Holiday Eating Skills for Highly Sensitive People (HSPs)
If you're a sensitive soul, have a sensitive nervous system, feel emotional nuance in relational dynamics, or experience sensory sensitivity, and the last stretch of the year tends to stress you out around food, fear not! You are not destined to struggle with your eating every year around the holidays. Because High Sensitives feel so much, a favorite unconscious strategy is to "check out" from feeling. Here, I encourage the opposite! If you're a sensitive soul doing her best to care for your body and eat well during the holidays, take these 4 suggestions to heart:
Holiday Eating Skills for Highly Sensitive People
1) One of the quickest ways to empower yourself around food and eating is to notice how your body feels when you eat. There will be certain foods and certain amounts that feel great. There’ll be certain foods and amounts that don’t. The more you show up in your body and FEEL, the more skilled you’ll get at eating just the right amount and type of food and leave the table feeling pretty well. If you only focus on one thing and completely commit to this during the holidays and beyond, your eating will likely improve and your overall attitude will relax as you are focused on bodily sensation before, during, and after a meal.
2) Decide how you’d like to feel prior to the meal.
Then ask yourself, “what way of eating will
support me feeling that way?” It is a question I offer often to those working on their eating. It’s an empowering question and reminds us that we get to name how we’d like to feel and then make choices that are supportive of that. For example, you might decide you'd like to feel relaxed and permissive without feeling stuffed. You might choose your absolute favorite foods, stay present while you're eating, and stop when you feel pleasantly full. Or you might decide you'd like to feel grounded and opt for hearty foods like turkey and sweet potatoes. Or maybe you want to feel relatively health-oriented and fill a large part of your plate with roasted carrots, beets, collard greens, turkey and cranberry sauce. There is no "correct" way to want to feel. The empowerment is in deciding how YOU'd like to feel ahead of time and consider what way of eating will support you feeling that way.
3) Untangle black-and-white, sin/repent type thinking. Don’t buy into the idea that the holidays are a time to go completely unconscious with eating because the New Year will give you an opportunity to crash diet or eat perfectly “clean.” If your personality system carries a strong belief that there is only one right way to eat and that way is "perfectly," it will likely also hold the belief that one meal can “ruin” a diet entirely. What does that mean? It means that one unusual holiday meal could be viewed as “ruining” things, contributing to a feeling of defeat...resulting in more unwanted eating habits. It's like a woman who believes swearing off processed carbohydrates is the only way to have a body she loves, then sees fresh holiday rolls on Thanksgiving, feels anxious, eats one, (or three or four), then mentally decides to "check out" and eat extra food that remainder of that evening or even for the remainder of the holiday season. The best solution to this maddening, polarized pattern, is to eat as if there were no option for a New Years’ resolution diet plan. You’ll probably pay more attention to what you’re doing (a la eating skill #1 above) and feel you can relax into the New Year focused on health rather than focused on heroic and unrealistic restriction.
4) Identify and care for your emotions. If you cannot tolerate what’s happening in your emotional world and the sensations in your body, you might turn to food to distract you or shift your physiological state. We all do this from time to time so its nothing to feel badly about. Though if you constantly feel discouraged and powerless about your eating habits when with loved ones around the holidays and you have a sense its due to relational dynamic, then working with this could dramatically impact your eating habits during the holidays. Short term, giving yourself permission to step away from unwanted conversations, stepping outside for a fresh air or a short walk, eating for yourself rather than to please others, and deciding the length of time you'd like to stay at a gathering can all help. Longer-term, therapy/coaching, somatic work, journaling, dream work, loving touch, getting adequate sleep regularly, and self-compassion (among many others) help us draw on and cultivate deeper resources expanding our window of tolerance.
Think of the holidays as your nutritional and relational "dojo," your training ground to practice the skills you most want to embody! Choose one of the holiday eating skills for highly sensitive people to focus on the remainder of this year.
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