The role of a healthy lifestyle in overcoming emotional disorders

Many people seek psychotherapy because they just don’t feel good. They say they feel stuck or that they don’t feel like themselves. They feel tense and keyed up. They can’t stop worrying about work, money, or their relationships. Many say they’ve been sleeping too much or waking up throughout the night. They’ve started drinking or smoking more often. They’ve started eating less healthfully and they never exercise. They have no sense of energy when they wake up in the morning and instead feel dread and fear about what’s coming next. Some people can articulate that they feel lonely, sad, disappointed, confused, anxious. Many others just feel a vague sense of numbness and fatigue. They just don’t feel well.

Sometimes there are external circumstances, like the death of a loved one, a divorce, or a stressful transition, that triggered their change in thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It is just as likely that there is no external circumstance that explains the change.

In the search for wellbeing, you may have tried all kinds of interventions to help yourself feel better before seeking psychotherapy. You or your friends and family see that you aren’t acting like yourself, that you are sleeping, eating, drinking, and exercising differently. You are tense and irritable or withdrawn and isolating yourself more often. You might try committing to exercise, eating better, drinking and smoking less, sleeping regularly, meditating, putting “boundaries” around work. Sometimes this brings relief and restores your sense of well-being. I am not against any of these healthy lifestyle behaviors.

I want to talk about what’s occurring when healthy lifestyle behavior changes don’t “work.” Let’s discuss what’s happening when no matter how healthy your lifestyle is, you still don’t have a sense of well-being. Or, no matter how much you want to commit to certain behaviors, you can’t seem to commit on a regular basis.

Suffering or wellbeing occurs based on how you relate to your mind and body, not from what you do. It’s not what you do, but how you do it.

People who relate to their thoughts, feelings, and sensations with openness, compassion, and courage do not have the desire to engage in self-destructive behaviors. Self-regulation in the form of balanced sleeping, eating, exercising, working, and socializing occurs naturally, because there’s no fight to be or feel a certain way.

In contrast, people who relate to their thoughts, feelings, and sensations with fear, distrust, anger, guilt, and shame will attempt to avoid themselves. The behaviors they choose in the attempt to avoid themselves often offer immediate relief but in the long-run intensify the feared thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Self-regulation is difficult and feels forced. The constant effort is burdensome and it gets harder and harder to maintain balance. It feels like willpower is required to maintain balance and self-regulation. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the more willpower the person uses to maintain equilibrium while avoiding uncomfortable thoughts, feelings, and sensations, the more willpower is required.

Many individuals are so used to using effort to control their thoughts, feelings, and sensations, that they don’t even know that there is another option. Relaxing their effortful control of their thoughts, feelings, and sensations feels terrifying and threatening; they worry that if they embraced this posture, they would “give up,” “lose control,” or something else catastrophic would occur.

Fortunately, relaxing your attempts at control of your internal experience and relating to your thoughts, feelings, and sensations with compassion and courage is a learnable skill. It is not an inherent personality characteristic that some people have and other people do not. Some people have biological and environmental life circumstances that make it easier to relate to themselves with compassion and courage, but overall, it is a learnable skill set.

Work on opening up to your internal experience with compassion rather than criticism. This takes time and practice. Healthy lifestyle changes will likely occur as the result of facing internal or external pain with courage and compassion, not willpower.