the other day I noticed I had 90s pop hit IA by Wenger boys going round and round in my head back to the island o if you know it you know it and when I noticed that these lyrics were going round and around in my head I was thinking what why why this song I think I was 15 when this song was released and it wasn't exactly a favorite but then when I thought about it I realized that 10 minutes ago I had come out of a client session and my client had been on holiday
in itha so that mention of itha triggered something off in my brain my brain which like yours has 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections and in there in that mass of neurons and trillions of connections is the lyrics of anger boys IA and I share this to highlight how much content we have in our wiring of our brain where they're kind of like I conditioned responses there's a trigger and then there's a reaction the trigger was I heard the word IA the reaction was I couldn't get that song out of my head for the
next hour and since planning this YouTube video and planning to talk about it it's back but back to binge eating if we think about binge eating as a conditioned pattern there are a whole cluster of neurons and networks that are dedicated to how you think about food feel about food and behave around food and if you feel like you are on Groundhog Day you are going around the same thing over and over again chances are you have these neural networks that are quite um strongly wired which means they're just very active and so if we
have a conditioned problem there's two potential Solutions the first one is to maintain a state of awareness and presence so we watch ourselves think we're looking out for it we're super aware we're able to occupy that higher level of Consciousness which I don't mean that in a woo way just the capacity to be able to watch ourselves think and intervene now when I have clients who say yeah this is great this works but does this mean I'm supposed to maintain this perfect place of presence throughout my life that doesn't feel possible it actually feels like
hard work and no that's not what I'm saying because I go unconscious there are times when I want to switch off even though I'm still awake and doing things and I go into autopilot I think it's very human so this brings me on to the second solution to a conditioned problem and that is rewiring we want to create some new wiring that the more that becomes conditioned the more available it is so even the thoughts that I now have around food and my eating are so different to what they were years ago and I'm not
doing that that is automatic that is now part of my conditioning and so when something becomes conditioned it takes less effort so the question becomes how do we make the old conditioning less active and make the new conditioning stronger well there's three things that I want to talk about today and these things are blocks to this process but they're also AIDS things that you can use to help the process of rewiring in networks that look more like a recovered mind so this is about how to go from binge mind to recovered mind and the first
piece that I want to touch on is beliefs now I want to separate beliefs from thoughts because they're not the same thing I will still get the occasional thought that goes why don't you just why don't you just go and binge a couple of months ago even I was really overwhelmed with a few things and my brain went you could just binge now I didn't have to choose my reaction to that thought like I did in the process of recovery in the process of recovery it would be noticing that thought and in that a word
St a word in that state of higher awareness and going ah how do I want to respond to this thought but now because that has become integrated into the wiring of my brain my brain just goes no we don't do that anymore and there's no battle so it can feel like recovery is going to be one long battle because in the process of it it feels like it's hard work but this stuff can start to become automatic if you take these things into consideration so firstly how might your beliefs be working against you I think
the most important question anybody who wants to stop binge eating needs to ask thems is what does recovery actually look like cuz for some people especially if they're stuck in the binge restrict cycle they think recovery looks like the restrict part of the cycle not realizing that that image of recovery looking like that is actually part of the condition problem or even if you're not a binge restrictor your idea of recovery might be some perfect way being with food or you might think that recovery means you never have to think about food try finishing this
sentence I will believe I'm recovered when and notice what came up and in fact share with me in the chat below what came up what is this belief that you have that needs to happen how things need to look in order for you to be recovered because if there are beliefs that are either not realistic maybe you have this belief that your body should be a certain way and your biology is going to keep pushing back against that because you're trying to eat less than your body wants or maybe there's a whole load of confusion
about not knowing what recovery looks like in which case this is where my channel comes in this is where other people who are out there talking about recovery from all kinds of eating challenges you can listen to them and then here's the important piece you then think about it for yourself I know it's very compelling to binge watch 2 hours of content and just be like if I just get enough information maybe that will change my behavior but without taking time to reflect to think cuz while you are thinking about new information you are thinking
new thoughts and when you are thinking new thoughts you are creating new wiring any new wiring that is created just through listening or reading content is going to be very fragile until you start thinking about it now you might think well I think about this problem all the time but if you're thinking about this problem all the time chances you're thinking about it from the condition state so you're just thinking the same thoughts over and over again about this problem we need some new thoughts and again to separate thoughts from beliefs which leads me on
