Asking for help may look different at different times. Who and how you ask for help has everything to do with your specific needs at the time. Consider the list below as a starting point because going into adequate detail is beyond the scope of this book. Contemplate your needs or discuss them with someone you trust to determine what steps you can take to care for your tender heart.

Noticeably different from distracting and soothing, personal exploration involves moving toward your discomfort in accessible ways. You might choose behaviors from this list when you feel safe and stable enough to directly engage with what is happening in your life but perhaps not yet ready to ask for help. Many of the options normalize what you are experiencing, which may allow shame to dissipate so that you can reach out to others for support.

As you learned, your nervous system is constantly seeking safety. When in a dysregulated state of sympathetic or dorsal activation, certain practices can bring you back up to the regulated ventral state. Mindful soothing includes food. There will be times when using food to soothe is the right choice at the right moment. What is different about this approach from emotional overeating is the conscious choice to eat, the mindful attention paid while eating, and the freedom from guilt or shame.

Nondestructive distraction is just what you might imagine: temporarily removing yourself from what you experience as painful without increasing your suffering. It can be absorbing, entertaining, or just different from what you don’t want to focus on.

The name of the game is self-care. True self-care. Not the kind you can buy in a bottle or at a store. Not the kind that requires self-improvement. True self-care is subtler and woven into how you live your life day to day rather than something that happens in broad strokes occasionally.

​

What did you learn by first assessing your basic physical and emotional needs? Does this shed any light on how you are feeling right now? Is it possible your current experience, for example, is being influenced by a lack of sleep or feelings of isolation?

Any time you experience emotional turmoil, review the biological basics. One constant is your need for adequate quality and quantity of sleep, proper hydration, and regular meals consisting of a balance of protein, carbohydrate, and fat.

Any time you experience emotional turmoil, review the biological basics. One constant is your need for adequate quality and quantity of sleep, proper hydration, and regular meals consisting of a balance of protein, carbohydrate, and fat.

In her book Mindful Eating, pediatrician and Zen Buddhist teacher Jan
Chozen Bays writes about the different kinds of hunger. This includes heart hunger, the emotional hunger you feel when you have unmet needs, experience internal turmoil, and struggle with difficult feelings.

​

When we eat to numb out, perhaps bombarding our senses with simultaneous Netflix, social media, and Chunky Monkey ice cream, our goal is to feel everything—and therefore nothing. When we eat out of ignorance, one approach to returning to our true experience is to simplify.

When we eat to resist or change painful or uncomfortable emotions, we try to substitute the pleasure of eating for what we deem undesirable.

Whether we are eating a favorite food that no longer tastes so good as we become satisfied, or we have reached the point of comfortable fullness during a meal, eating to grasp onto pleasure is chasing pleasure that is dissolving or has already dissolved, and no longer responding to what our bodies are communicating.

Food and eating meets a variety of our needs beyond just supplying our bodies with calories and nutrients. It can provide comfort, entertainment, and connection. It can punctuate holidays and celebrations and be a means of expressing our heritage.

As with anything else in life, how we use food and eating can be to “wake up” in our lives – to work with the reality of what is unfolding for us moment to moment. Or we can use it to “go to sleep” – rejecting reality and trying to alter our experience to be more to our liking.

If you have a negative body image, says Jenna Hollenstein, contemplating the five skandhas can help.

Whether you’re looking at your first gray hair, another stray eyebrow (aka chin hair), early whispers of crow’s feet, or the new belly you’ve acquired, you might feel unprepared for your body to age. When the face looking back at you in the mirror becomes momentarily unrecognizable, there’s no doubt that you, as all things, are impermanent. That can lead to fear, make you feel exposed, and cause you to cling to the past.

I am so excited to announce that my workshop “From Emotional Eating to Intuitive Eating” has been rescheduled for September 22nd through the 24th and I hope you will join me. Registration is open and folks are already signing up!