The Home of Amy Neuzil, ND* Naturopathic Doctor, Author, Speaker, and Goofball.
Category Archives: Healthy Mind
It doesn’t matter how healthy your body is, if your mind is struggling. Life is full of ups and downs but having a healthy mind helps you weather the storm with grace and joy. Your mind is so fantastically wonderful – you have the capacity to be joyful and fulfilled in your life.
Okay, so maybe not a guaranteed Nobel prize, but according to new research there is a link between chocolate and smarts – that is to say, eating more chocolate makes you smarter and actually increases the likelihood that you will win a Nobel prize. Honestly, just the health benefits were enough to encourage me, but the Nobel prize thing isn’t bad either! I’m not 100% sure what actually triggered this research because it seems like a kind of bizarre association between things, but somebody thought this was important enough to fund (and I like chocolate enough to feel like it’s important enough to pass on!). Not only that, it was important enough to publish in the New England Journal of Medicine, which is considered one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world.
Chocolate Makes You Smarter – Maybe Even Nobel Prize Worthy
The overarching theory is that eating chocolate could make you smarter by improving cognitive function, which we can measure by the number of Nobel laureates per capita. The study shows a very strong association in that direction, and that association is mathematically and statistically highly significant – meaning that it probably is an accurate description of reality. So today’s excuse to treat yourself? It’s because you’re working towards the Peace Prize.
Chocolate makes you smarter! Image courtesy of the New England Journal of Medicine.
In this graph you can clearly see that the countries in which people eat more chocolate, also win more Nobel Prizes. Coincidence? I think not. Previous research from the University of Nottingham showed that dark chocolate improves brain function and cognition. Flavenols from dark chocolate were shown to increase blood flow to key brain areas for two to three hours after consumption. This increased blood flow then led to increased alertness and performance. There must be a god, and that god must love us because CHOCOLATE MAKES YOU SMARTER.
Chocolate makes you smarter, healthier and happier. Thank you god! Lovely image by Andre Karwath
Other Health Benefits of Chocolate
Of course, smarts isn’t the only thing you get from chocolate. Here are some others:
Endorphins – those happy, happy little brain chemicals
Heart healthy – one to two servings of 70% dark chocolate (or greater) per week cuts your risk of heart failure by a third.
High in flavenols, antioxidants, and fiber
A German study concluded that regular chocolate consumption reduces your risk of heart attack and stroke by 39%
Chocolate has five times the health-boosting flavenols of an apple.
Dark chocolate is filling and according to a Swedish study (you’ll notice the Sweds are big chocolate eaters in the Nobel Prize study), meaning it reduces your cravings for sugary, salty and fatty foods.
Eating chocolate daily during pregnancy leads to less-stressed moms and happier babies who smile more according to a Finnish study (Finns also big chocolate eaters)
It tastes AWESOME (this is my favorite reason).
The bottom line is that chocolate makes you smarter, happier and healthier – just remember to get 70% dark or better. You’re welcome.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could create happiness – if happiness was a simple goal you could achieve? As it turns out, it is exactly that. It is a process of doing – it isn’t something that happens to you, it’s something you chose to be, and part of that choice is acting in a way that leads towards happiness. Here are nine practices, developed by Don Richard Riso, to help you on your journey:
Treat Others With Kindness and Integrity
One of the simplest ways to help others be kind and helpful to you and to treat you like an independent worthwhile human is to do the same for them. And god knows kindness goes a long way towards happiness.
Love Yourself and Others Equally
Love your neighbor as yourself – but also remember to love yourself as your neighbor. Many of you (women especially) tend to care for others, for the needs of the kids, the spouse, the parents and forget about your own needs. Don’t forget to add yourself to the list of cherished loved ones and to make your needs count for as much as those of everyone else. There is no way to create happiness if you don’t factor yourself into your own life.
Be Authentic And Truthful in All Matters
Research has verified that lying, no matter how much you have convinced yourself it doesn’t matter to you, actually raises the levels of your stress hormones and contributes to anxiety, stress and the aging process. The same might be true for the soft lies – the moments where you go along with what is going on just so you don’t make waves, even if it isn’t something you want in your life. To create happiness be true to you – your body always knows the difference.
Joy! Create happiness in your life today.
Discover Beauty and Pleasure Everywhere
It’s out there. Beauty is out there all over the place and it is so easy to walk by and not notice because you’re caught up in the latest drama at work or your to-do list or that tiff you had with your partner. Don’t miss it – if you don’t see the beauty and enjoy the little moments now, then when will you? The only time you can change is right now so if you want to be joyful then live into what is happening RIGHT NOW.
Learn from Everyone and Everything
It is so hard to remember to truly appreciate every situation and so easy to pop up the defenses. Of course you can approach every situation like the expert – you already know it, you’ve done it before, you know how this goes. The basic problem with that is that you only leave room then for one possible outcome, and that is that you come away from that situation with nothing new. In short, you don’t grow or change, you just stay stagnant. Try for one day approaching every situation as though you are new to it and as though you can learn something and I promise, you will learn something. You will grow and evolve – how wonderful is that?
