lynns wrote:I have problems being obsessed with or using food when any kind of stresses enter my life, knowing it's coming or not.
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We get caught up in this cycle of stress mounting in our life and garbage food comes to the rescue. We have to break that harmful cycle and release that grip it has on us.
LynnCS (as I will always think of you!), welcome back! I enjoy your comments, always.
It's funny, I am reading a book on frustration tolerance in modern America, and the main takeaway is how we are constantly setting or resetting our notion of what we can "handle". So when we say to ourselves, "I CAN'T TOLERATE the anxiety I'm feeling about my car" or "I CAN'T TOLERATE the temptation of being in a room with that trigger food" -- we reinforce the idea that this is true -- and then we act accordingly.
On the other hand, each time we do the opposite, we build up our ability to handle minor discomforts. We say, "I can tolerate the anxiety I'm feeling about my car, and really don't need food-related coping mechanisms to get through this." Or, "I can handle being in a room with a trigger food, and it's not going to kill me to endure the temptation for 15 more minutes."
Over time, I think we can train our minds to understand that even moderate or major discomforts will not kill us, and that we can tolerate them without doing anything that self-sabotages our health or our feelings of self-efficacy.
The author of the book I'm reading is a big fan of making every effort to down-regulate the body when the body is screaming "I CAN'T TOLERATE", because you're likely doing physical patterns that correspond with a situation of outward physical danger. Like, no matter how non-threatening the situation is to your actual safety, you probably have shallow breathing, increased heart rate, maybe even adrenaline in your system for a fight-or-flight response. So you kinda gotta lie on your back somewhere and let those symptoms settle out, because that CAN be unsettling.
Handling minor discomforts and slowly building the frustration tolerance is a good thing!