When Food Isn’t the Fix: 4 Emotion Regulation Skills (Part 1)
===

Georgie: [00:00:00] This is the breaking up with binge eating podcast, where every listen moves you one step closer to complete food freedom hosted by me, Georgie fear and my team at confident eaters.

My pattern is using food to solve all the things, Megan wrote. I notice when I'm cold slash tired slash behind schedule or intimidated or unsure or angry, really whatever, my brain says, should we eat? Even if I'm not hungry at all. Like a toddler trying to fix a broken computer by spooning yogurt on it. This is a perfectly worded example of how emotional eating makes us act. Just like Megan, we become simplified. We find ourselves using the same action. That's [00:01:00] eating to respond to any kind of feeling rather than stopping to discern what's actually happening and choosing a response from the many available options.

Today, Christina and I are going to cover some of the more advanced skills that we teach our clients to help them leave behind emotional eating and binge eating.

Christina: If you have struggled with emotional or binge eating yourself, which wouldn't be surprising as it is pretty common, you probably know that just trying to stop is rarely successful. Well, why is that? If you have spent decades getting something to eat, when you feel upset or stressed, you may not have gotten a lot of practice doing other things in response to big feelings. So if you try to simply remove the food from the story, you feel like you need something, and food is the only option you can think of.

Georgie: What we'll cover today are four other strategies you can use to regulate your emotions. All of which are great alternatives to eating. If [00:02:00] hunger is not the problem, then food is not the solution. For each example, we'll describe a situation that is likely to trigger some pretty uncomfortable feelings.

Then we'll talk about the most likely feelings to result from that circumstance, and finally, what it would look like to employ a specific emotion regulation strategy to that situation. We'll start with the easiest and move to more advanced strategies. I guarantee you can do at least the first couple today, and the later ones will come along with some practice.

Christina: Okay, situation one. You receive a call from your doctor that your annual checkup revealed some abnormal results, and you need to go in for follow up testing. They haven't given you much information about what they suspect, or what the worst case scenario is, or how likely it is to be serious. But for now, you just have to wait a week for the follow up test. So everyone listening, when you imagine yourself in this position, what feelings do you have?

Georgie: Oof. [00:03:00] When I imagine this happening to me, I feel uncertainty and fear. My mind is going to play out all of my worries and worst case scenarios. I also know that I would be really impatient. Waiting in those circumstances can feel like torture. I know I've had a hard time waiting for things like academic test results or your SAT score or your, you know, grad school test scores, but waiting for medical stuff adds in a whole nother layer of Like, fear for your own safety and well being.

Christina: Totally. So a good technique that we would recommend for this set of emotions that Georgie just mentioned would be distraction. We call this skill emotion regulation 101 because it's really a great first step. It's not that complicated. And it even works if you can't figure out or name the feeling that you are experiencing. If it hurts or is causing you to suffer, distraction will help. [00:04:00] Distractions can be anything that draws your attention away from the problem or the emotions you're having. As a result. Losing yourself in a book, a movie, housework errands, or a game can help you survive while you have to wait. Focusing on the worst case scenarios that could happen Or Googling the medical issues you might or might not have, which I am guilty of doing myself, it can keep you feeling that fear and worry at 100 percent intensity. And feel like time is passing even more slowly.

Georgie: Anytime you have to wait, distraction is a very effective strategy to use. It's also helpful for combating cravings or urges. Really, anytime you want to resist an impulse to do something. Aside from food applications, it can also help weaken an urge to purchase something, or write or say something out of anger, or lash out.

In our Breaking Up with Binge Eating Group program, during the second week, we have [00:05:00] everybody make a list of activities that they can do for distraction when the urge to binge pops into their mind. You want something that will take your attention that you won't do automatically. So washing the dishes isn't the best distraction, because most of us can do it while our mind is still focusing on the upsetting thing.

But a really engaging television show or novel, something that really pulls your attention into it, can be just the thing. So if you want to give it a try, Make this list for yourself. Let's go to situation number two. It's been a long work day. You have had meeting after meeting, and they all feel like a waste of your time.

Your spouse is away, so it's all on you to take care of the kids, the dog, the groceries, and the house. Your email inbox is filling up with messages and they all sound urgent and unpleasant. What are the feelings most likely to come up in this situation?

Christina: I first think about overwhelm, maybe some anger or resentment that it feels like [00:06:00] more of the housework is falling on me. This actually sounds like a really common thing that happens to my clients. A lot of them are doing for other people and the to do list never ends. And for some reason or another, they find themselves feeling trapped with more tasks to do than is humanly possible to complete.

And they feel like they don't have the support that they need and they feel overwhelmed, resentful. Like those are things I hear from people a lot.

Georgie: My clients too. Overwhelm seems to hit all of us in turn. There's two techniques that I like to use for this example. Technique number one is adjusting expectations. In order to stay regulated, or, you know, not lose your cool, you may need to shift your expectations of yourself, of other people, or of the world in general.