Trust Your Ability to Face Challenges and Contribute Willingly
It’s so easy to worry and it feeds into so many basic states of pathology. Worry is a way of creating drama and tension, of pretending you might have control over the uncontrollable and also it’s one of the biggest ways of doubting yourself or your loved ones that you can engage in. By worrying constantly you are sending the signal that you don’t trust your (or your loved ones, if you worry only for other people) ability to cope with life, to deal with the challenges that arise. But here is the thing – if you or the people you worry about are still alive then you are entirely capable of facing everything that life has thrown at you so far. That is kind of a powerful thought – you have effectively dealt with every challenge that has come at you. That is one hell of an awesome track record. Boosting your trust in yourself and the universe is a great way to boost happiness.
Pure Freaking Joy. Create your own happy now.
Be Attached to Nothing and Experience Real Freedom
This doesn’t mean don’t attach to anything therefore don’t love anything. Love with your whole heart, but let that love grow, evolve and change. Let everything grow, evolve and change. It’s so easy to get into a place where you try to keep things the same, keep them stable and predictable and uniform but life isn’t like that. Everything grows and develops and ultimately might even fade, but none of that is bad. By allowing your relationships, your life, your patterns to evolve you also allow yourself to find deeper joy, greater authenticity and more freedom. In other words don’t try to control or be attached to life being a certain way, because then you don’t allow it to ever get any better.
Let Go of Willfulness and Empower Others
This one can be a challenge to see because society trains you to learn to get your own way. It’s actually one of the biggest skills you learn as an infant or toddler because at that stage of development it is important to be able to get what you need from the people around you. As an adult, however, it can be helpful to notice the behaviors that you have adopted that might push people to behave a certain way around you or give in to you. Guilt, shame, blame and judgement can be subtle (or not so subtle) ways of bullying people and using those tools can be entirely unconscious. To create happiness isn’t it time to examine the ways you might manipulate those around you?
Value Yourself and Engage with the Tumult of the World
This is the hardest one for me – both to understand and to follow. You might, like me, notice the internal tendency to being the peacekeeper, to trying to keep things smooth and even and to keep everyone around you happy. Peacekeeping is a strong gift and can be of great value in your life, but it can also slip over into a form of self-denial. The small ways you don’t speak your truth because you want to keep the peace. Again, there are degrees of health here. Sometimes engaging with the turmoil and allowing there to be bumps in the road can be the most authentic path forward and can allow you to experience real happiness and to be absolutely true to yourself. This doesn’t mean that you should cause problems just to stir the pot, but you should be able to give true expression to problems that are already there and not try to dismiss them.
Dog smile – thanks for the picture to Pixel blue eyes (smiling) and her person Jenny.
Create Happiness Now
Waiting for someone, something, some circumstance to make you happy is common, but it’s also a dead end. If you’re waiting to be happy and don’t do something to change your mind, you will always be waiting to be happy. Start today – take a simple step to create happiness. There is no reason to wait. It might not happen overnight, it might not happen in a month, but it will happen and you have the power to control it.
Okay – so first disclaimer is that I’m not advocating huge amounts of cookie-eating, but there are times when you really just want a cookie and it has to be gluten free and quick. Frankly, who can eat gluten these days and who has actual time for baking? The reality is we all want food that fits with our basic nutritional philosophy, tastes good and is quick and easy to make – essentially we want perfect food. Like these perfect gluten free quick cookies from my dear friend Hallie, whom I will forever blame for getting me hooked on these.
Ingredients:
1/2 package of Bob’s Red Mill Shortbread Cookie Mix
Lots of walnuts and pecans (unsalted)
6 tablespoons of Kerrigold butter from grass-fed cows
1-2 egg yolks
Gluten free love
So – this is a cheat on the recipe on the back of the Bob’s Red Mill Shortbread Cookie Mix package that adds some awesome health benefits as well as all the fun addictive properties of cocaine (sorry about that – once you start eating these it’s hard to stop). Here’s what you do:
Bob’s Red Mill GF Shortbread Cookie Mix – this is where the magic starts…
Steps to Make the Perfect Gluten Free Quick Cookie:
Preheat the oven to 375*
Put 1/2 the package of Bob’s Red Mill Shortbread Cookie Mix in a bowl
Grind the walnuts and pecans so that you have about an equal amount of this nut mix. I use a Vitamix and do kind of a rough chop so that some of it is finely ground like a nut powder and some of it is more like crushed nut pieces. It’s about 2 cups of whole nuts to grind down to the right amount, but there is a lot of flexibility here so don’t worry about measuring. Just eyeball enough nuts to equal the amount of the cookie mix you used.
Add 6 tablespoons of butter (I pre-melt it so that it mixes easily) and 1-2 egg yolks. 1 yolk makes the cookies drier and more crumbly like shortbread and 2 makes them stay together a little more than that.
Mix well.
Shape into little balls and then flatten onto baking sheets.
Bake for about 15 minutes, give or take, until the edges start to turn a light golden-brown.
