3 Tools to Aid in Emotional Detox

 
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When you think about cleansing and detoxing, you might only think about what to eat, drink or supplement to clear out unwanted toxic build up in your body. It turns out some of the most dangerous residual toxic materials are related to excessive stress hormones that can accumulate in your body. Excessive stress hormones negatively impact sleep, mood, energy and overall wellness by disrupting all the systems of your body.

While detoxing through wellness practices, nutritional additions or even supplements can help get the process started, there are other practices you can incorporate that will help aid in restoring balance from excessive toxic emotional residue due to stress, anxiety, grief, anger, resentment, overwhelm, fear, contempt and other emotional build up that can settle into your being and cause significant tension and discomfort internally.

Have you ever felt as though you have been emotionally “slimed?” Where you feel like you just can’t shake or rid yourself a particular emotion and the triggering thoughts associated with those emotions? If so, you are not alone! Emotions can be difficult to cope with, feel and release. These three tools below can help to detox the “slimy” internal residue of uncomfortable emotions and stress. A big part of releasing toxic emotional build-up in the body is acknowledging it and having a method to release. These three tools are helpful as they can offer an opportunity to create a space to explore the emotions and let them go.

1.    Journaling

Writing in a journal can act as a container for your thoughts, feelings and emotions. When you hold on to stressful thoughts and feelings, you keep your mind and body in a state of fight or flight—this is not healthy or helpful. Journaling has been proven to help reduce stress hormones, to improve the quality of your life and create a healthier perspective on emotions and life in general.

The next time you just can’t seem to “let-go” of an uncomfortable emotion or stressor, dust off an old journal or notebook—or even open up a document on your computer—and just start writing. If you are not sure where to begin, start with the emotion, the stressor and write-write-write. See how it feels to get it out, to purge these thoughts and feelings, close the journal and move forward. Think of journaling as a detoxing process for your mind, which will consequently help to clear your body of built up tension and stress.

2.    Art Making

Creativity is a major component to living a full life. Art making by its nature is healing and life enhancing. Creating a mandala is similar to journaling. To create a mandala, draw a circle on a piece of paper and then use any art materials such as colored pencils, markers, oil pastels or even crayons to release your feelings onto the page. The mandala (circle) acts as a guide, not a barrier. Begin by selecting a color that represents your internal emotions or stress and use line, shape color and form to let it out! You can change colors throughout, just begin with one that represents the emotions you are desiring to release.

Mandalas are one of my favorites because the circle acts as a balancing form on the page, however, even scribbling, doodling or doing soothing painting with water colors can have the same impact. Try not to focus on the product (what your picture looks like!. This is not relevant to the desired outcome: releasing uncomfortable stress and emotions! Art making acts as an emotional detox by letting it flow through you, out and away from you. Art making can be more freeing as you are not limited by words. The next time you are feeling stuck in pattern of holding onto a negative feeling, try creating with art materials and notice how it impacts your mood state. 

3.    Breathe

Your breath offers a direct passageway to greater health in mind, body, and spirit. You will breathe whether you think about it or not, it is a marker of being alive. However, you can bring your breath into your conscious awareness and access the healing benefits through specific actions of your breath.

When you breathe diaphragmatically you engage the parasympathetic nervous system, the part of the nervous system that calms you down. Parasympathetic nervous system response is referred to as “rest and digest mode.” The other function of the nervous system is the sympathetic nervous system response which is referred to as “fight or flight mode.” When you are harboring stress, uncomfortable emotions, or thoughts that are triggering those emotions, even subconsciously, you expose yourself to the toxic residue of these emotions. Emotions themselves are not good or bad, they are valuable information about our experience of our lives. However, if you hold onto emotions they can become a negative experience inside and out, causing significant discomfort that gets shoved into your physical body and creates toxicity.

Breathing helps to calm the nervous system and offers more clarity of thought. This can open you to deeper awareness of why the emotion is there, and how it came to be stuck or stagnant as you may originally not have been open or comfortable with receiving the message it was there to offer you. To begin, place one hand on your abdomen and the other hand on your chest. Then, direct your breath in through your nose and expand your abdomen as you inhale slowly. Then, breathe out through your nose drawing your navel in towards your spine slowly.

Continue with this pattern, breathing slowly and deeply and notice the impact on how you feel. Try not force it, just assure that your abdomen is expanding with your inhale, not your chest. You can pair this diaphragmatic breathing with a phrase, such as “let go”—saying “let” in your mind as you inhale and “go” in your mind as you exhale. This helps to free stuck emotional residue and can significantly reduce your stress. This practice also gives your mind a point of focus making it less likely that it will wander off to any other stressful or distressing thoughts.

Emotions are a part of life. Learning to experience, manage and release them is a tremendously valuable part of life. The paradox is often that if you avoid the discomfort you perpetuate its existence. If you allow yourself to feel your emotions, be present with them and make a decision about how to respond in the moment, you offer yourself to feel it as it’s related to the triggering circumstances—versus feeling all of the toxic build up and residue from long-term avoidance and fear.

Try integrating one or more of these tools and notice the impact it has on your life, your body, and your self-awareness. When you free yourself of the discomfort of holding onto emotions that are not needed for your present moment experience, you open yourself to the possibility of offering a deeper space of peace and contentment within.