to attention being able to direct your attention choose where to put your attention practice putting your attention where you want it to be is crucial rewiring is a learning process and in order to learn we have to pay attention we can't learn new language we can't learn to play an instrument we can't learn any of these things without attention and practice so when you have old conditioned thinking patterns that come up like when that bab Boy song came in my head it's like I'm not thinking those thoughts those thoughts are happening to me so as
Byron ktie says we spend a lot of our time not thinking but being thought we identify with our thoughts being us and we we think that well because we're thinking it this is us think thinking it and this is true as opposed to this is just old stuff coming up again and again so unless there is a deliberate effort attention and intention to start practicing new ways of thinking the old thinking is always going to win if you don't learn to direct your attention your condition patterns will rule your life and you'll be pulled from
one compulsive thing to another compulsive thing whether it's food or TV or Internet relationships whatever it might be maybe you have ADHD and you're listening to this girl great she's lost me at this point there's several studies one in particular from UCLA that took people with ADHD and they did eight weeks of very short mindfulness and meditation exercises and at the end of those eight weeks their ability to focus had improved and their levels of depression and anxiety had reduced so if you have something like ADHD yes directing your attention is a challenge it's like
being born with a muscle that's particularly weak it doesn't mean that you can't make it stronger with practice I think sometimes with so much rhetoric out there at the moment about ADHD some people are feeling hopeless and going well I've got ADHD so none of this stuff is possible for me there are great content out there by ADHD content creators with all the I know life hack things about how to actually get yourself to do the thing cuz if you struggle with atten ention particular if you struggle with ADHD you might be like okay well
yeah if I could meditate then that might improve things but how do I get myself to do it so you might need accountability you might need to sign up for a short course you might need to find a way to make it novel or track it or whatever it is that you need to help your ADHD brain be willing to give it a go and the thing is it will get easier and easier because even after 8 weeks we're seeing a difference in Focus so hopefully when you're looking at your beliefs and your thoughts you
started to identify like what does recovery look like and then it's like okay where is it I need to be putting my attention to be practicing these thoughts this direction of attention is crucial if you're somebody who thinks about food a lot now firstly if you are trying to restrict you're going to think about food a lot your biology will do that and none of this stuff is relevant until you have addressed that piece but if you're not restricting but you're just thinking about food a lot because this is part of your condition pattern then
being able to direct your ention when your mind starts obsessing and going oh I'm going to going to go over here I'll do this thing if I see a photograph of myself and maybe my mind gets drawn to something I see on that photograph and I have a a critical thought about my body or my appearance or something I I I push myself away from it I'm not going down that route because the more I focus on what I perceive to be flaws the bigger they're going to become in my mind it's like that with
anything whether you're focused on food whether you're focused on something to to do with your body the things we focus on expand and this is partly how body dysmorphia develops someone becomes very fixated on a floor and the more they look at it the bigger that becomes in their brain until their brain physically sees that floor differently perceived floor not a floor what it thinks is a floor differently to how everybody else sees it so with attention practice practice practice that can look like a meditation or mindfulness practice it can be Googling sematic exercises and
doing something that's much more in your body it can be something like yoga it can be just going for a walk without your headphones and just trying to really be in your environment it doesn't have to be this formal breath work meditation find something that works for you but I can't emphasize enough how this is key to having Mastery over maybe everything in your life to be able to choose where you put your attention and your wiring will follow suit to keep strengthening that and strengthening that and then it becomes automatic and you don't even
have to consider where you put your attention in that area there'll be another problem that pops up somewhere else because that just seems to be what happens and the last piece which kind of turbocharges this process of rewiring it's about emotional reactivity in the generation before me the question would have been where were you when you heard JFK was shot for me it was where were you when Diana died or where were were you when you heard about the twin talet attack and when you ask these questions to people people know where they were because
when we hear something shocking or we have an emotional response to something particularly if it's out of the ordinary our brain flags that as important oh it's created this emotional response that means it's important we need to remember this that's actually no advantage to me knowing where I was when I heard Princess Diana died or when I heard about the Twin Town but it gives us an insight into the brain and how the brain works so there's two aspects to this the emotional reactions that keep happening within the old conditioning keep reinforcing the old conditioning
