Stephanie Fein MD:
Hello, fabulous. It's Dr. Stephanie Fein here with weight loss for fertility. And I was thinking about Louise Hay. It was her birthday in October. I get emails about her. I love that woman. She is the queen of affirmations.
Stephanie Fein MD:
And she was my gateway person to all things self help. This was so many years ago. She practiced what she preached and the center of her very consistent message was love yourself. Now, the thing about affirmations, she's. This was decades ago that she first came on the scene and her message is about positive affirmations, saying positive things now. It was a really important step in the trajectory of modern recent self help. This idea that negative thoughts can lead to negative feelings and negative actions. We've talked about the model before and therefore positive ones lead to a more positive outcome in many things.
Stephanie Fein MD:
The missing piece. And it wasn't that she was missing it, it's just that she didn't talk about it as much. Is this idea of believable affirmations so that we can't just say, you know, I'm a billionaire if I don't believe that I am or it's possible it won't get us very far. So there's that little tweak of affirmations absolutely work if we believe them. So that's just a side note. Love Louise and her message that she really hammered home. And I love how focused she was on it because I like her believe that it's the basis, the foundation, which is high self regard, loving ourself. When we say that, what that means is when you love something, you treat it really well.
Stephanie Fein MD:
That's where that comes from. And that helps us with weight loss. She believed, and I do as well, and you can check out my 100th episode, that was about a month ago, that when we have a deep sense of compassion, respect, trust, love for ourselves, there is nothing we can't do, including permanent weight loss. And because we free ourselves to try things without the fear of being judged or punished by that mean voice in our heads. And as a mentor of mine puts it, we have our own back. We are safe. We are a safe, safe place to land for ourselves. And that makes going through life so much easier.
Stephanie Fein MD:
When we have our own back, this of course, we want to surround ourselves with love and caring people, but when we can create this for ourselves, we always have it. And that makes us like bulletproof, really. When we create our own safety, we can't do anything. Louise Hay's main technique for how to achieve this love high self regard is mirror work. It's such a powerful practice and I have a whole episode on that. Episode 45. But I recently came across Louise Hay's list of ten ways to love yourself. And I'm going to read it to you right now.
Stephanie Fein MD:
It's very brief, really straightforward. 10 ways to love yourself. 1. Stop criticizing yourself. 2. Stop scaring yourself. 3. Be gentle, kind and patient with yourself.
Stephanie Fein MD:
4. Be kind to your mind. 5. Praise yourself. 6. Loving yourself means supporting yourself. 7. Love your negatives.
Stephanie Fein MD:
8. Take care of your body. 9. Do mirror work. And 10, love yourself. Now that is a very basic Louise Hay love yourself list. Amazing. I could go on all of those 10 things.
Stephanie Fein MD:
I actually do have another episode. It's episode 24 for the Praise Yourself one. That really does help and work. So I highly recommend that. But the one that stood out to me when I first read this was number two, Stop scaring yourself. Stop scaring yourself. It was, it just, it caught me. It's distinct from criticizing yourself, right? Number one was stop criticizing yourself.
Stephanie Fein MD:
And number two is stop scaring yourself. And the two together. I often think of us being mean to ourselves, our brains being mean to ourselves. And if you sort of look into it more, it is these two things. One is criticizing and the other one is scaring. We're going to flesh this out a little bit today because her point is really well made. We don't scare things we love and treasure. We make them feel safe.
Stephanie Fein MD:
So how do we scare ourselves? The main way we do this is by worry. Now, worry is more than just thinking that something could go wrong. That's normal, natural. That's problem solving. It's excessive worry. It's perseverating on something. It's thinking of the worst case scenarios over and over and over and over again. Sometimes we get to the place where we think worry is useful, but worry is not useful.
Stephanie Fein MD:
These repeated thoughts make us feel scared and very anxious and frightened. And when we feel these feelings, we're frozen. We can't take action. And we just sort of marinate in it in the worry and the doom thoughts and these really awful feelings. And then we need some relief. And so we eat to dull the pain of these really harsh feelings. Remember, thinking that something might be wrong is normal. Find useful.
Stephanie Fein MD:
It's the thinking over and over and over again that is the problem. And that's the thing that scares us. When we're scaring ourselves, we are really, really worrying. So I want to teach you a process. You can see how it can be directly related to overeating. When we're medicating those feelings of fear, we can do it with food, and we don't want to do it with food. We eat when we're hungry. We stop when we're satisfied.
Stephanie Fein MD:
So when we're frightened, we don't want the connection in our brain to be eating. What we want is to take action when we have a thought that needs investigation. And so that's what I'm going to get into now is I want to teach you the process for handling worry. Okay. Well, first things first is we have to recognize that it's there. So we recognize either the thinking pattern, like if we notice a thought that keeps coming over and over and over again, or we can notice it from a feeling so of high anxiety or fear, we notice that first. The next step then is to become aware of the thoughts that are producing it. If you remember, thoughts create feelings.
