How to stop seizing stress and get rid of addiction once and for all
Overeating is life-threatening, but knowing about it does not stop food lovers when they become addicted to food. The reasons for addiction are in our psychological state. When we enjoy life, food ceases to be the only source of pleasure …
It’s impossible to calm down until you send in a large piece of cake, so juicy and sweet, soaked in liquor and covered with thick chocolate icing. Mmmmm… Melts in your mouth. She ate it and immediately released it … But then what? Extra pounds on the sides, pimples on the face, swelling, fatigue, dullness and … dependence on sweets. How to stop seizing stress and not losing the joy of life? We are looking for the answer in psychology.
Juliet writes about her conditions before Yuri Burlan's training "System Vector Psychology": “I ate sweets instead of breakfast, lunch and dinner. In large quantities. My head understood that I didn't want to, that I was sick, but inside there was a void that I wanted to fill. After every meal my brain stopped thinking. As soon as my head began to recede and my head cleared up, I again shoved any sweets to turn off my brain, because it hurts to think, scary to think. Every day I walked home from work in tears, shoving myself over and over again. She ate until dizziness, nausea …”(full confession here).
Food is the biggest temptation because it is the easiest way to enjoy yourself when things are not going well in life. Physiologically, this is justified: food balances the biochemistry of the brain. In response to stress, the hormone cortisol is released, and we tense up and worry. And food triggers the production of serotonin and dopamine, and your mood improves. Simple carbohydrates (cakes, cookies, candy, chips) provide a lot of glucose, which is a fast energy source, and a person feels better.
But such well-being quickly passes, being replaced by a mass of unpleasant side effects.
Consequences of seized stress
We need to eat and drink so much that our strength is restored by this, and not suppressed.
Cicero Mark Tullius
Everyone knows that if there is a lot of sweet and fatty foods, you can get better. But this is far from the only consequence of overeating. Satisfying with food not physical, but emotional hunger, a person acquires diseases of the internal organs, which work in an overload mode. Excess weight contributes to the development of diseases of the cardiovascular system, a drop in immunity. Cognitive functions are also impaired - concentration of attention, memory, speed of information processing. Decreased efficiency.
Excess food interferes with the subtleties of the mind.
Seneca Lucius Anney (the Younger)
Food soothes, but not for long, increasing emotional experiences - guilt, self-doubt, disgust and hatred of one's own weakness, increased depressive states.
But knowledge of the consequences does not stop - the soul hurts more. Sometimes so much that food becomes a drug, a pain reliever, without which a person cannot live. Then we can talk about food addiction.
Signs of food addiction
You may not notice how the dining table will take the place of the altar in consciousness.
František Kryška, poet and translator
Overeating is not always a consequence of food addiction. Sometimes it's a bad eating habit. For example, when there is no opportunity to eat all day, and a person is limited to snacks "on the run", and in the evening before going to bed he has a hearty dinner. So he compensates for daytime fatigue and calms down. But this does not mean that he is addicted to food.
A person is addicted when:
food helps to cope with any emotional distress - stress, resentment, irritation, boredom, melancholy:
“I just eat out of boredom, without feeling physically hungry. I just think about some delicious food, and I want to experience satisfaction and happiness, and I only experience this when I eat delicious food."
"I always want chocolate when I'm nervous."
(from comments in social networks)
- thoughts all day revolve around food;
- after crunching chips or eating a cake, he feels incomparable relief and relaxation;
- want to eat only foods with bright tastes (sweet, salty, fatty, crunchy);
- it is impossible to stop in time, there is no sense of proportion. A person stops only when it becomes bad;
- one feels that sweets or other favorite foods are the only joy in life. She alone is a source of endorphins for the brain.
Why general tips don't work
There are many tips on how to stop seizing stress. Someone recommends preventing binge eating attacks by jogging or exercising in the fitness room. In the evenings, when tears roll in from fatigue and loneliness, instead of eating cakes, they are advised to watch a soulful movie or cry out to a friend. Some propose to fight the consequences of compulsive overeating through dieting and restricting high-calorie foods, include willpower and a reasonable approach. There are even those who say that during times of stress you need to eat, because it gives real relief in times of excitement. We will deal with the consequences later.
