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When we don’t understand the nature of Thought, our thinking can (innocently) be fearful, to greater or lesser degrees. This, in turn, causes us to need to comfort and distract ourselves with unwanted habits like overeating. Alternatively, when we learn about the nature of Thought our unwanted habits become unnecessary and fall away.

You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below. 

Show Notes

• How our thinking can be fearful, even when we don’t notice it
• Our problem-solving brain is always trying to keep us safe
• How our unwanted habits distract us (temporarily) from our thinking
• When we see the nature of though our unwanted habits dissolve

Transcript of episode

Hello explorers, and welcome to Q&A episode 30 of Unbroken. My name is Alexandra Amor. I’m really happy to haveyou here with me today. 

Today the question is: is fear making us fat?

This was something that crossed my mind the other day that I really wanted to share with you as a way of looking toward the understanding that I share here on the podcast and toward this inside out understanding of the way that we work, and how everything that we’re experiencing is coming to us via thought. It occurred to me the other day, I was just thinking about my thinking. And I realized that so much of my thinking is insecure, or fearful. 

We often talk about how our thinking is so often in the future or in the past. And it’s really clear to me that so often when we’re thinking about the future, when I’m planning things, or thinking about what might happen, or what could happen, or what should happen, or what I should be doing in any given situation, that thinking is quite fearful. We might not necessarily label it as such, unless we’re aware that we live in the world of our thinking, not in the world of our circumstances. 

I started reflecting on the quality of my thoughts, or the nature of my thoughts even when I feel like things are relatively peaceful, inside my head, and calm and quiet, and things are fairly settled. And I realized that even then, my thinking can be quite fearful. This makes sense, because our brains ability to problem solve, I always call them big problem-solving machines. It’s their nature to want to look out into the world into what might be happening, and then solve that problem. 

Where does that come from? That comes from a place of insecurity or fear. 

There might be a situation that I as a human might encounter in the next 10 minutes. And my brain, being a problem-solving machine, wants to get out ahead of that problem, and it wants to fix it before it can happen. It wants to anticipate what might occur in order to keep me safe. And this, of course, makes total sense. I’m not judging my brain, or my thinking at all. It’s doing its job, and it’s doing its very best to try to protect me and keep me safe. And you as well, of course, we’re all designed the same way. 

So given that problem solving nature of our brains and our thinking, so much of our thinking can be like I said, insecure or fearful, even when we’re really calm and quiet. And then what can happen – and this is where I see anxiety start to occur in people – is that thinking kind of builds on itself. It gets even more sped up and more sped up and more sped up. And now we’re spending a lot more time in that worried or anxious state. It’s like a river running faster and being really turned up. 

That can become an unwanted habit as well, I realize. We get into this unwanted habit of being anxious and having these layers and layers of insecure an anxious thinking. 

What does that have to do with an overeating habit? 

Well, here’s what I saw about how fear is making us fat. When we have that kind of anxious, fearful thinking, and we’re not aware even a that it’s happening, that it’s something that’s occurring within us, rather than coming from our lived experience, and be that there’s such a simple way to deal with that thinking and that is simply to see it for what it is. 

Once we we see the shadow puppet on the wall and recognize it as such, then we know that there isn’t a monster in our bedroom. That’s one of the analogies we use in this understanding. But when we don’t know these things, and we’ve got all this thinking that’s fearful and insecure, then what happens is, we need to comfort ourselves, that’s just perfectly natural, and normal. And of course, we want to feel safe and secure. And, in a way, create a buffer between ourselves and all of that insecure thinking. 

So what do we do? We reach for substances to help us to do that. 

And that can be anything; it can be food, it can be alcohol, it can be sex, it can be shopping, whatever it is, we’re trying to create a buffer between ourselves and our thinking, or distract ourselves from ourselves and are thinking or soothe ourselves from the thinking that’s going on within us. I know I’ve talked on previous episodes about how the substances that we use to soothe ourselves like food, like overeating, they have a way of, at least initially, quieting down the thinking that’s going on in our brains. So that’s why they work. And that’s why we use them. 

All that is to say that this is why, in this understanding, in my work, we’re always pointing toward, we’re always pointing upstream, as I’ve talked about, in a previous episode. We’re pointing toward the root cause of what’s creating an unwanted habit. So looking downstream, and looking at the specificity of “I only eat when I’m anxious about being in the car,” or “I only overeat during the in that circumstance”, or “I only indulge in my unwanted habit during this specific circumstance, like if my spouse is out of town, and I’m in the house by myself” or whatever it is, doesn’t matter what it is. 

That kind of specificity is actually looking away from the root cause of the problem. So again, we look upstream. And the root cause is our thinking, the fact that we’re living in the world of our thinking, not in the world of our circumstances, and that the feeling that we have the drive to overeat, the cravings that we have, are always, always pointing us toward the quality of our thinking, and letting us know if it’s gone in the toilet. And that looking in that direction is what ends up resolving an unwanted habit, like overeating, rather than looking in the other direction and getting really granular about what’s going on. 

When we see that it is our fearful thinking that’s making us fat, that can be really helpful in helping us let go of an unwanted overeating habit.

I hope that that’s been helpful for you and that it opens a little window into helping you understand the nature of thought, the nature of where our unwanted habits come from, and how looking at how we all work as human beings is the thing that resolves these habits, and understanding the kindness and the perfection really, in our design, about how those feelings are letting us know that we’re caught up in this busy, fearful thinking. 

It’s just the perfect design and it’s always there for us, always supporting us, always letting us know what’s going on. It’s our cravings are not a problem. They’re they don’t reflect that we’re broken, or flawed in some way or lacking. They’re always, always perfection, really and letting us know exactly what’s going on. I hope that’s been helpful for you and if you would like any clarification about that or have any follow up questions about that or about anything else, please let me know. You can go to alexandraamor.com/question, fill out the form and I’ll be happy to answer your question on a future episode. 

Thank you so much for being here. And I will see you again next time. Bye.

Featured image photo by Juli Kosolapova on Unsplash