How To Do Uncomfortable Things and Get More Freedom

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Episode 24. In this episode we talk about the concept of psychological flexibility. Do you ever feel like you are playing whack-a-mole with your negative thoughts? Like ok I’m supposed to feel worthy, and energized, and have internal motivation, and never have diet mentality thoughts. Then having negative thoughts or self-doubt becomes another way to feel like you have failed? Do you ever think, “Why can’t I just be confident?” or “Why do I care so much what other people think?”

Today’s episode is all about the concept of psychological flexibility. This has overlap with the concept of acceptance. It does NOT mean accepting all as it is and becoming complacent and it also does not mean accepting things won’t change. It means being willing to have uncomfortable thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations in service of your most important values, your WHY, your reasons and purpose for living.

This conversation builds on our previous ones about support and accountability. Accountability can be incredibly useful as we work through discomfort.

We are going to talk about:

• Why “just think positive” is a major problem and rarely moves us in a positive direction
• The concept of toxic positivity and how it keeps us from emotional agility
• How to use the concepts of psychological flexibility and willingness from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to get you unstuck and moving forward regardless of how “motivated” you feel

Want to start from the beginning? Check out the Foundational Episodes of the Motivation Made Podcast here!

• Introduction: What is this podcast all about?
• Episode 1: Want to Get & Stay Motivated? A Crash Course on Motivation, Weight Loss, and Health
• Episode 2: How Dieting Steals Our Motivation
• Episode 3: How To Get Motivated To Improve Your Health (Motivation 101)
• Episode 4: How to Transform Health Fears Into Forward Progress

Clarify Your Values

Want a step by step guide to help you reflect on your most important values so you can remind yourself WHY you are getting comfortable with being uncomfortable? My free values and goals guide does just that. Check it out for free here!

What if I Can’t Change My Thoughts?

Have you heard of cognitive-behavioral therapy? It’s an evidence-based and incredibly effective therapy that works for a wide-variety of conditions.

The idea goes like this. If you have an event happen to you, like someone walks by you on the street and makes a frowning face, your interpretation of the situation will impact how you feel, and perhaps how you behave.

If you assume they frowned because they think you are fat or unattractive, then you may feel angry, or sad, or ashamed of your body. You might feel depressed, and you might stop walking as a result.

Alternatively, if you assume that they probably were thinking about something unrelated to you and just randomly frowned while they happened to be looking at you, you might feel neutral, not feel down, and go on with your day and continue walking in that area in the future.

Change How You Think to Change How You Feel

So the idea in CBT is, we identify unhelpful thoughts like “he thinks I’m fat and unattractive” and examine whether that is likely true or not, and even if true, whether it’s helpful. We change the thought and practice thinking differently, then ideally we feel better.

But what about when thoughts are really hard to change? We argue with them, but it doesn’t really make us feel better. What about when they just won’t go away? When we are really down or really anxious, it can feel impossible to change our thoughts or beliefs. Particularly when they are entrenched in feelings of shame, as most of our really difficult stuff often is. Then what do we do?

The energy required to challenge each and every thought we have might feel daunting, or darn near impossible. We might be so tired of fighting our thoughts, we have no energy left for actual things we need to do in our life, that might be equally hard if not harder (like exercising outside when we feel bad about our body, or winded, for example).

“Drop the Rope” – Tug of War with the Monster

A common metaphor used to illustrate the idea of psychological flexibility is the “Tug of War with the Monster” metaphor.

In this metaphor, the monster represents all the uncomfortable internal stuff we try to avoid. Like uncomfortable thoughts, emotions, or physical sensations.