These are delicious and have 1/2 the sugar of the original recipe along with all of the additional benefits from the pecans and walnuts including fiber, protein, the cardiovascular protective effects from nuts and good healthy fats. Did I mention they’re delicious? Yeah – that’s an understatement. Plus you don’t really have to measure or be good at baking – it all kind of works out in the end no matter what. My first batch was seriously nut-heavy. I totally overestimated how much I would need and just dumped it in. They were awesome. The second batch was lighter on the nuts and I tried two egg yolks instead of one because they were small eggs. Still awesome. I’m thinking they’re fool-proof.
These really are the best gluten free quick cookies ever. They even have a little bit of healthy in them.
Of course it’s still a cookie and not exactly health food, but it is so much better for you than regular cookies, and it’s made of real food, and start to finish it takes maybe 20 – 25 minutes including clean up. How’s that for gluten free quick cookie perfection???
When we think of addiction we usually think about the big scary addictions like heroine or crystal meth or alcohol. As it turns out you may be plagued by an addiction that takes a far greater toll on your health – you may be addicted to thinking.
Ha! How could that be a problem? We *love* thinking. We worship thinking. Thinking helps you to grow and innovate and solve problems and plan for your day, your life, your week, your career. Thinking got you all those certificates and awards and diplomas and promotions. But what if there is a point where all the thought turns into over-thinking. Where the planning becomes worrying, and where the thought loops become obsession? What if we are a Nation that thinks instead of feels?
I feel like this is a fine line to walk, but every day in my patients (and yes, in myself too) I see people trying to solve all the possible problems of the future by thinking of them in advance. I see people so consumed by fear and anxiety about what might happen that they don’t notice the wonderful things that are happening right now. I see people trying to decide if they love their partner by making pro and con lists (hint – this isn’t going to generate the right answer for you). Maybe we all need to take a collective deep breath and watch all those thoughts go by until they can settle down just a little to give us space to feel, to notice, to breathe. Maybe then we can unwind all those knots in necks and shoulders and relax those overly tight muscles.
What is the Answer to Over-Thinking?
I feel like there is only one answer to the problem of being addicted to thinking, and that is mindfulness. I know mindfulness is the new buzz-word. Everyone thinks you should have it because it helps with stress levels and combats chronic pain, but what is it actually? In a big general sense, mindfulness means being here right now. Instead of thinking about the past and what has happened, or the future and what might happen, or analyzing the “why” or “how” questions, instead you are completely present with the here-and-now. Surprisingly, that is harder than it sounds, and it isn’t something we’re used to doing. For this the practice of mindfulness meditation is the key to training your mind to be right here, right now.
How To Practice Mindfulness Meditation
First – assume the position. Not crash position, actually just sit upright in a chair with your feet flat on the floor and your hands resting gently on your thighs. Keep your back upright and straight, so not slouched down resting on the back of the chair, but rather with your vertebrae ‘like a stack of gold coins.” Keep your eyes open and your gaze downward at about a 45 degree angle. Open eyes help you to not get distracted by your thoughts. Here are the steps:
Assume the position! (As I just described)
Set your timer on your phone for 3 minutes. (Yes! Just 3 minutes!)
Take three deep breaths to help settle your mind and relax your system
Just keep your eyes open and notice what is happening in your mind.
Chances are, you’re thinking. Notice the thinking and let it drop without following it and turning it into a story.
When you have a new thought pop up, just notice it and drop it.
When the buzzer rings, drop the thought that’s happening right then, and you’re done!
Pat yourself on the back because you just did your first mindfulness meditation.
Now rinse, and repeat! Do another 3 minutes and then you’re done for the day.
Try to do this 5 days a week and then just watch out world because there is going to be a whole new you.
The Benefits of Mindfulness
Mindfulness does so many wonderful things for you – here’s just a short list.
Cures that pesky addiction to thinking
Reduces anxiety
Reduces panic attacks and helps you get out of them more quickly
Helps decrease chronic pain
Gives you more peace of mind with who you actually are (and helps you to have less of the self-critical voice in your head)
Increases attention span
Helps you focus
Increases your joy in the moment
Enhances your immune system
Helps reverse heart disease
Be a BLISSED OUT JOY-BUNNY! The gorgeous fractal is “Finite subdivision of a radial link” by Brirush – Own work.
As if all of that wasn’t enough, you also get to be the blissed-out joy bunny on the block because you are able to see all of the wonderful things happening right now. Mindfulness is no joke and the more research we have on it the more powerful we realize it is. Isn’t it time you dedicate 6 minutes a day to being a happier you?
I’m amazed at how many people are coming into my office with MTHFR mutations, and also at how difficult it can be to actually understand the MTHFR mutation basics. So let’s start from the beginning and go from there.
What is MTHFR? Why Do I Keep Hearing About It?
