🎯SPECIFIC Advice From A Therapist: Psychology of Overeating

so much of the advice out there about how to stop overeating is focused through behavior and nutrition so it's things like don't eat this eat more of this don't keep Foods in the house plan your food and maybe some of that is all well and good but the problem is is that our behavior is preceded by what's going on in our psychology and what's going on in our emotions then a lot of the advice out there that comes from psychological lens tends to talk about things things like feeling your feelings and being more present when you eat and these are all great topics I mean I talk about them myself but they can feel really broad so I wanted to make this video to be really specific about some of the things that you could do things that you could do immediately that could make a difference these things I'm going to share with you today are all about how to harness some of our psychological processes so that they can start working for us and not against us so the first stage of getting our psychology to work for us is we need to be able to calm down our lower brain now our lower brain is where we have our emotions uh we have our Primal drives including our appetite and in our higher brain we have our executive functioning and decision making we often make the mistake of thinking our higher brain is more us because we become very identified with how we think the problem is if the lower brain isn't calm it's a very powerful system and because it does doesn't have language in the same way it can influence your behavior in ways that you don't understand and then you'll call it self- sabotage so in the realm of overeating there's two things we need to do to calm down our lower brain one is to eat enough this video is not about that but I bang on about that in every one of my videos because if you are trying to restrict you will continue to trigger off desires to ovat that's what's supposed to happen but the second piece is the capacity to process your emotions now I know that sounds like like a broad topic but I'm going to share with you something very simple and specific that you can do about this to help your brain get better at processing your emotions when you are asleep and you are in deep Sleep call it RM sleep stands for rapid eye movement because when someone is in that sleep if you look at them their eyes are moving back and forth under their eyelids we now know that when our eyes are doing that and we're in that kind of sleep that is when our brain is processing and when we are asleep our brains will prioritize Pro processing emotions over laying down memories it's why if you've gone through a stressful period in your life you can look back and your memories of it can be really vague that's because the processing your brain was doing at night was emotional now the way the brain does this and why the eyes move back and forth is because there's something going on in the brain that we call bilateral stimulation by meaning to lateral meaning across and stimulation so what's happening is the left and right hemispheres of the brain are communicating with one another they're in in synchronicity with one another now your right hemisphere tends to be a bit more emotional bit more creative and our left hemisphere tends to be a bit more logical and rational we also know that the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body so this bilateral stimulation that happens naturally in sleep we can do it while we're awake and it can still be very effective the most common form of bilateral stimulation that most of us do at some point throughout our day is walking we talk about walking as going out to clear our heads and it really does work for that reason now before you think I'm about to say to you just go out for a walk I'm not I appreciate that it's not practicable every time you want to process some emotions to just go off for a walk there is a lovely technique that has been well researched as a form of bilateral stimulation that works very well you can do it anywhere and it's called The Butterfly hug so in order to do the butterfly hug all you do is hook your thumbs together like this so it looks like yep a butterfly you place it on your your chest and you just start to tap it's as simple as that and this is bilaterally bilaterally stimulating my brain my brain's going left right left right and what's happening is those two parts of the brain can communicate with each other doing it like this is very soothing for the nervous system as well this is a sematic exercise that can help calm us down so that we can process so much of the processing of our emotions actually happens unconsciously in our brains so we just want to support that process by utilizing something like bilateral stimulation if you want to know more about it like there's loads of information out there on the worldwide web there's a great uh website called Google I think it's going to catch on I've been using it for a long time and it's it's really good for finding our information now the second stop on our psychological tour is that we need to shift the psychology of scarcity so you may well be eating enough but if your lower brain keeps freaking out cuz it keeps worrying woring that there isn't going to be enough food to eat that is something that could drive you to eat even more so this is a very simple technique that I came up with I started doing it for myself on my own journey and I've used it with clients as well who have also found it helpful and it's simply this it's part of the decision making process so usually when you were trying to decide whether to eat something or not you're treating it as a yes or no decision so yes I can have it or no I can't some brains get very threatened by the no I can't have it makes you want it even more right so what I'm offering for you to try is in that moment to consciously be staying to yourself This is not a yes or no decision this is a now or not now decision it's like our brains need constant reminding that the food is available it is going to be allowed later as well which is why this doesn't work alongside restriction we have to start shifting how we make decisions around food the process that takes us to the decision if if we want to be able to make different decisions so it's never yes I can no I can't it's am I going to have it now or am I not going to have it right now now there will be occasions in life