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Apr 12, 2021 / Kerry Thomas

Angus Greig

This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from people in the TED community; browse through all the posts here. 

Overwhelm. 

That word doesn’t feel very pleasant hanging there, does it? It brings up feelings of failure and isolation. I’m a professional organizer, and it’s the word that I hear the most from new clients.

I have a friend and client who runs a successful business, is very active in the community, and is the most positive person you will ever meet. Yet at our first consultation, she told me that not only did she feel overwhelmed, she felt paralyzed. When I asked her to elaborate, she brought up words like shame, failure, fear and isolation.

I assured her that she is not alone.

In fact, in our homes, businesses and relationships, “overwhelm” is our society’s dirty little secret. We fill everything. We fill our houses, our cars, our storage units, our offices, our phones, our minds and our hearts with more than we can manage.

We think that more will lead us to happiness, but all it does is perpetuate the overwhelm. Because of this, the word “clutter” is everywhere.  But what people don’t realize is clutter is not just our stuff. Yes, it can be the physical things that clog up our homes, but it can also be digital, mental, emotional or even spiritual.

I define clutter as anything that keeps you from living the life that you were meant to lead, anything that keeps you from living the life that you want to lead and anything that stops you from accomplishing your work and enjoying your life.

Physical clutter is the typical stuff we think of — the closets that are overflowing, the garages that can’t hold cars, the storage units that have become a billion-dollar industry in the US alone.

Digital clutter are things like the 10 or 200 or 50,000 emails in inboxes — something I see on a very regular basis. It’s also all the files saved on your computer without naming conventions so you don’t know what they are and you spend a lot of time looking for the ones you want.

Mental clutter could be your fears, your to-do list, what’s going on in the news or anything else that’s filling your head at night.

Emotional clutter can be the negative patterns and beliefs you don’t even realize that you’re carrying around. It can be all those “I can statements that run through your head like “I can’t lose weight” or “I can’t quit my job and own my own business”.

Spiritual clutter can be a lack of forgiveness or a lack of peace.

Those last two — emotional and spiritual clutter — can be very subtle, and they can also be the most paralyzing.

While it may not seem possible, I believe that all the different types of clutter I’ve listed here have one main cause. My wonderful friend, mentor and business coach Barbara Hemphill has trademarked a phrase that sums it up: “Clutter is postponed decisions.”

Think about that for a minute. Take physical clutter, for example. When you look at your closet, perhaps there’s a whole section of clothes that we don’t wear and the postponed decision there is: “Am I really going to
put in the effort or time to lose that last 10 pounds and fit into this whole stuff?” Or maybe the postponed decision is: “Am I going to clean out my storage area so I can take these things, put them into bins, and rotate
them in and out every season?”

Paper is a huge source of the clutter I deal with. We pick up a piece of paper; we put it back down and one pile becomes 10 piles. Then when you have family coming over for dinner, you push them all in a bag and put them in the closet.

And we do the same thing with email that we do with paper. We open it but we’re not making any decisions about it. Sometimes our decisions are easy — we just delete, reply or put it in a folder, but quite often we postpone making a decision until we get to the point where we don’t even want to open up our computer.

I always had a very good handle on the first two: physical and digital clutter. And I understood how the other ones worked with my clients, but I didn’t truly understand how those could affect me in my own life until I got stuck.

In 2012, I had heart surgery. My whole life I’d had a valve defect, and I’d always been told: “You’ll live into your 80s with no medical intervention; you’re fine.”

Well, that year, my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given a very short time to live, and my oldest son was hospitalized for suicidal thoughts. My heart figuratively and then literally broke.

By April 2012, I was in heart failure so I had to have surgery.

I flew through it, and I was the model patient. I was only in the hospital for 48 hours. Afterwards, I was up walking and doing things in record time. I
completed a half marathon 11 months after heart surgery.