All these recommendations sometimes help, but are ineffective if there is no awareness of the reasons why we overeat. And even deeper - why we are stressed.
Victoria only at the training "System-vector psychology" realized what made her indulge in cakes. She says that without realizing the internal reasons, using only external restrictions in form, she could not get rid of her addiction to sweets before:
You also need to understand your psychic nature. Depending on the vectors of the psyche, people react differently to stressful situations. There are those who have negative emotions suppress their appetite. They will have no problem overeating during times of stress. Some people overeat from boredom, loneliness or anxiety.
And there are those who are especially disposed to seize stress. But it is they who will react to the introduction of any restrictions with even greater tension, with physiological reactions of spasms of the smooth muscles of the intestines and sphincters. Diets can end up with digestive problems for them.
Based on the knowledge from the training "System-vector psychology", you can deeper understand the psychology of food addiction and outline the ways out of it.
How to get out of food addiction
If an excessive and exclusive passion for food is animality, then an arrogant inattention to food is imprudence, and the truth here, as elsewhere, lies in the middle: do not get carried away, but pay due attention.
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov
If you're unsure of how to stop stress eating, start with psychology. A sustainable result in the fight against overeating will give:
- understanding how to get rid of stress,
- a conscious attitude to food.
Minimize stress
Getting rid of stress is impossible. This is part of life. But you can significantly reduce it by understanding the sources. There are two main causes of stress:
- non-realization of innate properties or a blow to values;
- inability to interact with people.
The stress of lack of implementation. Each person is born with a potential that helps him realize desires that are meaningful to him. For example, the owners of the visual vector are born to feel, merge their souls with another person, feed on the colors and beauty of this world and, of course, create it. But if their life is poor in emotions, they are limited in communication or locked in an office, as in a solitary cell, they will feel the meaninglessness of life, boredom and longing. The loss of loved ones, separation, divorce becomes a great stress for them. The unrealization of properties increases their level of anxiety, exacerbates their fears. Against the background of such experiences, craving for food can develop into a serious addiction.
People with an anal vector seize up resentment, lack of gratitude, the inability to complete the matter. Stress for them can be the constantly high rhythm of the big city, moving, changing jobs, exams, betrayal of a spouse.
Each vector has its own significant values, the impact on which can cause severe stress. Many people tend to compensate for it with food because it doesn't take a lot of effort. Yes, and there is no knowledge how to solve your psychological problem. And if we consider that a resident of a modern city has 3-5 vectors, the number of reasons to solve the problem with food increases.
The training helps you understand your desires and talents and start living life to the fullest. Then that emptiness, which was filled with a simple and short-term pleasure from food with many unpleasant consequences, is filled with deeds and events that bring real joy. Favorite hobby, a loved one next to you help you feel much more pleasure. When we are carried away, we forget about food, or at least it is easier for us to distract ourselves from thinking about it.
Other people as a source of stress. Other people are often the cause of our worries. We take offense at them, demand and do not receive attention. They annoy us with their vanity and stupidity.
A person who knows how to interact with people is a successful person. But how can this be achieved? Why relationships with men (women) do not develop? Why doesn't anyone love me? Why did the boss do this to me? The answers to these questions come during the training, and stress resistance increases. When we understand values, desires, "read" the thoughts of other people, life becomes more predictable, and the response "run or fight" does not appear so often.
Be mindful of food
1. Analyze your eating habits
Psychoanalysis, awareness of childhood traumas and habitual ways of reacting in different life situations establishes a connection between the conscious and the unconscious. What is realized ceases to influence us and lends itself to change.
