Did I talk about this before? That's the downside of keeping a spot where half my ideas are out there and half (more than half), in draft.
It's getting more and more clear to me that my eating has been impelled by anxiety - that is anxiety at the level where it's a bit of a disorder. I don't know what that level is called - a level where a professional might help, and yet isn't necessarily required?
So anyway, I've been working on doing things in my life that help deal with sources of anxiety for me. For example, I'm getting a lot more order in my home. This helps! However, that sort of path isn't as new to me as the other tack I'm taking, which is to accept that some situations will occur that are liable to trigger anxious responses in me, regardless of how I try to control my life - so I need to try and zap the anxious responses in myself as the stress comes to me and have a way of handling that stress, so that it's not feeding the anxiety I've had.
I followed some on-line trails a little way back which led me to a CBT (Cognitive Based Therapy) site. I wasn't looking for something about anxiety because I wasn't paying much attention to the fact that I had a problem with anxiety. I just was aware that CBT is the therapy often suggested as relevant for eating disorders, and I saw a link to this site which helps people try to get some self help from a CBT perspective for whatever ails them. The site wasn't about weight loss. At the time I visited I barely took in what they were saying, but I paid enough attention to influence what I've done since.
I took a few things from the site.
1) If I'm suffering from anxiety I'm liable to irrational thoughts.
(Who me? I thought - and then the next time I was writing here, I wrote one down. It wasn't exactly a thought, more like the translation of my feeling into thought, and then I could see just how irrational it was.
It was this thought: If I stop worrying something bad will happen. I understand that there was some logic involved in what started that feeling, but I also get it that by itself, that idea just won't hold up. When I wrote this down a bunch of stuff fell into place. I had been told before, that this is what people think when they are suffering from anxiety, and that they need to just stop thinking that. This was some time ago, when I was also very anxious, without realizing that I was. OK. Last time that information turned out to be correct. This time it did too.
2) If I'm suffering anxiety I may be irritable and cranky with other people and push them away from me, despite the fact that I need their support.
(Who me?) I'm one of the good guys aren't I? If I'm cranky it's because I'm extremely provoked by a succession of provoking incidents and provoking people!!
OK. Maybe I am irritable.
3) If I'm anxious, doing relaxation exercises a couple of times a day might help. Yes. They only relax me while I'm doing them, but apparently afterward they will help keep the general level of stress I feel at a lower level - like the lower stress will linger a bit.
Geez I was resistant to that idea. My response was that I didn't want to drop my guard and let less anxiety in, because I had to stay anxious to protect myself. Also, I didn't need to listen to a relaxation exercise, because I was already very good at relaxing my body very fast whenever I wanted to, but I just didn't want to. So I didn't concentrate on the exercise. LOL. I did hear something about flowers though.
So I don't know if focusing on the physical relaxation components and doing them slowly might offer me something extra or not, because by now I always speed through it, always am amazed at how limp my body has become and how automatic the responses are now and always feel that it's very pleasant. So I did it that way - my own way. And I added some flowers to the end of my routine - because I do like flowers. It was nice. I did it some more sometimes because I liked it.
And then I really did become too busy and caught up in Christmas and it's stresses, and various commitments - and I followed up other issues on-line, and I was reluctant to put a heap of extra time into the anxiety/binge/weight area. So I guess I found some materials I'd need to shore up a bit more of the path ahead of me - but actually I wasn't pushing forward on the path itself - I took a couple of steps backwards. Small back steps though, because I wasn't sweating them. Yeah, I ate worse, yeah, I was showing anxiety - but knowing I could see where to get more of what I needed to deal with those things kept a lid on how bad it got - plus you know - I really was starting to realize that stressing less - even stressing less about what I needed to do to control my bingeing and weight issues, really was paying off, so I kept not stressing about it as much as I could.
Stress comes though. Stressful situations crop up. That is totally unavoidable. Not everyone finds the same situation causes the same level of anxiety though. That point is the one I've been working on and making progress with in a new way.