My life looked great and I was getting a lot of compliments, but I felt stuck.Why? I had massive amounts of emotional clutter. It consisted of fears, questions like:
“What if the surgery didn’t work?”
“What if my heart breaks again?”
“Why am I having these dizziness spells?”
“Why do I still need a nap every single day a year later?”

And also guilt. I asked myself: “Why am I still here while other people aren’t?”

And — let me tell you — those two combine to make some pretty big spiritual clutter.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that my house is very, very neat and clean almost all the time. At the time, I had a client who was the opposite. She was depressed by her townhouse and hadn’t had people over in years — except for me, to try to work on it. We became very close very quickly.

One day, I was commenting to her that besides this stuff that was dragging her down, she had a vibrant life, was doing fun things, continuing her education, going on trips. I tried to prompt her a bit by saying: “Imagine what you could do without all this stuff weighing you down!”

She zinged me and said, “Look who’s talking. You keep telling me about ideas that you have for your business and things you want to do, and you’re not doing any of them. You are also stuck.”

So we challenged each other, and we both started facing our issues. I stopped postponing my decision to look at my fear and postponing the need to deal with my guilt.

Now I don’t know what your postponed decisions are. Do you have a fear you’re not facing?  Or is there someone you need to give forgiveness to?

To move forward, you need to make a decision.  Some are easy — for instance, you could say, “Two weeks from today and I will clean out this garage!” Some are grand — “I’m going to drop out of school, move to California, and write a novel!” And some are minuscule — “Every week I’m going to unsubscribe from two store emails.” Having clutter does not make you a bad person; it is not a moral sentence. And feeling guilty about your clutter is not going to help you, whether it’s guilt from someone else or from yourself.

There’s a saying I like that goes: “Change is a result of action, and action is the result of a decision.” You have the power — even in the midst of feeling horrible overwhelm to the point of being paralyzed — to create change by making a decision. It all starts with an action.

With the physical clutter, you’ve got to box it up, bag it up, take it to the donation center or the curb or wherever it goes. For the other kinds of clutter, you also need to take an action — it might be talking to a good friend, getting out in nature, meditating or journaling. In other words, do something, move forward, make a decision and take an action, even if it’s tiny. The universe will reward you with momentum.

And yes, some clutter is going to come back; that’s just life. But if you keep making decisions and don’t postpone them, you’ll ultimately move from overwhelm towards something that all of us want — peace.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kerry Thomas is a professional organizer and the owner and founder of Conquer the Chaos. She is passionate about helping business owners and leaders with ADHD organize their environments and clear all forms of clutter from their lives, so they can experience productivity and peace of mind. Thomas is also the author of the soon to be released book Less Clutter, More Peace: A Dog’s Teachings. She is based in Leesburg, Virginia.

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Apr 15, 2021 / Gary W. Lewandowski Jr PhD

Stocksy

Let’s get one simple fact out of the way: All couples argue. 

Whether you see them or not, every couple has disagreements. You may think that happily and unhappily married couples argue about different things, but they don’t.

According to a 2019 study, here are the top three conflict triggers that upset, irritate, hurt, or anger partners. They are:

• Condescension (i.e., you are treated as stupid or inferior; your partner acts like they think they’re better than you)
• Possessiveness, jealousy and/or dependency (i.e., your partner demands too much attention or time or is overly jealous, possessive, or dependent)
• Neglect, rejection and/or unreliability (i.e., your partner ignores your feelings, doesn’t call or text, doesn’t say they love you)

Other high-ranking contenders were inconsiderate partners, self-absorbed partners and moody partners. 

But what about the topics that we routinely avoid? While we sidestep thorny areas such as past partners and our past and present sex life, there is one topic we avoid altogether: The relationship itself.

Couples who believed “arguing should not be tolerated” were less satisfied and more aggressive, and the female partners were more depressed.

Much like parents who avoid the “sex talk” with their kids, partners avoid discussing their relationship because it provokes anxiety. In a study, it was the number-one taboo topic for one out of every three people and among the top topics to avoid for seven out of ten people.

