Fun is a Four-Letter Word

I’ve been struggling with having more fun. Sounds kind of weird, right? I mean after all, fun is fun. And, I’m someone who’s changed her whole life just to have more fun. I coach people about having more fun so I should be all over it, right? To top it off, I’m kind of a funny person so shouldn’t I be living in a perpetual state of FUN? Yeah, wasn’t exactly working out that way. Welcome to my work.

My coach-friends were actively coaching me on having more fun using great tools like making lists, making time for fun, exploring my beliefs around why I’m not having fun–all that stuff we know to do. None of it was sticking. And worse would be when one of them kindly asked, “What do you really WANT?’ That question was enough to make my brain seize up for days.

Then, with the help of another coach-friend, I accessed a higher source–call it Spirit, God, my Higher Self, Guides–I think of it primarily as a power greater than me; greater than my own mind. And what I found there was a very funny and kind message:

Fun is a four-letter word for me.

I was making the concept of “fun” mean a bunch of stuff. “Fun” had to rise to some impossible standard of good times, raucous laughter, excitement, or adrenaline rush. “Fun” was like a drug fix, a pleasure-seeking activity to give my brain a big ol’ hit of dopamine. Turns out “fun” was not what I was looking for. So when I tried to think of fun things, I would get nada–because nothing met this high yet crappy definition I was holding in my mind. I could redefine fun, but honestly that word and I had baggage, it just wasn’t going to work for me anymore.

Time for a new word.

Delight.

Ooooh.

I mean, OOOOOOH!

The word brought tears of joy to my eyes. Now I was onto it.

Delight is relaxing, it’s easy, it does not come with any standard. It just is. And it is fabulous for me. I can easily think of a TON of delightful things. And even better, my new question to go with my new word:

What would be delightful right now?

Turns out doing the dishes is delightful sometimes.
Writing this blog post is delightful.
Watching my dog Scruffy play with her new toy is totally delightful.
Funny email and Facebook exchanges–delightFULLLLL! (That’s me saying it like Oprah.)
Deleting emails I decided not to deal with because they didn’t feel delightful–delightful!
Afternoon Delight (the song and the concept)–delightful.

Turns out, I’m surrounded by delight. I do delightful things all day long. Now that I let go of this lofty concept of “fun,” I see the delight all around me. It was always there, I was just so busy seeking “fun” that I didn’t notice it. And even better, I’m using my super new question as my guide through the day–if it’s not delightful, I’m not doing it.

The Oh Sh*t Response

You come home from work and you’re simultaneously fantasizing about popping off your bosses’ head like a champagne cork, giving your kids to Brangelina to raise, and/or breaking into your go-to karaoke rendition of “One is the Loneliest Number,” for the thousandth time.

Instead, you decide to power through a bag of pork rinds.

Oh Sh*t.

That’s the response you have when those pork rinds are sitting in your belly like a gut bomb.

To flesh it out, the internal dialogue sounds like this: oh sh*tIateporkrindsandnowI’mgoingtobefatandlonely
foreveryousuckyouscukyousuckyousuck.

Or something like that.

The Oh Sh*t response leads to the burning desire for–more pork rinds–with a side of Easy Cheez.

Which of course leads to the kissin’ cousin of the Oh Sh*t response, Aw Screw It. You know exactly where Aw Screw It is don’t you? It’s that place where you tell yourself it doesn’t matter anymore so you might as well check out and eat what you want. Except is does matter.

Your thoughts about feeling scared or stressed or lonely might be what caused you to overeat in the moment, but it’s the Oh Sh*t response that will keep you overeating. The Oh Sh*t response is my technical term for the way we beat ourselves up for overeating. When you overeat, your Inner Lizard serves up the OS response as a way to try to keep you from doing it again. The lizard logic believes that by telling you how bad you are, you will then do good. That equation doesn’t balance. Non-loving thoughts always lead to non-loving action (e.g. Pork Rinds with Easy Cheez).

Here’s how to shift the sh*t.

1. Drop the sh*t
Without sh*t, you are left with oh. As in “Oh, I notice I’m feeling stressed/scared/lonely.” Or even “Oh, I put more food in my body than it needed, hmmm, something must be up.” Oh takes you back into being curious and interested about your thoughts and actions, which allows you to access the tools to make a shift.

2. Make peace
There will never be a time when you clean up all your thinking and never have another negative thought or feeling. Not gonna happen. The mind’s job is to produce thoughts, and some of them will be negative, we can’t stop it. Instead of judging yourself as backsliding or lacking, make peace with your thoughts. Just because they pop up doesn’t mean you have to buy into them, and the OS response means you’ve bought in hook, line and sinker.

3. Give yourself a break
I’m not talking about being Aw Screw It overly permissive, I’m talking about letting go of the OS response so you can focus on what’s really going on from a place of peaceful curiosity. Giving yourself a break by dropping the OS response allows you to go back to that issue with your boss/kids/empty house (Remember that? Yeah, the OS response is also a big giant distraction from your original thoughts and feelings.) and figure out what’s really going on.