The Power of Your Food Story

 
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When you embark on the path to heal your relationship with food, knowing, writing, telling and finding insights from your personal food story can be an extremely enlightening part of the process. Allowing yourself to learn, access and heal your relationship with food by exploring the points of origination throughout your life where your relationship with food went awry in the first place. When you witness your own story, you are able to learn, grow and begin to heal your relationship with food from the deepest roots.

We all have a food story. We all received messages from those around us, the media, and other influences about food and how it should or shouldn’t make us feel, look or be. We all have emotional triggers that run quite deep. Food may have been used as a punishment or reward as child in an attempt to control your behavior. You may have been told to clean your plate or that there were starving children who would be grateful to eat whatever was left on your plate—implying how ungrateful you are for your full belly or maybe the undesired vegetables.

These are examples, and while they may be fairly common, remember, when you set out to write your personal food story and learn from your history with food it can bring up ALL kinds of feelings, memories and sensations. You may struggle with feelings of guilt because you do not want to place blame on others. It may bring up uncomfortable feelings towards a family member because you feel a certain way about a particular message you received from a parent, sibling, friend or bully. The fact is, no matter if your family did the best they could with what they had (or not), that does not mean that what they did was what you needed or didn’t create some of the root struggles of your relationship with food.

Just because someone may not have meant to create or exacerbate a complicated relationship with food for you, that does not mean that what they did, said—or maybe didn’t do or didn’t say—didn’t cause conflicting messages for you. They may not have meant to have caused you to experience feelings that impacted how you felt about food, yourself and your body, which ultimately deeply impacted your self-image and self-esteem. Just because a parent or someone else may not have intended to create discomfort in your life does not mean that they were able to meet your needs. Acknowledging this is a part of the healing process. Acknowledging these harsh truths allow you to empower yourself as you move forward.

While you may not want to place “blame” on someone else for your struggles, the awareness that what did or didn’t happen in your past allows you to learn, grow and make changes in the here and the now. A major part of becoming a “grown-up” is learning to re-parent yourself where your needs were not met. Maybe you were not given the opportunity to learn self-regulation skills and you had whatever you wanted whenever you wanted it. Maybe the emphasis on food was that it is a treat or a reward. This may have caused you to have a difficult time with self-regulation around food including mindset, planning and follow through. Or maybe you grew up in a rigid environment where everything was OFF-LIMITS, causing an equally troublesome message about food. All of these experiences can impact how you interact with your life, including how you view, interact with and feel towards food to this day.

If you grew up without examples of self-regulation you may feel as though it is difficult to assess your hunger and full cues, to not feel deprived and resentful if you choose NOT to eat a desirable food—even if you are not hungry—or it may be overwhelming to plan your meals—or even a grocery list—and stick to it. If you grew up in a rigid environment when it came to food choices, you may have adopted a “FORGET-IT” attitude where you feel as though you are asserting yourself as an adult to eat whatever you want whenever you want it. It could also be that the rigidity has caused a fear of food, calories, weight, and body-judgment from others.

BOTH of these experiences can be met with desiring change, a desire for a different way to be with foodto be with yourself. Both of these examples of possible experiences from your youth can deeply impact how you interact with food, your body and your life to this day.

There are many other common messages you may have received surrounding food, such as: food is love “I made this just for you”—or, food is comfort: “I knew you had a bad day so I made you your favorite ____________”—or, food is a reward: “You did such a great job on ______________ I made you this treat to celebrate!” These are just a few examples of how messages can be received that can create dysfunction within your relationship with food, especially if it is already complicated!

More subtle messages man be in the mix as well, such as a parent who feeds the family but was always on a diet and they restrict their portions or eat different foods from the family at mealtimes. Or, maybe if your family perceived your body to be overweight, they may have put you on an undesired diet or worse, even locked food away restricting what you could and couldn’t eat. This may have caused a desire to hide, sneak and steal food, eating it in secret. No matter what messages you received about food—or your body—the impact runs deep and creates complication in the process of making peace with food.

This is where writing your food story—your personal history with food—can be enlightening, empowering and freeing. Writing your food story is an exercise I have in my book, Wholistic Food Therapy and I wanted to share it here as it is an incredibly important part of your healing journey.

To begin, think about your history with food. Consider the various messages you received about food and your body that were both direct and indirect. Spend time identifying emotions that drive you to desire comforting foods. Consider memories or phrases you heard that impacted you and how you felt about food and your body. Spend time journaling and writing it out for as long as it takes.

When you complete your story, review it. If there were some particularly challenging moments you came across, picture that version of yourself and offer that picture in your mind of yourself kindness and compassion. Acknowledge that your needs were not necessarily met and as an adult you will empower yourself to meet your own needs. Thank yourself for putting in this powerful effort to heal from the deepest roots, to face and release old messages, thoughts, feelings and experiences.

When you are working towards healing and change, awareness is always the first step. Acknowledge how this increased awareness can help you change as you move forward from this process of examining your food history and writing your food story. It may be helpful to tell your story to someone you trust, someone you do not fear will judge you. Having your story to be witnessed by another is powerfully healing, and you never know how your story may inspire another person.  

I’d love to hear your story! This process is covered in depth in my online course, Freedom From Emotional Eating. If you are ready to immerse yourself in a process towards healing your relationship with food, you can check it out on my courses page to learn more!

I look forward to walking with you along your path to healing your relationship with food.