But never have we paid so little attention to something so important — when couples believed that conflict was a bad sign, they had worse relationships. Those who believed “arguing should not be tolerated” were less satisfied and more aggressive, and the female partners were more depressed.

When researchers from the University of Michigan and Penn State University followed more than 1,500 adults for more than a week, they found that while people felt better on the day they avoided an argument, the next day they had diminished psychological well-being and increased cortisol, which can lead to weight gain, mood swings, and trouble sleeping. Short-term gain, long-term pain.

When we avoid conflict, we miss the opportunity to help our relationship improve. Without arguments there is no progress.

Studies have found that avoiding conversations now means making the relationship worse later. A 2017 study found that when partners avoided important relationship topics, they had worse communication, were less happy, and were less dedicated to their relationship seven weeks later.

Not only that, but when we avoid conflict we miss the opportunity to help our relationship improve. Without arguments there is no progress.

So most couples need to argue more, not less. To be clear, we shouldn’t seek friction and intentionally find reasons to fight, but we should willingly embrace naturally arising conflict. With that in mind, we should embrace frequent low-stakes disagreements and occasional arguments and have few, if any, big confrontations.

When we assume the best of our partner, we’re less likely to see malice in their actions, which makes arguments less stressful and more likely to be resolved.

For the good of the relationship, every argument needs to start the same way: Partners need to give each other the benefit of the doubt. Rather than start off assuming your partner is wrong, is hopelessly flawed, has bad intentions or is trying to hurt you, you give them what psychologist Carl Rogers calls “unconditional positive regard,” or the belief that at their core, everyone is a good person.

Research from 2019 backs this up, finding that when we assume the best of our partner, we’re less likely to see malice in their actions, which makes arguments less stressful and more likely to be resolved.

For successful conflict resolution, next you need to know what type of problem you’re dealing with. For serious problems like infidelity or substance abuse, it’s better to be direct by demanding change, taking a nonnegotiable stance, and showing anger, especially if your partner is able to change.

If the problems are more mundane (for ex., divvying up chores), you’re better off taking a cooperative approach by using love, humor, affection, and optimism. This is also the better tack for unsolvable problems (e.g., a meddlesome mother-in-law) or a partner who is hopelessly stubborn.

We are too confident in our ability to understand our partners, and they overestimate how clear they are when speaking to us.

Regardless of the problem, there’s no substitute for listening to your partner. Sounds simple, but we rarely truly listen.

How do we become better listeners? Give a “CRAPO”. Here’s what I mean:

1. Clarify

When your partner talks, you need to be sure that you’re clear about what they’re saying. We are too confident in our ability to understand our partners, and they overestimate how clear they are when speaking to us.

To remove all doubt, ask questions like, “When you say ______, what exactly does that mean?”; “Am I correct that ______ is the key issue?”; and “Can you give an example of ______?” It’s possible you’ll get it wrong, but then your partner can set the record straight and they’ll appreciate that you cared enough to try.

2. Reflect the other person’s feelings

This one should probably be named “empathy,” but I needed the letter R. Of course, the R could also stand for “Really Important” because of the five keys, this one is the most critical to get right.

Mastering empathy starts with a simple realization: Behind everything our partner says, there’s an emotion they’re dying to have us notice.

When you give a CRAPO, your job is to reflect back the deeper feelings that your partner is expressing: hurt, embarrassment, confusion, disappointment, frustration, annoyance, nervousness, bewilderment, apathy, or feeling overwhelmed, undervalued, lost, and inauthentic.

When acknowledging your partner’s feelings, you can hedge a bit with phrases like “You seem.. .,” “It sounds like… ,” or “Are you feeling . . .?” If you’re wrong, your partner knows you’re trying to understand, and empathy research shows your effort is more important for relationship satisfaction than accuracy.

3. Attend

Trying to find the right thing to say is only half the battle. You also need to watch your nonverbal signals, or the ways you communicate that go beyond the words you’re using.

