Confident Eaters

Fighting Boredom and Using the Feelings Wheel with Chelsea
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Georgie: [00:00:00] Hey friends, it's Georgie back with another episode of The Confident Eater's podcast. Today, I've got a real life client call for you with my girl, Chelsea. Not only is she a fascinating person and very bright, she's also a competitive ballroom dancer and a really successful artist. All around, she's a pretty fascinating person.

Since we started working together, she has been steadily losing weight. As she closes in on her goal, we are still working on some of the times when she feels like she might be more vulnerable to eating unnecessarily, or in other words, eating when she isn't hungry. The next topic I'm going to work on with Chelsea is emotional awareness.

And that paves the way into emotional management. She'll get to meet our good friend, the feelings wheel today, and we'll get a little specific about the feeling of boredom. So if you encounter boredom on a regular basis, and it can cause you to have a snack attack, this would be a great episode for you.

I hope you enjoy.

[00:01:00] Welcome to the Confident Eaters Podcast, where you get proven methods to end overeating, emotional eating, and stressing about food. We are heading for harmony between your body, food and feelings, hosted by me, Georgie Fear, and my team at Confident Eaters.

Okay, have you ever used a feelings wheel before?

Chelsea: I believe so.

Georgie: In what context?

Chelsea: yeah, I think I've had them in little like pre made journal thingies. Okay.

Georgie: Sort of looks like this.

Chelsea: Yes.

Georgie: So if we look at this wheel, the idea of using a feelings wheel is it's sort of like a menu, not for how you'd like to feel, but suggestions for like, how am I feeling right now? So right now, if I'm going to do this, I would say I'm feeling I'm in the green area over there. I'm a little dismayed at not having [00:02:00] any answers for my frequent heartburn.

Chelsea: Yeah.

Georgie: But I'm also, I don't see the word relieved on here, but that's the word that's coming to mind.

I'm Oh, there it is. It's an orange. I'm relieved that all the scary things have been ruled out.

Chelsea: Mhmm, yeah.

Georgie: And then I'm also, I guess I just sort of feel like calm and pleased because now I get to sit here and talk to you and talk to people after you and like three enjoyable people is a very chill day. So I sort of like, I guess I scan inward first.

And then that's sort of what I'm feeling is that here, you know and then you take a second pass to see what might be the secondary thing going on. And then like take a third pass and sometimes it might be completely unrelated to whatever thought or story was on your mind for the first one. So take a stab at it.

What do you get from our feelings wheel today? Right now?

Chelsea: Yeah, it's as soon as you said like relieved and calm, I was looking for them because I'm having kind of an unusual weekend [00:03:00] that I just got done two very I did something that booked out my sales calendar, and I did something that got my YouTube footage to my editor way early this week.

So I get to just kind of sit here and feel peaceful, which I see relieved as like an offshoot of peaceful and also just calm because there's nothing else that I like have to be doing. And I would say there's definitely an Element of gratitude. I have to see where this is on here.

Georgie: It doesn't have to be on here. I mean, it doesn't have to be every word..

Chelsea: grateful.. Yeah.

Georgie: You could be grateful. That's a good one.

Chelsea: Yeah, like, my partner's home for the next 12 hours and we kind of just get to hang out and yeah, I just feel grateful to be with her and not to, I basically got to just work just like a little bit today and I didn't have to do anything I like didn't want to do and like, what a delight.

Georgie: Okay. [00:04:00] Excellent. A plus on using the using the wheel. Got that done. So what we'll do for this next week is I'd like you to set a time each day. It's helpful if you have like an alarm that goes off or you just do it. Like some kind of reminder to use the emotion wheel once a day to pick up what am I feeling right now?

Chelsea: Yes.

Georgie: It doesn't really matter when you do it. It can be at a time that's typically easy. Like first thing in the morning, though. First thing in the morning tends to have very little variability. Okay.

Chelsea: Yes.

Georgie: We're all like in the same, like, what day is it? What do I have to do today when we wake up in the morning?

Chelsea: Yeah.

Georgie: And so it may be helpful to find more variety if you do it a little later in the day.

Chelsea: Yeah. so I've done a version of this before, but I was consistent with this for a really long time. And then when I lost my cat, I was like, okay, I'm just putting my mood.

Georgie: Got tired of writing I'm sad?

Chelsea: Yeah, it's just, it's so depressing even to fill it out and look at the little graph, and so I stopped.

I had been doing it on my phone, because it has, Like the iPhone has its own little like [00:05:00] version of this. Is that compatible with this?