MTHFR, just to be confusing, is the name of both a gene and the enzyme which that gene helps your body to make. We call it MTHFR because the actual name, methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase, is just ridiculously long and cumbersome. This enzyme helps your body to methylate. If your genes have a mutation it means that the enzyme they’re supposed to make turns out just a little bit wrong. You still make the enzyme it just isn’t exactly the right shape and so it works differently from normal. It’s become kind of a buzzword these days simply because we’re discovering that it is more common than we thought and if you happen to be a mutant (like I am) then you may be at greater risk for a number of health problems. We’ll get to those in a second.
What Does the MTHFR Enzyme Do?
The short answer is that this enzyme methylates. Since the short answer sounds like something nobody cares about, let’s also talk about a long answer. Methylation means that you add a “methyl group” which is essentially a carbon bonded to three hydrogen that looks, appropriately, like mutant mickey mouse ears. This sounds highly anticlimactic, but actually helps your body to do almost everything, like replicating and using your DNA, activating your B vitamins, detoxifying toxic substances and a whole host of other things.
What Are The Possible MTHFR Mutations?
There are TWO MTHFR genes, the MTHFR-C gene and the MTHFR-A gene and you have two copies of each of these (one from your mother and one from your father). This means there is a whole variety of ways that things could go wrong… Let’s look at those here:
Possible good and bad copies of the MTHFR gene
This means that there are two genes, each with two copies and you could have good or bad copies of one or both… So:
All possible variations of MTHFR gene combinations.
The basic rule is that the more bad copies of the gene you have, the more likely you are to have negative health effects from those genes. The good news is the more bad copies of the gene you have, the more benefit you can get out of working to improve your body’s methylation ability.
Can I Fix a MTHFR Gene Mutation?
Yes and no. You are born with a set of genes and you’ll die with the same set – nothing can change your genes. That sounds like bad news, but the good news is that we can get around a slow enzyme pathway – usually by supplementing the methylated form of B vitamins (so that it doesn’t matter if your genes can’t convert them) and also methyl donors. MTHFR mutation can make your life miserable, but if you learn to deal with it correctly it can also be overcome.
Poor methylation is becoming a common topic in medicine simply because we’re realizing how common these mutations really are and how great an impact on health they have. Learn more about some of the conditions caused by this mutation here, and about some of the problems you can run into taking methylated B vitamins here. There is so much more to this story, but at least we’ve covered the MTHFR mutation basics here. If you suspect a problem, get tested and talk with a doctor who knows about it because that will be the quickest path forward.
Everyone has gut feelings, but what does that mean in a culture that wants everything to be logical? Is it valuable to listen to your gut or is the evolution towards listening only to your brain/mind a good way to go? I’m a big believer in the inherent wisdom and knowing that your body holds – especially your gut.
Gut instincts – your gut always knows. www.dramyneuzil.com
What is a Gut Feeling?
A gut feeling is a sudden strong feeling about something that doesn’t necessarily have thoughts behind it, it’s more like intuition or an inherent sense that you “know” something. It’s the sense you know something even though you don’t know why you know it. There may even be a body sense of that feeling – a literal sensation, usually in your stomach area, that gives you a very simple idea of what your body likes or doesn’t like. Gut feelings can be instant judgements about another person, about a situation, or just a sudden sense of “knowing.”
Your Gut is Your Second Brain
Technically, your gut has some 100,000,000 neurons (that’s a hundred million) which is more neurons than are in your spinal cord. Over 30 neurotransmitters are present within the digestive tract and 95% of your body’s serotonin is found in your bowels. The brain and the gut communicate, but while only 20% of the information flow goes from brain to gut, 80% goes from gut to brain. There isn’t that much information about digestion, so the gut must be giving other information as well, potentially about emotional state and also potentially contributing to the “gut feeling”. This second brain certainly influences your state of mind. “A big part of our emotions are probably influenced by the nerves in our gut,” says Emran Mayer, professor of physiology, psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (U.C.L.A.).
Butterflies in the stomach, which are signals from the gut in response to stress, is a simple example of how your “second brain” might contribute to emotions and information processing. Everyday emotions, according to Michael Gershon, author of The Second Brain, may rely on messages from the brain below to the brain above. One example given by Gershon is the new depression treatment which involves electrically stimulating the vagus nerve. This may actually mimic the healthy signals from your gut, therefore telling your brain that all is well.
Trust Your Intuition
In a general sense, your gut feeling is your body’s only way of telling you yes, or no, or if something feels unsafe. As a doctor (and as a woman) I always encourage people to trust their gut feelings – about people, about situations, even about foods that they eat or supplements that they take. If you stop to listen, your body will give you a gut feeling about many situations that has the potential to be a far more relevant signal than what you think about that thing. It’s easy to get into convoluted thought loops about things, but your gut and your intuition are pretty direct. Bottom line? Gut feelings are usually important – pay attention.
Chances are, when you’re stuck and overwhelmed, you don’t really want to add any more things to your to-do list. I’m guessing your to-do list is full to overflowing with sh*t that really needed to get done yesterday. Uh-huh, I’m feeling your pain here. Sadly, mine too. And I have been feeling a little stuck and overwhelmed. Not so much that life isn’t moving forward, it’s moving forward with great haste but instead of driving the ship I’m running behind it trying to pick up the pieces that pick up the pieces that are being left behind. It’s that kind of feeling. This weekend I stumbled on a great solution that has shifted my feelings of stuck and overwhelmed to something softer and more manageable and even given me a big dose of excitement about the future.
