"I only eat badly in the evening" - EVENING BINGE EATING

Today, we explore the relationship between having a busy life, anxiety, and comfort eating. We delve into the reasons why people work so hard, naming potential triggers; addiction to productivity, fear of stopping, the desire to please others, or anxiety. The podcast highlights how these contribute to distress, which can lead to comfort eating after the day's work is done. Shelley emphasises understanding and addressing the emotional roots of these behaviours, and offers insights on coping with worry and anxiety.

Shelley also invites listeners to join her community for resources to help you overcome comfort eating and emotional struggles.

Citations
Some ideas here were inspired by a Nicabm training on working with anxiety. You can buy your full training programme here

Try this podcast next: 10 Ways to Overcome Anxiety

Transcript

Shelley Treacher Underground Confidence Recovery: 0:00

Today, I'm going to talk about being overproductive and how this might be affecting how you eat in the evenings. Hi, I'm Shelley Treacher from Underground Confidence Recovery. I help people to overcome comfort eating By understanding and coming to terms with the emotion that lies underneath. If you're ready to do something about your eating now, I'd really recommend joining my developing community. The link is in the show notes but you'll also find me under all the app stores under Underground Confidence. Today I'm going to start with a really brief quote from a client. This is something that's always stuck in my mind since she said it. It's such a simple thing, she said pottering is really underrated. And I couldn't agree more. She was actively embracing being able to just do nothing or to follow her body for what she wanted to do and to find value in that. It can be so difficult to let ourselves do that, right? So this is what I'm going to talk about today. This is the third podcast in a series about comfort eating in the evenings. So to recap what I've talked about in the last two weeks. It was understanding your evening eating habits and thoughts, observing what state you're in in the daytime that might be causing you to binge eat, being curious about what the binge is doing for you, and recognising a stress state. Today we're talking about over productivity and anxiety. Once you start getting into this subject you're really left with the question of why? Why do we work so hard? When you're in the state that you're in before you go home and start comfort eating. The state that you're in when you're working or you're doing something. What is the reason for that state? Just like we're asking what's the reason for your binge, what's the reason for the state? Why do you work so hard? Why are you actually in this state? If you're in a stressed state at work, what's causing you to rush? Or to make you do all that you do in the day, in the way that you do it? In the state that you do it in? What is that state doing for you? Maybe you could even ask, how is it trying to help you? If you ask this compassionately, what is it trying to do? One of the reasons that I see quite often is an addiction to productivity. This is such a big thing in our culture. We always have to be doing, don't we? It's actually a chemical that's released in your brain that when you do something productive, makes you feel good. Just like when you eat chocolate. So you might be addicted to productivity. This is your physiological system and the chemical saying,"I need more of this productivity to feel good about myself." Does that sound familiar? This is a lot like sugar or junk food or any other drug, right? You can start to see this as another pattern of thinking that you have, or a habit. You're literally brainwashing yourself into thinking productivity is amazing. The best thing that you can do to make yourself happy. But it's exhausting, isn't it? Another reason for being so busy in the daytime is being afraid to stop. This in itself deserves compassionate understanding. I imagine this is quite common at the moment with the economy as it is. We're a little bit scared right now, right? But stopping and bearing discomfort is hard. And we choose naturally not to do it. But sooner or later, in order to give up comfort eating or to overcome the habits that you've got around food, you are going to have to learn to bear that discomfort of being human and emotional. I've talked a lot about this in podcasts. And it's true, you really do just have to do that work. And most likely you'll be the first one in your family with all of your ancestry to do that. Another reason that people are overproductive is in order to please other people. Here we're worrying about what people think of us. Maybe you're comparing yourself to everybody else and thinking that you have to work really hard, otherwise everybody's going to think badly of you. This is a really hard one, again. Rejection is something we don't like. And we all have our own stories around rejection, or our own belief about what it is, and our own response to it. If you just imagine being rejected now, someone saying no to you, what's your instinctive belief or thought or feeling? I had one client who suddenly realized she said, so basically, I'm working too hard because I'm just afraid of getting told off." And often, it is about not being liked in some way. Can you relate to that? Not many of us can handle not being liked or being told off. We don't like any kind of criticism, do we? Especially, perhaps, in our British stiff upper lip culture. As a nation, we are notoriously avoidant of any kind of conflict or confrontation. We hate it in England. I lived in America for three years once. I have to say, whenever I see that there are any listeners from America, especially California, I often feel a little bit of pride because that's where I lived for three years. It was actually the highlight of my life, but that's a whole nother story. But one of the things I really noticed when I came back after being in America for three years was how much everybody put themselves down and apologized for everything. I found it really claustrophobic. Because of course it triggered that back in me. But most of the time, we are imagining that we will be told off or thought of badly. So this is a really good thing to understand that you might be triggered into. If you feel that you're overproductive in the daytime and you get into a stress state while you're working, have a look for your self critic. Somewhere behind the most stressed out people is a self critic. So identify what that critic is saying about how you should run your day. It's going to help you to say something like this in your head,"Actually, I'm going