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Pamela Levin, R.N.,T.S.T.A.
Pamela Levin is an R.N.,
a Teaching & Supervising Transactional Analyst and award-winning
author. In private practice 42 years, Pamela has
taught and trained professional and lay audiences around the world about emotional needs and
how to take care of them.[Your affiliate link to YEN]
T
he consequences of neglecting our food diet—of bad eating habits and poor nutrition - are well
known to most of us. That's why we pay attention to when we eat, how much we eat, and
the quality of our food.
But another kind of diet is at least or
even more important: our emotional diet.
Ignoring, neglecting or abusing our emotional diet can lead to all kinds of dire consequences.
Here are five of the many such examples, followed by what to do to avoid them:
1. increasing stress
2. relationships going sour
3. greater number and intensity of physical illnesses
4. increasing failure to achieve goals
5. rising feelings of frustration, bad moods, increased anxiety, anger and even
depression.
The good news is that not only can we avoid these miserable consequences, we can also
create massive positive changes for ourselves by paying attention to, and then improving
the quality of what we take in emotionally. Since our emotional diet is made up of
the emotional 'food messages' we ingest, we escape these negative outcomes
by taking in messages that support our
emotional health and eliminating the ones that are
toxic to our emotional well being.
To start, we first need to become aware of the two sources of these messages. One is supplied
from within ourselves. In other words, these are self-generated: we 'feed' them to ourselves
internally. The other source is composed of messages we take in from others. Once
becoming aware of what we're currently consuming, we can decide how and what to slowly change
about what we ingest.
Why make these changes gradually? A food analogy answers this question well. If we've
been starving for food for a long time, no doubt we have developed a nutritional backlog
from starving. Still, to suddenly stuff ourselves would only produce more illness. Our
bodies are not capable of taking in everything we need all at once. A starving person
absolutely can return to a peak nutritional state -by taking in very slowly - especially in the
beginning.
Or suppose we've been eating junk food, or even toxic food and now we want to improve that
diet. Our bodies would probably go into shock if we tried to change too quickly, even though
the change would definitely be for the better.
If our emotional state is like either of those examples, we will need small and frequent
'feedings' at first.
To review: we start by becoming aware of our current emotional diet status. ( I've heard people
who started to do this remark that, "I didn't realize I was starving emotionally." Or, "I can't
believe how much emotional junk food I've been living on. No wonder I feel so emotionally
weak." Or, "I'm stunned to realize I've been consuming emotional toxins my whole life long. In
fact I'm so accustomed to them, I'm not sure I would even know what to do with some real
emotional food!" )
Then we need to allow ourselves to take in some yummy, messages that nourish our emotional
self.
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