The Simple Solution for Feeling Stuck and Overwhelmed
It really is a simple solution – and I’m pretty sure it works universally. It boils down to “Just Clean Something” but has far reaching implications for your psyche. For me, the something that I had to deal with was my back porch. Please keep in mind this weekend I had a list of things to do that quite literally couldn’t have got done if I’d worked 24 hours and hopped myself up on red bulls. It was already piled up with stuff that needed doing. Instead of tackling that whole list and getting bogged down in the heaviness of all of that task-management, I took a track that fed my soul a little bit more and has given me the mental room to make the to-do list look simple.
This Sounds Like Crazy-Talking
Yes, yes I know it does. Here’s the thing – there is more to this cleaning thing than meets the eye. So here’s what I want you to do.
Find an area in your space that has been driving you crazy – it could be a big area like your bedroom or your kitchen, or it could be the hall closet full of the random stuff that doesn’t go anywhere else. It might even be a place that used to be a favorite place but that has fallen into some serious disorganization (like the back porch).
Put aside the rest of the to-do list that you’ve been spinning out about, and just get down to it. Physically organizing a space is usually a whole lot more simple than organizing your life or your brain, so get to it.
Get rid of anything that isn’t making you happy in that space (for me it was the dead plants, the empty pots, the half-started projects.) If it isn’t enhancing your life somehow then just chuck it.
Make the space feel like you – this might mean adding some finishing touches or it might just mean looking at thing with fresh eyes and creating a space that suits you now (as opposed to the space that suited you whenever you last looked at this).
Voila! Accomplishment – you have officially beat back the chaos in this one small area and re-asserted control over your domain.
Feeling stuck and overwhelmed? Tackle a controllable project and unlock those mental gears.
Cleaning as a Metaphor for … Cleaning
Um… yes. So – the cleaning that you’re doing is actually an act of taking-charge. It is the literal act of making order out of chaos in one small area of your life (for me, the porch). By making order out of this one tiny area of chaos something in your brain recognizes that you, as a human, have the capacity to do this. If you can make sense of one chaotic area of your life, then you can make sense of others too. I know this sounds a little odd when I say it, but honestly your brain is very literal. If you can do the thing, you can do it. Your brain is clear on that. Literally your brain does it again with other things because it knows it can – it knows it did it before. One chunk of chaos might be bigger than the other, but it’s still the same thing and the same puzzle and you’ve already solved it. So what are the psychological benefits here?
Your brain suddenly recognizes your amazing ability to solve the chaos problem, which ironically frees up a lot of mental space for actually solving other chaos problems.
You have solidly started and completed something, which generates some good satisfaction and productivity juju.
Clearing clutter and chaos out of your environment does actually help your brain to de-clutter too, simply because every thing that’s heaped all over your space takes a tiny bit of your attention. Fewer things and less mess means you have more free attention to spare.
You now have a lovely space to enjoy. Like my fabulous, serene, peaceful back porch. This alone creates joy and fulfillment. Even with the to-do list still rattling away in the background.
The to-do list suddenly starts to go down far more quickly because your brain knows it can generate order, and that’s a lovely thing. There is far less tire-spinning and far more just crossing things off.
I know it sounds too simple to work, and a little counter-intuitive because you’re actually neglecting your to-do list in order to make your to-do list easier to manage. It’s just that this actually works so next time you’re feeling stuck and overwhelmed, find that one project you can totally tackle and just clean something – getting it done helps you to get it done. Voila! Instant un-stuckness.
Life is short, and sometimes you come to a crossroads where you have to choose what really matters moving forward and what really doesn’t. I am at just such a crossroads now in my life and when that happens I usually wander back through my journals, blogs, etc… to see if I can get any clarity about the arc of my life. In doing so, I found this post from my previous blog and it struck a cord in me about what actually matters in life, and when it comes to the most important questions, what I might truly value. This post was written in 2011 and I’ve left it in it’s original form. I hope it inspires you to think, just a little, about what really matters to you today.
I wish I could say that the inspiration for this post is a happy one, but it’s anything but. I found out today that three colleagues, two of whom were dear friends from graduate school, have passed away recently. Eli was a completely hilarious, quick witted, sarcastic man who kept everyone around him laughing and would go out of his way to make people happy. Susan was a beautiful, vibrant woman who was somewhat quiet and always smiley but when she did speak up it was always with something unexpectedly funny that would take everyone by surprise. She was one of the kindest, warmest people I’ve met. Stacey was in school after I was, but we worked together and I was impressed by her positivity and drive.
These three were all young (30s and 40s), vibrant, and did everything for their health. They had great relationships, children, careers and busy lives. I don’t think any of them would have anticipated leaving the world so early. I can’t begin to fathom that they are gone.
