Optimizing our environment (using interior design principles) is a powerful tool to help us develop new habits.
I work with my clients to change on six levels to break free from emotional and binge eating. One of the levels is their environment.
When I worked with Adriana Gómez Navarro, Holistic Interior Designer, on her eating habits, she had brilliant ideas about making small changes in her home to help her build the new eating and thinking habits I taught her.
I loved her ideas so much that I asked her to write a guest post about them so you can benefit from her tips too.
Check out her post below about how to use Interior Design to help you break free from emotional eating.
My name is Adriana Gómez Navarro, and I am a holistic interior designer. Beyond creating beautiful spaces, my work is about well-being and designing for the changes people want to see in their lives. We shape environments, and then as we live in our spaces, the environment shapes us back.
I met Rita a couple of years ago and loved her guidance while reviewing my habits and impulses around food. We both agree that forcing new habits doesn’t work. Instead, it’s best to flow towards desired outcomes. We both help our clients look at their experience to identify, in their armour of beliefs, why they are stuck in bad habits that don’t allow them to have the life they want.
We think we’re talking about food, but it’s really about our body’s physiology. We eat to satisfy chemical impulses. We do this mechanically and systematically since we learned to control negative emotions early in life. When we feel anxiety, a release of dopamine (the hormone of pleasure and reward) restores our sense of balance; eating it’s one of the quickest and most effective solutions.
Sadly, our inner child failed to learn to deal with emotions healthily. Thus most of us live with a cocktail of unresolved emotions. That is why we are stuck with bad eating habits (and most likely some other self-sabotaging practices).
Working with Rita is about deciding to intervene in the dopamine loop, face negative emotions, and take an honest look at ourselves to step out of our systemised past and become our best version.
We are neurologically wired to live in the loop of bad eating habits. In his book, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, Joe Dispenza says that we repeat 98% of our thought processes from one day to the next. We don’t think very intentionally because we already have a program that channels our behaviour into repetition.
Rita has excellent tools to help us observe our program for eating and understand what derails us from being healthier. Nevertheless, it’s up to us to ground our intention and focus on doing the work of becoming healthier. That’s why it’s hard!
To make things easier, you can invite change into your space. Interior Design can actually help you get in the flow!
The following suggestions support Rita’s program but can also be done to practice flow change in our lives. They are low-cost solutions for playfulness and experimentation. Furthermore, while you shift things in your home, you will also fortify your sense of style. Of course, expanding and investing in a Holistic Interior Design transformation is always great!
Change the overall layout of the spaces you inhabit. This will disrupt the program that runs in your mind. Consider removing furniture; we tend to accumulate. If you suffer from attachment to all your stuff, practice (if you have alternative storage) putting some things away temporarily. Choose pieces that don’t modify warmth and cosiness.
Create disruption and become your new you by making adjustments in your home with what you already have.
Your home is a projection of whom you will become:
Do you know how many decisions you make when travelling by plane? From when you arrive at the airport until when you leave the airport at your final destination, you get to choose what you drink during the service on the flight. That’s it.
Airports are designed to channel human behaviour, and we respond smoothly at every queue. There are tapes, signs, front desks, screens and clear instructions. Space is automatised almost 100 per cent.
Try stickers, images or tape to place temporary marks to guide your behaviour. These should have clear instructions and/or suggestions.
Place them strategically (focal points where your eyes land when you move and flow). Design for the new thinking program. These will help you pause, decelerate your mind and be present:
Get visual and tactile if you are doing NLP and exercises to work on anxiety. Place a circle on the floor where you will stand up to release energy and anxiety. Place another to meditate for a minute.
Reward yourself every time you beat a craving, and add a mark in a habit tracker every time you release an emotional blockage to see your progress.
Working with all these layers is a great tool to stop running on our systematised program. Trust the environment shaping you back. You can make as many changes as you feel like and flow in new ways.
Changing your home or workspace is like soaking your identity in a safe and energised environment where you can loosen up. You will also discover how versatile your home can be and how art can nurture you in whatever new intention you have.
* Beware, your brain will integrate stimulus, becoming automatised and indifferent after some weeks. Redesign by changing colours and placements of signal a new phase. Reframe your strategy and design the next round of behavioural modifiers.
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