3 ways of dealing with a crap day

Prefer to listen?

Prefer to read?

Perhaps you’ve had a crap day today or maybe it was yesterday. Maybe you had one or several last week! I really want to talk to you about this topic as we are all affected by this.

How do you deal with having a crap day?

Now perhaps at the moment you are finding yourself turning to chocolate, or opening a bottle of wine as a way of dealing with it, but what other ways can we cope with them as these are just a part of life. We sometimes have wonderful days and sometimes days which aren’t as wonderful!

So I want to share with you my top tips on how you can deal with these kind of days which don’t involve food, as ultimately chocolate and crisps aren’t going to help, as this is about you learning to cope with the things which life can throw at us.

1 ACKNOWLEDGE

I see and hear this so often, that women don’t always fully acknowledge how they feel, they don’t own their feelings or step into that place of truth where they go ‘today has been really rubbish and I’m feeing a little bit fed up with it all.’

Instead we put on a mask, show a brave face and tell everyone we are OK. But fast forward to the evening when the children have gone to bed or we are on our own doing something, we have a little break down and get upset, maybe even finding ourself in the kitchen getting something to eat as we push down how we truly feel.

That’s got to stop. Not because there is something wrong with that behavior, because there isn’t, at all. But simply because it’s really not going to help in the long run as it’s just reinforcing the fact that you can’t cope with these emotions when you’ve had one of those days. Remember we all have days like that (I had one yesterday!) but learning to truly acknowledge and own how we feel is really important.

2 SELF COMPASSION

So you’ve had one of those day – it might have been to do with work, maybe you got cut up in the car, your children have been driving you crazy, your partner has been driving you crazy, and you just want the day to end!

How many times have you felt like that but then deflected that on to yourself? Blaming yourself.

“It was all my fault as I did this, or didn’t do that. I should have tried harder. I should have done this, I should have done that”

STOP!

Self compassion goes such a long way when we are trying to heal our relationship with ourselves, with who we are, with food, with feeding our soul, becoming more aligned and connected.

Beating ourselves up is absolutely pointless. I’m talking from expereince as I was a total pro at beating myself up, judging myself, criticizing myself and blaming myself for pretty much everything.

If the day went wrong, it was my fault.

If something happened at work, it was my fault.

If I got stuck in traffic, it was my fault for not leaving ealrier.

Perhaps you do the same.

Self compassion is about practicing cutting yourself some slack, it will help you relax more into the fact that some days are more challenging than others. And that’s OK. It’s nothing to do with you so stop blaming yourself! OK??

3 SELF CARE

If at the moment you turn to food as a way of coping as you’ve had one of those day, even though you might not think it at the moment, what you are doing subconsciously is using that behavior as a form of self care.

There is a part of you that believes if you eat that chocolate bar on the way home from work that you are going to feel better.

If you buy that bag of sweets from the petrol station on the way to collect the children from school, you are going to feel better.

There is some kind of belief underneath that behavior that truly believes you will feel better and that is arguably self care

But what if you could take the food out of the equation and do something else in order to take care of your needs?

Now I’m not a massive fan of running bubble baths, as we all know that in the moment of coming home when you are thinking ‘today could not get any worse!’, that is the last thing you want to do.

So instead, try and be more creative with this. I personally cannot stand bubble baths, they aren’t my thing, I get more stressed having a bath! So figure out what works for you. How can you feed your soul what she needs when you feel like you do?

Tap into your creativity, get a pen and paper and brainstorm all the things which would make you feel more soul fed, content, connected, satisfied, nourished, aligned, grounded. Write them down.

It might be a book, a cup of tea, feeling your feet on the grass, listening or dancing to music, speaking to a friend, being on your own. It might be a bubble bath!

There are so many variations of what we might need at any given moment to bring us back into our own reality.

When we’ve had such a rubbish day, which inevitably happen, when we have these coping strategies we can dip into, we start to feel  more in control.  Rather than heading into the kitchen (by default) and stuffing those feelings down with crisps, cake, chocolate.

I promise you will start to feel more empowered, connected, embodied, aligned and it will help you feel more in control of the life that you have.

Want some extra help with addressing emotional eating?

I’ve created a free training series on ‘How To Stop Emotional Eating’ just for you, which contains 4 videos to show you how to heal your relationship with food and yourself.

To get started, head over to: http://www.rachelfoy.com/emotionaleatinghelp

Missed last week’s post? You can see it here: Are you emotionally fed?