BURNOUT, Fatigue, & Comfort Eating

I talk about how you can recover from burnout and fatigue, Covid-19 stress, and how it has affected our eating. The pandemic brought us so many challenges. Each one of these might cause us to seek comfort. Part 1 is about stress burnout.

This week, my citations are from my own media mentions. Here are some Covid-19 related published articles, where I have been asked to contribute:

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, I'm Shelly Treacher from Underground Confidence, or the Binge and Over Eating Recovery podcast, which it previously was named. Today and for the next few podcasts, I'll be talking about COVID-19 stress and how it's affecting our eating. But first I have an announcement. I mentioned last week that the podcast name is changing to Underground Confidence. This week I also want to tell you that I'm going to be changing the format slightly. One of the biggest pieces of feedback I ever receive is that these podcasts are jam-packed with ideas and things to understand. I'm told over and over again that people even take notes as they listen. If you're a note taker when you're listening to my podcasts, apparently you are not alone. I'm incredibly flattered that many of you feel I have that much to offer that you want to write it down. Clearly, I need to invest in transcription, but until I can get that sorted out, I also can't help but think that I might be giving you too much information all at once. So I'm gonna be experimenting with producing shorter podcasts, perhaps for more often. Please bear with me as I work out the logistics of this and let's see how it goes. I will still be here every Wednesday. So now let's turn to the QA. When people join my Facebook Comfort Eating Recovery Support Group, they're asked what they want to hear me talk or write about. One request, and one that I get very often, is to explain more about what causes comfort eating and how it can be overcome. That's actually the aim of my podcast, so all of the podcasts are about this in some way or another. It's a big subject to try and understand. But I know that in order to break a habit, there needs to be a lot of repetition and reminders. So I thought this would be a great opportunity to remind you of some of the things that I've said before. As I've said before, it takes something special to sustain a new habit. So don't beat yourself up if you need this to be repeated. And don't give yourself a hard time if you've gone back to binging or you feel like you've failed. Just get back on that horse again and congratulate yourself for any small change or win. These are the main things that I see people use and that I use myself to stop comfort eating. The first one is to identify why you really want to stop comfort eating. This is not about the presenting reason of wanting to lose weight because you want to look better. That might be a reality for you, but it hasn't stopped you from eating so far. This is about finding something much more meaningful to you. I often quote examples from my life about why I do things and how things work for me, so I've been talking all about this in the last podcasts, but this is one that happened for me this weekend. So this weekend I chose not to drink any alcohol and chose not to have any caffeine because I really wanted to get some good night's sleep. You might think that's good enough reason. But actually, the real motivation was because of what I was doing for the rest of the weekend. I returned to dancing this weekend. It's something that's been really important to me in the past, and of course I've not been able to do it with any partners in the last year and a half. So I returned to dancing properly on Saturday night. And I've gotta say, I really did myself a favour, because being clear-headed and being more together in my body meant that I had such an excellent night and felt like I could dance again, which is something I wasn't expecting to feel, and I'm really grateful for. And then Sunday I was meeting with somebody special and we had something important to talk about, and I wanted again, I wanted to be clear-headed for that, and to give it my all, and to respect that person and that situation, and that relationship and that experience. So all of those things helped me to bear in mind that I didn't need to fix or to comfort that very insidious craving that I might have had for alcohol or for caffeine. And I did, I did have those cravings. So look beyond what you think is your initial motivation and look, make a list of things that really mean something to you that you will be able to do if you don't give in to that craving. Number two is find and challenge your habits around food. I've talked a lot about this, especially last week, so you might want to go back and listen to those podcasts. Number three, learn to be objective. That's kind of what we're talking about already. Learn to observe your behaviour, observe your thoughts, observe your feelings, so that you know exactly what's going into why you're choosing a comfort food or any other kind of comfort. And then more specifically, pinpoint your self-critic. Guaranteed this is always something I find at the root of people's comfort eating is a self-critic is somebody who's being really critical to themselves and then feels awful about it, so they need to comfort eat. So do some research on yourself. How are you talking badly to yourself, and in a way that might make you want to comfort eat. Number four. Distinguish your