Comfortable Addiction

Why are we seeking comfort more and more? The easy answer is because so many of us do not have comfort. Body pain, chronic uncomfortable symptoms, excess body weight, combative relationships, unfulfilling or stressful work situations, fear in our world, lack of control in our lives ... how can we have comfort? The answer is that we attempt to create comfort as a treat for making it through our days. This can be a yummy dessert, a glass of wine, a particular television program, pain killers, CBD, recreational and pharmaceutical drugs, gambling or even social media.

These are our attempts to seek comfort for ourselves. What begins as a treat gradually becomes a need and slowly takes priority over activities, people, healthy habits. Our brain is actually rewiring itself to biochemically stimulate us to seek out this comfort through the release of dopamine, cortisol, norepinephrine. Not only is our comfort-seeking a habit, it becomes essential for relief from our symptoms. It becomes a need and we will avoid anything that interferes with or blocks our ability to indulge in our comfort-seeking habit.

So what used to be a lovely treat becomes a coping mechanism, an avoidance strategy, a solution for the things we think we cannot change or control such as loneliness, boredom, pain, illness, depression and sadness. In fact, if you actually sit down and ask yourself why you need the Starbucks coffee, the brownie, the CBD gummy, the glass of wine, the cocaine, the sex ... you will find that the answer, the true answer is always an emotional one. Even body pain is most often described in emotional terms because of how the pain changes our mood, our desire, our motivation.

What makes this even more difficult is that we are now experiencing socially acceptable habits that are considered "normal", even desirable, such as working overtime or exercising in ways that push the limits. These can bring us comfort just as much as a glass of wine or a quart of ice cream can. But because of the rewiring in our brains, we don't just work or exercise, we push the limits to the point that unhealthy body patterns and functions are created, changing the landscape of our "normal", mistaking addiction for passion.

So now looking back we realize that these comfort habits are how we have learned to regulate our emotions, to achieve a high when we have none, to soothe our frayed nerves, to bribe us into another day of stress. These self-soothing habits are the images that we hold in front of our mind throughout our day like a carrot in front of a donkey. But don't be fooled into thinking that we're only talking about emotional soothing here. Biochemically we have created a pattern in our bodies of pursuing positive feelings and comfort with something that causes us negative feelings with its very absence. These negative feelings are part of an unhealthy cycle in the brain that influences and changes essential hormones such as cortisol, adrenaline, insulin and even fertility hormones.

If we don't break the cycle of receiving our emotional comfort and balance from an addictive habit, we will never achieve lasting health and happiness. So how do we do this?

First, be honest with yourself in identifying your comfort habits and cravings. Ask yourself what is really behind these? What is the need that is being met?

Identify the triggers that push you towards that habit and try to minimize them. This is a great place to insert some meaningful distractions!

Many recovery groups encourage people to seek substitutions for their cravings. This may work in the short term, but you will need to create a different body balance that eliminates your cravings altogether. This is where your diet becomes the key:

· You have to regulate your blood sugar with a nutritious, whole food diet. This helps to keep your blood sugar level and reduces hunger.

· Start each day with 30 grams of protein within one hour of waking in the morning.

· Drink 1/3 to 1/2 of your body weight in ounces of water each day. Often hunger is signaling thirst even more than the desire for food.

· Eat a healthy fat at every meal in your day. This creates a longer, enduring energy source instead of the rapid depletion in energy from sugar.

I encourage you to create a log of your cravings including the time of day, noticeable triggers and your emotional state. Pay attention to how often you are eating your meals, what foods are you choosing and especially what you were thinking when the craving began.

This brings us to the recent explosion in insulin management drugs for weight loss which has happened simply because it is an easy fix that avoids the deeper work of identifying these patterns and comfort habits that have hijacked normal metabolism. But as happens with so many weight loss attempts, once you stop the tendency is to put the weight back on. This really is because you haven't addressed your comfort habit, you simply stopped yourself temporarily from doing it or you used the insulin management to dampen the effects.

I want to encourage you to really evaluate your glucose and insulin management because often just the anticipation of stress or a stressful situation can elevate your blood sugar. It's not just about what you eat, it's about how much energy your brain believes you need. This is again affected by your comfort habit of choice because of the changes the brain experiences. So insulin control reduces the effect of stress, but it doesn't change our reliance on unhealthy coping mechanisms that we have relied on to boost our energy, elevate our mood, forget about our stresses and treat ourselves at the end of the day.

The key to lasting change is to uncover the hidden roots of our symptoms and illness. In my practice I use many natural remedies and solutions, but without honestly looking at our deeper needs and patterns of self-soothing, we may never truly feel happy and healthy. 

Karen Clickner, C.C.H., is the owner of Conscious Body Natural Medicine, Inc., in Westborough, MA. For more information visit www.consciousbodynatmed.com