Hello my friends. Welcome back to the podcast this week. I’m so happy you are here. Today I want to talk about the concept of time. And I know for all of my busy women out there, time can feel like this constant struggle. So often you feel like it’s always running out, you never have enough of it, and this struggle comes up a lot when it comes to healthy eating. One of the most common struggles my clients come to me with in the beginning is that they feel like they just don’t have enough time to eat healthy.
And this is a very common struggle. So in this episode, I really wanted to provide you a resource that you could come back to whenever this is something that’s coming across your mind and I really want you to feel clear on why your time is feeling like such a struggle and a barrier between you and the eating habits that you want.
So that’s what we’re going to talk about in today’s episode. And first, I really want to address how most of you are experiencing this struggle and how most of you are experiencing this struggle is you are believing that you just don’t have enough time. And what this does is this usually means that you feel very overwhelmed in your day to day life. So you’re constantly rushing, you are hustling, you are taking a lot of action.
And what happens is eventually you just find yourself completely burnt out so you lack energy and you feel like you don’t have a lot of time to give back to yourself. So this is the moment when you genuinely will think that you cannot eat healthy or make healthy food decisions until you have more time. And because of how awful this feels, not only do you feel like you don’t have enough time to eat healthy, but your urges to overeat become higher.
So you overeat to numb this emotional experience that you are having to give yourself a break from the day-to-day experience of not having enough time. So this is not a cookie-cutter experience. Your personal experience may look slightly different, but I want you to take a moment and really picture how this matches up to your experience, what your experience of food body healthy eating is like when you really believe that you don’t have enough time.
Because the first thing we need to do in order to solve for this experience is to acknowledge that I don’t have time is actually only ever a belief that we can have. As in it is a sentence in our mind, a thought that goes across our brain and a way we think about time. It can’t ever actually be a fact about time. And for those of you who are like me, just stay with me cuz I promise it’ll make a bit of sense.
I want you to think about how there is just time we all get the same amount of time we can consider 24 hours a day exists. And then there’s how we choose to spend time so we all get the same amount of time as currency and then we get to choose how we spend it to believe we don’t have enough or we don’t have time. Can’t ever possibly be true because there’s just the time that all of us have and we get to decide what we do with it.
So we’re not here to argue with your thoughts about not having enough time. I always say I am never in the business of convincing any of you how to think, right? But this can be a much more supportive place to start with to acknowledge that I don’t have time. Can ever only be a thought that you have about your time?
Because if this is true and you have this perspective, then you can see how the overwhelm your experiencing day to day is because of this belief about your time, your perception of the time you have. When you perceive your time as not having enough of it, the emotional response in your body, the vibration is overwhelm. Or maybe for some of you it goes so far as anxiety.
When this part of you is left unchecked, it feels very reactive and heightened. And I want you to take a moment and experiment with yourself here. Drop into your body for a moment. How does it feel emotionally when you are genuinely believing I don’t have enough time or I don’t have time or I’m running out of time. What emotional experience comes up for you?
And take a moment to neutrally observe with yourself how that feels. This is what I want you to see here, is that your thoughts about your time matter, and I promise we’re gonna get to how this relates to how you eat and how you can more eat healthy no matter what your time looks like.
But here’s what’s important to know. When you are believing I don’t have time and you are creating this overwhelm consistently, here’s what this does to your brain long-term, and it’s quite fascinating. What this does is it increases your cortisol levels in your brain and your cortisol levels are actually responsible for your perception of time, your perception of how much time you have. So if you have the continuous belief and the emotional experience that time is running out, your brain will further increase your cortisol levels and then skew your perception of time to further allow you to think that you’re running out of it and survival.
This is actually very productive. This exists in your brain as a survival mechanism primi, because I want you to think if you see a lion chasing you in the wild and you have a thought and you have an emotion that feels very heightened and survivally based primi, what your brain wants to do is skew your perception of time so you further see how time is running out because it wants you to act quickly.
So I want you to see how powerful your thoughts about your time are because if you’re having survival based thoughts and emotions about your time, your survival brain will follow suit and create a further survival experience of your time. This is why you rush. This is why you hustle. You are living in an experience of your life where time is always running out and your in danger really.
So knowing things like this is important because we really want to see how there’s nothing wrong with your brain, your circumstances, any of it. You’re just not operating your brain in the best way when it comes to your time. And as a result when it comes to healthy eating, how you work with this survival brain, this brilliant and sometimes annoying survival brain is you question the automatic survival beliefs that drive your emotions.
So here it’s not having enough time.
You just want to be able to objectively and neutrally see this as a thought, as a belief. It’s not a fact. Once you do that, you can acknowledge that overwhelm for exactly what it is. It’s not the truth of the world. You are not actually in danger. It’s a vibration that exists in your body involuntarily, but it’s not reality. It is safe for that overwhelm to exist.
It does not actually mean you are running out of time in your everyday life, although to validate this experience, it will present as such if you are not stepping outside this experience and questioning it. Because here’s how this affects your eating habits. This is so important. When you make the overwhelm and your perception of time, the truth of the world, your body will react by increasing your appetite and your cravings for foods.