inner child or your feelings. The feelings that you have in response to that inner critic. And be kind to yourself, attend to these feelings. This again is something that my podcasts are all about. If you're not sure how to identify your inner child, go back again and listen to a lot of my podcasts about any kind of emotion, and they will tell you a bit more about how you're feeling. My penultimate suggestion is to reverse your criticism with a more reasonable thought. This is about challenging your self-critic and seeing if it's actually realistic what the criticism is or whether you're just being really hard on yourself because you've learnt to do that. So to be challenging it with something more reasonable, something more adult, something more mature, something more kind and something more broad-minded. And then lastly, expand your resourcefulness and your self-soothing. Because you're gonna need something else to replace the food when you need comfort. And the idea behind all of my podcasts is that if you can learn to express yourself, and then you can learn to resource yourself and use techniques to self-soothe, then you're gonna be in a much better position to just choose not to eat comfort food. The habits that you build around food may be exacerbating self-criticism. That's why it's so important to get on top of the shame that you might feel about eating. There are reasons why you do it. Overcoming this is all about understanding yourself, what you're doing, and how you got here. Then relearning how to be kind to yourself in the present. This is what self-care really means. As I often say, it's not easy. It's not a quick fix, but it is possible. So now let's get on with talking about how COVID nineteen has been affecting us. COVID nineteen has brought us so many challenges, each one of which might cause you to seek comfort. Closer to five million people have died of COVID nineteen around the world. There is absolutely nobody who has not been affected by COVID nineteen. Everyone's been affected and continues to be affected. We're still going through this. In some ways my job here in exploring the mental health effects of COVID nineteen is impossible because we don't know that yet and we won't know some of them for a long time. Much is still unprocessed because we're still going through it. So nobody is an expert in this yet, but what is clear is that we live with uncertainty like we never have before. In our generational lifetimes at least. Here are some of the things that my clients have told me they've experienced and that I know a lot of people must have experienced during COVID 19. Becoming wary of strangers being scared to leave the house feeling isolated and disconnected. If we usually coped by relying on other people, this has been tricky. There's been a scarcity of resources and panic buying. The use of food banks has increased, domestic violence has increased, child sexual abuse has increased, mental health problems have increased, and we have become aware of mental health much more than we were before. And we've also become aware of global privilege in different countries compared to others. The lines between our personal and professional lives have become far more blurred than they were before. The way we work has been changed forever. It was inconceivable before. We've had to negotiate new spaces to work in with the people that we live with. Many of us now have a hybrid way of working, with a mixture of working from home or in person. I asked my clients recently whether they wanted to go back to one-on-one working or whether they wanted a hybrid working way themselves. Every single one of them wanted a more flexible way of working. For whatever reason, one-to-one has lost its charm. But as I was saying, this has not been easy for anyone. In the spirit of keeping this from being overwhelming, which is highly pertinent to the subject of today, today I'll just talk about one thing, I'm going to talk about burnout. Burnout and fatigue are really to be expected at this time. As one of my clients said this week, she realized the majority of her binge eating happens when she's tired. So burnout may be part of what's making you eat in this unusual time. Burnout happens when the nervous system is overwhelmed and overworked. Our bodies get tired of responding to danger, drama, and crisis. You might be experiencing or have experienced, as I know many of my clients have, many, many times in the course of the pandemic, apathy, negativity, tiredness, or feeling distant. As we slowly start to come out of the pandemic, we can expect to be exhausted for perhaps a really long time to come. Especially as we don't even know if we're coming out of it yet. I was quoted in The Independent recently saying that you may have a desire to reset without the energy to actually do it. What you need most is to move forward steadily and with self-care. Overwhelm occurs when we have too much to think about or too many feelings happening all at once. We can become dissociated, confused, stuck, and unmotivated because it's humanly difficult to focus on more than one thing at a time. Yet we're often overloaded with tasks. In lockdown, many of us felt the need to do something. This is a fear-based response. People can become addicted to productivity, which makes them push themselves too far. If you tend to bite off more than you can chew, you're not the only one. Most people assume that everyone else can handle more than they themselves can, so they try to extend