Episode 10: Pain Relief Urges: When Food Feels Like the Fastest Way Out

Georgie Fear : Have you ever felt like stopping binge eating would be no problem at all if only your life wasn't so... hard? Maybe you get an email that disappoints you. Nothing catastrophic. Not your whole life falling apart. Just the kind of email that makes your stomach drop a little. Or somebody says something sharp. Even though you kept going with your day, it stays under your skin. Or maybe you have a terse conversation with someone, and afterward you keep replaying it, imagining what you should have said, wondering if you were misunderstood, feeling that hot little mix of anger and embarrassment. Or maybe nothing dramatic happened at all. You're just annoyed. The house is messy again. The dog won't stop barking. Someone left the cupboard open. Your phone keeps buzzing. Something took longer than it was supposed to. And you are tired of being patient. And then food appears in your mind. Not because you're hungry. Because you feel like I need a break, I need relief, I need this feeling to change. That is what we're talking about today. Pain relief urges the urge to eat because something hurts and food feels like the fastest way to better. And when I say pain, I mean both emotional pain and physical pain. Emotional pain might be social feeling rejected, criticized, left out, misunderstood, unseen, or lonely. It may be self-directed shame, embarrassment, disappointment in yourself, or replaying one of your mistakes. The pain could be relational. This includes conflict, resentment, annoyance, feeling unappreciated, or feeling like you're the one who always has to be patient. And sometimes it's just plain sadness, anxiety, overwhelm, or boredom that feels almost itchy in your body. Physical pain counts, too. Of course. Headaches, back pain, cramps, digestive woes, nausea, injury, illness, poor sleep, body tension, or the wearing down effect of being uncomfortable for hours. Sometimes your patience is basically down to one sad little thread. Not because something huge happened, but because your body has been asking for care and relief all day and often. Of course, physical and emotional pain are not separate compartments they stack. A headache is not just a headache. If it ruins the evening you are looking forward to. An injury isn't just an injury. If it means you can't move in the ways that help you feel like yourself. Chronic pain is not only the sensation in your body, it's also the exhaustion of dealing with those sensations again and again and again. This is one reason why pain relief urges can be so powerful. The pain is not always one cleanly defined thing. It may be body discomfort, plus frustration or loneliness, plus fatigue or conflict, plus jaw tension. You get the idea. Before we go further, I want to be clear about something. My goal for my clients is not to build a life where nothing hurts. That's out of the question. Pain is part of being alive. Discomfort goes hand in hand with growth and living life. If you care about things, you will be disappointed sometimes. If you love people, you will feel grief and fear and longing at times. If you try new things, some of them are going to feel awkward and uncertain. And if you have a body, it will sometimes ache, cramp, get sick or tired and it'll ask for care in inconvenient ways. A painful feeling is not automatically a problem to solve. Sometimes it's part of being an actual human, living an actual human life. So the goal is not to avoid every painful feeling. The goal is to stop treating every painful feeling like an emergency that food has to rescue you from. That distinction matters because pain relief urges can make very convincing arguments. The argument usually sounds like I need relief now. Not in an hour, not after I journal, not after I become my most well-adjusted self right now. Food is here. Food is familiar. Food will change. My state. Food gives sweetness, crunch, warmth. It will help me with distraction, stimulation and reward. It will give me something to do and something to look forward to, and it will ask nothing of me. And honestly, we don't need to pretend that food never helps give you relief. I mean, sometimes food does help briefly. Sometimes it gives comfort, sometimes it gives pleasure. If you're hungry and anxious, eating enough can make the world feel more manageable while getting rid of your hunger. If you're disappointed and you sit down with a homemade muffin, that may be a perfectly lovely way to be kind to yourself. So we're not asking, is food comforting? Because often, yes. The better question is how expensive does this comfort become? I like to think about it like this. A fabulous trip to Italy might be incredible. Pasta museums, espresso. sunshine. Walking down some beautiful old street, pretending you're in a movie. Completely delightful. But if the trip costs money that you don't have requires time you can't take and leaves you stressed for months afterward, then. But it would feel good is not the only thing to consider. The fact that something is pleasant doesn't automatically mean that the price is reasonable. Food can work the same way. Eating a large amount of food might have a nice aspect to it. It may soothe something or numb something, but if your cost includes your sleep, your health, your self-confidence, your sense of trust with yourself, or the next day spent recovering from that relief, then we have to be honest about the price. Comfort is allowed. Cost is the question. This is where I think it's important to be nuanced because the cost of a reasonable meal or a single serving of a comforting treat is often not that high. You don't pay some enormous emotional bill because you ate an ice cream bar and then moved on with your evening. That