Stephanie Fein MD:
So whenever we have a feeling, there was a thought that created it. That's cognitive behavioral theory. Thoughts create feelings which lead to actions. So we recognize the pattern, either thoughts over and over again or a feeling of fear. We become aware of the thoughts causing it. And then the first thing we do is investigate them. We take the necessary action. And then once we've done that, investigated and taken necessary action, if it keeps happening the same thoughts, even though we've already dealt with them as best we could, then we redirect the repeated thoughts and that's how we avoid overeating.
Stephanie Fein MD:
We don't have to eat over that. We're going to take these steps, recognize the pattern, become aware of the thoughts, investigate them, take necessary action, and redirect repeated thoughts. So I have just an example. I made this up. And I'm sure you could relate to this. I mean, I'm sure it's happened before, but let's say my husband's 10 minutes late. So I notice in my body a tightness. And I also am noticing that I keep checking the time, like over and over and over again.
Stephanie Fein MD:
You know, one minute has passed, I keep checking, and this does not feel good. So I look for the thought and what it pretty easy to find is he could be dead in a ditch somewhere. Now, my husband isn't someone who's always perfectly on time. He's. There's always a little wiggle room for him. So it's very reasonable that he could be running 10 minutes late. It's, that's and, and, and I purposely chose 10 minutes. It's not like he's an hour and a half late.
Stephanie Fein MD:
It's 10 minutes late. But My brain can go nutty on certain things. It depends on, you know, what's going on, you know, what else has been happening lately. Time of day, day of the week, busy. You know, there's lots of different reasons why 10 minutes late could make me go nutty or could be just no problem. But I'm picking a time when my brain went nutty. And the immediate thought is, he's dead in a dish somewhere. Now, here's the thing.
Stephanie Fein MD:
Technically, it could be true. So our brain is high and mighty about this sort of thing. Like, it's possible he really could be, but the odds are very slim that that's the case. So that's where I'm becoming aware of the thoughts, and I just started investigating them. Okay, the odds are very small. Okay, so it's there, he's coming home. At the end of the day, it's more likely that there's traffic, you know, way more likely that there's traffic than that something terrible happened to him. But I can still take other actions.
Stephanie Fein MD:
So if I'm worried that something terrible happened, I can check the phone and see if he's on a regular route, if he's on his way, if he texted me to tell, like, tell me that something happened or that he needed me or that he was going to be late, anything like that. I can check my calendar to see if I made a mistake, that I was expecting him at this time. But I, you know, he had told me he's doing something else, and I just totally forgot. So those are absolutely actions that I can take. And in that case, the worry, or I should just say that thought could potentially be useful. Now, it would be more useful if my brain just said, oh, you know what, he's late. Maybe why don't we just check the calendar instead of going to the, you know, in a ditch somewhere. But, you know, we work with what we got.
Stephanie Fein MD:
So if I've done the things that make sense to me to clear out why that might be, I don't need to do them again. Right? Like, I already checked the calendar. I already checked if he texted me. I saw that in terms of, like, a location, which, oh, my God, aren't we lucky that we have locations nowadays? I mean, we never had those years ago. Oh, my gosh, we just got to worry. Or not depending on if we went through this sort of thing. But anyway, I did those things, so there's no need to do them again. I can negotiate with my brain and say, look, if he's still not here in 30 minutes, 15 minutes.
Stephanie Fein MD:
You know, we can check again, but my brain will likely offer the thoughts again. But I already did what I could, what I thought was reasonable. So now I will reassure myself. And this is the redirect. Repeated thoughts. So the thoughts keep coming even though I've done the things that make sense to do. And now I'm going to reassure myself. This is the redirect.
Stephanie Fein MD:
But I guess that's. It's slightly. We're going to redirect in that I'm going to reassure myself. It could sound like this. I know you're scared. I totally understand. And we are on it. We checked and nothing is standing out as an emergency.
Stephanie Fein MD:
So we're going to wait another 15 minutes and here I'm going to put a timer on and then we will reevaluate. What shall we do while we wait? Read a book, watch a show, knock off an item on the to do list. A crossword puzzle. This is how I literally talk to myself. So we're talking to. We're talking the thinking off the ledge, right? We're grounding it in that we've done something. We are acknowledging that it's there, but that we've actually addressed it already so it can calm down and feel safer. And then we're going to decide with it what we want to do.
Stephanie Fein MD:
You'll notice that food wasn't on there as one of the options. It was book, show, to do item, or a crossword puzzle. I mean, there's a million other things you can do. But this was my little list. Eating is not on there because I'm not hungry. Now, of course, if you're hungry, then you eat what you plan. But if you're not hungry, then eating is not something we want to connect here with distraction. We can use one of these other things.
