Expand Your Emotional Capacity

Welcome to episode 8 of Binge Breakthrough. We are in the middle of a deep dive into the eight solutions to unwinding binge eating. 

In Episode 1, I talked about my history and what I mean when I talk about bingeing.

In Episode 2, I discussed the 8 reasons why people binge.

In Episode 3, I covered the 8 solutions - one answer for why you binge.

In the 4th and 5th reasons why you binge (Episode 6 and Episode 7), we have discussed the importance of understanding what is happening in your body and how to connect with it.

This week - we are looking at reason #5 why you binge - it's a coping mechanism. You use it to cope with big emotions or things that feel too scary or overwhelming. 

The solution to bingeing as a coping mechanism is to expand your emotional capacity. In expanding your emotional capacity, it is best to start small. Remember, this is a new skill that you are developing. Just like at the gym, start small and work your way up. 

Don't forget to notice and celebrate your progress. This is an important part of making change sustainable. 

Define Your Food Freedom Workshop

Have you ever defined what food freedom actually means for YOU? Knowing what you don't want isn't enough. It's important to know what you are working towards and to make sure that your definition is supporting you, not sabotaging you. 

Join me live October 5th - Save your spot.

Want to know why you struggle with food and what to do next? Start watching The Food Freedom Mini Series today. 