may simply be comfort. That might be pleasure, and that might be part of your care plan. The steep bills usually come when it becomes. Serving after serving, after serving. Especially when you're already in pain and you set yourself up with a value size box of food that is the hardest for you to moderate. That's a very different situation. A couple cookies with warm milk sounds like great comfort to me. But a value sized box in a high pain moment sounds like a setup. So please do not hear me saying that food can never belong in a comfort plan. It can. If you have confidence that you can eat a reasonable portion of a food that you find comforting, I encourage you to include it. Put it on a plate, sit down. Let it be part of the care you're giving yourself. The issue is not comfort food. The issue is when food is asked to provide all the comfort in your life. That is really the heart of this episode. The work that we need to do is see the cost, widen our options, and build ways to respond to pain that don't leave us with more pain afterward. Pain often needs more than one source of comfort. If the only thing you know how to do when you're hurt is eat, then food is carrying a job that is much too big for it. If you feel like one serving of a treat, food, or a reasonable meal just isn't enough. This is why. So we are not going to take food away and leave you standing there with nothing. That would be cruel and also ineffective. We're going to widen the options you have for pain relief. The first step is to name the pain. Before we move on to choosing the comfort, not just I feel bad. That's too vague to be helpful. Try to get specific. I'm disappointed because I was looking forward to that. I'm annoyed because I asked for help and I didn't get it. My head hurts and I'm tired of pushing through client after client. I feel rejected because they didn't respond. I'm embarrassed because I made a mistake and I keep replaying it. When you name the pain more accurately, you have a better chance of matching the comfort to the actual hurt. If the pain is physical, the most effective comforts may need to be physical to medication if it's appropriate. Heat. Ice. Rest. Darkness. Hydration. Changing positions. Lowering sensory input. Going to bed instead of trying to drag your poor body through three more hours of productivity. If the pain is emotional, comfort might look like expression. This could be crying. Writing the sentences you wish you could say, writing that angry text but not sending it. Taking space for yourself after a conflict. Naming the feeling out loud instead of letting it rattle around in your body all evening. Sometimes the emotion needs somewhere to go, and food becomes tempting because it gives the body something to do with that pent up energy. Sometimes comfort is sensory. A warm drink, a shower, a bath, soft clothes and low lighting music. Aromatherapy. If scents are soothing for you a soft blanket, a furry pillow. If you know me, you know I'm a big fan of furry pillows and blankets. Lying down with a guided meditation. Not every hurt needs some big cognitive intervention. Sometimes your nervous system needs cues of safety and softness before your thinking brain has anything useful to say. Sometimes the most effective comfort takes the form of problem solving. Make your next task smaller. Ask for help. Cancel that nonessential thing. Reschedule. Set a boundary. Repair a conflict. Make a tiny plan for the first step. Pain often feels worse if you feel trapped, and even a small amount of agency can change the experience of the moment. This is why once you start to help yourself, many of your problems immediately begin to feel better. Notoriously, this happens in mental health when people who are suffering from depression reach out to talk to somebody. Often making that first appointment goes a long way toward reducing their symptoms even before they've gotten to see their therapist. you may find comfort in an absorbing or regulating activity. Go outside, take a walk. Exercise if it helps your body discharge stress or feel more alive and I mean that carefully. Movement can be regulating, but not if it turns into punishment or making up for eating. You might do a puzzle read. Make something clean one small area of your home. Play music. Draw, garden. Knit, Stretch or do something that gives your attention somewhere steadier to land for a time. And one of the biggest comfort options, maybe the biggest is connection. This is where I want to bring in one of my favorite lines. Turn to people, not food. To add something personal here. This was probably the biggest piece of essential advice that I did not get when I was working on recovering from disordered eating. I learned a lot of useful things. I learned about eating enough, allowing all foods, understanding patterns, and trying not to live in restriction. All of that mattered. But the message I got really late in the game was interacting with other humans can be ten times more effective than doing all of the so-called right things in isolation. When I finally understood that, it felt like one of the last missing pieces clicked into place, somewhere between all of my journaling and happy lights and exercise and meditation. I had been trying to handle so much privately. I was acting as if emotional regulation was my responsibility to do alone inside my head, using my own discipline, because my problematic relationship with food had been so private. I defaulted to thinking healing also had to be done totally on my own. Now I really do feel confident that whatever shows up in my life, I can handle it. Not because I am endlessly calm,

00:13:30 Georgie Fear: Not because life never hurts me, but because I have relationships that I can turn toward when life hurts me.