The tug of war and the rope represents a normal seemingly helpful response. I feel uncomfortable with these thoughts, so I will do what I can to avoid them. Examples of avoidance include:

• Playing a game on your phone to try to distract yourself from anxious or sad thoughts and emotions
• Turning off your alarm clock and not working out because you are too tired
• Eating when you aren’t hungry to avoid feeling uncomfortable feelings like sadness or anxiety
• Not exercising due to not enjoying feeling winded or sweaty
• Not exercising because you don’t want to see yourself in the mirror at the gym
• Not asking someone out because you are fearful of rejection

The Costs of Avoidance

Unfortunately, avoidance can become pretty problematic. As we often talk about it, it isn’t “bad” to eat when you aren’t hungry at times, and sometimes it’s the most adaptive way to cope with the tools you have or had at the time (think of a kid who can’t go anywhere and is experiencing emotional abuse in their home).

However, continued avoidance via emotional eating rarely solves the underlying problem, and especially if there is shame and guilt there, just exacerbates your stress and shame and the cycle repeats itself.

Learning to “Drop the Rope” can be incredibly freeing. It means you don’t have to feel perfectly motivated, free of anxiety or zero shame or self-doubt before you can start moving towards what you value.

How to Know What to Move Towards With Supportive Accountability?

It’s important to talk about where and how to use these skills. It’s interesting, because in the past I led a lot of weight loss groups where we talked about how to apply these skills to weight loss behaviors (e.g., recording calories – which pretty much no one on earth likes to do) and exercise.

I think these skills are essential for living in a world where pain, fear of rejection, fear of failure, and self-doubt are inevitable. Avoidance of those feelings often leads us to live small, disconnected, less meaningful lives.

What Thoughts & Emotions Should I Accept?

However, our culture is weight loss obsessed and what I would not recommend is using these skills in a very diet-y type way. The way we approach weight loss, dieting, and health almost always moves us away from our goal of improved health, not towards it, over the long-term. That is, thinking things like “avoiding foods I crave will just always be hard,” or “I’m hungry, but I’m going to wait to eat until later to hopefully lose some weight tomorrow” or “I just have to accept I will always have super strong cravings because I’m out of control with food, there’s something wrong with me.”

Instead I’d recommend using them to de-fuse from feelings that are inevitable, like “I am anxious about this party because there’s a lot of food I really like there and in the past I would binge eat.” Dropping the rope in that example means de-fusing from the thought and realizing you don’t actually have to get rid of the thought to go to the party and have a good time.

Coping with Uncertainty and Lack of Self-Trust

Very often, people I work with have a lack of trust in themselves that they can “handle” a situation with food. Therefore, they avoid the food, and then eventually just eat all the food in the package so they don’t have to deal with the uncertainty of “am I going to finish it” or “am I going to binge eat?”

Typically, if you are still binge eating, you are likely either under-eating or restricting certain foods and that is why you feel compelled to binge. That is, giving yourself true unconditional permission to eat and regularly fueling your body with quality foods, you will likely have reduced desire to binge over time.

But you very likely will still crave certain foods. When I say have psychological flexibility, it might mean being able to identify the difference between a thought like, “I’m really craving this this cookie,” and “I feel anxious about having this craving because I don’t trust myself around this food.”

If you realize you are truly not hungry and decide you don’t want to have the food, you can say to yourself, “I can have the thought I HAVE to eat that cookie” and still actively choose not to eat it. Not because it’s BAD to eat it, but because you are practicing a skill of psychological flexibility. You are practicing the skill of giving yourself choice.

How Does Intuitive Eating Fit with All of This

I have talked about how Intuitive Eating is helpful to me. I will say that I don’t typically have to accept a lot of cravings anymore. That’s the magic of Intuitive Eating, when you don’t restrict, it isn’t as big of a deal to have something or not. When it’s allowed, strong cravings decrease substantially over time.

When I talk about support and accountability here, I am mostly talking about using it to apply to other behaviors, like exercising to feel good, and pursuing other things in your life that matter to you. That might be doing more yoga, walking, or connecting with a group of friends who have a similar hobby. It could also be meal prepping so you don’t eat out and spend as much money.

