Ep #35: Allowing Discomfort

Hi! Welcome back! Before I get started today, I just want to express how much love I’m feeling right now for all the amazing women I did mini sessions with this week. I just love them so much for having the courage to reach out and talk to me and for taking that next step to dive deeper into what they’ve learned on the podcast and get some additional, personalized help. So awesome. I just love talking with you guys so much! It’s nice to have a conversation and hear your stories, rather than just being the only one talking.

Alright, let’s talk about being comfortable and being uncomfortable.

Which one sounds better to you?

I bet you’re thinking it’s being comfortable! Am crazy for even asking?

A lot of binge eating happens because of the desire for comfort.

Urges are uncomfortable and you don’t want to feel them so you eat.

Negative emotions are uncomfortable and you don’t want to feel them so you eat.

Eating may solve your discomfort for a short time, you may feel better for a little bit, but it’s not a long term solution. I mean, think about it, do you really want to run to food any time you feel uncomfortable?

Maybe that’s exactly what you’ve been doing, and how has that been working out for you?

Eating is comfortable, yes. Eating relieves you from urges and negative emotions. Eating to not feel is part of your comfort zone.

It’s familiar, and easy, and you know what will happen if you do it. It’s not unknown or unpredictable.

That’s why we like comfort zones. They’re not scary and you can be at ease when you’re in there.

Right now, binge eating is part of your comfort zone. You may not realize bingeing is comfortable to you but it’s more comfortable than what you’d have to feel if you didn’t binge, if you just sat there with an urge or negative feeling.

Unless you’re willing to step away from what’s comfortable and familiar, then you will continue to binge. You will stay exactly where you are.

You’ll keep running to food anytime discomfort appears and nothing will change.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with being comfortable, but if you’re there for too long and you are afraid to step away from it, then you will never grow, evolve, or change.

You can sit around and watch Netflix and eat nachos and be in the comfort of your couch doing the same thing day to day if you want to, but where would that lead you? It sure wouldn’t lead you to become the person who want to be become.

You gotta get up and do something different if you want to be different. You have to try something new and it may be scary and uncomfortable but it will also be so worth it once you get to where you want to be.

If you are someone who is consistently staying in comfort and avoiding discomfort like the plague, I just want you to know that there’s nothing wrong with you and that this is actually how our brains are designed to work.

It’s for our survival. We naturally want to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and use the least amount of energy as possible and this concept is known as the motivational triad.

If you apply this to binge eating, you avoid the pain of uncomfortable feelings and urges, and seek pleasure with the easy solution of eating.

This triad worked well for us back in the caveman days when pain could mean death and pleasure meant reproducing and fueling our bodies with sex and food, and using little energy meant we’d be okay if we weren’t able to find food for awhile.

But now with the world we live in, it’s way too easy for us to fall into the comfort trap. Look how easy it is to avoid pain and discomfort as soon as we feel it. There’s food right there to numb it away and it’s so easy to get! No hunting necessary.

So yeah, because it’s so easy to avoid discomfort whether it be with food, drinking, drugs, or even by distracting with sex, shopping, or gambling, anything that can give you pleasure or a high of some sort, that makes it harder to not take the easy way out. Why do the hard thing when you can do the easy thing?

Well, because the hard thing is much more rewarding, and the easy thing will most likely give you a negative result in the end if you do it in excess.

If you want to be different and become a different, better version of yourself, you have to stop taking the easy route or at least stop taking it too often.

You have to step outside of your comfort zone and into the discomfort zone.

You have to go through the hard part and feel terrible which sounds like an awful idea, but it’s not because what’s on the other side is so worth it.

You’ll be one step closer to your goal.

You’ll become stronger, more skilled, wiser, and more confident.

The more time you spend in discomfort, the more time you get to spend in the kind of comfort you actually want. Not the comfort of binge eating and emotional overeating, but true comfort where you feel good about yourself, are happy, energetic, and proud.

The other option is to spend more time in the comfort you don’t want and get more of the discomfort you don’t want, which would be feeling negatively about yourself on top of food hangovers and being sluggish and unfocused.

Going through the hard and uncomfortable gets easier and easier the more you do it.

Feeling uncomfortable becomes part of your comfort zone. I know it sounds crazy, but I swear it’s true. I live it now.

I used to eat in response to discomfort all the time. If I felt nervous about something, I’d eat. If I felt insecure I’d eat. If I felt stressed I’d eat. But now that doesn’t happen.

I feel uncomfortable often because hey, it’s a part of life, it happens sometimes. We’re not going to feel happy and amazing always. So when I do feel uncomfortable for whatever reason, I just feel it. I just let it happen. I don’t fight it or ignore and numb it, I let it be.

You can’t let discomfort stop you from doing what you want to be doing. Amazing things come from the willingness to feel anything and I’ll tell you that this podcast was the result of a lot of uncomfortable feelings. Seriously, if I wasn’t willing to step into discomfort, this podcast never would have happened.

I can take it way back to when I first posted my binge eating story on my Facebook page for all my friends to see. I finally shared my most embarrassing secret with anyone who saw it and I was unbelievable nervous to do it because I was afraid of the judgement. But I did it anyway and after I did it, I got to feel all the good feelings that come after doing something hard.

Then actually self-producing the podcast and doing all the technical stuff I had to do in order to publish it, oh boy, there was a lot I had to learn and there was a lot of frustration and confusion and it felt horrible, but I pushed through, got to the other side, and now getting it out to you is simple, I’ve got it down. I got past the hard so I could get to the easy.

And there was so much more before that and in between. I went through the discomfort of allowing my urges so I could learn to not binge, I went through the discomfort of coach training certification so I could learn how to coach you, I’ve gone through tons of discomfort feeling confusion, doubt, fear and so much more as I worked on creating programs and coming up with relevant topics to talk about and figuring out how to be an entrepreneur.

There was so much discomfort I went through to get here, to be able to help you, and you’re welcome.

I did it for you and now it’s time for you to do it for you.

Be willing to feel uncomfortable.

Your dreams and goals are on the other side of it and the only way to get there is by going through the muck. Get in there, and know that the more uncomfortable you feel, the more goals you’re going to achieve.

Feeling urges and negative emotions and not bingeing are all uncomfortable. But it’s worth it.

Try it out, see what happens. It may not be as bad as you think.

Do it over and over and the hard gets easier the more you do it so allow yourself to feel urges over and over and watch it get easier.

Become a new person and get a new comfort zone, one that includes discomfort.

This is one of the best skills you can acquire and something I work in depth with my clients on. I have a process that walks you through exactly how to feel discomfort and if you’re interested in working with me on this and all things binge eating, let’s do it. To do it, sign up for a free mini session with me so we can see if you’re a good fit for my program at coachkir.com/mini. We’ll talk about where you are now, where you want to be, and how you can get there. Be courageous like the women I was talking about in the beginning of this episode. Take the next step. It just might be exactly what you need.

Now go feel all the uncomfortableness! All of it! And have a great week, bye bye!