For example, you need to show you’re listening by maintaining eye contact and sitting squarely facing your partner in a relaxed and open position, with just the slightest lean toward them.

Appearing fully engaged and present, without nearby distractions like your phone or other screens, conveys to your partner that the conversation is important. Prioritizing nonverbal signals also helps you pay attention, which is important because you need every ounce of mental bandwidth to master the other four steps to giving a CRAPO.

We need to realize that problems won’t just disappear and that talking things out is our only hope for improvement.

4. Paraphrase

To demonstrate your understanding, you should be able to recap what your partner is saying, using your own words. The process of rephrasing and summarizing has two big benefits: First, it shows your partner that you’re deeply invested in the conversation; second, knowing you need to paraphrase forces you to pay close attention.

5. Open-ended questions 

If we’re being honest, in most conversations we’re waiting to turn the focus back to ourselves. When giving a CRAPO, you keep the spotlight on your partner by giving them the space to talk through how they feel.

To do that, ask open-ended questions that help your partner process their feelings. Lead them toward deeper analysis by asking questions like “What would you suggest to someone else in this same situation?”; “How did you make this decision?”; “What would make things better?”; “Why do you think this happened?”; and “How do you see this turning out?”

Each question focuses the problem, helps our partner gain perspective, and allows greater insight into the issue at hand. Now all you have to do is really listen to your partner’s answers.

Every relationship has flaws. We need to realize that problems won’t just disappear and that talking things out is our only hope for improvement.

We must see those conversations for what they are: difficult but necessary steps that help a strong relationship get stronger.

Excerpted from the new book Stronger Than You Think: The 10 Blind Spots That Undermine Your Relationship and How to See Past Them. Copyright © 2021 by Gary Lewandowski. Used with permission of Little, Brown Spark, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. New York, NY. All rights reserved.

Gary W. Lewandowski Jr PhD Gary W. Lewandowski Jr. PhD is the author of the book Stronger Than You Think, a TEDx speaker and a psychology professor at Monmouth University in New Jersey. His writing and research focus on using science to help improve relationships.

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Oct 24, 2017 / Lidia Yuknavitch

Monica Ramos

Suffering is not beautiful, nor is it a state of grace. But you can swim to the wreckage at the bottom and bring something back to the surface that can help others, says writer Lidia Yuknavitch.

The truth is, suffering sucks and it can take you to a place of wanting to kill yourself, and there’s nothing beautiful about that. Suffering is not a state of grace. Suffering, from my point of view, is about a real place in a real body where you face the other side of living. How you choose to understand that story probably determines how you’re going to live the rest of your life.

I feel kindred with fellow sufferers, not because they suffer, and not because of some absurd vortex of victimhood camaraderie, and not because sufferers are in a state of grace, but because they go on, they endure. And because sometimes, the sufferer reinvents themself — and this kind of reinvention is what misfits are so good at. Misfits not only know a great deal about alternate and varied definitions of suffering, but misfits are also capable of alchemizing suffering, changing the energy from one form to another.

Here is the thing I want to say loudest of all: I haven’t transcended anything. No great revelation has come my way. I haven’t “moved on.”

So let me tell you a different suffering story that cannot be corralled by a culture that asks you to process your suffering in ways that make you a good citizen in an ever-churning economy of productive people. My daughter died the day she was born. I am not the only person who has experienced the suffering that comes from such a loss. But I am one of those who is willing to stand up, tell the story out loud, admit that I have carried that profound loss, that birth-death crisis, for more than thirty years now.

Here is the thing I want to say loudest of all: I haven’t transcended anything. No great revelation has come my way. I haven’t ascended into some magical wisdom. I haven’t “moved on.” At least not without her — my daughter I mean. And my suffering is not a state of grace. It’s just a part of me. Like my heart. When her birth-death first happened, here is what I did: I lost my marbles. It did not happen instantly.

