Post Pandemic STRESS & Comfort Eating

How the pandemic may have affected your nervous system, and vicarious trauma. These experiences may lead to comfort eating, or using substances to regulate how you feel. 

As we find ourselves recovering from COVID-19, we may still be coming to terms with the impact the virus has had on both our bodies and minds. None of us has escaped its effects. When we first went into lockdown, many of us were anxious and felt lonely. Those first few weeks were all about calming our nervous systems down from fight or flight. We responded to a very real threat by going into survival mode. But where are we now?

Try this podcast next: 10 Ways to Overcome Anxiety

Citations
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:

• Why A September Reset Might Be Just What You Need
• The ‘Will We, Won’t We?’ Narrative Of June 21 Is Exhausting
• 9 Therapist-Approved Tips To Tackle Nighttime Anxiety
• Do you have a FODO?
• How to deal with the 'deer in the headlights' feeling of overwhelm
• Why more empathy among employers is key for post-pandemic recovery
• Post Covid-19 stress: How to recover
• The effect of your upbringing on your comfort eating - How to heal

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, this is Underground Confidence with Shelly Treacher. Today I'm going to carry on talking about the effects of COVID-19 on us, but first I have a comment. I have a worrying reliance on food, and I'm struggling to overcome it. I need ways to think less about food. I want to know how to retrain my thoughts, patterns, and emotional reliance on food. All of my podcasts are about this. They're about how to manage the feelings underneath comfort eating, which are actually pretty common to anyone struggling with stress or self-doubt. So my podcasts are about managing those feelings, but I also talk about how to manage the habits that come with a comfort substance, namely food in this case, but it could be any substance. Last week I gave a rundown of the main tools for learning to quit comfort eating. This week, in response to this comment, I'd urge you to go back and look at the cravings podcast, and I'm going to tell you how I'm coping with cravings at the moment. So just knowing that a craving is something chemical that happens in my brain and in my system makes me not as interested. It's just knowing that piece of knowledge that there's something automatic that happens in just three brain cell movements that automatically leads me to knee-jerk response do something makes me feel a little bit rebellious. I feel a little bit like, well, I don't want to be under control of that. So I do still crave chocolate every morning, and I still don't eat it. Somehow the thought that it happens automatically in my system gives me the seconds or the minutes that I need to reassess what I really want. By becoming more mindful with what I need and being more honest with myself about what's going on inside me, somehow I get the time to start thinking in a different way. So I start thinking more consciously about what I'm actually doing and why I'm doing it, which again gives me the chance to make a different choice. I'm not saying I always get it right. I'm not saying I'm always a perfect eater. But knowing how this system works and taking it seriously and looking at that all the time, becoming quite conscious of what's going on, is giving me choices. So I guess my advice is to educate yourself. Find out what's going on in your system, find out what's going on with cravings, find out what's going on with habits, and find out what feelings you're responding to, and find out how other people respond to those feelings. Are there other ways that you could be doing this? I suppose firstly the thing to do is to forgive yourself for having this issue. It's very, very common. And then start trying to understand it with compassion. Today's subject should help you with one part of that. So let's start turning to how our nervous systems have been affected by COVID-19. None of us have escaped the experience of vicarious trauma. Vicarious trauma is the distress witnessed by someone who is in contact with other people suffering from trauma. It's clear to see how first responders may have been traumatised by the horrors they witness, but we've all been affected by so many things. We've been affected by constant horrific news updates, we have the fear of catching or passing on a deadly and horrible virus, we've been in continued isolation. This has brought up so much anxiety, depression, hopelessness for so many, and it may also have resurfaced past trauma and abandonment. We've had job, work and livelihood loss, or the fear of that loss. This causes powerful feelings of anxiety and despair. And COVID is not the only trauma. There's climate change and horrific prejudice as well. Any of this may have forced us to have a personal response, and it may have resurfaced our own past trauma. When we first went into lockdown, many of us were anxious. Those first few weeks were all about calming our nervous systems down from fight or flight. We responded to a very real threat by going into survival mode. This is a natural physiological response to danger. It cannot be stopped. It's a biological necessity that we all went through. You may have had one of the following responses. See if you can identify with any of them. Did you get angry about the situation? Some people focused on blaming the government and fighting injustice. There were arguments at home or