their own personal limits. Perfectionists are at a high risk of feeling overwhelmed now because they're constantly seeking to do better, leading to more pressure and stress. Now more than ever, we might fear losing work, so feel the need to prove ourselves and take on too much. As a result, we find ourselves feeling tense, anxious, and breathless. When we rush, we breathe shallowly. This leads to the restricted nervous system activity of fight or flight. Overwhelm is the nervous system starting to close down and protect itself from too many stimuli. So here are some hints on how to combat burnout and to recover. Well, to start, it's important to know when a piece of work is finished. People with perfectionist tendencies may spend a long time trying to improve something only to end up feeling frustrated and stressed. First, you need to forgive yourself for being human. It's easy to berate yourself for being unproductive, but it's not your fault. Give yourself a break both in terms of self-criticism and literally. Take one step at a time. Plan your schedule, prioritize the most important tasks, complete one task at a time, and reschedule everything else. Slow down and breathe more deeply. We often underestimate how much time we'll need for a project. And we're also often chasing that reward system that I talked about last time. When you do something productive, it gives you that dopamine hit, makes you feel like you're doing really well. So we might be chasing that as another form of comfort. The point of self-regulation is to bring your nervous system out of stress or overwhelm to a more calm state. When we're worried, shocked, stressed, exhausted, or grieving, our bodies go into a sensitive, hyper-aroused state, or an underactive, hypo-aroused state. Our need is to bring the body back to our more balanced window of tolerance. Breathing is just one way that you can start to balance your nervous system immediately. You can do this lying down, sitting comfortably, standing, or walking. You can try it with me now if you want to. So just breathe in for four seconds. One, two, three, four, and hold it for four, two, three, four, and let it go for four, three, four, and pause for four, two, three, four. And just repeat that until you feel calmer. But you can also do whatever frequency feels right for you. These kinds of techniques help you move into the part of your brain that's rational and reasonable and compassionate. This is a completely different part of your brain from the part that deals with stress. It's where you regain a sense of self and can make good choices for your well-being. This part can stop you from overworking, using comforts and addictions, and can choose to rest. Often I find I start yawning pretty quickly when I do these kinds of exercises. And this is a great sign. It means your parasympathetic nervous system is coming back online, which means you'll have access to this karma more reasonable part. I also have started singing recently. I don't know if you've seen on iTunes on the top right hand corner, if you're using it on a desktop, but you can get all the lyrics to all the songs that they have. This is a great revelation for me. And I'm improving my breathing and my voice, and also hopefully reducing my snoring, apparently, by learning to sing. So I've been singing every day, and I must say it does make it interesting to see how much I'm breathing, and to be able to try and keep up with the songs, it means I have to breathe quite a lot. It's it's a good exercise, I'd recommend it. Another way to deal with burnout is to respond to your feelings and your needs. Taking time to acknowledge what you feel may be all that you need to shift. Sometimes just saying it out loud helps. Crying is also designed to make us feel a lot better. It releases chemicals that actually calm us down. It kind of acts as an anaesthetic. The body is where emotions begin. By staying focused on your bodily experience of emotion, it can be understood and moved through quite quickly. You can also internally step away a little. Observe the feelings and states that you experience from a slight distance. Your feeling state is only one part of you, and only one state that you experience as a human. You are so much more than that. This may be something you need professional help with. Sometimes it takes time to learn how to trust your feelings. The effects of COVID-19 may have caused you to block off your feelings to cope, and you might be using food to do that. Often this may reflect a previous trauma too. I'll be talking more about that next time, but understanding how you feel and addressing that is often all that you'll need. Just acknowledging or expressing how you feel can start to release burnout and make you feel better. That's it for today. Thank you so much for listening. This week, I'm particularly interested in hearing about your experience of what you're finding difficult in this stage of the pandemic. How are you feeling now? What are you struggling with? I would really love to hear what you have to say. Next week, I'll be talking about how our nervous systems may have responded to the pandemic. If you want to hear about everything that I have to offer, please sign up for my newsletter. The latest Understand Your Reading program is halfway through, so we're nearly there. So I will be looking for people to join up for my next program. Please be in touch if you want to find out more about that. Thanks again for listening. I'll see you next Wednesday.