Transcript

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Welcome to Binge Breakthrough, a podcast designed to help you finally break through the barriers that keep you stuck, feeling out of control around food. I'm Master Certified Coach Jane Hilker, and I want you to know that no matter how long you've been struggling or what you've tried, food freedom is possible. And I'm here to show you how. After years of therapy, eating disorder treatment, restrictive diet, and reading all the books, I will still stop in the on-again, off-again cycle of restricting and binging and how I was able to see it all from a new perspective that changed everything. Each week I will share the strategies, tools, and mindset that allowed me to overcome my decades-long battle with binge eating. Your journey to body trust starts now. Let's dive in. Hello, trusted listener. Welcome to episode eight of Binge Breakthrough. I call you a trusted listener because I trust that you are listening to this episode at exactly the right time for you. That there is something that you are going to hear today in this podcast that is going to be the start of a breakthrough for you. No matter where you are in this journey, that there is something in what I have to share with you today that you need to hear in this very moment. And I trust that you are going to come away with this with something that you can apply today for your life so that you can start to see your journey with food, your relationship with food in a new way, that you are going to hear something different, something that you can apply right away into your life. So today, we're in the middle of a deep dive into the eight solutions to unwinding binge eating. And if you're with me for the first time, I want to give you a little bit of recap of where we've been and kind of where we're going. So in episode number one, I shared my story of two and a half decades of binge eating, just so that you can understand that I get it. And I also talked a little bit about what I mean when I talk about binge eating. And then in episode two, I went over the eight reasons that I see why most people are stuck in the pattern of binge eating, binge eating. And then in episode three, I went into the solutions to each of those eight reasons. I outlined and summarized the how to stop binging, in summarizing those eight reasons, those eight answers for the eight reasons why you binge. And so then what we're doing now is we're diving deep, one episode for each of the eight solutions for how to stop binge eating. Now, the last couple of weeks, we've been talking about the importance of working with and understanding what is happening inside your body. We talked about the nervous system and we also talked about learning to connect with your body. And this week, we're looking at reason number five why you binge, and that is that it's a coping mechanism. You use it to cope with big emotions or things that just feel too scary or overwhelming to deal with. So I want to start with this. It is not a bad thing that you use food to cope. If you've been through, if you've been with me through this series, you might remember the number one reason why you binge, it's shame and judgment about the behavior. Thinking that you're bad, wrong, or broken because of what you do with food. Now, this is the number one reason. Because when you're in shame and judgment, you literally don't have access to the curiosity and compassion that is required for long-term change. So if you think that you are bad or you're wrong because you use food to cope with challenging emotions, you won't be able to see the solution for what it is. You'll continue to stay in shame and judgment and continue to eat to cope because you don't have the skills to be with those emotions or to recognize them and to shift them. So this is another place that these eight solutions become intertwined. Remember, none of them stand on their own. Okay, so what is the solution then to using food as a coping mechanism? The solution is to expand your emotional capacity. Okay, so then what is emotional capacity? Emotional capacity is your ability to be with any emotion. Now I want to be really clear. This is a skill. It can be learned, practiced, and improved. So most of us didn't learn about emotions growing up. We weren't taught how to recognize them, to name them, and to process them. So it makes sense that our emotional capacity might be very small. As we were growing up, we learned that when we were happy, we got praise, approval, or acceptance. Many of us were told not to be too emotional, too loud, or too much of anything. Now, I want to be clear, this really is not anybody's fault. It's not like our parents or teachers were keeping a secret from us. They didn't know any better. So in my house, we didn't talk about emotions. We didn't say, I love you, we didn't hug, and we did not do conflict. If somebody got upset or frustrated, we would just walk away. I often went to my room and slam the door and wouldn't come out until the next morning. That's how I dealt with being frustrated or angry. I would just go slam the door. And the next morning, when I would come out, there was never any discussion of what happened, any resolution of the conflict. We just went right back to life as if nothing had ever happened. Now, when I look back on this, I so wish that I could remember what I did when I went into my room, but I don't. I really don't remember. I think I just shut down, which is part of why I can't remember what I used to do. Now, if we fast forward like decades, at least one and a half decades later, I was in intensive outpatient therapy at a local eating disorders treatment center. And we were doing art therapy. And as we were doing art therapy, there was this door that kept slamming shut. And it was very triggering to me. Each time I heard that door slam, I could just feel this tension inside my entire body. At the moment, I probably couldn't have even told you that. All I knew is that it was just like, oh, it was so, it just like, it drove me crazy, is probably all I could have told you. And after some processing with some people at um at the through IOP, the intensive outpatient therapy, I realized that after I left home and I went to college, I used binging to slam the door on myself and my emotions because I started binging when I went to college. And it was such a revelation for me to kind of create this awareness of like, wow, the binging is my way of slamming the door on myself. And what was so amazing about it was once I had this awareness that my binging was myself slamming the door on myself, that door at the uh in the art therapy room, that door, it kept slamming, but it no longer bothered me. This is why I talk so much about the importance of awareness. It's everything when it's when it comes to the process of change. All change starts with awareness. That door in the art therapy room, it did not stop slamming, it did not make any less noise. The only thing that changed was my awareness of why that door slamming was so impactful for me, that it was so triggering for me. That just