The cool thing? You get to decide. And if you are very used to being in a diet focused world, giving yourself the choice and autonomy might just be the freedom that you are actually craving – to focus on living the life that truly matters to you.

Coping with “I Don’t Want To” Thoughts

Goal setting is a skill. We set out to do things in our life and we either follow through or not. A lot of people I work with have excellent follow through on many areas of their life, except food.

They feel ineffective and don’t trust themselves so they just stop setting the goal.

Sometimes we are not going to want to do things and it’s important to do them anyways. Not because we “should” but because we said we would.

Example: As I write this post, I have 30 minutes before I am going to pick up the kids. I really want to finish the post, but I also committed to 21 days of yoga for 30 minutes.

I have NO desire to do it. I want to finish my work. BUT I committed to the 21 days and I shared with my Body Respect Program participants I was doing it for extra accountability.

I’m having thoughts like “Ugh, I do not want to do this.” “I need to finish my work.” “Yoga is boring.” “I will feel best if I get my post done.”

AND

I’m going to do the darn yoga. BRB.

How Do I Know if It’s Diet Mentality?

You might be wondering, how do you know if it’s truly diet mentality or just you setting a goal that is important to you.

This, like most things, will be a work in progress. You will have to keep asking the question and keep being honest with yourself. This is going to be different for different people. Some people have a very strained relationship to exercise, others less so. Some people end up using some form of tracking their eating or the scale, and others decide to avoid it completely.

Some find that a community of people working towards fitness goals is super helpful, for others it triggers diet mentality and body shame and it just isn’t for them.

This will be a learning process over time, and your path will look different than others. But as you become more skilled at making commitments to yourself and working on psychological flexibility on the way, it will become more clear over time.

Steps to Build Psychological Flexibility and More Freedom in Your Behavior

1. Detach from needing to “feel good” all the time before taking action. This frees you up to follow through on your commitments to yourself regardless of if you are having an off day.
2. Follow through on your commitments (most of the time), evaluate afterwards. I’m ALL for you evaluating whether or not approaches are truly right for you. Like are you running even though deep down you hate it and never want to do it again? Then maybe re-evaluate! But don’t re-evaluate right before your scheduled run, do it another time. Do it at a time when you can more clearly look at the bigger picture and ask, “Does this fit with my goals? Does this move me towards a more fulfilling meaningful life in the grand scheme? Or is this a goal I can shed to free up focus and energy for something else?”
3. Hang out with people who encourage you to be brave and take care of yourself. Surrounding yourself with like-minded people, people who are taking a different approach to their bodies, who accept body diversity and who work on overall self-care, not just weight management or eating and exercise habits, is key.
4. Practice mindfulness and/or yoga. A lot of yoga or mindfulness practices build psychological flexibility. My favorites aren’t the ones that just encourage you to “let it go” and “feel at peace with the world” but those that encourage you to drop the struggle and just practice being with what is here now. We don’t have to change, analyze or get rid of all of our internal stuff. Doing so will keep us stuck, keep us living small and comfortable, and probably keep us from some of our biggest dreams and goals.

I want to hear from you!

If you enjoyed this blog and podcast, it would be amazing if you could leave a review on iTunes. That helps me know what content you are finding valuable and also helps to support the show in staying free. If you know someone who could benefit from this info, please share it! The two of you can listen and build a support and accountability system for each other. I’d love to hear your plans! Send me a DM on Instagram or tag me @psychology.of.wellness and let others know about this episode and how you are planning to seek additional accountability and support in your life so that you can thrive, feel good, and move towards your most important goals and dreams.

Clarify Your Values

Want a step by step guide to help you reflect on your most important values so you can remind yourself WHY you are getting comfortable with being uncomfortable? My free values and goals guide does just that. Check it out for free here!

Disclaimer: This blog and podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individual professional advice or treatment, including medical or mental health advice. It does not constitute a provider patient relationship.