Stephanie Fein MD:
So continuing to repeat the scary scenarios over and over again at this point is just mean. It's something we would never do to someone we loved and we are someone we love. So we can acknowledge that they're there, but we're not going to let it spiral out of control. We're going to acknowledge it, investigate it, respond to it. So we're not skipping that part of it. We're not saying, oh, stop it, don't be ridiculous. That wouldn't be ultimately helpful. And by the way, that doesn't sound really loving either.
Stephanie Fein MD:
It's kind of like saying, shut up, which is never nice. We are here for all that's going on. We just want to be reassuring. We want to take the action that we can. Oh, my gosh, it's so funny. I didn't even think of. We could just call him. Oh, my gosh, that's so funny.
Stephanie Fein MD:
We could just call and ask what's going on. That's one idea. And when we're calmer, we can think of these things. Is that so funny? I mean, this is not even a real scenario and I got caught up in it. This is. Our brains can really do that sort of thing. Let's say we called it went to voicemail. There you are.
Stephanie Fein MD:
Okay. But we'll do the things that we think to do. And then once we've done that, once we've done the things in our control and our brain keeps trying to scare us, that's when we're going to take control of the situation in a kind, loving way. And that is something we would do for someone we love. We wouldn't let our brain continue to scare us because it's scary. I know that sounds silly, but it is uncomfortable to be scared, especially for no reason. And the reason I say no reason is because we've already investigated it. So again, we don't ignore.
Stephanie Fein MD:
We're going to deal with it. But then once we've dealt with it, we're at the place where it's mean to keep scaring ourselves. Now, the fertility journey is fraught with places that we can scare ourselves. We can just scare ourselves silly with it. So I like this technique because it slows down the process and makes it very concrete. So during the investigation stage, you may find you're missing some information that can easily be obtained from calling the nurse. Oh, or maybe you see that the thing you're concerned about is unknowable, just no one can know it. Once we see that, we can work on the reassurance piece, helping to comfort ourselves during a tender time.
Stephanie Fein MD:
Tender is so much easier to deal with than fright or panic. We have more of our faculties available to us and things can come to us. Like if we're feeling tender, there's a lot more available to us. Calling a friend, cuddling with a pet, taking a bath. Like, tender is easier to deal with fright or panic. It is even just saying that I can feel how uncomfortable it is and it makes me. The image I have is running around with my hair on fire. Like, just running around, running around, running around.
Stephanie Fein MD:
The chaotic energy is not helpful. But tender energy just needs some care. And when we see that, we know exactly what to do. It feels so much better. Now, I'm not saying tender feels amazing, but knowing how to deal with tenderness feels so much better than the panic, chaos that frightened can be. The great thing about weight loss for fertility and the skill that you develop when you start using the hunger scale is that that skill translates here, that the skill you need for the hunger scale is checking in. So when you're checking in to see are you hungry, are you satisfied, that's the same skill that we need to find the thoughts to connect them with the feelings that we're feeling, to know what we're feeling emotionally. And when we do that and we see the thoughts and we connect the feelings, we get so much information, tons of information about how we work, about what makes us tick, about how our brain is wired.
Stephanie Fein MD:
And then we can go about keeping the things that work for us, that help us get to the goals that we want and shifting the things that don't help us. Excessive worry is one of the things that does not help us. Keeping the things that work for us is so much more effective and it's a long term solution, much more so than eating a sleeve of Oreos. I think of it as like a grown up way of dealing. And there's no, we certainly don't learn this as a child. This is. And by the way, it is something to be learned. It is a skill that we're not born with.
Stephanie Fein MD:
So we need to be taught. And food dulled this for us. It air quote worked in terms of having us feel a little bit better, but that was a short term solution. And once we're at the point where we decide we want to lose weight, then we are forced to learn a different way and this is a different way. So on our quest to hold ourselves in high regard because weight loss is so much easier and lasts so much longer when we do, we investigated Louise Hay's idea to refrain from scaring ourselves because we don't scare the ones we love. And we learned a process for handling worry not with food, but by recognizing the pattern or the feeling which would be worry, fear, high anxiety, becoming aware of the thoughts that are triggering those feelings, investigate them, take necessary action, and then redirect and reassure repeated thoughts. No overeating necessary. So I hope this was helpful.
Stephanie Fein MD:
Please let me know if you have any questions. Ephanyfinemd on Instagram or LinkedIn. You could always also go to my website and contact me there. Stephaniefinemd.com I am sending you so much love. Scary thoughts are just part of living, but we don't have to repeatedly scare ourselves with the same thoughts. We can investigate, take necessary action and then reassure ourselves. And when we do that, we shift how we feel and the actions that we take. And then overeating doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Stephanie Fein MD:
Sending you so much love until next week.