Life is short – Live NOW. Photo by Ian Britton, www.freefoto.com
As I sit in my house, surrounded by my stuff and reminders of the things that normally weigh heavily on my mind I am struck by the sheer madness of my entire existence. That I am here and whole and healthy is such a miracle – such a gift. I feel so ashamed at the amount of time I waste worrying about things that don’t matter. When I look around today, after learning of these three deaths, my worries are so trivial and tiny and neurotic. I have everything I need, I have wonderful friends, amazing family, a house I love and good food on the table. What does the rest of it matter? Where is there any kind of problem?
I’m also ashamed of the time I waste doing things that don’t truly make a difference in the end. Sure it’s a good idea to make sure my business keeps running and my house is in good repair. But what about the time I fritter away on the internet or with some kind of escapism like TV or movies or books? Doesn’t that just amount to watching other people live instead of living myself? Am I willing to spend some of these precious moments that way when I know that life is short? There is nothing like the stark reality of death to make a whole bunch of silliness just fall away.
This also throws light on the social and emotional stuff that can become issues in my head but are utterly meaningless. Remember, life is short. How many times have I not called a dear friend because I was too busy or had to get one more thing done at work? How many people have I failed to keep in touch with, or not shown my feelings for – for some ridiculous reason like laziness or shyness or inconvenience. How many activities and events have I missed because there was something that really needed doing, or work, or I was so tired from work that I couldn’t muster up the energy, or some other equally small excuse.
At moments like this it is so hard not to look at my life and feel like maybe I’ve missed something somewhere. If Susan or Eli or Stacey had just a few more days – would they spend them working? Taking care of responsibilities? Or would they smile with their loved ones, maybe go to a park, pick flowers for their bedside table, eat chocolate or watch the sunset. Or maybe something totally different and fun and wonderful – who knows? The point is – they’d probably make joy and love and laughter a pretty high priority. And shouldn’t we all? I’m not saying we should ignore real life and let everything go – but what if work and money and stuff mattered just a little less and life and people and friends and joy mattered just a little bit more? Your life is short too – what do you choose to do with it today?
Both of these gorgeous images are from http://www.symphonyoflove.net/ – Thanks!
To some degree emotional eating is just part of being a human – we all do it now and again because the bottom line is that it works. Food really does translate into comfort in the human brain and that comfort feedback can get out of hand. It’s easy to use food as a reward, as a treat, or as a way to calm down when you’re anxious, depressed or angry. It’s easy to do because a lot of the time it works – food does help you feel better in the moment when you’re emotions are getting the best of you. It can also hurt you in the long-run because then you have to struggle with weight, self-image, powerlessness and body issues. This is a no-win cycle, but there are ways out.
Candy!! A great emotional eating trigger food. Take Five!
Six Signs of Emotional Eating:
You often eat so quickly or so much that you feel over-full, uncomfortable or bloated
You find yourself eating ‘for no reason’ or ‘because you’re bored’
You eat more when your schedule becomes tighter as a sign of stress
You gain weight in stressful times or in emotional times
You feel ‘addicted’ to food or to certain foods
Your cravings are compelling and changeable (ice cream for sadness, chips for boredom, snickers when you’re feeling lonely)
Fixing Emotional Eating:
Emotional eating isn’t easy to fix, but it isn’t hard either, there isn’t a complicated technique or months of waiting, just some honest emotional processing. The hardest part is being willing to actually sit down with yourself and feel exactly what you’re feeling instead of self-medicating. Sort of like an eating meditation, or a food contemplation. There is not really a big difference, grand scheme of things, between hiding from your feelings with food and hiding from your feeling with heroine. These are both just ways of escaping from what you really feel, even if one is a little more dramatic than the other. It sounds really easy to admit that you’re feeling crummy and sit with that; maybe cry or get angry or be scared but this is honestly one of the hardest, most wonderful and most terrifying things you can ever do as a human. Real, honest emotions can be genuinely world-changing. This is some of the scariest, most honest work you will ever do along with some of the most rewarding, so let’s get to it.
The Cure for Emotional Eating: Take Five
Take a tour of your kitchen and pantry and find your emotional trigger foods. Chances are you know what it is you go for when you’re feeling stressed or overwhelmed or sad or lonely.The usual list includes things like brownies, snickers, sweets and candy, ice cream, chips, pop corn, etc…
Write on the outside of those food containers with a sharpie to “Take 5” in big letters so that when you’re in a vulnerable place you don’t have to try to remember whether or not that’s a trigger food for you, you can just read the package. Make sure that when you go grocery shopping you label your trigger foods when they come into the house.
When you grab something out of the pantry, check the package to see if it says “Take Five”
Sit down as usual, but set your kitchen timer for five minutes.
In that 5 minutes, just sit and look at your food but don’t touch it yet. Just sit, and look and pay attention to how you feel. Not how you want to feel, but how you really feel. If emotions are hard for you to get in touch with, then just focus on your body. How does the air feel in your lungs when you breathe? Is your stomach tight? Do you feel relaxed? Are you hurting anywhere? What does it feel like to be inside your body?