There are many invisible levers in the subconscious that control life without our participation. You can start with the collective unconscious, that is, with the memory of humanity, which affects everyone. Ancient people also relieved stress from stress (at that time - due to hunger) at a common meal. After a person has eaten, he feels ripe, dislike for his own kind goes away. We still unknowingly use the same methods of dealing with stress. But for us this is already an archetypal (outdated) approach to solving problems.
You can also remember what eating habits have been inherent in you since childhood. Perhaps you were force-fed, and the long-forgotten stress of force-feeding forces you to eat when you are already full, when there is no feeling of hunger. Or they calmed you down with candy when they could not agree otherwise. All this needs to be remembered and realized how childhood patterns of behavior laid down by parents still affect you.
"Debriefing" is devoted to two thematic classes on food at the training "System-Vector Psychology", during which students have important realizations, and the attitude towards food and life in general changes significantly.
2. Become aware of conditions that trigger the sticking response
Everyone would do well to take a closer look at themselves while eating.
Elias Canetti, writer, playwright, thinker
System-vector psychoanalysis helps to better understand oneself, one's states. Before, you didn't realize that you were in fear, chronic resentment, or that lack of joy in life is associated with latent depression. Once these states are understood, it becomes easy to track which deficiencies overeating replaces. What becomes the trigger for eating "everything that isn't nailed down"? Fear, anxiety, resentment? These are states inherent in different vectors, which means that you need to cope with them with knowledge of your psychological characteristics.
Imagine: you suddenly find out that the report needs to be submitted tomorrow, and you only have half a day to finish it. Instead of concentrating and sitting down tightly to work, you generally stop thinking, thoughts scatter to the sides, and your legs themselves pull you to the refrigerator. When you come to your senses, you are already overeating and even less inclined to work. You put it off until the last moment.
This is a typical reaction of a person with an anal vector. He reacts to sudden changes with stress, which puts him into a stupor. The food is soothing, but the desire to act remains even less. Knowing your properties, the desire to do everything as much as necessary for a quality result, you need to avoid such turns. After all, you don't want to make mistakes in a hurry, do you? Is urgency really justified, or is it someone's crazy decision, not dictated by reason? We need to find out. If this happens all the time, is this the right place for you? This question must be answered, something must be changed in life, and the cause of stress will be eliminated.
3. Realize if you are really hungry
The best seasoning for food is hunger.
Socrates
At the moment when you want to have a snack, you need to stop and ask yourself the question: "Do I really want to eat or does it just seem to me?" When there is a real feeling of hunger (physical, not emotional), even a crust of bread and salt will taste good to you. This is a test that you are really hungry. When you go over in your mind one dish, then another and you can not stop at anything - this means that, most likely, there is no hunger.
This is how the human psyche works: he experiences the greatest pleasure when he has accumulated a great shortage. The larger the size of the void, the greater its filling.
Try fasting for at least 24 hours (for example, from dinner to supper), at least once, as an experiment to compare the pleasure of eating. After starvation, ordinary borscht will seem like a gourmet dish. And when you are emotionally hungry, you may endlessly eat chips, cookies, cakes, candy and not taste them. Because you are consumed by emotions, not by the taste of food. You are not enjoying the moment, but are caught in excitement.
When you get the experience of eating only after the feeling of real hunger appears, you will no longer want to fill your stomach when there is no such desire. Because it doesn't taste good.
Why training is changing attitudes towards food
The right attitude towards food can develop a taste for life.
Yuri Burlan
If the right habits were laid in a person from childhood (eat when hungry, eat as much as you want, and feel grateful for food, share food), his attitude towards life will also be appropriate. The ability to enjoy food = the ability to enjoy life.
To get rid of addiction to food, you can go from the opposite: if you learn to enjoy every day, you will be happy in your family and at work, you will have nothing to eat. You will only eat as much as you need for life.
The training "System-vector psychology" rebuilds neural connections to the ability to enjoy life. And people suddenly find that the constant craving for food has disappeared.
Doctor Diana Kirss tells about what the training "System Vector Psychology" gives for getting rid of food addiction:
Remember how Juliet filled the void inside?