At the hospital I could feel myself disintegrating a molecule at a time, but I didn’t say anything. I drank the water they gave me, though I didn’t eat the food. I held my swaddled lifeless daughter several times. I kissed her, I cradled her, I sang to her. I let the nurses give me a hot towel “bath” in the bed the second night, which remains on my list of top five most phenomenal physical experiences of my life. I thought I might be dead, but the heated wet towels reminded my skin that I was in fact alive, even if I was deadened.

It was my sister who brought me back to life, slowly, feeding me bits of saltine crackers to lure me back, and then one day an egg, and eventually, a milkshake. The milkshake made me smile.

By the time they released me and sent me home, I wasn’t speaking at all, to anyone. And I wouldn’t let a single human touch me. I felt . . . mammalian. Back to some animal past of pure instinct and wariness of everything around me. The hair on my legs and arms grew long, like white fur, which sometimes happens when someone stops eating.

It was my sister who brought me back to life, slowly, feeding me bits of saltine crackers to lure me back, and then one day an egg, and eventually, a milkshake. The milkshake made me smile. It was my sister who stepped fully clothed into the shower with me when she would hear me sobbing. She held me tight like a mother would, and her clothes, I began to feel the texture of her clothes against my skin.

It took almost a year. Partway through that first year, I did something unethical. I lied. I lied more than you can imagine. I went back to college, and I had a part-time job at a daycare center, which in retrospect may have been a tragic error. I lied to everyone who asked me about my daughter. I told anyone and everyone that she was alive, she was beautiful, such long eyelashes. I lied about where we were living, I lied about the classes I was barely attending. I’d throw my head back and laugh and say, “Motherhood!”

What I’m telling you is that in the face of people who came toward me with their regular-person questions about my pregnancy and birth story, I broke into fictions because I could not make what happened come out of my mouth. My story didn’t fit the other mothers’ stories. Misfit. My lying started out as me telling people I was staying at a friend’s house, which was a story line that passed quite well. But I wasn’t living with a friend. In the tapestry inside my head and heart a new weaving emerged that made a kind of “sense” given how it felt to be me.

My daughter’s death was so alive in me it felt like we were two people walking around. I mean she felt that present to me — like a second body.

What it felt like to be me was that I was among the walking dead, and I lived at the bottom of a very dark ocean. A ghost person living in some sea wreckage. And so I gravitated toward other ghost people, at night, and I started sleeping under an overpass just at the edge of town, near a bus stop where buses would take me back to the normalcy of a college campus during the day. I read books. I wrote a paper or two. I passed a test here and there.

My daughter’s death was so alive in me it felt like we were two people walking around. I mean she felt that present to me — like a second body. As present as when she swam her days and nights away inside the world of my belly. I “passed” in every sphere of regular life I entered, but I entered those spheres less and less and spent more and more time under the overpass. I was never alone. My daughter was with me.

Some people will understand this kind of ghost life. I had a notebook in which I wrote pages and pages of crazy lady gibberish, or seeming gibberish. I read all kinds of books. Inside the books I again saw stories that I recognized, because, well, literature is filled with characters whose lives are so broken they can barely breathe.

Literature is the land of the misfitted. Inside that notebook filled with what may have looked to an outside observer like strange hieroglyphics, in between the lines, there were glimpses of actual stories. The stories were about strange girls filled with rage or love or art that came shooting out of them, almost violently. And as I stepped back toward the world, I saw that the lies I’d been telling weren’t lies at all. They were precise fictions about living inside a woman’s body and the journey I’d just made to the bottom of an ocean, the journey to death and back. What other people called lies were actually portals to finding my ability to invent stories.

The other side of destruction is always the possibility of self-expression. Creativity. The mistake we make with teens and young adults and broken adults is to forget that.

Ten years later, the quality of my suffering took on a different form. My suffering became hunger. Hunger for ideas, hunger for sex, hunger for danger, hunger for risk. I read every book I could get my hands on, then I’d research the books the author had read and I’d read all of those. I slept with teachers, with students, with drunks and junkies, men and women, with anyone who had a glint of fire or danger in the corner of their eye. There wasn’t a drug I wouldn’t try.

