Advent is a season of waiting
Whether you’re waiting for a hugely meaningful religious festival, for tinsel and baubles to light up your home or for a succession of parties, the four weeks of Advent are about a run-up to something.
You may be so busy that it passes in a blur, or you may find that longing for what’s coming makes time stretch out and slow down.
Waiting for something can be simply marking time – the turning of the earth on its axis is way out of your control, so it can feel like you’re simply watching as the days tick round and the event approaches of its own accord.
Waiting doesn’t have to be passive
It’s useful to remember that when we are waiting for something, we don’t have to remain passive. That is particularly helpful when what’s coming down the track for you this Christmas isn’t all sweetness and light.
On the famous Life Events Scale drawn up by Holmes and Rahe, where death of a spouse tops the scale at a rating of 100, Christmas comes in with a rating of 12! One point above ‘minor violations of the law’. So its impact on you stress-wise is on a par with a minor brush with the cops.
Whether you are looking forward to the festivities this year, or quietly dreading them, there may be some things you can do in mitigation.
Waiting as an active time
Actively engaging with what’s coming can be particularly helpful when it comes to things that are likely to be difficult.
Let’s look at how you can actively use this waiting time to make things easier when events arrive under three simple headings
- Planning
- Preparing
- Rehearsing
What situations do you need to plan for?
Planning is about identifying which situations are going to pose challenges. Specific eating occasions may be particularly angst-ridden for you, and identifying the challenge in advance gives you an opportunity to prepare yourself.
- Will the works Christmas party buffet overwhelm you and leave you feeling out of control?
- Are you apprehensive about sharing Christmas dinner with people who are going to push more food onto you than you want?
- Does having festive treats in the house mean you worry that you’ll pile on pounds just from so much temptation?
There may be a few situations you’re not sure about, or just one biggie.
Preparing for tricky situations is about working out a strategy
This is where using your existing knowledge, or extending your understanding, of the psychology and biology of eating and appetite comes in handy. There are far too many possible situations for me to go through here, but let’s just consider the 3 examples I gave above.
- Faced with a buffet, the number of dishes and the fact they are all presented together can be overwhelming. My tip here would be to use your knowledge of Taste Specific Satiety (TSS) to appreciate that each time you taste a new food, your appetite, in effect, refreshes.
- Take your time casting you’re your eye over what’s in front of you. Some buffets have more than one bowl of the identical dish, so the buffet may look like a greater choice than it actually is.
- My tip is to go for maximising pleasure by choosing just a small number of your favourite things rather than a bit of everything. That way, you won’t be refreshing your appetite so often and will feel satisfied from less food.
- How you’ll manage a meal where the pressure is on to eat more. If you’re concerned about how a particular meal over the festive season might go, remind yourself of some of the group dynamics at play during social meals.
- Remind yourself that there’s a socially-based regulatory strategy going on during social meals, where the goal of the eater may be to eat less than another person (check the blog in the link above for more about this study). Other people may be encouraging you to eat more so that they can eat whatthey want, and still be eating less than you!
- And remember that if you do opt to take the line of least resistance and join in the overeating, a single large meal doesn’t lead to weight gain (regular overly large meals do).
- How you’ll deal with tempting treats. The obvious thing here is to capitalise on your knowledge that your appetite system is activated merely by catching sight of food.
- By putting a bit of thought into how you store them, you can arrange your kitchen so that treats are out of your line of sight unless you choose to find them (using opaque containers and the back of shelves).
- A super-helpful additional tip is for those moments where you are confronted with tempting treats when you weren’t intending to eat. Use your knowledge of the fascinating work on the effect of recent episodic memory for eating to help you resist. When you see the tempting treat, pause and recall clearly what you ate for your last meal (more explanation of this in that blog).
Rehearsing your future success
Once you’ve predicted which situations are likely to pose a challenge to how you want to eat, and you’ve reminded yourself of the key points about the biology and psychology of your appetite system that are relevant to this challenge, you can start rehearsing.
- Mental rehearsal is used in CBT, EMDR and other psychological therapies, in order to enhance your ability to carry out a new, desired, course of action. Think through how you want to behave in the situation and make a mental movie of yourself successfully carrying out that intended behaviour. There’s more about this in my blog “How to have faith in your ability to achieve things”. The point is to create a ‘success video’. You are the director of this video and things go exactly as you want. Rehearse this each day in the run up to the event. Doing this type of rehearsal, you’ll be in really good company. It’s what Ronaldinho, Brazilian international superstar uses to improve his soccer skills.
Resources for you
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Reference
Holmes, TH and Rahe, RH The Social Readjustment Rating Scale. J Psychosom Res. 1967. 11: 213-218
photo by Daniel Sessler for Unsplash