84 When You Notice Yourself Overeating Overdrinking Overspending During the Holidays

Welcome to the Great Leader, Great Mom podcast, where we trade in Mom Guild and Burnout for calm, courage, and a whole lot more joy. I'm your host, Liz Jolly, engineer at your life coach, mom of three, and founder of the School of Courage. Here we talk about While eating at work and at home without losing your sanity, your sense of humor, or yourself. If you're ready to stop the guilt and grow your courage, you're in the right place. This is episode 84 four and we are going to talk about when you notice yourself overeating, overdrinking, overspending during the holidays. And if this is you, there is nothing wrong with you. You're not broken, you're not weak, you're not out of control You're simply a human being with emotions that you're never taught to feel. And the holidays amplify this absolutely, where we feel more obligations, more crazy family dynamics, more comparison, more pressure to make it all magical and we're just exhausted weeks before the actual holiday event. And what I find is when our emotions rise, our brain does what it's wired to do. It It seeks pleasure, it avoids pain, and it conserves energy. All the time on default, this is what your brain does. So food, wine, spending, they all become fast routes to pleasure, to avoid pain, to avoid discomfort in our lives. That is so often the reason why we overeat, over drink, overspend all the overs. So here's one of the stories from one of my clients. We'll call it the peppermint bark night. She told me that every night in December, after the kids went to bed, she would slice off a piece of peppermint bark, and then another, and then another. And in the morning she would think, What is wrong with me? Why did I eat the whole bar? It honestly had nothing to do with the peppermint bark. Or that it even tasted really good, because I think a lot of us just don't even realize what something tastes like after a couple seconds. What we found was those were the only fifteen minutes of quiet she had all day and She wasn't overeating, she was overwhelmed and trying to avoid that feeling. And so the way out wasn't to Force yourself to stop eating it, to remove it all from the house. It was to feel the overwhelm and realize what was causing it and solve that. For so many of us, this is the same And what I teach here in the School of Courage is that we don't numb or buffer our emotions away because we're undisciplined. We do this because we haven't learned how to feel our feelings and we haven't learned the fact that Life is 50-50. You're supposed to feel negative emotion in your life. And so trying to tap out of it every time you're in it is not helpful. And during the holidays, we get all these extra emotions like the stress and the guilt and the resentment and the loneliness and the pressure and the inadequacy. when we look around and compare us to our neighbors or whatever it is. And so we turn to these external things that we think will make us feel happier, feel more accomplished, feel more connected with people, feel less guilty. And those things are the food, the alcohol, the shopping, all the things we use to escape. And so I'm sure you're potentially in this place too I had another client who was a leader and she told me, Liz, I buy so much on Amazon in December. It's embarrassing. Half the time I don't even remember what I ordered. And then when I open it, I'm like, oh, wait a minute. Did I actually get this? And what we discovered was she was feeling guilty for not being present with her kids that year because she was working And shopping wasn't about the gifts. It was trying to soothe the guilt she felt inside, which she believed was because she shouldn't be working so much. And so overspending wasn't the issue. It was realizing there was guilt there and we needed to address the guilt and solve for what was causing the guilt. We had to figure out this the thought she had in her mind creating the guilt and address it so that she realized what she wanted more than anything was to connect and be with her children and buying presence wasn't gonna do it And then we were able to change her action because she was able to show up in a way that created connection and love and that was what she really wanted. One of the things most women get wrong is we think we're lacking willpower. And that's just the wrong tool when we're trying to force our actions. Um, we're trying to resist, we're trying to work against what our default nature is, which is to overeat and over drink and overspend. Because it's so easy. We want to feel that pleasure. We want the dopamine hit. And so often women believe like if they were just more disciplined, if they were just stronger, like they had more willpower, then they wouldn't have this problem. But here's the reality, you're not lacking willpower, you're doing it all wrong Trying to control our urges with willpower is like trying to hold a beach ball under the water. You can do it for a moment, but eventually you're just gonna not be able to hold it anymore, and that beach ball shoots out of the water with a lot of force. This is what happens when we resist emotion, when we when we hold back and we're like, I'm not eating sugar right now. And then everything we see is sugar and we're like resisting that urge. And it shows up with things like alcohol too. Like we go to a party at a Christmas party, which they're all the time now, and you tell yourself, I'm not gonna drink, I'm not gonna drink, I don't want that and And the reality is you're resisting the urge, and so it just gets worse. It's the beach ball under the water and it shoots up and then you not just maybe blow it by one drink, you have like six. And this is what we do, or the Amazon shopping Willpower can work. Like many of you have probably been on a diet at some point where you've tried to willpower your way into eating better, like counting all your calories, trying to manage what's in your fridge. That willpower, the problem with it is you're trying to control your action line without trying to address what you're thinking. And remember, what I teach is your thinking Creates your feeling which fuels your action. And so if you're trying to change your actions without managing your emotions or changing your thoughts or identifying what is even the thought causing it you'll never be able to change your actions in a way that's sustainable. When we're resisting the emotion that's underneath, that