having that awareness of, oh wow, I am slamming the door on myself with a binge. That awareness itself changed my response to the slamming of the door. Now, when it comes to change, this is why awareness is so important. So many of us, we just want to get into action. Tell me what to do, tell me what to change. But just becoming aware of something can create big shifts in perspective that are necessary for that change to take place. And this is part of why I love doing this podcast, is my hope and my desire with this podcast is that I can help create these perspective shifts for you so that you can listen and think, oh, wow, okay, I am aware of something now that I was never aware of before. That awareness starts the change. This is why just listening, becoming aware of things that you weren't aware of before, shifting that perspective. It is the start of everything, particularly when you can get out of the shame, the judgment. It allows that awareness to take place. The awareness can't really take place when we're in shame and judgment. It's like the shame and judgment shut down the ability and the capacity for us to even be aware. Okay, so with awareness, we're going to now we've talked about awareness. Let's increase our awareness. In episode six, I talked all about the nervous system. I talked about this concept of home base, or also uh it's also called the window of tolerance. If you haven't listened to episode six about the nervous system, I highly recommend you go back and re-either listen for the first time or just go back and revisit it after you listen to this episode. With this understanding, you can kind of go back and see how this all ties in together. But your window of tolerance or your home base, this is basically where you are, you're able to tolerate your experience of life. It's where you feel like you're kind of most like yourself. And you're you're, it's called the window of tolerance because you're you are able to tolerate your experiences, you're able to tolerate your emotions in that place. Now, you can also see this area, this window of tolerance, or as I call it, home base, you can see this as your emotional capacity, your ability to be with any emotion. Some people have a very small emotional capacity, so that if you are in this experience where it feels like an emotion comes in that is maybe too much for you or your system to handle, you might go into either a shutdown response or you might go into more of an activation response. But when you're there and you're with that emotion, that is your emotional capacity, your ability to be with that emotion. So as soon as something feels uncomfortable beyond what you think you can handle, consciously or subconsciously, we go into that survival response. So that checkout response. It could be through a number of different ways. We could check out through and try to cope through food. We can do it through social media, we can do it through TV, uh, alcohol, shopping. There's there's no shortage of ways that we can kind of check out or cope, escape from our emotions. Now, the solution here to this coping mechanism issue is to expand your emotional capacity. Because if you just try to stop eating when you feel certain emotions, you're likely just going to end up replacing that food with something else, like shopping or drinking or Netflix. So the ultimate goal, it's not just to stop eating when you feel certain emotions. The goal here is to expand your emotional capacity to get to the place where you feel confident that you can experience and be with any emotion. Now, in my opinion, it's best to start small when expanding your emotional capacity. Now remember, this is a new skill set that we are developing. It's not reasonable to expect that you are going to be amazing at this right away. I love to use the analogy of going to the gym when we're talking about expanding your emotional capacity. Now, you're not going to just walk in a gym for the first time and go pick up the 50-pound dumbbells. If you do that, you are likely to get injured and you are likely to never go back to the gym again because that will seem like a very bad idea and potentially a very dangerous place. So we want to start small. If you want to develop the habit and the skill of going to the gym on a regular basis, it wants, you want it to feel doable. You want to feel good and accomplished when you leave there. You might start small, you might start with the one-pound weights, the three-pound weights. You might start with no weights at all and just go and get a feel for what the gym is. Maybe you go get a tour. Then you go back. You start small, you work your way up. You see after you've been like, wow, all right. Feels good to get a little blood moving through my body. You work your way up. Another analogy might be if you're learning, you literally are learning how to walk. You're a toddler, you're learning how to walk. You're not just going to start sprinting right away. You have to stand up. You have to get your bearings, you have to learn how to take a few steps. Then you get a little more confident in that. You start small and work your way up. This is a skill. Be careful. Those of you and those of us who have or have had binge eating patterns, we can go into our black and white thinking, our all or nothing thinking. This is not an all or nothing process. This is a skill. This is something that will take time. So we don't want to dive into the deep end right away with emotions, like, okay, here's this big emotion. I'm going to expand my emotional capacity and I'm just going to dive right into the deep end the next time a big emotion comes for you. If that happens, your nervous system is likely to think this isn't safe. And you're going to go straight into a survival response, which for you is likely to eat. So we want to take this slowly and with your nervous system. Again, I want you to go back to episode six, re-listen to episode six about the nervous system, or listen to it for the first time to really connect how your emotional capacity and your understanding of your nervous system, how they really do tie together. Okay, so awareness. So first we become aware of the size of our current emotional capacity. We don't judge it, we don't shame ourselves for it, we just become aware of it. Then we create the intention to expand our emotional capacity. Okay, so how do we do that? How do we expand our emotional capacity? Well, we first start by checking in. So we check in with our body. And again, we talked about this last week also in learning to connect with your body. This is how all of these are intertwined. Episode number seven, you check in, you connect with your body. So when you check in, can you name your emotions? What am I feeling right now? There are two resources here for you that I love. That is the feelings wheel. You can just go into your favorite internet browser and type in feelings wheel. Click on images and you will see a no shortage of um different feelings wheels for you that will have all kinds of amazing different words for you to use for the various feelings. That's uh resource number