I haven't felt motivated to do relaxation exercises twice a day. I don't know whether I ever will. I've done some though. That was better than none.
Also, more recently I've done my instant relax repeatedly, whenever I've thought it might be a good idea. I guess this is a bit like deep breathing, which is hardly a secret technique for quickly lowering physical stress, however, it's more than that for me, and I don't think I could do it as effectively as I do now, if I hadn't practiced it slowly, many times in the past.
Then another piece in the puzzle (scale in the wing?), came to me within the last couple of days.
I have deliberately pushed myself to do something that I thought would be worthwhile, but involve some stress. The reality of it maxed my stress in a major way. I guess that was part of the reason I did it. I felt anxiety whenever I thought about going back to a forum I'd been a part of and thought going back might help me neutralize it. Well, it did, but not instantly, not before it raised my stress levels through the roof. It was full on, throbbing pulse in my neck, sick feeling in my stomach - massive. Even writing that is bringing the physical symptoms back a bit. So for that, I used some repeats of the quick exercise. During one day, I did it so often, frequently just using part of the process that it started to get a bit automatic, and without thinking, I did it when I got a kid stress attack. Bingo. It was the magic scale.
I started looking for that one before I started this blog. I'd seen the habit I had of imagining the chocolate as the stress came in, or grabbing for it as the stress came in. Was it obvious to you that I needed a stress reducing habit to replace it with? Not to me, not then. I just saw that I was trying to balance some pain with some pleasure, and looked for an alternative pleasure I could imagine or obtain which wouldn't make me fat! Occasionally I'd have ideas of what that might be. I even got excited by the thought that I could use a focus on the beauty around me, photography, art, this blog. I thought well, I couldn't necessarily enjoy those things at the time I had a hassle to deal with, but I could insert the idea that I WOULD enjoy them in the evening or weekend, instead of thinking that I would eat chocolate. This kinda worked a bit. At any rate, at times I would move past the instant thought of food when I got stressed. However, I was still getting stressed. These past couple of days I realized that if I insert the destress routine while I'm being bombarded, if I have the idea that the right way of reacting to ridiculous behaviours by children is to be physically unemotional (despite recognizing the behaviours for what they are), then the stress gets deflected before it gets started. I simply have less stress by not letting the events trigger physical stress patterns within me, or by releasing that stress as soon as I notice it.
I'm sure this post is a mess. But it's a mess about a good important thing. I really feel like this is a piece (a scale), I needed.
I always felt that I would get to this spot one day - I felt like I was moving toward it - but I did not know what was the thing in this place. That's very strange really, because at the same time, I don't think I've said one new thing. I don't see much at all that hasn't been said before or that I didn't already know. Only, when I get the mess sorted out of the words here - I really do think - for me - this IS NEW.
Also, when I link it to binge eating, to the way it makes my impulses to eat badly just fall away, then I truly think it is saying something I do not believe I've seen everywhere else.
Maybe it's too new. Maybe it won't stand the test day to day? Remains to be seen. It's working. That matters. Whereas once, I could have lined up three bulldozers worth of whatever mental push I had against a binge and the binge would have marched through them, now if I get it early enough, I can exert a pinky push and it goes.
Plus there's the Holy Grail - the ideas that will interrupt a binge once it's started - turning on destress patterns in my body.
I so am not going to try and link this to hormones tonight! Of course it does. I fully recall that that stress hormone, whatever it's called - cortisol? promotes eating. Why did I not understand this in the way I do now, before???
Am I imagining that this is a new idea to me? I know I often think I'm realizing something new then read what I wrote years ago and find out that I already knew it then ..
Okay, this is just another scale I know. Nothing works by itself - but what a scale.
BTW - "kid stress attack" = sudden uncontrollable gush of stress to the head, provoked by unforeseeable infuriating behaviour on the part of a kid.
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