Get Clear on Your True Need Right Now

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? Or are you meeting your physical and emotional needs and what you are experiencing now is separate from that?

In many cases, a combination of factors are at work. For example, you are struggling with body image, but when you take a step back you realize you are sleep deprived, about to get your period, and dealing with a lot of stress at work that is messing with your ability to eat regularly, leading to occasional binges. If this were the case, this is how we might approach it:

1. Address basic physical needs.

2. Acknowledge and attend to basic emotional needs.

3. Gently engage with your current acute emotional difficulties that are separate from numbers one and two above.

​Following these steps might look like this:

1

Make an effort to get to bed slightly earlier and practice proper sleep hygiene by turning off screens an hour before bed, using aromatherapy like lavender to signal bedtime is approaching, taking a warm bath or shower to calm and soothe your nervous system, and doing a sleep meditation or some yoga to further relax your body and mind into sleep. Also, try to address whatever makes it difficult to prioritize sleep. If young children are climbing into bed at night, could you alternate with your partner to take them back to bed and settle them? If you regularly practice “revenge procrastination,” in which you get your me time needs met when your body really needs sleep, consider scheduling time on the weekend to catch up on movies or shows that interfere with rest when watched late on weeknights.

Track your period so you know when it is coming and recognize your specific pattern of physical and emotional symptoms. Connecting a physical or emotional experience to where you are in your cycle can be a huge relief. Emphasize sleep, eating regularly, and providing yourself with comfort and soothing during this time.

2

Talk to someone about the stress you are experiencing at work. Might you relieve your burden by lightening your workload, changing how you are working or who you are working with, and reality checking whether you’re putting too much pressure on yourself? Give yourself permission to use convenient foods so you can eat regularly—heating up a frozen breakfast sandwich in the morning, packing apples and trail mix for snacks, protecting thirty minutes to eat lunch, scheduling a timer to remind you to break for snacks, pairing salad from a box with frozen pizza for dinner. Assess whether it’s appropriate to add stress-relieving techniques such as yoga, meditation, or breathing exercises.

3

Begin with self-compassion to address your current body image struggles: acknowledge your suffering, normalize it based on what you know about how many people struggle with body image, and offer yourself kindness. Recognize how unmet physical and emotional needs can make this struggle feel even harder. Remind yourself of the nature of impermanence and that this specific feeling won’t last. Consider whether it is time to directly address body image struggles with an Intuitive Eating practitioner, a community dedicated to Health at Every Size and Intuitive Eating, or a work-book focused on improving body image, such as Sonya Renee Taylor’s Your Body Is Not an Apology Workbook.

​All of the different parts of your experience are related. And this path brings your full experience into the light—it is valuable and you are worth the effort. By framing working with yourself in these ways, difficulties can start to feel manageable.

Journal prompt: Think of a recent time you used emotional eating to self-soothe. How would you have assessed your basic biological and emotional needs? How might that have positioned you to engage gently with whatever emotion or emotions were troubling you at the time?