to slow down, because that's going to be better for me." Being in a place of worrying about other people, we forget ourselves, and that's the key here. Worry or anxiety is another great big reason why people work so hard, and for evening eating. Obviously it could be a big reason for eating at any time of the day, comfort eating, but it's often at the heart of evening eating or stress eating. We all worry, and we've had a lot to worry about in the last few years. Some worry is important to identify for addressing what really matters to us. It's an important signal that something may not be right, so we need to work it out. It helps us to avert danger or discomfort. But most of us don't really have a lot of education in how to cope with worry. The problem here with comfort eating, Or with going from a stress state to perhaps a collapsed state in the evening Is that the worry, or the subject of the worry, or what's underneath the worry, never really gets addressed. It just gets squashed and denied. A really common example that I see of this every day is that people often worry about their weight and their body image instead of addressing underlying loneliness or self rejection. Generally, anxiety is fear of the unknown. It's a fear of doing something or needing something, and being unable to meet that need. Worry is often about the past or the future. Worry assumes that something was or will be very wrong. And worry asks, what if? And being uncertain about the answer of what if, what might happen. This always invites projection, fantasy, lack of reality. Worry almost always involves giving yourself a hard time. Like a stress state that I talked about last time, the physical signs of anxiety are a flat face, breathing only in the upper chest, and a monotone, high pitched voice. Anxiety is also a heightened state of fear and defence. What's happening in the body is that it's getting ready to defend or protect itself. For the comfort eater, as with most of us in Western society, anxiety is so uncomfortable that our instinct is to just avoid it, to pretend it's not there, to plough through it. But this is really harsh, and it means we never actually address what's underneath it. So the worry never really gets met or sorted out. And then on top of that, this whole attitude of denying worry, Also, makes you feel shame for feeling it, or for being vulnerable. So you might be eating because you're worried in the first place about something, and then also because you feel ashamed for worrying. I've heard countless numbers of clients calling themselves stupid for worrying about something. The belief underneath worry and anxiety is that we can't cope. We fear the worst of what we think we might feel. Which actually, if you try and work out what that is, it's quite hard to identify. Most of the time we're not actually afraid of what we think might actually happen. With anxiety, we overestimate the risk and we underestimate our ability to cope. Here, our belief systems play a huge part. How do you behave when something worries you? What do you usually worry about? And can you see that you respond to anxiety with food? The physiological state of anxiety actually increases anxiety. As the breath gets higher in the body, we start to panic. A panic attack can occur with the combination of this chest breathing and worried thoughts, especially if there is a belief that there will be a panic attack. As a binge or comfort eater, your body is in a state of fight, flight or freeze a lot of the time. As I've mentioned before, the state of binge eating is a dissociative or an angry state, where physiologically you may be in a heightened defense state when you eat, so you may be susceptible to worry as well. Given that this is a natural physiological state that can't be stopped, and you can't just be okay if someone says, Hey, calm down, forget about it. That's likely to inspire you to do the opposite. We're more likely to calm down if we address the physiological symptoms of our anxiety. And understanding what we need to do about the worry underneath. And often there's nothing we need to do, actually. This is just a trigger system. Of beliefs. Or from core wounding. And sometimes as a deeply grooved habit, it is actually possible to be addicted to anxiety as well. But it's all in the name of ignoring something that you're too afraid to face. With a binge or comfort eating, you are trying to achieve a certain physical state or a certain emotional well being. But unfortunately, the substance perpetuates that problem cycle. And it doesn't really work for long. Of course, it makes you feel worse by the end of the day or by tomorrow, or actually sometimes instantly. I'm going to give you a way through this. Clearly something else is needed. Something apart from people pleasing. Or working too hard. So next week I'll start talking about what you can do about stress eating in the evening. What I've talked about in the last three weeks is understanding your evening eating habits and thoughts, observing what state you're in in the daytime that might be causing you to binge in the evenings. I've asked you to be curious about what the binge is doing for you in the evening. And I've asked you to ask yourself why you stress in the daytime. Today I've talked about the contribution of over productivity and of anxiety. If you're ready to disrupt your life, and do something about your comfort eating, please join my community. There's a ton of free information here. Everything that I produce goes through the community now. I had a lovely conversation recently with somebody on TikTok. She most graciously let me know that the transition I was using was off putting for her in my videos. I really appreciate that kind of feedback, because it's difficult to know what people are receiving. But this led to us talking about my podcast, which she then checked out and said that she couldn't stop listening to it. I'm telling you this because there's a lot of stuff for free on there. that you might find really useful. As another one of my YouTube comments has said recently, I'm severely underrated. And I'm getting sick of this. So sign up for free and get to know what I have to offer you. There really is mainly only free information on there at the moment because I'm developing this app. But if you're not sure if your eating is emotional, I have a little mini course for you there. Much more to follow in the coming months. So be one of the first to know when something bigger comes out. The link is in the show notes but you'll also find me under all the app stores under Underground Confidence. Thank you so much for listening today. This is Shelley Treacher from Underground Confidence. I will see you next Thursday.