Here’s your task: notice in the next few days (or the new few seconds if you have a highly active OS Response) where you’re having the OS Response and then use the steps above to create the shift.

Comment below and let me know how you did.

(And per Elise’s brilliant below, feel free to comment even if you don’t complete the task. )

Fanning the Feel-Good!

I talk a lot about letting go of crappy dieting habits, ferreting out thoughts that don’t serve you, and how resisting feelings just causes them to linger.

That’s all good, but let’s get some freakin’ feel-good rockin’ here shall we?

Here’s my idea.

Let’s generate the world’s largest list of awesome thoughts to support us on our weight shiftin’/body rockin’/healthy livin’/fun-havin’/confidence-flowin’/ideal life livin’ journey.

I’ll start, and you comment and leave yours.

I’m a fun machine.

I love how my body feels when I work out intensly.

I’m proud of myself every time I make a choice that support who I truly am.

And who I truly am is extremely kickass.

Music fuels my soul.

Love is the best thought/feeling shifting tool–or is it laughter… or sex… well one of those!

Life is too short to take myself too damn seriously.

I love how my body has been there and supported me through everything.

I use food to nourish my body.

I use my tools to deal with life.

Food is to be savored and enjoyed–just like life.

I am so lucky.

I give up the crown of perfection.

I love me more than nachos.

Now YOU GO!

PS

If contemplating “Fan Guy” made your mind freeze, I’m sorry about that.

The River of Your Emotional Life

Think of your emotions like a river.

When you overeat, overdrink, overshop, whatever, it’s like building a dam with sticks, but the only thing that happens is the river builds up behind the sticks until it flows over and through them. The river actually becomes more powerful and concentrated the more you try to stop it. The way to make a river gentler is by widening the banks and smoothing the slope, which in terms of your emotions means allowing them to exist. When your emotions feel big, create a bigger space for them. Allow them to flow. Don’t try to constrict them with dams made of Cheetos and cute shoes.

Feeling The Crappy

Those of us who have done a little bit of emotional eating in our day are really trying to avoid Feeling The Crappy. You won’t find any of us wearing t-shirts saying “I feeling my feelings!” We have performed amazing feats of distraction–overwork, overeating, overthinking, over-shopping, over-you-name-it, just to keep from being with ourselves. The problem is, we are already with ourselves. And, The Crappy is already there too. What we are doing is fighting The Crappy, which ups the intensity of The Crappy by about a factor of 10.

The best way to deal with The Crappy is to feel it. Truly.

Here’s an example. My client Lola*, has a thing about getting it all done. She will set a deadline for herself and push everything else out of her life to make it happen–other projects, exercise, socializing, and fueling her body. She recently realized she was operating in this pattern again, but instead of beating herself up or trying to push her feelings away, she did this:

“Right now, just articulating that I’m in the weird getting it done funk has helped a little. This time I’m watching myself do this, and saying why am I doing this? It’s progress… but it feels harsh because I’m not eating it away, I’m actually feeling what this is like–the stress, the tiredness, the strain.”

What’s she’s doing is perfect, she’s feeling The Crappy around her behavior, which is causing her to examine it and decide what she wants to do differently. If she does not feel The Crappy, she does not get to make a different choice.

How to feel The Crappy.

1. Locate it.
Where specifically are you feeling these emotions in your body? In your chest, heart, head, stomach? Scan your body and notice what you feel. You can actually feel the physical manifestation of your emotion.

2. Name it.
What exactly is the emotion you’re feeling? If this is hard to do, you can start with asking yourself if you feel sad, glad, mad or scared. Notice the difference between thoughts (I feel fat, I feel worthless, I feel gross) and emotions (I feel lonely, I feel anxious, I feel peeved). Naming the emotion helps you connect with feeling it.

3. Lean into it.
Instead of pushing The Crappy away, lean into it. I do this by visualizing myself leaning into wherever I feel the emotion in my body and allowing the emotions to come. Often my clients tell me they believe they will be consumed by the emotion if they do this. The truth is resisting the emotion and eating it down is consuming them. Feeling an emotion allows you to get to the other side of it, to process it. Then, like Lola, you gain clarity about your situation and decide what you want to do, rather than continuing to react and feel stuck. The thing about feeling The Crappy is that once you allow it, the feeling dissipates.

This is what Lola reported after feeling The Crappy:

“Big sigh of relief over here–and what made me laugh at myself is that it all was truly my creation, my fabrication… what up with that? It’s kind of comical now to think about.”

When you can laugh at yourself again, you know you’ve come out the other side.

*When you’re my client and I use your story in a blog post, you get to pick your own pseudonym.

PS

My friend and fellow coach Dani Fake Webb was thinking along the same lines with this post where she gets even more specific on how to feel your feelings.