negative emotion, like guilt or restlessness or loneliness or the stress or the disappointment, resisting the pressure we feel or like we're sh not enough That is what we need to turn into and because that's what we're so often buffering away. And this is one of the things that I learned in coach training which blew my mind years ago was how When we're numbing or buffering, we use external things to change how we feel emotionally. And it does work temporarily. Like if you go and eat the cupcake You're gonna feel a little bit better for a brief amount of time. But if you realize the fact that when you ate the cupcake, it's not getting you to the result you want, which is maybe a healthy body. one that doesn't feel the sugar high or the crazy or the out of control or the spending thing too. If you're overspending Because you want that dopamine hit of buying something and having something new. It does feel really fun for the moment, but then you've spent more than you wanted, and then you feel guilty and inadequate at the end And the same is true when it comes to overdrinking. It's not always because we love the wine, it's because we're worn out of our kids or our family, or we're avoiding the anxiety or the social pressure Or we're feeling really lonely when we go to a party and so we want to take the edge off. Or we've had a long day and so we're exhausted and we feel like we deserve it. Those type of emotions, those type of stories we make up, those type of thoughts are what resist what's real for us and therefore we can't really fix it. So here's three steps to break down this cycle without using willpower. The solution again is not more control. It's not more discipline. It's not pushing or beating yourself up harder. The solution is this openness to feel all the emotions. And so the way we do this is we name the emotion before the cookie goes in your mouth or the wine in the glass or the item in your Amazon cart Just pause and ask yourself, what am I actually feeling right now? What is the emotion I'm trying to avoid? Is it loneliness? Is it stress? Is it overwhelm or guilt or resentment or pressure? Naming the emotion brings you into consciousness and that slows your brain down from creating that negative emotion. The second step is allow 30 seconds of that emotion to be there Check in with your body. Nobody tells us how to do this growing up. If you just sit with it, maybe put your hand on your heart or your hands on the top of your legs and you just breathe and you notice the vibration in your body. Like where is it showing up? And you can tell yourself, this is what stress feels like, this is what guilt feels like, this is what sadness feels like. Look inward and bring that awareness into your body. So when that emotion shows up again, you can find it in your body and it can help stop your brain from creating more of that emotion unconsciously. When you're able to name the emotion and allow it to be there, it loses its power. You're no longer resisting it. It's not the negative emotion that kills us or what we're afraid of. Honestly, it's the resistance when we fight against that emotion and we take on all these terrible behaviors like the overing, the overeating, over drinking, over shopping, over all the things That is what makes us suffer and brings in so much negative results into our life. So step three, give yourself real relief instead of this fake transient pleasure. So the fake pleasure is like sugar or wine or shopping or scrolling the internet or Netflixing. Turn the real relief comes from looking into what's actually happening for you and then deciding to truly change it at the root of the problem. Maybe you need help. Maybe you need to take a breath. Maybe you need to say no to people that are asking you to do things. Maybe you just need to go work out. But identifying what the real problem is allows you to solve it instead of just cover it up and resist it. Because when we resist, that's what drains us. Here's another story from one of my clients where a mom said, I don't even like wine, but at holiday parties I keep refilling my glass because I feel awkward to not have something in it. And when we unpacked what was going on for her in her brain, we realized that she was feeling anxious and exhausted and The wine was her emotional armor. It was her resisting what was going on for her. And she didn't even really want to be at that party. And she was doing it out of ex out of guilt and And it was just extending the exhaustion in her life. And when she learned how to allow that anxiety and to identify what she actually wanted She was able to not resist that negative emotion and her desire to drink just faded away. And it wasn't because she was white-knuckling it and resisting it, it was because she no longer needed that escape in her life. Here's something you can borrow this week to help you as you go to the holiday parties or whatever it is you're facing this week, whether it's overeating, over-drinking, over-netflixing, or over shopping. Say this in the moment when you feel the urge to buffer or to numb it all away. Nothing is wrong with me. This is just a feeling I haven't practiced feeling yet, and my body isn't aware of what it is I can take a deep breath. I can say, I don't need to cover this up. I'm going to allow it to be there, to vibrate within our body. The resistance is what works against us. This is emotional adulthood. This is conscious living, and this is the most courageous thing we could do in our life. As we close, know that buffering doesn't mean you're failing. It means you just haven't learned how to feel and name your emotions. And you're resisting all these negative emotions that are coming up in your life and their vibrations in your body. see what's going on in your brain and allow those emotions to be there so you can address them at the root. You can learn how to feel your emotions in a different way. One that doesn't require willpower or self-judgment. A way that brings you back to home to yourself. If you want to practice this more deeply, whether it's managing your emotions or expanding your capacity or staying grounded no matter what the holidays or your life brings Come join me inside the School of Courage membership. This is where transformation actually happens for women that want to have careers. and want to be amazing moms. The link is in the show notes, but go to courage. thschoolofcourage dot com. Thanks for being here and I'll see you all next week. Bye everybody