00:13:37 Georgie Fear : I have people who will sit with me, listen to me, make me laugh, remind me what is true, or just be nearby while that hard thing passes. And compared to chocolate chip cookies, I have found a loving spouse or friend is a hundred times more comforting. Pain gets heavier in isolation. Food can give you a private way to change your state for a few minutes, but people give you a place to bring your pain, share it, bond through it, and often laugh at it. And in this instance, remember, dogs are people too. Many times the dog is the most emotionally adjusted person in the room. Sometimes turning to people means texting a friend. Sometimes it means sitting beside your partner. Sometimes it means asking for a hug. Sometimes it means sending a voice memo that says, I'm having a rough moment and I do not want to be alone with it. Sometimes it might mean asking, can I vent for five minutes? Or can you please remind me that this will pass? It does not have to be a twelve paragraph emotional disclosure. You don't have to be dramatic to deserve support. And sometimes it means sitting on the floor with your dog, taking them around the block, brushing them and letting them lean against you. Dogs are not a consolation prize here. Dogs are elite nervous system co-regulators despite their terrible boundaries and questionable breath. The point is not that people or dogs magically fix the pain. The point is that the pain does not have to be carried in isolation. And if food has been your most reliable private comfort, connection could feel strange at first. It may feel vulnerable. It may feel inefficient or like the complete opposite of what you're used to doing when you're hurting. It may feel like, why would I bother someone with this? You could think I'm being a baby. Or maybe you feel compelled to apologize immediately after opening up to someone. But if you're trying to build responses to pain that do not leave you paying such a high price afterward. Turning toward people is one of the strongest options there is. So this week I want to give you a simple experiment. Look back over the last seven days and ask what kinds of pain or discomfort showed up most often for me. Was it mostly physical discomfort, headaches, cramps, fatigue, poor sleep, digestive discomfort and injury? Or that general worn down feeling? Was it mostly emotional discomfort, disappointment, annoyance, conflict, loneliness, anxiety, shame, feeling unseen. Feeling left out? Or was it both stacked up on top of each other at times? Next, get specific. Which moments made food look especially appealing? And if you used food for comfort, ask, how much did that cost me? Not was I bad or should I have done something else? Just what was the actual real honest cost if the cost was low. That matters. A reasonable meal, a cup of cocoa, a single serving of anything you enjoy. If that helped you move forward feeling cared for, that may be a perfectly good comfort option. If the cost was high, be honest about that too. Maybe the first few minutes were comforting, but then it just became this zoned out. Serving after serving. Maybe you slept badly. Maybe your stomach hurt. Maybe you felt secretive. Maybe your self-confidence took a hit. Maybe the next day started with that heavy feeling of having to recover from the food. Then I want you to try building a lower cost comfort plan. And I want it to include two options. One option if you want can be food. As long as you feel confident that you can keep it reasonable. A bowl of soup, a real dinner, warm milk and cookies, a plated snack, something that's chosen, portioned, and actually feels comforting. And one option should come from somewhere else. I don't want to reinforce food carrying all the burden to comfort us. Text someone. Sit with the dog. Use heat or ice. Put on soft clothes. Put your face on a furry pillow. Move your body in a way that helps. The goal is not to make the pain disappear. The goal is to respond to pain in a way that leaves you with more steadiness, not more fallout. Food can feel like the fastest way out of pain, I get that. But Fastest is not always kindest. Fastest is not always the option that leaves you feeling cared for afterward. I'm with you in this. Pain is part of life, but you don't have to meet it with only one tool. You can comfort yourself in so many ways. You can build a life where hard moments still happen, but they don't automatically send you back to that same expensive form of relief. If you want help understanding your own eating patterns and building recovery that actually fits your life, working with me personally could change everything you thought you knew about food, emotions, and eating. Learn about coaching at confidenteaters.com . And if you enjoy the show and want to support it, you can subscribe to the paid version for five dollars a month. It helps keep the podcast going. And if subscribing is not possible, please support the show for free by leaving a review or telling somebody about it. Thanks for showing me the love. I'll see you next time.