Gratitude helps you see the positive aspects of your life, brightens your mood, and consequently reduces the need to eat to feel better.
How we feel – how happy we are, how stressed we are, even how well we sleep – may seem like it’s out of our hands, but it is actually often a choice we make. We can choose to be grateful for what we have and feel more blissful. Or we can choose to focus on what we’re lacking, who has wronged us, and what’s not going our way. And guess what? We’ll feel miserable. We may blame others, circumstances, or fate for our unhappiness. But at the end of the day, it’s often about us and the choices we make.
One of the simplest ways I find to be able to shift my mood is focusing on gratitude. Of course, sometimes that’s easier said than done.
But as a motivation to practice gratitude more often let’s see the benefits of gratitude, how you can easily integrate it into your life, and how practising gratitude helps to stop emotional eating.
Being mentally exhausted or overwhelmed are typical reasons for emotional eating and constant snacking during the day. Especially if you work from home and you can easily grab a snack when you feel mentally tired, stressed, overloaded and overworked.
That’s why it’s important to learn to manage our mental energy.
Taking a deep breath to calm down may not work for you and it can make you more anxious and stressed. When it comes to breathing and anxiety, slow and steady wins the race. By focusing on extending your exhale and practising diaphragmatic breathing, you can promote feelings of relaxation and reduce stress in your body and mind.
“Taking a deep breath” to calm down is NOT what you need
As a busy, high-performing person, you often find yourself constantly on the go, with a never-ending to-do list and high expectations to meet. This can lead to feelings of overwhelm, stress, and anxiety.
To cope with these overwhelming feelings, many people turn to unhealthy coping mechanisms such as overeating, binge eating, or drinking. You may find yourself reaching for sugary snacks or junk food to help you cope with your emotions or turning to alcohol to unwind after a long day.
Unfortunately, these coping mechanisms only provide temporary relief and can lead to long-term health consequences.
One of the most common pieces of advice given to help calm anxiety and reduce stress is to “take a deep breath.” However, I recently learned that quickly taking a deep breath can actually worsen the symptoms of anxiety by upsetting the delicate balance of gases in our bodies.
Mindfulness has become a buzzword in recent years. Mindful living is a practice that involves being fully aware of the present moment and turning your attention to the current experience.
The benefits of mindful living are endless. It can help you eat better, sleep better, and feel more connected to yourself and others. Mindful living also teaches you how to be more accepting of things that are out of your control.
Other benefits of mindful living are:
A more balanced life
More self-compassion and less self-criticism
Higher levels of creativity, focus, and productivity
A sense of connection with others and the world around you
Improved moods and overall well-being
For many people, mindful living is not natural. They tend to live on autopilot. The problem with this is that autopilot mode often amps you up.
10 daily mood-boosting activities to help you overcome emotional eating
This post will show you mood-boosting activities so you can lift your mood without eating.
Many people use food to improve their mood when they are sad, stressed, anxious, bored, lonely, tense, agitated, or even just exhausted by the end of the day. Food is often used to suppress negative emotions or distract ourselves from these feelings. Food can make you feel calm and relaxed temporarily.
It´s ok to eat emotionally occasionally, everyone does that. The problem is when eating becomes your main coping mechanism. It’s beneficial to learn and use other mood-boosting activities too so eating won’t be the first thing you want to turn to.
Even if you love your job, keeping a strong work-life balance is vital for avoiding burnout and maintaining your health and relationships. Some researchindicates that poor work-life balance can eventually lead to a number of health problems, including increased risk of stroke, heart disease, and depression. Fortunately, there are quite a few things you can do to keep yourself healthy while still enjoying your career. Here are four ways to improve your work-life balance.
Find Ways to Exercise
Healthline explains exercise is incredibly important for both physical and mental health. It can boost your energy levels, reduce your risk for disease, and even improve your outlook on life. Try aiming for approximately 30 minutes of physical activity every day, with frequent movement throughout the day to minimize extended sedentary periods.
While it can be hard to set aside extensive amounts of time for trips to the gym, even small decisions throughout the day can add up. Try going for a brief walk every hour at work, get out of the office at lunchtime, or work out longer on the weekends.
