Emotional and Stress-Eating

Carrying on from this post about sorting out your priorities and how to say ‘no’, here’s a tool to help you decide what goes onto your priorities list.

Many of us spend a lot of time multi-tasking**: trying to do more than one thing at a time. That can mask how you actually feel about a specific task, a person, a food, etc. If you knew what that thing/person was really like, you might not want it on your list.

Try mono-tasking.   (Be like the lion in the photo.  He is mono-tasking digestion.)

Mono-task for at a least a day. Be present with the one task you’re doing, the one person you’re interacting with, the one food you’re eating, etc. so you get to experience it fully. Some things will turn out to be better than you thought; some you’ll want to move down, or off, that priority list from yesterday.

When you get the full experience, you can make a more informed choice about what’s a priority.

Multi-tasking does have its uses though; if you have an obligation on your priority list that you need some relief from. An example is a relative who complains a lot, but you want to keep in touch with them because family ties are important to you. Can you take that person on your walk or your bike ride, or see them in a group? That dilutes the situation and still meets your value of family ties.

** It’s actually just your brain flicking back and forth between things really quickly rather than true multi-tasking. It can be exhausting, and way less productive than you might think.

Photo by Erin Daldry