Georgie: Absolutely so you can use whatever, if it has a different wheel or different selection, that's fine. what we're going to look for in this is patterns. Do you already know some patterns that you have?

Chelsea: Ooh, I think I had started to maybe tap into them before when I was like more consistent. I think at the time, I remember being surprised by just how, positive I typically felt. Like, even if a day was, like, really stressful or overwhelming, I usually found enough to feel, like, at least, calm or hopeful or something else.

And I would have thought that I would have recorded it a little bit differently.

Georgie: So usually there's some element of positive emotion in there, even if it's accompanied by more difficult ones.

Chelsea: Yeah.

Georgie: Okay. Any patterns related to food? For example, some people will say, Oh, what are some of these words on here?

I know are like [00:06:00] food emotions for me.

Chelsea: Interesting.

Georgie: Like, when I'm feeling insecure? Snack time.

Chelsea: Bored.

Georgie: Okay.

Chelsea: Yeah. In fact, yesterday I dance competition was over. And I just kind of like had the day to myself. I had zero exercise. It was just supposed to be like rest up and recover, which was really nice, but I would kind of get. a few hours into something and be like, okay, well, could I like eat or something?

Like, I don't know what to do right now.

Georgie: On the first call I jotted down some emotions, futility, stress, frustration, anxiety, negative fortune telling, catastrophic thinking, personalization. Now I'm sure some of those are my interpretation and not what you told me. I think we were talking about the context of after a sales call.

Chelsea: Yes. That has actually gotten much better, I think, because I come off of the call and just proactively think, what can I do to, like, genuinely take care [00:07:00] of myself, not just kind of numb this feeling.

Georgie: Great.

Chelsea: And yeah, like, I have actively noticed it make a difference and help. I don't even necessarily have to reach for like a piece of fruit or something as a harm reduction.

Georgie: Right.

Chelsea: Like, okay, well, if you feel like you have to eat, at least just make it a handful of grapes or something like that doesn't even happen as much anymore.

Georgie: Good for you. All right. Has improved with her new habit of trying to actively care for herself after sales calls.

Chelsea: Yay.

Georgie: Good job.

Chelsea: So I would say like long stretches of boredom are maybe the next main hurdle when it comes to food.

Georgie: Okay. Boredom is actually one of the simplest, I don't want to say easy, but it is in the easier side of the spectrum when it comes to doing things other than food, because it's having nothing to do, which means almost anything is an improvement. So many things will help boredom, [00:08:00] even if it's your doorbell rigging and somebody's soliciting you.

Like a lot of things will alleviate boredom. I know you've worked on costumes in the past or obviously worked on your artwork.

Chelsea: Yep. That's what I did last night. Actually. That's like why I'm ahead on work is I finally got bored enough where I was like, well. I could go work on a painting, which will solve a work problem and give me something to do.

And I kind of had to talk myself into it, but then I was like, oh, that kind of feels great to have done that.

Georgie: Do you find sometimes when you're bored doing something productive, even if it's not fun, still feels rewarding? Like picking up the kitchen or folding laundry?

Chelsea: Okay, so, like, self care tasks are my actual kryptonite. Like, if I am depressed, it is the first thing that feels absolutely impossible. Like, Herculean. But being productive on other things? Yes.

Georgie: You said self care tasks feel impossible to Herculean.

Chelsea: Okay, yeah.

Georgie: What sort of [00:09:00] tasks? Does that include cleaning?

Chelsea: Yes.

Georgie: Okay, so cleaning, probably hygiene.

Chelsea: Cleaning the house, cleaning myself.

Georgie: So it's sort of like house and home care.

Chelsea: Yeah. Like, I have a bunch of weeds in the front yard, and yes, there is an active feedback loop of like, looking at it stresses me out, but the more stressed out I am about needing to go and pull weeds, the less likely it is to happen.

Georgie: Yeah.

Chelsea: Yeah. It, it is house and self care, but like, doing little business projects or creative things weirdly aren't as prone to that.

Georgie: Sometimes that happens. It's not that strange. Sometimes business projects or work things feel more directly rewarding or they give us a sense of progress that we don't get from doing a task that we're just going to need to do again in a number of weeks.

Chelsea: Exactly. I think with a lot of like care tasks, the benefit is like, you don't feel like you're falling behind versus like actually feeling like you've [00:10:00] gotten ahead on something.

