3 Emotions Holding You Back From Success
If you’ve ever tried to change the way you eat or begin a new workout program…
Have you ever felt that sense of confidence that comes from making up your mind and knowing that nothing can get in your way of success…
…only for things to go so far wrong mere weeks (or even days) later that your head is left spinning trying to figure out where you’ve ended up?
Like when you vowed on Monday to cut back on sugar only to find yourself deep in a bag of cookies on Saturday…or when you bought that exercise bike only for it to sit unused after your first 10 rides.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with eating sweets, but there IS something unsettling about breaking a promise to yourself.
In the beginning of a new endeavor, you’re filled with enthusiasm because you’ve envisioned a positive future, where you feel in control of what you eat, and work out without twisting your own arm. You dream of how good it will feel once you’ve changed for the better and the expectation of experiencing those positive emotions motivates you.
Your desire to seek out those emotions is a powerful driver of your behavior.
But on the flip side…
Your emotions can also hinder your progress.
The top three emotions I see tripping people up who desire a healthier relationship with food and exercise are guilt, shame, and impatience.
While you may not be able to sidestep these emotions entirely, knowing what to expect, how they operate, and how to healthily process them will help you maintain your consistency so you can make it past the challenging first few weeks of behavior change and achieve the long-term success you deserve for your hard work.
Guilt
Many of the new Food Body Self students I meet are masters of guilting themselves when they take an action they didn’t intend to, like overeating, skipping a workout, or making an “unhealthy” food choice (for the record, I prefer not to describe foods as healthy or unhealthy).
Guilt can derail you by nudging you towards making further choices you feel guilty about. For instance, if you’re an emotional eater and you feel guilty after an episode of emotional eating, you may have the urge to continue overeating, either triggering a binge, a later episode of emotional eating, or saying “screw it” to your goal-aligned food plans for the rest of the day.
This can, of course, trigger more guilt, thrusting you into a guilt spiral. You use avoidance (eating, drinking, procrastination, etc.) to escape uncomfortable emotions, but the avoidance leads to more discomfort, and a greater desire to escape.
Shame
Shame has a lot of overlap with guilt, but is a distinct emotion. The best description of the difference between guilt and shame I’ve heard is from shame researcher Brené Brown:
Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. Shame is “I am bad.” Guilt is “I did something bad.”
While guilt and shame can both indicate regret for an action you took, shame comes with the added worry that something is inherently wrong with you—you’re weak, lazy, incompetent, or otherwise not good enough. Shame arises from our deepest insecurities and can be a particularly painful emotion.
Like guilt, you can fall into a shame spiral where when you feel shame for an initial behavior, you then use avoidant behaviors to try to escape the shame—like eating copious amounts of ice cream or hiding out at home watching tv instead of keeping that promise to yourself to go out on a walk.
Impatience
Although guilt and shame are powerful, uncomfortable emotions, impatience can also readily knock you off the wagon.
Impatience indicates a desire for instant gratification—which is often one of the reasons you ended up where you are in the first place. More of the same won’t get you a different result.
Aside from the fact that it’s unrealistic, when you get hyper-focused on seeing immediate progress, you can often begin to feel like what you’re doing isn’t enough, which leads people to change too much at once, making the changes harder to sustain.
Similarly, when you don’t see fast results from the changes you make, it can lead you to feel that what you’re doing isn’t “worth it” and I’ve seen many people quit when they were on the verge of making great progress—all because they lost their patience.
Guilt, shame, and impatience are all very human, very natural emotions and it’s understandable why they might arise for anyone embarking on a journey of change.
The good news—no, the GREAT news—is that these emotions don’t have to stand in the way of your goals.
Even though they arise as an automatic response, you can learn how to process these feelings in healthy ways, without avoiding them, no matter how uncomfortable they may seem.
And the second piece of great news is, each time you process these challenging emotions in a healthy way, the more likely it will become in the future that your automatic response will be a more helpful one.
In other words, you can get to the point where you don’t feel guilty at all for overeating or skipping a workout. You can just move on with your day and keep up your consistency without getting completely derailed.
This is exactly why sitting with and processing your emotions are skills at the core of Food Body Self coaching.
Your emotions can both facilitate and hinder your progress.
It’s essential to learn both how to generate helpful emotions and work through unhelpful ones if you want to be successful.