In that 5 minutes, you may feel angry for having to wait, impatient, frustrated, sad, or irritable. You may burst into tears, start thinking about a fight you had with your partner or have a grand realization about your life. You also may not notice anything, or think about the toe you just stubbed on the chair as you were sitting down. Just pay attention to however it is that you feel and when the buzzer rings then eat like you normally would.
As you’re eating, notice what the food feels like in your mouth, why you chose the food you did and how you feel as you’re eating it. Really think about whether or not that food is making you feel any different. Really think about if that food is giving you what you thought it would or not. You don’t have to change anything else about the eating other than just paying attention to it. Honestly, if you’re paying attention to how you really feel the compulsive eating will resolve itself.
That’s it! That’s all you have to do – is just wait five minutes and really be in your body before you eat and while you’re eating. This is an exercise in finding out about yourself. Emotional eating is different in every person because we all have different hurts, fears, traumas, anxieties and life situations. The only way to fix it is to notice that you’re doing it, notice when it happens and acknowledging those feelings in a healthy, honest way. The idea behind this is that you can’t deal with whatever is under there, unless you know what it is. Pretty simple, right?
If you work through things on paper, like I do, then keeping a journal about what you’re feeling can be really helpful. If you’re more of a talker then finding a food buddy can be helpful or talking with a counselor. If you like to read about the idea then the best book I’ve found about this subject is Geneen Roth’s Women Food and God.
Women Food and God is just a great resource for anyone who really wants to get to the root of their emotional self, and the book uses the idea of food as a pathway to everything – life, beliefs about yourself, and god. Essentially her idea is that your relationship with food is your relationship with life, so if you’re eating for comfort or solace or escape, then what does that say about the rest of your life? Emotional eating is a challenge for sure, but it is also an opportunity for growth and a tool that you can use to explore yourself more deeply. Of course there are many health reasons to do this, but the most important reasons are about happiness. After all, nobody self-medicates happiness.
The folks at the Diabetes Council were kind enough to make an audio version of this article, read by Holly Houston (sadly I can’t claim that lovely voice). If you prefer to listen, rather than read then here it is!
The Benefits of Being Sick: Plain Old Written Version 😉
This is such a difficult topic because our culture likes to make things all “bad” or all “good” but the truth is, there are many social benefits of being sick and sometimes it’s hard to get well if you’re not willing to really look that whole concept in the face. For the most part, nobody actually wants to be sick. There are some rare exceptions with psychological diseases, but at the end of the day most people want to be healthy, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t benefit in some way – usually some entirely unconscious way – from being sick. When there are benefits of being sick, sometimes they can become an obstacle to truly getting better – simply because somewhere in your subconscious mind you aren’t ready to let go of whatever it is you’re getting out of being ill. It’s easy to generate a lot of judgement about this and to immediately recoil from the idea that people might have unknown motives even for suffering, but the fact of the matter is that your brain is more highly evolved than you can possibly imagine. If your brain finds a way to get what it wants, it isn’t necessarily going to stop and ask for permission from your rational mind – it’s just going to go ahead and get what it wants and give your rational, thinking self a nice story (I’m sick – I have to stay in bed) to hold on to. Never underestimate the power of the human brain, and certainly don’t fall for the illusion that “you” – the part of you that you hear thinking in your head and that makes up all sorts of reasons why things happen – are actually the one in control.
Illness is a huge, multifactoral beast. Sure, there are plenty of colds and flus and simple things that you get because there is some kind of germ or bug going around. Although when you really look at them, even the simple things might not be so simple. Why is it that some people go down with a particular flu and some don’t? Sure there are lots of arguments about immunity and previous contact with that virus. No question those things matter, but what about the convenient fact that often the people who get sick are the ones who really need to take a break? Or the ones who haven’t let themselves rest? Sure – their system is weakened from overwork, that is probably true, but it might also be true that being sick is a socially acceptable reason to stop, to rest, to take a break, to not be at work, and to actually give your body the sleep it’s been missing. When you get into complex or long-term illness it’s a whole different animal.
I want to say here that I am NOT trying to imply that people are fabricating illness in any way – absolutely not. When you get sick you actually get sick and for people who are chronically ill, they’re actually ill and not because they want to be. Still, if you don’t look at the benefits of being sick then sometimes that can become a barrier to becoming well, simply because your body isn’t willing to give up the benefits if you haven’t changed your life to incorporate them naturally. Let me start with an example – this is a pretend client that is based on literally hundreds of real clients I’ve seen in the same position:
“I’ve always been healthy and I was a really energetic person – I was always able to go above and beyond for everybody. I worked in a corporate setting and was in a high stress job but I really loved it, I loved the challenge and the business. Everything was great, but when I had my second child it felt like everything suddenly shifted. That child is a little more demanding than the first was and generally needs more of me and I just started to feel drained. Now I’m on a leave of absence from work and I really don’t know if I’ll be able to go back because I feel worn out. My joints hurt, I’ve become sensitive to so many different foods it feels like I can hardly eat without something disagreeing with me. My sleep has suffered but all I want is more sleep. I can get up to fix breakfast for the kids but that just wears me out and I have to spend the next few hours resting or watching TV or trying to recharge. I feel pitiful – just getting up to make breakfast shouldn’t be all I have in me for the day.”