Photo by Pille Kirsi from Pexels
For extra motivation, a fitness tracker like the Apple Watch Series 4 can become your activity coach. It’ll track your steps, monitor your heart rate, help plan your routine, and automatically know when you’re working out. Another great choice is the Polar A370, which helps with both daytime and nighttime activity. It includes heart rate monitoring to gauge your workouts and sleep tracking to analyze whether you’re getting good-quality rest.
Side note from Rita May: Use the Floral Coloring Plannerto track your new habits and your mood, plan your days and weeks, and color the beautiful floral patterns to relax. You can get it for the price of a coffee.
Prioritize Sleep
When you’re busy with work, sleep is often one of the first things to be sacrificed. It’s easy to feel as though you can get by on just a few hours of sleep per night — but Johns Hopkins Medicine explains that this can be incredibly detrimentalto your health, increasing your risk for issues like dementia and certain cancers.
Instead of deciding to “catch up” on sleep over the weekend, try to consistently get 7 to 9 hours of sleep every night during the week. Make changes to your sleep environment to promote better slumber as needed. For instance, if light is peeking through your curtains, add blackout shades. Sometimes a seemingly subtle adjustment can make a huge difference.
Set Clear Boundaries
With the prevalence of technology, sometimes it can feel impossible to disconnect from work. You may feel like you always need to be reachable, making it so that you can never relax even when you’re at home. PsychCentral notes setting clear boundaries, both for yourself and your employer, can help you ensure that you actually enjoy your time off.
Make sure that you clearly and professionally communicate your boundaries to the people you work with. It is completely acceptable — and healthy — to have time to yourself outside of work. You can also set boundaries for yourself; for example, decide that you will check your work email from home before dinner, but then put your devices away for the rest of the evening.
Side note from Rita May: if stress at work drives you to use food as a tool to release stress or as the main source of pleasure, check out my How to Stop Eating Your Feelings Workbook to discover what you are REALLY hungry for and finally break free from emotional and stress eating.
Whether this means your significant other, your friends, or your family, spending time with loved ones is vital for a healthy work-life balance. Connecting with others can reduce your risk for depression and strengthen your immune system. It also helps you maintain perspective, rather than getting completely overwhelmed with your professional life.
Image courtesy of Pixabay
If you can, try setting up regular dates to do something with your friends or family. This doesn’t need to be a huge time commitment — invite someone over for pizza and a movie, go grab a coffee on Saturday morning, or simply talk on the phone. Fostering relationships and setting down your professional responsibilities for a while will help you maintain a healthy outlook on life, and will enable you to return to work fresh.
Taking time to step away from work and prioritize your own well-being is incredibly important. Not only will it help you stay healthy throughout your life — it will help ensure that you can be fully present, creative, and productive in both your personal and professional life.
George Mears is a brain fitness expert, educator, and counselor. He is passionate about sharing his thoughts and research through his articles.
Is manifestation real? Most of us heard of the Law of Attraction from the film Secret. This is a method of manifesting everything you want into your life, simply and easily. It’s based on Asking, Believing that we get what we asked for, and Receiving.
However, there is a problem; the Law of Attraction doesn’t work for most people. They don’t Receive.
Right now, there’s something holding you back from success with the Law of Attraction.
Do you know what it is?
Take this quick quiz and find out what’s blocking YOU from success with manifestation. It will unveil your #1 manifesting block and it’ll show you how to overcome that blockage. All you have to do is answer 10 simple questions.
Save it for later
Why don’t most people see the desired results with manifestation? Because they’re approaching manifesting the wrong way.
Most people think the Law of Attraction is a mysterious force, some magical thing they need to learn to use.
Are you looking for a Christmas present for a stressed-out loved one or for yourself? You are at the right place. Check out my list of 43 stress relief gift ideas for overwhelmed people. I’m sure you will find something that you like. Happy browsing 🙂
43 stress relief gift ideas for overwhelmed people
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Negative emotions such as anger, sadness, fear, frustration, embarrassment, guilt, anxiety, you name it, can pop up in our lives unexpectedly at any time. Sometimes we become completely overwhelmed by these negative emotions. They might be caused by the people around us, the traffic, our jobs, an illness, the weather, and so on.
Unfortunately, we cannot control these circumstances but we can control how we react to them.
If you feel like you have no control over your reactions and emotions, don’t worry. These tips will improve your ability to mindfully walk through your feelings in a productive way.
I will show you how to develop the skills to feel your emotions without letting them control your behaviour.