Adjusting expectations of yourself might call for deciding dinner is going to be something simple and easy. It's not going to be a home cooked masterpiece. You might also [00:07:00] decide, even though you usually reply to all of your emails the same business day, today's messages are just going to get their replies tomorrow.

Adjusting expectations of other people or the world can help if you're angry at your boss, for example, for running late on a meeting, or if you're feeling resentful of your spouse for being on a business trip. After all, if you expect that every single meeting is going to wrap up on time, You'll experience more frustration than if you expect that a certain percentage of them will always go longer than they're scheduled.

It might also be unfair, both to you and your spouse, if you expect that they are never, ever going to leave you alone to handle the kids on your own. Yes, those days are difficult, but if you frame the situation as WTF, this is unfair and unacceptable, You're going to feel a lot worse than if you tell yourself, most of the time I really need a co parent here to help equally, but sometimes the duties are going to lean more heavily on one of us or the other. [00:08:00] Technique number two that I think would be apt for this situation is taking effective action. The big idea behind taking effective action is that it can replace using food to cope. Emotional eating is actually a form of emotion focused coping.

That is, it's something a person does to ease their experience of the emotions that are coming up. But another type of coping is called problem focused coping. And that's when a person copes by directly addressing the stressor. In the example I mentioned of being overwhelmed with work and household chores, effective actions might be to set up a schedule of what gets cleaned when.

Maybe assigning the kids some chores, hiring some help, ordering your groceries to be delivered instead of picking them up, and RSVP ing no to any work events which are optional.

Christina: Let's do situation number three. The woman you've been on three dates with suddenly stops returning your texts. You figure she's busy at first, but [00:09:00] after a week you're getting the picture: she's ghosted you. you. spend hours mentally replaying your last date, searching for what you said or did wrong. I'm never going to find a long term partner, you say to your reflection in the mirror. No one wants me. I must have said something dumb. I always do that.

Georgie: Ouch! I think the emotions involved in this sort of being ghosted example are disappointment, surprise, annoyance, uncertainty, self doubt. I mean, that is a really tough situation to get through. And being hard on yourself makes it even tougher.

Christina: Agreed. There are a lot of sabotaging thoughts happening here as well. When I notice my clients say things like, I'll never be able to do something or I always mess up, my instinct is to write down those thoughts so we can refute them. When we see the words always or never in a thought, it's often an exaggeration and not exactly [00:10:00] true. In this case, I always say something dumb is probably not the truth. So we want to respond with a more helpful, less upsetting or kinder thought in place of the sabotaging one. A response to, I always say something dumb could be, we all say something dumb on occasion, but this woman went on 3 dates with me, that all seemed to go pretty well. Most of the things I said must have been okay

Georgie: Sabotaging thoughts aren't only exaggerations, though. Sometimes they can also be identified, because they contain fortune telling or mind reading. I'm going to die alone, or I'll never know what it's like to be married, are examples of fortune telling. Mind reading is when we think we know, or we're just guessing, what's happening in other people's heads.

She didn't like my haircut, or she probably thought I didn't make enough money, are examples of mind reading. This situation, the one where someone suddenly ghosts you, is a total trap for [00:11:00] mind reading. Because it's tempting to guess why they went silent. But as long as you keep that guessing game up, you probably aren't feeling any better.

It's best to just accept that you don't know why they don't want to continue dating, because they didn't tell you. But there's no reason to misinterpret one person's lousy communication skills into an omen that you are destined to be forever single. A response to these sabotaging thoughts, the type that our mind reading or fortune telling, could be, I don't know that, I can't read minds.

Or, I don't know that, I can't see into the future. When you replace sabotaging thoughts with more reasoned, kind, helpful ones, it can decrease the intensity of negative emotion. In fact, once you get the hang of it, it's a reliable and fast way to feel better.

Christina: to recap what we demonstrated today. We went through three different scenarios that could trigger emotional discomfort. With each [00:12:00] scenario. We pause to identify the feelings that were probably occurring before jumping into a way to cope. This is an important step, so don't skip it. We also described four strategies that work to help regulate emotions. You can try each of the four with different emotional upheavals in your own life. The four strategies were distraction, adjusting expectations, taking effective action, and refuting sabotaging thoughts. One of the reasons it's helpful to identify emotions first is that your choice of emotion regulation strategy can change depending on what emotion you're trying to regulate. Self doubt or fear, for example, are often emotions on which The sabotaging thoughts strategy works very well if anger is coming up, taking an effective action is generally a helpful move, but you can choose any of the four you like and it's okay if you find you prefer some more than others.

Georgie: We have lots [00:13:00] of other emotion regulation skills that we teach our clients, and we'd love to teach you too. So you'll want to make sure to come back for part two on this very topic. Thanks for joining us. And now it's your turn to go out and start practicing this stuff.

See you in the next episode.