What I no doubt do not need to explain is how dangerous my hunger and subsequent behavior were. That’s a story line we are all trained to understand. What I do want to explain is what my hunger was generative of. What looks from the outside like self-destruction isn’t always so. The other side of destruction is always the possibility of self-expression. Creativity. The mistake we make with teens and young adults and broken adults is to forget that. All creativity has destruction as its other, just like the beyond beautiful dead infant I held in my arms.

What I saw in literary books was a possible path from suffering and self-destruction to self-expression. I went back to the nutso gibberish I wrote down in that notebook under the overpass, and I began to cull the stories. Once I started writing, I never stopped. For this reason I would say that the death of my daughter and entering a real place called psychosis and being homeless were not just tragic. They were generative. Those experiences put writing into my hands.

Twenty years later, the quality of the suffering took shape and form on pages. The girl I lost became the girl I found inside stories where girls nearly die but then don’t, where girls with their hair on fire invent ways to save themselves, where girls who are incarcerated by family or violence or love or social norms break out of culture and into journeys no one has ever imagined before. What I’m saying is, the more I wrote, the more I understood that my so-called traumas — the death of the daughter, the abuse in my childhood, the rage I carried and acted out as a teen and young adult — were places of storytelling. Realms of expression.

In this sense, to be a misfit means to be willing to dive into the waters of one’s life, swim to the wreckage at the bottom, and bring something back to the surface.

Thirty years later the quality of my sadness has changed so radically that I can only understand it as pure creativity. In every book I have ever written there is a girl. And there always will be. My grief and my daughter’s death and my suffering were not something to “get over” or medicate or counsel out of me. They were generative of the most important forms of self-expression I’ll ever create in my lifetime. And that doesn’t just matter for my career as a writer, or even for my mental and emotional health as a woman. It’s also the path I took to learn love, so that when my son came, sun of my life, I was able to give it with abandon and joy.

Death, grief, trauma are alive in our actual bodies. We carry them our whole lives, even if we act like it’s possible to “step out of them.” Writing, making stories, drawing and painting, and making art doesn’t release me from loss or grief or trauma, but it does let me re-story my self and my body. In this sense, to be a misfit means to be willing to dive into the waters of one’s life, swim to the wreckage at the bottom, and bring something back to the surface.

When I tell you that literature and writing have saved my life, perhaps you can believe me when I say they came into my body and lodged in the space that my daughter left open. If you are one of those people who has the ability to make it down to the bottom of the ocean, the ability to swim the dark waters without fear, the astonishing ability to move through life’s worst crucibles and not die, then you also have the ability to bring something back to the surface that helps others in a way that they cannot achieve themselves.

You are not nothing. You are vital to your culture. We misfits are the ones with the ability to enter grief. Death. Trauma. And emerge. But we have to keep telling our stories, giving them to each other, or they will eat us alive. Our suffering is not the Christ story. Our suffering is generative of secular meaning. We put ordinary forms of hope into the world so that others, scruffy or graceful, might go on.

Excerpted from the new book The Misfit’s Manifesto by Lidia Yuknavitch. Reprinted with permission from TED Books/Simon & Schuster. © 2017 Lidia Yuknavitch.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the bestselling novels “The Book of Joan,” “The Small Backs of Children” and “Dora: A Headcase,” as well as the memoir “The Chronology of Water.” She is the recipient of two Oregon Book Awards, a Willamette Writers Award, and she was a finalist for the 2017 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize and the 2012 Pen Center Creative Nonfiction Award. She writes, teaches and lives in Portland, Oregon.

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Mar 4, 2019 / Daryl Chen

Jenice Kim

Here are three common-sense tips to help you feed your hunger and not your emotions, from dietician Eve Lahijani.

This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community. To see all the posts, go here.