demonstrations in the street. This could be classed as a fight response in the fight flight freeze cycle of responses to trauma. Or did you become anxious? Did you get stressed or did you overwork? This could also be a flight response to trauma. Remember I said last time that the feeling some of us had in lockdown was that we needed to do something? This is what I'm talking about. This is a flight based, fear based response. Or did you shut down and become quite insular? This could be a freeze response to trauma. We've all been affected by something traumatic here, and most of us have had one or all of these responses at times during the whole pandemic. Any one of them may have caused you to comfort eat or to rely on another substance to cope. I know I have at times. We're living in a world where even therapists have been affected by this one, so we all need great care and attention. I'm aware that our success in how we've coped in this period has relied on our connections mostly. I don't know if you know, but I run videos with my cat and I call it therapy cat videos on TikTok. And on one video I asked everybody to tell me how they had coped during the pandemic and what they'd used to do that. Hands down, everybody said the people and the connections that they had had got them through. I know that I've strengthened my connections with the people who helped to sustain me quite considerably in this time. Co-regulation is all about how we as humans need to regulate with others, to come out of trauma dysregulation. It's so much easier with other people. Without others, we may deaden. And we may feel that the trauma takes place in a vacuum because our sense of self is disintegrated. The experience of trauma is one of deep disconnect and disorientation, both individually and collectively. We become lost in time, space, safety, embodiment, narrative and relationship. It's like nothing that happened before counts now. Everything becomes unpredictable or uncertain internally. Add to that the external truth that things are still unpredictable for us. When we're traumatized, which we all have been, we become obsessed with finding safety. We've all experienced feeling dislocated or isolated due to the trauma. This means we're all going through something called collective trauma together. Trauma feels individual and personal, but it's actually relational. We may be very confused when we come out of this trauma. And we've also experienced incredible adaptability and collective resilience. As Miriam Taylor says in Deepening Trauma Practice, the task we undertake is to find a way to be with the trauma in order to create the possibility of meeting it with clarity and grace. She goes on to quote Melissa Harrison, who was lamenting the broken world in which we live. Her friend replied, Yes, the world is sick. We have to care for it as we would a sick child. This absolutely includes you. As you find yourself recovering from COVID-19, you may still be coming to terms with the impact the virus has had on both your body and mind. I mentioned that we may have re-experienced our past traumas during this time. Trauma can bring up other traumas, grief and isolation can bring up other grief or isolation you've experienced. My clients' experiences have been many. There have been some who've shut down and conserved their energy, some have got angry, some have felt more hopeless about being alone, many have overworked and worried, and most have processed old trauma. I myself, in the first stages of lockdown, my work cut by 50% in the second week, and I went into flight or fight or flight myself, and it wasn't till I had a pep talk by one of my mentors that I realized that I was in fight or flight, and I had to calm myself down before I could do anything about trying to get more clients. But I also re-experienced the abandonment of my childhood. Being so on my own for those first few weeks and months, I re-experienced this feeling of nobody loves me. I'm alone in the world. I knew this was trauma-triggering because of my profession, but I still had to go through those feelings and be caring and considerate of my inner child. You may have experienced some of this too. So now seems like a good time to do a little self-soothing exercise. I invite you to close your eyes and just start to notice that you're breathing. Allow your attention to focus in on your body and your experience and your energy. And start to locate a place in you that might need nurturing or comfort. And then gently allow yourself just to put a hand on that area and to breathe. Allowing this comforting contact and soothing. How would you communicate to this area that you want it to be comforted? And breathe. And then every time you breathe out, allow yourself to breathe out any tension or difficulty. And when you breathe in, breathe in the nurturing and the soothing and the warmth of this hand. You can pause the recording here if you need to experience this for longer. I'd love to hear how this affected you. Thank you for listening today. Next week I'll still be talking about the effects of COVID-19. I'll be talking about social anxiety. Please be in touch if you think that you could benefit from co-regulating in a group, because I have a couple of groups on offer right now. Please do also keep your comments coming in about how you've coped with COVID-19 and how you're feeling now. Now we're in this stage of the pandemic. Thank you so much. This is Shelly Treacher from Underground Confidence. I'll see you next Wednesday.