of course where it really is a Now or Never moment maybe you're on holiday or you're in this crazy expensive restaurant that you're not going to go back to for a while in that case I say just enjoy the food we're looking at trying to shift habits here and things that are working against you not taking away your freedom and your permission to enjoy a variety of foods third stop off point in this psychological tour is we need to be able to disrupt habitual patterns when we're doing something repeatedly so we're stuck in a cycle of something that neural network that corresponds to this cycle gets stronger and stronger so what it can feel like is the minute your brain starts off down this path there's only one way it's going to end if you've ever had that you haven't overeaten yet but you have that feeling of inevitability that it's coming and you feel powerless before it's even happened you feel powerless to stop yourself this is what's happening in the brain you're stuck on this track and it's like you can't get off it if you try to resist it by fighting with yourself unfortunately that is part of the same network because that's been such a repeated pattern in the past as well so what we're trying to do is jump off the track and direct our attention some somewhere else now some people might use distraction for this and that can work sometimes you might want to try that but it doesn't always work or it's not always available to distract yourself so ideally we want to be able to teach our brains to be able to psychologically jump off that track onto something else and we do that by asking a question because when we ask our brains a question we are telling our brains you need to go and find the answer it needs to go and look for the answer and this is the question that I use what happen happens if I don't eat this food right now what happens because the thing is when you're on the track your brain can only see one possible outcome nothing else feels possible in that moment but when you ask the question you're just asking it to imagine and this is why you don't want to be getting in a fight with yourself you just want to be inviting your brain to go and have a look because it needs to have an image or a picture of an idea of what that would look like and feel like not to have the food right now now occasionally when I did this my brain would go I don't care like it wouldn't even want to answer the question it would just go I don't care and that's normally because my lower brain needed to be calmed down and that's either by making sure I'm eating enough or processing my emotions this is why I've presented them in this order so if you find that's happening go back to calming down your lower brain first because these later things need your executive function to be online otherwise they won't they won't work so ask asking what happens when I don't your brain has to access another part of the brain to imagine a world where you didn't always say I'll have it now and the last place we're going to go to in this world of psychology is reverse psychology now me saying that might conjure up I ideas of like a teenager who wants to rebel and then when they have permission to do the thing suddenly they're less interested quite often with overeating or compulsive eating many of us feel like it's quite a rebellious part of us that wants to eat and the reasons Rebels Rebel is because they feel like they are being controlled and when your Rebel isn't cooperating when you can't control your overeating it's like you double down you double down on trying to force the rebel into submission and they just fight back this is how we end up in a battle with ourselves so there's two ways you can Implement reverse psychology one is to plan to eat more more if you're anything like me when I was trying to get a handle on my eating I was always planning to eat less and so then I always ended up eating more when that switched and I actually started planning to eat more what I noticed the Paradox was was that I ate less this is the law of reversed effort it's this idea that when we want something so badly we cling on to it so tightly that we keep breaking it it's like if you're someone who struggles with sleep the more you try really really hard to fall asleep the more elusive it will become if you're someone for whom your recovery from your eating issues has become your whole world it is your purpose in life to fix yourself with this food thing what would it be like to just go maybe I give myself a few weeks where I didn't think about this or I just I go and live my life I focus on all the things I imagine I would be focusing on once I had fixed my problem this was another thing that happened for me and it wasn't particularly intentional I had never thought about it in terms of the law of revers effort but i' got to a point where I was like geez maybe I'm just going to struggle with this forever like what if that is true maybe it's not possible for me to feel balanced and calm around food and feel like I'm free to make my choices and so it wasn't like I accepted it and I was like okay that's fine but there was pardon me was going I need to still live my life I can't keep putting my life on hold and so when I did start carving out a life and and doing things and learning I started training to be a therapist at this time actually having those other things to put my energy into ironically or paradoxically actually meant I was able to recover the law of reversed effort you can also find that on that website I told you about earlier Google my frustration out there is so many the people who were trying to help people with this problem of overeating they're either looking at it from a oh how do you say yes to to food more often like those are the people in the uh anti-diet world like say yes say yes say yes and then you got people over here on the other side going this is how you say no to food this is how you say no no no and I'm trying to find this Middle Ground where it's like we need to learn how to say yes and no and to practice doing both of those in an emotionally psychologically and physically healthy way if you want to know more about me my events communities yada yada yada all that stuff below see you later

Channel: The Binge Eating Therapist

Views: 52,911

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Id: X1hZQRJG3JE

Length: 12min 34sec (754 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 22 2024