one. I would recommend you might print it out and just have it for you. If you have that available, kind of visible, maybe you save it onto um into your phone that you can go and kind of check in with at any time. The other resource that I love about naming your feelings is Word Hippo. Word hippo, they have an app. There is also a website, wordhippo.com, and that's hippo, like the animal, the zoo animal, hippo, h-i-p-p-o, wordhippo.com. Word hippo is an amazing resource because I use it all the time. Like I'll think, okay, how do I feel right now? I feel, mmm, I feel like maybe it maybe it's excited, but that's not quite right. I know it's somewhere in the family of excited, and that's actually how I feel right now. Like I'm, I know excited doesn't quite nail the emotion that I'm feeling right now. It's like I'm feeling very enthusiastic to share this, um, to share this information with you. But enthusiastic, excited, that's not quite nailing it for me. So I would go into Word Hippo, I would type one of those words in, and it will give you uh definitions, and then it will give you a large list of synonyms that you can go in and choose from. And then you can click on one of those words and you can really dial down into it's like, yes, okay, that is the word right now for how I am feeling. And it's a great way to kind of get into the nuance of your emotions. Most of us, we have maybe three or four words for how we're feeling. Maybe it's good, bad, um, angry, mad, sad, glad. That is very often, well, and it even as I just said that, angry and mad are kind of the same, kind of the same things. So many of us have a very, very small vocabulary for how we're feeling. Now, this is not a surprise. If your emotional capacity is small, your ability to describe your emotions is also going to be small. If you are not used to checking in and to naming your emotions, it's going to be small. You don't have the skill yet. So again, remember, we're not going to judge ourselves. It's like, wow, we can just start before you even go with the feelings wheel or word hippo. I would actually recommend that you do this. Just write down what are the typical emotions I feel on a regular basis. You might notice, wow, I actually have a hard time even naming any of the emotions I usually feel. I don't know that I actually could tell you the emotions I feel on a regular basis. Well, that's great information for us to know. You're starting with a pretty small emotional capacity. And it's not surprising. If you are using food as a coping mechanism, it is very likely that your emotional capacity is slow, is small. And that's great news. We now know. Remember, awareness. Awareness is the first step of change. Okay. So we are aware. Now we start checking in. We can we name them? Can we name our emotions? Okay. Now, once we get a name for them, how would I now we go back into connecting with With our body, how does this particular emotion feel in your body? How would you describe it? So, right now, this emotion that I'm feeling, I don't have a perfect name for it yet because I haven't looked at word hippo, but it's somewhere in the family of um enthusiastic, I'm excited, I'm anticipating what uh what might be clicking for you right now. So, how does this feel in my body? Uh, I'm actually feeling I'm feeling a lot of energy in my body right now, and it's definitely flowing. It's kind of flowing upwards. I feel this energy, it's like starting in the base of kind of like in my stomach, and it's flowing upwards. It's flowing up into my chest, up into my throat, and I can feel it all the way kind of flowing up and into kind of like behind my eyes. And if I think about it, this makes so much sense because this energy is helping me to get the words out and to communicate with you. And um, so yeah, I could describe it in that way. It's definitely flowing, it is moving. Um, there's probably a little bit of like a bluish purple color to it. There's all kinds of ways that you can describe a feeling in your body. So as you are getting curious and you're checking in and you're naming your emotions, you're seeing how this feels in my body, then you can also get curious. Are there certain emotions that I'm I'm wanting to avoid? Are there certain emotions that I'm more kind of willing to be with? And are there certain ones that I'm wanting to avoid? One thing that I love to do here, kind of a little tip that I love to do here, is looking at, okay, rather than looking at this as a black and white, okay, am I willing, like, yes, I will feel this. No, I won't feel this. Can I just be with this for a little bit longer? Maybe one tablespoon. I love the visual of one tablespoon. Can I just feel this one tablespoon more than I did yesterday? Or even than I think I'm capable of right now. Most of us might be willing to go one tablespoon more than we really want to. One tablespoon, like, okay, one tablespoon. It's kind of like, can I just dip my toe into that water? I'm not asking you to dive into the deep end without a life jacket. But yeah, maybe I'll dip my toe in just to see just how cold it is. Can I just? And if I dip my toe in, am I willing to maybe dip two toes in instead of one? No, not today. Okay, that's fine. So we're kind of taking this slowly. We don't want to dive in. We don't want to create a situation for ourselves that feels like it's more than our nervous system is ready to handle. Am I willing to be with us for just a little bit longer? Now, I want you to remember the desire to binge, it's an emotion. Now, some people call it an urge, and an urge, it makes sense, right? Urgent desire. I call an for me when I'm experiencing an urge, it doesn't, I don't experience them in this way anymore. But when I was very much in the throes of my binging, my urges felt like I just wanted to come out of my skin, like creepy, crawly, all over my skin. Like I just wanted to get out. I wanted to, like, it just felt intolerable. I also have, I have some clients who will tell me, like, yeah, I feel like I will die if I don't eat. It's that type of feeling. Can I just give myself one more tablespoon? Can I be with this for one more tablespoon of time? All emotions are energy in motion. They need to flow, they need to move. The process of actually allowing an emotion, fully allowing an emotion, when we just allow it, can happen in 90 seconds. But most people don't really allow emotions. What we do is we we do one of three other things. So there are four things that we can do with an emotion. We can act, we can argue, we can avoid, or we can allow an emotion. Four A's. Act, argue, avoid, allow. If we act on an emotion, what that's going to look like is essentially for our purposes, it's binging. We have an emotion, we have that urge, we have that urgent desire to binge, we act, we just eat. Arguing with an emotion is like, I don't want to feel this way. We also do this with our urges. Like, no, I just want it to go away. I don't want this to be here. We um, I don't want to be, I don't want to be mad, I don't want to be angry, I don't want to, I don't want to cry, I don't want to be sad. We we push against it. We