Georgie: Yeah, sure. Yeah, it's like, why, why am I going to do this if I just need to do it again tomorrow and again tomorrow and again tomorrow? Okay. So for boredom, you might sometimes be in the state of mind where doing self care things feels doable. So I wouldn't say like take it off the potential list of things that you run by yourself if you're bored, but I would start with creative stuff.

Chelsea: Okay.

Georgie: Check on self care tasks, and then business projects or tasks.

Chelsea: Yeah I think that sounds good, and interestingly, if I can push myself to do, like, self or home care tasks, it actually feels disproportionately good. It just, I don't know, it's, it's like there's a bigger hump to get over, until it feels like there's momentum there and the good feelings can actually come out. It's. I don't know how logical it is, to be honest.

Georgie: It's workable, like it's, it's really common for people to, [00:11:00] we get stuck in like, these sort of two columns of behavior. This is how I behave when I'm feeling good, and this is how I behave when I'm feeling shitty.

Chelsea: Yes.

Georgie: And if I also said, give me a list of activities that make you feel good, they'd be the same list. And give me a list of activities that make you feel shitty, They'd be on this list.

Chelsea: Yeah,

Georgie: of course we get stuck. We get stuck feeling good and doing the things that make us feel good, or we get stuck feeling bad and doing the things that make us feel bad like endless scrolling spending money we shouldn't be comparing and despairing to other people on Facebook.

Hours and hours of television and round and round we go. So the trick is to feel bad and do these things anyway.

Chelsea: Yeah,

Georgie: because then you actually get to feel better.

Chelsea: Yeah.

Georgie: So it takes some recategorizing, because it's still instinctive to think, I feel bad I do these things.

Chelsea: Yeah.

Georgie: So, we need to think like, I feel bad, I need to do the feel better things to get [00:12:00] over to the other side. But, we'll get there.

Chelsea: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And you're like, spot on. That definitely tracks with my Experience and also something starting this time of year that I have to be really proactive about. So I'm glad we're talking about these things because man, when the days start getting shorter, it is easy to fall into that exact line of thinking that you just shared.

Georgie: Yeah. Emotions get their own sheets on the tracker here.

Chelsea: Yay.

Georgie: And we'll, we'll list the different emotions that we talk about and then like the tactics that we use for them.

Chelsea: Great.

Georgie: So for boredom we're gonna use, they're all sort of actions here. Some of them are going to have like more cognitive tools combat some things. Like, emotion regulation skills fall into two categories. Ones you can do in an airplane seat and ones you can't.

Chelsea: Yeah.

Georgie: So these are the, like, not the airplane seat kind. These are the actual movement of things, so.

Chelsea: Yes.

Georgie: Okay, so creative [00:13:00] projects, work, tasks, work check if, self care feels doable, the other one that crossed my mind is socialize, which can just be contacting somebody, like literally sending a text, Hey, you want to grab coffee on Friday?

Chelsea: Yeah.

Georgie: So I just reach out plan. Cause sometimes like I'm bored, but my friends are like working a night shift or like, They're busy. They can't text back and forth with me at that moment. So I'll just reach out. I'll throw out some feelers for the next weekend so. Any other emotions that you think are like big hitters for you that you want to work on, stick them in column a here on this page.

Sometimes we'll group them together. For example, if people are feeling disappointment and frustration, those are very closely related. So if somebody has those, I'll lump them together, because we use a lot of the same tactics, but. So this week, it's not really changing anything other than tuning into your emotions and using the wheel.

Chelsea: [00:14:00] Yes.

Georgie: And you do have some things you can do differently, if boredom presents itself.

Chelsea: Yes, perfect. Before, when I had logged this on my phone, I would typically do it as I was getting into bed, but I'm wondering if as it relates to food, It might be a little bit more accurate if I did it, like, at the end of the workday, just because I haven't necessarily had as much time to regulate through downtime.

Georgie: Yeah, I think that's a good idea.

Chelsea: I was wondering if you would get more of a glimpse into the tricky emotions if you did it, like, after work ended. What do you think about that timing?

Georgie: So I put emotional check in end of work day. If you forget at the end of the work day, it's not lost. Just do it when you remember it.

Chelsea: Yeah cool.

Georgie: Important thing is just to get it in there once a day. And then you can just write what you're finding in the box. So you can write the emotions. In the box.

Chelsea: Great.

Georgie: Cool. Alright, well, email me or text if anything goes down, if you need a hand, and we'll chat in two weeks.

Chelsea: Thanks so much, Georgie.

Georgie: Alright, see ya. Bye bye.

Chelsea: Bye.

[00:15:00]