What’s tastier: cookies or self-awareness?
Double chocolate peanut butter brownies. Cinnamon roll coffee cake. Soft serve twist with chunks of Heath. Desserts are alluring, but have you noticed that your appetite for them fluctuates?
When you’re feeling well-resourced, those same foods can seem indulgent. Over-the-top. Even unappealing.
Yet when you’re avoiding a predicament, uncertain where your life is going, or unwilling to do whatever it takes to get your life moving in the direction you want, those chocolate chips really sing your name.
Humans are susceptible to dessert because we’re hardwired to experience sugar in the same way we did in the ancestral context of scarcity.
But no longer are we scavenging for grapes in the Savannah. Although such wiring means that desserts may always tease us, it’s also true that their appeal gets stronger within certain psychological contexts.
Let’s take a look at the mindsets that make streetcake seem like a fair friend, and how to pivot toward more of what we really want.
When we feel we’re missing something. In the Yoga of Eating, Charles Eisenstein frequently references food’s capacity to satisfy needs that our lives aren’t helping us meet. He says that the desire for ice cream is often a sign of a lack of sweetness in life.
This perspective is compelling — how often are we using tools that just miss the mark? Do we crave spicy foods when our lives lack zest? Do warm soups entice when the voice inside our head grows cold?
The urge for sweets may also befall us when perspectives of bitterness or anger arise — we’re looking to replace vitriol with sweetness.
Even if these foods temporarily relieve or bring pleasure, they solve the problem in an awkward, fumbling way.
If we examine the immaterial feelings that go into our appetites, how often would we find that our desires could be more satisfactorily met through strategies that were mimetic, just like the feelings that generated our desires in the first place?
Might staging a puppet show about our anger, or recording an album laced with our justifications for feeling bitter give us more far-reaching and sustained feelings of relief? It’s got to last longer than a milkshake, which, no matter how rich and delectable, never lasts more than 10 minutes.
“You will never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” — William Blake
When we crave pleasant company during times of inertia. Is it ever hard for you to do something, even when you can think of plenty of reasons why that thing is the best available option? Do you have motivation but just can’t seem to act on it?
This is a common pretext for emotional eating, that feeling of needing sustenance, needing psychological movement, but instead trying to resolve it via physical means.
When you’re feeling inert, journaling is often the better option. That might also seem burdensome to some readers, but consider it an act of concretizing your thoughts. Your writing need not follow grammatical rules or resemble anything you’d want another person to read.
You’re going to be thinking anyway. The process of putting your emotions into words and logically threading them together is going to help clarify why you’re having trouble moving forward. Being aware of why you’re unmotivated can often be enough to break the cycle.
The process may even give you insights that wouldn’t have come from internal processing alone.
And that’s because journaling is a method of dialoguing with yourself. Seeing your thoughts on paper makes them tangible, and in turn, gives them their own existence, independent of you.
In this sense, you will have more freedom to shape and orient your thoughts as you like.
When ice cream cones and birthday cakes become punctuation marks on otherwise strange social encounters. Before meeting people, have you ever thought, “If there weren’t going to be food, I wouldn’t even go”?
Desserts often demarcate elements of social situations we don’t have the language to negotiate.
Cake is often eaten shortly before people leave a dinner party. We get ice cream before parting ways with the old friend we’ve met for a walk.
I often wonder what it would be like if everyone made an agreement to be as upfront and clear about their inner lives as possible. Despite all the harsh truths, I believe this would paradoxically bring everyone closer.
It’s alienating when we get the sense that a hangout is an obligation to both parties. Or when we both want to end an interaction but neither of us know how to do it.
Wouldn’t it be better if we were just transparent with each other? Might this introduce more humor and freshness into our lives?
Radical honesty could remind us that it’s possible to care very much about a person while not always wanting to do everything that goes along with seeing them.
If you’d like to spend time with people but avoid trans fats, those dark angels that degrade the lining of your blood vessels, replace those goodbye pastries with careful, honest language.
We’re more likely to get offended by people when they express hurtful things with clichés or platitudes.
Expressing what you want, why you want it, the history of such feelings and what you predict they’ll become is more likely to be accepted and understood than “all is well that ends well.”
Becoming aware of the psychological climates that underlie our cravings can give us important insight into the problems we’re using them to resolve.
By just acknowledging that we want a cupcake because we’re tired of checking our email or sitting in traffic, those cravings become less tyrannical.
We can replace those substitutes for things that don’t puncture our teeth, perhaps with our earnest, immaterial friends like understanding and transparency.