keep strengthening it making it more active your brain thinks it's important so it just keeps going into this old conditioning let's think about food all the time let's think about binging let's think about dieting whatever it might be so we get stuck how we feel makes us stuck so we need to reduce the emotional reactivity to this piece over here the condition part and then with the new conditioning the new wiring that we want to build we want to create some emotional energy around that in order to make this new wiring stronger I think it's
Amber Ray who talked about emotions as they're not personal they're like the weather they're these things that happen to us what makes them bigger and what makes them problematic is often our reaction to them so emotions tend to get layered so it could be you feel jealous and then you feel shame you feel bad about yourself for being jealous you think you must be this horrible person so now not only are you dealing with this feeling of jealousy but you're dealing with a layer of Shame on top of it any any self Judgment of emotions
is like pouring petrol on top of it or pouring gasoline on top of it it just compounds it our initial emotional responses are mostly outside of our control the bit where we want to come in and do something differently is in how we react to those emotional responses cuz for so many people I see that their reaction is the very thing that's making these emotional responses worse for them if you're like many people I meet you may end up identifying yourself with your feelings so you might say I'm a jealous person I'm an angry person
you might just say I'm an emotional person as opposed to I'm just a person with emotions we identify our emotions and we feel like they're part of who we are instead of experiences that are happening to us being able to switch from one set of conditioning into building this new set of conditioning involves an identity shift we end up identifying with the things we believe we identify with the feelings we feel instead of recognizing them as an experience and us as the experiencer we also know that when you are overwhelmed in a high emotional state
whether it's stress overwhelm your lyic brain becomes very active so therefore blood flow in the bra brain moves towards your lyic brain because that's where all the activity is but what that means is many people experience what feels like a kind of shutting down of their executive functioning the part that feels like them the part that can think more clearly and we can reduce emotional reactivity in a couple of ways and they are curiosity and compassion what curiosity does is it allows us to ask questions and to look at something in a different way you
will have beliefs about your binging and I don't doubt that some of the beliefs in there are about what a undisciplined weak broken person that you are what if that's not true like what if you're just trapped in this this conditioned Vortex over here when you disidentify yourself from the problem you are now outside of it able to look at it able to be curious but the minute you lose all curiosity and you think you know what it is you then become the problem again like I mentioned in the first point you will need to
really think about this concept if it's going to make any sense to you if it's going to be part of your recovery Journey cuz you might be listening to it and it might feel a bit confusing or you might be listening and you might be resonating but it's like pulling out anything of what I'm saying that makes sense to you assuming that you've stuck with me so far now let's move over to the recovery mindset the new wiring that we want to build up isn't it so much easier if you are in that mode of
losing weight and you're getting on the scale and every time you get on the scale you get this emotional reward which then keeps motivating you and you keep staying in it staying in it and then it's one of the reasons why when those rewards stop coming people end up springing back it's one of the reasons why psychologically dieting is so hard let alone the biological stuff so whenever you spend time thinking in your recovered mind anytime you are thinking feeling or behaving in a way that you want to reinforce for as the recovered you you
need to show yourself some appreciation just doesn't have to be big dramatic but taking a moment to really feel a sense of appreciation to yourself for doing that new thing for having that moment where oh gosh in this moment I would normally have slipped into this and instead I remembered this and I thought about it like this and then I was able to just make a choice that felt right for me these moments what it is you want you need to emotionally reinforce cuz that gives the part of your brain that's building these new networks
gives it a bit of juice this video was actually inspired by somebody in my comments section who said that by watching my videos they felt like their brain was being rewired uh which I thought was lovely and there was also another comment not that long ago where somebody said oh your content's good but I don't agree with everything you say and my first thought was good they're thinking about it for themselves and on that note I want to let you know this week I've launched my first course that starts in October and it's called your
intuitive eating blueprint and the idea is we do all the principles in the first 3 weeks and then we spend five weeks thinking about it constantly being invited to think about it and make it yours because I think this is how we really cement these changes that we want to make if you want to find out more about that course I will pop the details below but I just want to say I have a theory for people who see themselves as having low self-esteem and who don't like themselves very much at all I don't think
that they actually hate themselves I think the part of themselves they don't like is this conditioned part so if this is you I don't think that you hate yourself or you're disappointed with yourself or any of this I think that it's this conditioned part of you that you're struggling to like and because it feels like who you are you feel like you're just somebody that you just don't like being but anyway I'll leave you with that thought take care and I'll see you on the next video
