In this episode, I fly solo on a mission to bomb the ever-loving bejeezus out of emotional eating and the complexes of thought that keep you clinging to it. While simply touching the hem of my cloak via the airwaves may not instantly heal you, this primer on the functions of emotional eating and other compulsive behaviors will provide you with vital insight on your inner world.
Topics discussed:
- Why "emotional eating" isn't really emotional, rather the opposite.
- The vital role shame plays (and it's not what you think)
- How emotional eating begins
- Why kids are more susceptible to it than other substances
- The override system that fight or flight provides
- The time-travel effect of triggers
- Why food is particularly attractive to memory triggers.
- Why childhood psychological development makes us prone to "acting out" and how this dovetails with the ubiquity of food.
- Why the context of danger changes the way we experience memory.
- How this shuts down large parts of the brain in severe cases.
- Why "calming down" is often less about turning panic/stress "off" and more about turning the rest of the brain back "on."
- Why certain emotions get tagged as "dangerous" in childhood and thereby trip the "alarm bell" in adulthood despite the absence of any significant danger.
- Why you aways seem to care "way too much" or your reactions are not in balance with the present event that provoked them.
- How you can see these overreactions happening but still can feel powerless to stop them or their severity of feeling.
- How two humans with different conditioning can experience the same event in vastly different ways.
- Why we tend to recreate "triggering" situations in our lives.
- Why overeating or compulsive behavior doesn't respond well to "wanting to change" or "trying hard" or "self-control" and therefore is not a character issue
- How these behaviors cut us off from a sense of greater purpose, true identity, and our deepest values, and make us highly prone to future "triggers" or invalid alarm signals.
How We Heal - How our survival response, once provoked, convinces us we must overeat to survive.
- Why the brain often HAS to make logical leaps in order to develop survival mechanisms
- How we can reverse engineer this to our advantage in taking the apparatus apart.
- Why the story telling aspect of our survival mechanisms is so important and how we can use it to our advantage.
- How awareness both gives us increased influence over our conditioning and how we react, but also effectively dissolves structures of compulsion.
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