Why You Keep Getting Stuck In Repeating Eating Habits, Patterns & Behaviours

Whether you realise it or not, over your life time, you’ve developed a range of behaviours to soothe yourself, emotionally, mentally and physically. 

Sometimes we know we’re soothing ourselves, but most of the time, we aren’t even conscious that the things we are doing is for the purpose of releasing tension from our body and that our body silently sent a signal through to the brain and instructed it to do so. 

If we are aware that we are soothing ourselves, we just think we’re doing it for pleasure, and that’s true, but you’re also doing it because you’re body and brain are telling you you have to do it, and do it now. 

WHY DO YOU HAVE TO DO IT? 

• Whatever way it is that you soothe yourself, it’s hooked up to the reward centre in your brain.

• It relieves the tension that you feel in your body. And the need to relieve tension is a primal instinct. 

THE REWARD CENTRE OF YOUR BRAIN 

The body can’t cope with tension and it’ll send messages to your brain and together they’ll coerce you towards a behaviour that’s known to relieve tension by giving you pleasure. 

HOW DOES IT DO IT? 

You’ll get thoughts, images and feelings of something that has in the past, proven to give you a rush of good feeling dopamine. 

You don’t always need to be feeling tense either to get the message that it’s time to please the reward centre in your brain, it can desire a rush if it’s time for a fix. 

SETTLING INTO A LITTLE COMFORT 

Most of us are familiar with the term ‘comfort eating’. 

But really, whatever your thing is, you can put ‘comfort‘ in front of it;

• Comfort eating

• Comfort drinking

• Comfort smoking

• Comfort shopping

• Comfort cleaning

• Comfort arguing

• Comfort bitchiness

• Comfort drugs

• Comfort trouble making

• Comfort sleeping

• Comfort complaining

• Comfort TV watching

• Comfort procrastinating

• Comfort exercising

• Comfort yelling

• Comfort road raging

• Comfort working 

WHY DO YOU DO IT?

You have an emotion that feels unpleasant to you, bought on by external events or people or by internal thoughts. 

You have no way to resolve that unpleasant feeling; sadness, frustration, grief, anger etc.

Your thoughts go around between feeling the unpleasant feeling, wanting to resolve it, wanting it to stop, but you can’t find a way to resolve it and it won’t go away. 

Your body goes on feeling the unpleasant feeling, now compounded and joined by the feeling of not being able to make it stop and not being able to resolve it.

Each loop creates and builds on your original frustration and tension because you can’t escape the unpleasant feeling or the helpless feeling of not being able to stop it, and it becomes more in your face with each minute. 

To relieve the tension is essential to get you out of that endless loop.

SEND IN THE CAVALIERLY 

Long before your brain reaches panic mode, it goes into action.

It sends you pictures, images, sounds, sensations and emotions that will lead you to the thing it knows will relieve tension – something it knows has worked in the past.

And it’ll keep sending you them until you do what it wants you to do. And if you’re happy doing those things, it doesn’t take very long. 

Why does your thing soothe you? 

• You feel comforted because the reward centre in your brain just got a hit and released dopamine

• Doing your thing takes your mind off the other thing that was giving you the unpleasant feeling

• While you were busy doing your thing and enjoying your dopamine you also started breathing again. 

When you’re upset you either default to holding your breathe and shallow breathing as a consequence of whatever is upsetting you putting you into fight or flight mode or you put yourself into fight or flight mode by holding your breathe.  

WHEN COMFORTING YOURSELF PUTS YOU ON A PERPETUAL TREADMILL 

If the thing that comforts you has turned into something that’s now a burden to you then you end up with a little war inside of you. 

The brain wants to relieve tension and you want to abstain from the behaviour that no longer serves you because it’s now bad for your health, bad for your bank account, or bad for your relationships. 

If you engage in the behaviour, if you do that thing, you’ll feel momentary relief. But it’s not long, usually only moments, till you feel remorse for relenting and you’ve still got the original unpleasant feeling. 

The cycle begins again. 

The term ‘comfort’ leaves you thinking you’re taking care of yourself, self-loving and providing self-care in some way. 

The reality is the opposite though, isn’t it? 

Referring to it as comforting makes it harder to stand firm against it when the impulse strikes. 

And because it’s normally accompanied by thoughts of ‘I deserve/I need/I gotta have’ it makes it more challenging to disengage from the behaviour. 

LET’S PLAY ‘WHAT IF….’

What if you thought of it as what it actually is? 

What if you acknowledged that it’s only an impulse. An impulse to relieve tension. An impulse that’s only a brief bit of relief before it actually adds to the pressure and tension that you’re already feeling. 

What if you took a moment to close your eyes, soften your belly, breathe and ask yourself; 

Will the sadness, loneliness, grief, anger, thing that’s stressing me or causing me tension, the confusion, the frustration or whatever the unpleasant feeling is, will it go away? Will it morph into happiness? Will my comfort thing actually alter the reality of what ever is happening? 

What else can I do in this moment to soothe myself, to give myself relief from what I’m feeling?