argue with what is. And when we do that, when we argue with what is and what's there, what's real for us, we make it bigger. We can avoid them. If we avoid them, that looks like uh I'm really feeling this thing, but instead I'm going to go uh clean out a drawer. I'm gonna go do this. It's kind of like being busy instead of actually being with the emotion. This is where when you see those lists on uh social media that say 20 things to do instead of a binge, uh, you know, and it's all these things, it's they're basically telling you to avoid the, to avoid it, which is why those lists don't work, by the way. And then the last one is to allow. Now, allowing is what we want to do. Allowing an emotion is what will expand your emotional capacity. Allowing is going to the emotional capacity gym. The first three, acting, arguing, and avoiding, they are actually going to make the emotions bigger and come back even stronger. So the analogy I love to use is a beach ball. If you are acting on it, arguing it, or avoiding it, you are essentially, it's just like holding a beach ball down underwater. And ultimately, that beach ball is gonna come back up. It's down there and now with a lot more force on it, and it's going to come back up. And when it comes back up, it is going to come back up with more force and more pressure than when it was pushed underwater in the first place. This is exactly what happens. And this is why so many of us that avoid big emotions, why it feels like it's so big afterwards, it's because we've been pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing that beach ball down. So when it comes up, it does feel huge and big and overwhelming. But guess what? We are the ones who created that. So again, allowing is the only one of those four A's that expands your emotional capacity. So, how do we do that? How do we allow emotion? I love the concept by Tara Brock. It's called RAIN. And that stands, it's an it's an it's um a uh analogy, it's not an analogy. Oh my gosh, I just lost the term. Um, acronym, thank you. Isn't it it's an thank you, my internal brain? It's an acronym, RAIN R-A-I-N. Recognize, allow, investigate, nurture. We recognize the emotion. We talk about, we name it, what does it feel like in my body? We allow the emotion to be there. We investigate what else is going on and we nurture ourselves through the process. Remember, there is no shame here, there is no judgment here. In the investigating process, we ask amazing questions. And in the nurturing process, we nurture ourselves, we care for ourselves, we care for ourselves through this process. We realize we are expanding our emotional capacity. This is a skill, it's a process, and it takes time to develop. And the first step in all of it, all of it, is removing any shame or judgment you have about the emotion itself, about your ability to be with the emotion. Then we shift into awareness and curiosity. So, what is my current emotional capacity? And how can I go to work on expanding it? We know you go to work on expanding your emotional capacity by allowing, allowing more emotions. So, as you build this practice of checking in with your body, naming your emotions. Challenge yourself to use different words when you're naming your emotions. When you're first starting, just the practice of naming your emotions, checking in with how they feel in your body, asking yourself the amount of time that you're willing to be with them is so powerful. Then you can challenge yourself to see what's different. Can I use a different word? Okay, I used this word yesterday. Is it the same word today? Get into word hippo. Create some more nuance within your emotions. So you're not always just using the same five terms. And can you notice how it's different when you truly allow your emotions versus acting on them, arguing with them, or avoiding them? Here is a very uh key tip for you. If you are truly allowing your emotions, they will actually process and flow through you. It doesn't mean they're never going to come back, but you will feel some relief. And in some cases, it will feel almost complete. If you are acting, arguing, or avoiding your emotions, it is likely that they are um, they are going to return. They will feel like they are growing, um, and they will feel more intense. So that is a very good indicator that you are stuffing your beach ball down underwater. And it's likely all that's going to come back bigger. When you truly allow your emotions, it won't feel like that type of pressure that's building and growing. It will just be like, ah, okay, like moving on. So see if you can notice that. The other thing I want you to notice is I want you to notice your progress. Every single little tiny bit of progress. Wow, look at me. I named my emotions today. I did it one time. Good for me. Guess what? Yesterday I did zero. I actually looked at Word Hippo today. I printed a feelings wheel. I am starting to check in even more. Look at me. I did one more tablespoon of emotion. I sat with an urge for 30 more seconds before I actually decided to eat. All of this, I am with each thing that you do, you are expanding your emotional capacity. And guess what? If you are still listening to me right now, you have already started expanding your emotional capacity. You know why? Because you have so much more awareness than you did at the beginning of this episode. You have more awareness, and awareness is the first step to change. Okay, that is what I have for you today. Now I want to tell you something else. I have heard from many of you that these concepts that I'm teaching on the podcast are really resonating with you. Most people tell me, gosh, I can relate to all eight of your reasons why you binge. So I am in the process of putting something together for you that is going to be an amazing way for you to take what you're learning on the podcast and apply it to your personal situation so that you can transform your relationship with food and with yourself. I'm not ready to share all the details just yet, but if you want to be sure not to miss it when I am ready, I want you to go to binge breakthrough.com slash blueprint to get on the list and be the first to know everything about it. It's going to be amazing. If you're listening to this podcast later, after, uh maybe sometime after this has been released, that URL will always be up to date with the current information about what I'm putting together. So once again, that's binge breakthrough.com forward slash blueprint. Okay, next week we're gonna dive into reason number six why you binge, which is the attempt to control. And we're gonna get into one of my favorite topics, which is developing two-way trust with your body. I'll see you then. Thank you for listening to Binge Breakthrough. If you would like to download the eight reasons why you binge and what to do about it, visit binge breakthrough.com forward slash why. That's binge breakthrough.com forward slash W H Y. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast so that you don't miss any future episodes that will dive deeper into how to create lasting food freedom. I'll see you there.