I can’t begin to tell you how often I’ve heard variations of that same story. I was an uber-achiever until this thing happened and now I can’t keep up at all. I am forced to rest, to hold back, be home with my children, to not work, to constantly recuperate. No doubt this person is actually exhausted and actually has physical dysfunction – possibly autoimmune disease or mixed hormone failure. Absolutely. In reality those things are happening and need to be addressed. But what about possible benefits?
Primary Gain – The Benefits of Being Sick
Primary gain is a concept in medicine that looks at exactly this idea – that being sick does come with some advantages, even mixed in with all the obvious disadvantages, and that those advantages are a factor in healing. Primary gain deals mostly with the psychological benefits of being sick, which are typically entirely unconscious. These are the psychological perks of being ill that nobody actually notices or talks about, but that you may have a hard time giving up. Examples of primary gain might include:
If you’re not performing the way you think you should, being sick can reduce some of the feelings of guilt and inadequacy.
If you deeply believe that doing things for yourself is “selfish” or have a negative judgement about it then sometimes being sick is the only acceptable reason to allow yourself to care for yourself appropriately.
Being sick might actually encourage your partner to be more supportive, more caring or more nurturing.
Being sick is a valid reason to not do things that you might not want to (but probably think you should).
Being sick is a legitimate reason take breaks.
Being sick is a real reason to stay home more with the kids.
These are big obvious examples – but there are thousands of tiny gains that can be individual to each person and aren’t always obvious to them or to anyone around them (these are kind of obvious – but the best examples I could come up with this morning). Often in the healing process if we don’t address this issue, then healing gets stalled out as soon as we run into this wall. If we took the above example patient and re-balanced her hormones and addressed autoimmunity, chances are we’d get her to a great place right up until she started taking on too much again, because that’s her basic nature. She’d pick up all of her old obligations and no doubt over-perform to make up for feeling guilty about being sick and inevitably land in a crumpled heap on the office floor despairing because she relapsed. I’ve seen it over and over and over again. People charge right back into the old way of being without examining what it was that their body was trying to tell them with the illness. What was the benefit of being sick and how can they keep that without the sickness?
Of course it’s easy to talk about, but in real life this comes down to some incredibly hard transformations and evolutions as a human. Maybe it means letting go of the deeply ingrained belief that you only have worth based on what you produce. Or the feeling that your job is to take care of others (only others – anything you do for yourself is “selfish”). Maybe it means confronting ideas from your faith about how good people suffer, or how suffering is a penance. Maybe it means sitting down with your partner and having the tough conversation about ways to change your circumstances so you can stay home with your children more. It could mean looking at your life and seeing if you’re still on the path you want to be, or if you really wanted to be an artist but your family thought that was a soft option. These issues are at the core of who we are, who were were taught to be, and are always the biggest, scariest and most challenging to actually work though.
Secondary Gain – The External Benefits of Being Sick
Secondary gain is the idea that there are also real benefits of illness that come from the outside – from society. These are far easier to see and to deal with and include things like:
Missing work
Avoiding military duty
Financial gain (disability, family support)
Drugs
Avoiding jail (insanity plea, etc…)
Again, although these are more obvious, more tangible benefits, they are still largely unconscious. Your brain is tricksy and doesn’t let you see some of the subtle motivators.
There are No Benefits to Being Sick – This is The Worst!
I know – there are people reading this who are deeply and personally offended because they feel so crappy and have been struggling for so long to get better. I know that, and here’s the thing – it is 100% true. Being sick sucks in so many ways, but that doesn’t mean it has to be all black or all white – there are almost always shades of grey and sometimes looking at the grey areas can help you to examine your life more deeply, even if it ultimately doesn’t change the course of the illness at all. Here’s an exercise. No matter how horrible you feel you can probably think of three good things that come out of being sick – even if you’re really reaching.
The Benefits of Being Sick Exercise:
1. Write down at least three benefits you get from being sick. These can be big things (like my partner is nicer and more supportive) or little things (someone else cleans the toilet). At least three but list as many as you can think of.
2. List three things you’ve learned about yourself and what your body needs directly because of being sick:
3. If you were suddenly 100% healthy, what would be the hardest for you to change?
4. What are some ways you can keep the benefits of being sick but let go of the sickness? You don’t have to have concrete answers, but start the thought process.
Remember none of this is about judgement or right and wrong answers, it’s about learning something about you as a human and discovering a little more of what you need to be your happiest most functional self. Sometimes illness is the greatest teacher and you can choose to take the opportunity to grow from it. There are some benefits of being sick, but there are also ways to structure your life so that you have those benefits without actually having the sickness and finding them may help you on the path to healing.
Both of these gorgeous images are from http://www.symphonyoflove.net/ – Thanks!
