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In This Issue:
Featured Wellness Message: Let Kindness Be Your Guide 🤝
Recommended Resource: Quiz: What’s Your Eating Personality Style?
My Featured Blog Post: 7 Secrets to Making Resolutions Work
My Recent Blog Post: 10 Tips to Improve Your Relationships
My Psychology Today Article: Did the Holidays Trigger Emotional Eating?
Let Kindness Be Your Guide 🤝
Along with all the hope and promise of growth a new year can bring, sometimes there comes a bright and shiny to-do list too. Because now that you’ve set your resolutions, you have projects to start, new schedules to maintain, or tasks to take care of. That’s great!
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But promise me one thing: You will be kind to yourself through it all.
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Checklists can be stressful, and they can also be a source of guilt or shame if you’re not ticking off items in the timeframe you’d planned.
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Don’t let 2022 be more overwhelming than it needs to be. Practice treating yourself like you would a best friend: with compassion, understanding, forgiveness, flexibility. Be gentle on yourself when you don’t meet a goal; take time for yourself, then try again. Welcome moments of imperfection. Laugh over mistakes or setbacks. Celebrate mini accomplishments.
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In the end, when you can be kind to yourself through thick and thin, you’ll see that your to-do list is really just a to-try list. So strive for what seems doable, and love yourself whether you get it done or not. 💛
Quiz: What’s Your Eating Personality Style?
Find out how our dieting culture may be governing your eating style
Have you ever wondered whether you’re a picky eater, an emotional eater, an intuitive eater, or something else? Have you ever considered how diet culture is influencing your relationship with food?
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Well, there’s a fun little quiz you can take to get a sense of your eating style. Developed by Lara Zibarras, PhD, the seven-question quiz won’t give you a formal diagnosis, but it’s a playful way to begin a serious reflection on your eating habits and whether they’re serving your body and mind when it comes to food.
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After years of intense dieting and developing an eating disorder, Zibarras turned her recovery and doctoral education into science-based advocacy. With this shift in her own mindset, Zibarras is determined to help others find food freedom with her six-week online program, Health Mindset Matters. She says, “It is possible to work through emotional eating, body issues, and food obsessions. You can learn how to tune into your body’s signals so you can eat more mindfully and say goodbye to bingeing. You can transform your mindset from a dieting mentality to a health-focused mindset.”
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The diet mentality is so pervasive in our culture that there likely isn’t a day that goes by when we don’t receive a subtle message that makes us question our weight, calories, exercise, food, or appearance. Next time you feel swayed by the claims of a fad diet, exercise trend, or magic detox drink, look inward. Ask yourself, “Is this what my body really needs? Or is this what the dieting industry wants me to think I need?” Your body is wiser than you might think.​
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“Feeling compassion for ourselves in no way releases us from responsibility for our actions. Rather, it releases us from the self-hatred that prevents us from responding to our life with clarity and balance.”
—Tara Brach
7 Secrets to Making Resolutions Work
This year, stick to your goals for the long term
With the new year here, you might be thinking about your resolutions—whether you’ll keep them or maybe just give up. Consider that resolutions can be a great way to evaluate where you’re at in life and where you want to be in the future. Healthy resolutions can provide a great incentive to engage in healthier behaviors.
Setting your resolutions is the exciting part, full of all the wonder and promise of future success. But when reality hits, they can be a little hard to stick with. Here are two of seven tips to help you meet your resolutions over the long term:
Approach, don’t avoid. Research has found that resolutions that require an approach (e.g., I will eat three balanced meals every day) tend to be more successful than resolutions that require you to avoid something (e.g., I will stop binge eating).Create values-based resolutions. Our values are the guiding principles behind who we are, how we act, and who we want to be. So if you want to live and act in a way that factors in what matters most to you, create resolutions that are based on your values. Instead of binary goals, you’ll be creating resolutions that can help define how you act and what you prioritize.
Using these tips can help you keep yourself accountable. In turn, it’ll be easier to make progress toward your resolution. To get the other five tips, read the full blog post.
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10 Tips to Improve Your Relationships
Build stronger bonds for lasting connections
We should always be striving to improve our relationships. And in these isolated times, working on our connections to loved ones is more important than ever. Research tells us that when we are thriving in our relationships, we’ll experience more positives in our physical health, mental health, and overall happiness.
Putting effort into your relationships doesn’t have to take up a lot of time or energy. With these 10 tips, your improved connections can spark joy in other areas of your life too.
Know your emotional triggersAsk questions, be curiousShow compassionLearn how to have difficult conversationsListenKnow when to back down or show upMake time for quality timeBe vulnerableUnderstand boundariesTake care of yourself
There’s a lot more to say about each of these tips, so be sure to read my full blog post for why and how these approaches are so effective.
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Did the Holidays Trigger Emotional Eating?
To cope with guilt, anxiety, and stress, start counting memories, not calories
While the holidays are marketed to us as the happiest time of the year, for many this is not the case. If you turned to food to manage intense emotions—a practice known as emotional eating, binge eating, or compulsive eating—there are steps you can take now to get back to balanced meals at regular intervals.
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But first, it can be helpful to identify your triggers. Common emotional eating triggers associated with the holidays can include:
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• Money
• Lack of sleep
• Social situations
• Alcohol
• Emphasis on food
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When negative emotions get out of hand, it’s important that you acknowledge them, tolerate them, and build resilience, instead of pushing them away and trapping yourself in a negative emotion cycle.​
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Remember that being human is an emotional experience. If you numb your emotions, you might feel protected in the short term, but you’ll miss out on all of the good ones too.
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For six ways to cope with post-holiday emotions, read the full article.
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