So we know how the brain works.
When you believe time is running out and you create that emotion, your brain skews your perception of time to compel you to act quicker. This is one survival based response of this pattern and your body will also react and get into gear to protect you by increasing your appetite in these moments and your cravings for food. Because something we have to know about our survival brain is when it thinks you are in danger and your life is at risk, it’ll turn on all of the survival based responses in your brain and body.
So your body, how was it most in danger? In primitive times, it was in danger of famine and starvation and not having access to enough food. So this is a very primitive response to crave more food so the body can ensure that we’re having access to the energy and the food we need to survive.
And this will be really, really helpful for so many of you to see your appetite and your cravings for food when you are in stressful periods as a survival based response, it does not mean you are addicted to the foods or you have no control, my friend. You have a human brain that will do anything it needs to do to ensure your survival. So if you are having consistent thoughts about time is running out, your brain and your body will react in a survival based way.
So you have the belief that you are running out of time, you experience the overwhelm, which feels really heightened in your body, and then you react to it by rushing throughout your day. This stress state is what tells your body continuously that you are in danger. So if your long term experience in your life is that you are running out of time and you’re living in this stress state, that means you will also have consistent stress responses and survival responses with food.
So you’ll constantly feel a desire to seek comfort in food, and this is where weight retention occurs as well. For those of you where weight loss is a goal, when you are living in this stress state, weight retention is there just like your cravings to protect you. Your body wants to conserve as much energy as possible here. So then what happens is you eventually burn out because you’ve expended all of your energy because of this rushing state, and then you’ll feel an even higher urge to overeat, to comfort yourself.
So I really want you to take a moment. I know this can be a lot for those of you who’ve never had this awareness to really sit and unpack with yourself how this is coming up for you, how this cycle is present in your life when it comes to time, when it comes to your emotions, and when it comes to your eating decisions, really think about if you are living in the stress state with your time, how do your cravings make sense?
How does your appetite make sense? How does all of it make sense? There is a way out of this cycle, but the first step to getting out of this cycle is to have awareness of it. So you really want to start watching day by day how your beliefs about time are running, your experience of your time and of your eating habits. Because when you have awareness of this, here’s how you stop reacting to it. What will happen is you’ll start making quick decisions about your time.
So you’ll see the amount of hours you have in a day, You’ll make decisions as to how you’ll spend your time. You’ll prioritize. Pretty much all of you will know how to do this. Most of you listening will be type A women. You will know how to plan, you will know how to prioritize and get it done so you’ll feel compelled to make this a time problem and a planning problem because that’s what matches your type A problem solving brain.
That’s where it feels most comfortable for you to solve problems by fixing and by strategizing. That’s not the problem here. This is an emotional problem because what will happen is you’ll make quick decisions about your time. You’ll have a plan, but then when you feel overwhelmed about your time, you’ll procrastinate. You won’t follow that plan that you set and then you’ll think the problem is your time or your planning skills, and this isn’t what’s happening. You will want to make quick decisions about your time, and then when you notice emotions come up like overwhelm about your time, you address it and you hold space for it and you allow yourself to experience it without reacting to it.
This is a practice and for my clients, this is an ongoing practice we do together. They come each week and they practice this when they struggle here, they learn how to become someone that can acknowledge their thoughts about time, experience those emotions without rushing away from them, heal their survival responses in their body so then they can eat healthy and get the results they want.
What will happen if you stop engaging with your thoughts and your emotions about time is you’ll start making plans with your time. You’ll follow through with them because you are not reacting to the overwhelm and rushing or procrastinating from the overwhelm. When you do this over time, you will create evidence that you are someone who does have enough time. This evidence is only created when you stop reacting from the thought that you don’t have enough time.
Eventually, what happens is you reduce the overwhelm, you lessen the urges to overeat because you lessen the survival responses and you end up increasing your productivity as you eat healthy and lose weight. So this is a very important message for those of you who think that you’ll eat healthy and lose weight when you have more time. It is not a time problem my friends. It is an emotional problem and it’s not even a problem per se.
You have all of the equipment. You just need to learn to read the manual because what you are doing is making it a time problem, which thens become a planning problem, which thens become a tactical problem. What’s actually happening is your time isn’t running out. You need to learn to process the emotions so you’re not putting your body in a survival state where it makes it really, really hard for you to eat healthy and lose weight. This is why the best time to learn how to eat healthy and lose weight is when your life kind of feels like it’s in shambles because the reason why you are not eating healthy and not losing weight is because you are not managing those elements of your life.
When you learn to manage those elements of your life, you learn how to eat healthy and lose weight no matter the circumstances or in this case, no matter how much is on your schedule or how much time is available to you. All right, so this was a bit of a deep dive episode into this concept on time and healthy eating. I encourage you to see how this applies to you. Take what serves from this episode, and I hope that you enjoyed our time together today.
All right, my friends, have a good rest of your week and I’ll talk to you next week.