts that sound good to eat, suddenly I can’t get sweets and chocolate off my mind. Thoughts like these keep going around in my brain like a merry-go-round. Meditation is the only thing that helps me make mental peace with food.

—John

You’ve probably tried several tricks to get the cheesecake in the back of the refrigerator out of your mind: ignored it, tried to pretend it wasn’t there, pleaded with yourself, or tried to talk yourself out of wanting it. But emptying your mind of thoughts filled with food is no easy task.

The good news is that meditation is a helpful technique for clearing your mind, even when it is stuck on food. Meditating helps you look deeply into the origin of your food cravings. It makes your mind seem like a still lake. When your mind is placid and serene, you can see to the bottom. When it is active with painful and turbulent emotions, it’s hard to see what’s below the surface or what might be causing the turbulence.

Meditation may seem hokey or just the latest, trendy new age fad. But it isn’t. It is thousands of years old, and is simply a way to calm yourself down by helping you to regulate your body’s natural
fight-or-flight response
. This physiological response occurs when you are stressed. Your body gets ready to fight or flee, which increases your heart rate and adrenaline flow, slows your digestive processes, constricts your blood vessels, and quickens your breathing. Meditation tones down this response by inducing its opposite: the relaxation response. The
relaxation response
reverses the fight-or-flight response by slowing down your heart rate and breathing, lowering your blood pressure, and relaxing your muscles.

One of the nicest things about meditation is that it’s free and easy to do, and you can do it anywhere. Meditation provides many psychological and physical benefits (Baer 2003; Brown, Ryan, and Creswell 2007; Davidson et al. 2003; Shapiro et al. 2008).

Psychological Benefits of Meditation

• Reduces stress and anxiety
  
• Increases self-esteem
  
• Decreases irritability and moodiness
  
• Increases calmness
  
• Increases ability to concentrate and focus
  

Physical Benefits of Meditation

• Creates a relaxation response in the body, slowing the heart and respiratory rates
  
• Increases serotonin levels, which is helpful because low levels of serotonin are linked with depression, anxiety, obesity and headaches
  
• Decreases production of stress hormones
  
• Improves sleep
  
• Increases energy levels
  
• Increases immunity to illness
  

As you can see, these psychological and physical benefits are the perfect medicine for the emotional eater.

~self-soothing technique~

Meditation Styles

There are many different meditation styles (or techniques). When you can’t stop obsessing about food or need relief, try one of the following techniques. See which one fits your personality and is the most helpful for you.

Concentration Meditation

One way to meditate is to concentrate all of your attention on a single point. This point can be an image or an object. Begin by sitting quietly and focusing all of your attention on this object. Really look at it. Describe it to yourself. It is often helpful to focus on a detail, such as part of an image or the tip of a candle flame. The closer you look at it, the more likely it is that you will see something you didn’t notice at first.

Brooke, for example, is a frequent emotional eater. She counters her emotional eating by focusing on a photograph of Paris in her living room, rather than staying in the kitchen. When she starts to feel the need to stress eat, she firmly plants herself within inches of this picture and focuses all of her attention on the top point of the Eiffel Tower. This is a little like zooming in with a camera. She narrows her consciousness to include only this image rather than the images of food that had been swirling around in her mind. If thoughts of food are generated, she gently acknowledges the thought to herself, and then says good-bye to it. Then she redirects her focus to the meditation point. She continues doing this for however long it takes to calm herself.

Mantra Meditation

In mantra meditation, you focus on a sound or sounds.
Mantras
are intended to channel your thoughts away from any negative self-talk going on in your mind. The statements that keep you stuck, such as “I can’t stand feeling this way!” are
negative self-talk
. A mantra can be a sound, a word, a phrase, or even a sentence. But how does focusing on a mantra help the emotional eater?

It helps by actively controlling the focus of your attention to be on calming words. This focus is a complete contrast to following the random thoughts that pop into your head, which often encourage you to eat; thoughts like “I must have a candy bar right now!”

To begin, close your eyes and repeat a sound or phrase. Say it out loud. In the Hindi language, “om” is described as the vibration of all living things. Notice how it feels to shape your lips as you push out the sound. Notice how your body and lips vibrate as you make the sound. If you don’t like this or it doesn’t work for you, try more familiar sounds or words. You can use words or phrases like “peace,” “I’m okay,” “Allow it to be,” “love,” and “I’m open to what is.”

When you repeat the mantra several times in a row, you will find that your mind focuses and you can concentrate on creating the sound. If you are thinking about your bank balance or any other worries, it is hard to continue repeating or chanting the mantra. But it is worth the effort. Essentially, mantras help to quiet the inner dialogue that is likely adding to your stress. When the dialogue has been quieted, you can think more rationally about food, and then explore the best way to comfort and soothe yourself.

Mindfulness Meditation

This type of meditation involves observing and paying attention to your thoughts and emotions. You turn your attention toward, not away from, your thoughts, as you do with concentration meditation. From closely examining how you think and why you’re thinking about food, you get a better understanding of the emotions you’re trying to soothe. If you discover what’s really bothering you, you can determine a more effective way to calm yourself.

Give yourself one minute to do this exercise. If you need more, that’s okay. But begin by committing to just one minute. Stop what you are doing. Sit quietly. Direct all of your attention to your thoughts. Then just observe your thoughts swimming around in your mind. Breathe deeply. Close your eyes if it helps you to focus.

Now think of a time when you recently overate. Or you can try this when you are experiencing an emotional food craving. You will be just observing, in a nonjudgmental way, the thoughts and feelings you have about this desire.

To help with this meditation, you can imagine that you are a bystander at a parade watching from a distance. Each thought you have is on its own parade float. Perhaps you have thoughts like “I need chocolate! Why shouldn’t I eat it? I’m such a failure at eating healthy anyway.” Imagine that these thoughts are written on one float. Watch the float as it approaches you, passes by, and disappears in the distance. Allow your thoughts and feelings be whatever they are. Too often, we try to stop or change our thoughts by telling ourselves, “Stop thinking that!”

Instead, ask yourself with a gentle and open curiosity, “I’m wondering why I think I need chocolate to feel better? What happened today that would make that thought enter my mind?” Now imagine placing the next thought that follows that one onto the next float. Observe what kind of thoughts continue to parade through your mind. Are they guilty? Irrational? Angry? Observing individual thoughts slows down your automatic thought processes. It also helps you to observe yourself from a distance so that you get less caught up in the content of your thoughts.