Imagine if eating were as simple as, say, refueling a car. You’d fill up only when an indicator nudged towards E, you couldn’t possibly overdo it or else your tank would overflow, and you’d never, ever dream of using it as a treat.

Instead, for many of us, eating is anything but straightforward. What starts out as a biological necessity quickly gets entangled with different emotions, ideas, memories and rituals. Food takes on all kinds of meanings — as solace, punishment, appeasement, celebration, obligation – and depending on the day and our mood, we may end up overeating, undereating or eating unwisely.

It’s time for us to rethink our relationship with food, says Eve Lahijani, a Los Angeles-based dietician and a nutrition health educator at UCLA. She offers three common-sense steps to help get there.

1. Reconnect with your hunger. 

So many things drive us to eat — it’s noon and that means lunchtime, it’s midnight and that means snack time, we’re happy, we’re anxious, we’d rather not bring home leftovers, we’re too polite to say no, we’re bored, and oh, wow, has someone brought in donuts?!?

Similarly, we suppress our appetite for a myriad of reasons — we’re too busy, we’re sad, we’re mad, nobody else is eating, it’s too early, it’s too late, we’re too excited.

Now try doing this: Eat only when you’re hungry; stop when you’re full. “It may seem obvious to you,” concedes Lahijani. Still, think over your past week: How many times did you eat when you weren’t hungry?

She suggests that we think about our hunger and our fullness on a 0-10 scale, with 0-1 being famished and 9-10 being painfully stuffed (as in holiday-dinner stuffed). She says, “You want to begin eating when you first get hungry, and that correlates with the three or a four on the scale and [to stop] … when you first get comfortably full, a six or seven on the scale.”

The reason you shouldn’t wait until you’re starving (or, 0-2 on the scale) is because that’s when people tend to make nutritionally unsound choices. If you’ve ever gone to the supermarket when you were ravenous, you probably didn’t fill up your cart with produce; you gravitated towards the high-calorie, super-filling items.

Lahijani says, “It’s also wise to eat when you first get hungry because you’re more likely to enjoy your food [and] you’re more likely to eat mindfully … When you let yourself get too hungry, chances are, you’re eating really fast and not really paying attention. In fact, one of the biggest predictors of overeating is letting yourself get too hungry in the first place.”

2. Feed your body what it is craving.

When Lahijani was a stressed-out college and graduate student, her eating took one of two forms: she was either dieting or bingeing. As she says: “Whenever I was on a diet, the diet told me what to eat,”; while on a binge, she’d eat whatever was convenient or go all out on foods forbidden by her then-diet. Developing a different relationship with food meant stepping out of those patterns. “Instead of listening to others’ opinions of what I should eat, I became silent and I tuned into my own body,” she says. “I fed my body what it was craving.”

It turns out Lahijani didn’t crave junk food. She says, “I was actually tasting things for the first time, because my mind wasn’t filled with judgment and guilt. I actually found that my body actually craved nurturing, nourishing foods like vegetables and fruits. I actually liked my sister’s kale and quinoa salad.”

3. Try not to use food as a reward or a punishment. 

It’s not surprising that we do this. After all, as children, we quickly learn that rejoicing and parties come with cake, while transgressions result in … no cake. But one of the great things about being an adult is, we can establish our own associations. By all means, let’s continue to mark our birthdays with cake — or with fresh fruit and a stockpot of homemade veggie chili if that’s what you prefer. Or, celebrate in ways that have nothing to do with eating. You can set your own rules now.

When Lahijani’s fraught feelings about food eased, she was surprised to find these effects go beyond eating. “What’s really interesting is to see how making peace with food affected other areas of my life. As I learned how to listen to myself, I became better at listening to others, I became more empathetic,” she says. “As I made a point to trust myself, I became more trusting in my relationships and more vulnerable, and as I became more loving to myself … I learned what it meant to love someone else.”

Watch her TEDxUCLA talk here: https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ssr2UDB9EWQ?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daryl Chen is the Ideas Editor at TED.