Free 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food by Susan Albers Page B

If your problem really doesn’t have any comic elements, try to find humor elsewhere. Take your mind off your problem by going to funny websites or renting a funny movie. No matter what prompts your laughter, it will do good things for your body and mind.
13. when you feel empty, choose feeling that your glass is half full
    I messed up again! Chocolate chip cookies sent all my good efforts to eat well back to square one. Why can’t I get anything right? I feel I’m a complete failure. How hard is it to control myself? I allow myself a little pity party before remembering that I’m working on looking at the bright side. I must remember that this isn’t a make-or-break situation, even thought it feels like one. The good news is that there are no more cookies in the house. At least that temptation is gone and I can start again—right now. As my mother used to say, “You have to break some eggs to make an omelet.”
    —Kathy
    Therapists are experts at helping people feel better. When you consider that they have only words to comfort their clients, it’s amazing. No hugs. No gifts. No food. This is intriguing. They must use very powerful words and string them together very skillfully to get the results they do. So what is their secret? Partly, it’s that they give people support and encouragement. But what exactly do they say that helps people feel better even in their worst moments?
    Much of what therapists do is to
reframe
the situation. The therapist explains how the client feels from another perspective than the one the client has. Instead of focusing on the problem a particular issue creates for you, reframing looks at the benefits or opportunities presented by that difficult issue.
    Let me describe a common situation that many stress eaters face. Emotional eaters focus a lot on their failures. They have laundry lists of everything they’ve done wrong and condemn themselves for falling back into old habits. Here is one way to reframe this particular situation: those overeating moments aren’t really failures. Instead, they’re
missteps
. These missteps provide you with useful information to study and use to guide you. They are teaching moments that help you identify what you need to work on. The good news is that you can do such reframing yourself. You don’t need a Ph.D. in psychology to get a new perspective on your situation. You just have to look at it differently. As the saying goes, When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When you reframe a situation, you take charge of how you think about the issue.
    ~self-soothing technique~
    Practice the Art of Reframing
Evaluate your language. Write down any negative words that you use to describe the situation (failure, stupid, worst ever, and so forth).
Choose new words. For example, change “failure” to “stumble.” A “relapse” can be made into a “reminder” or even a “chance to start again.”
Consider how you can use this experience as a teaching moment. A
teaching moment
means taking a difficult situation and weaving an important lesson into it. We often see teaching moments with kids. If your toddler makes a negative remark about someone’s weight, that’s a good moment to talk to the child about being sensitive to others and accepting them, no matter what they look like.
Now get a pen or pencil and a stack of 3 by 5 index cards. Write down a valuable lesson that you learned from a particular situation you are currently dealing with or from an earlier experience. Post this card in an easy-to-see location.
    Let’s say you just had an episode of emotional eating. And let’s say that you tried to use a breathing technique to stop mindlessly snacking in the kitchen, but it didn’t work. You could reframe this incident as “good information.” Why? Perhaps this incident taught you that if you first get yourself out of the kitchen, the breathing exercise might work better. Write this advice on the 3 by 5 card.
    You can use reframes in two ways: