Be Careful What You Tell Your Brain

Be Careful What You Tell Your Brain

Karen R. Koenig, M.Ed., LCSW

You are not only what you eat, but what you tell yourself. Nearly every week, a client comes into my office and tells me how “overwhelmed” she is. She’ll say it multiple times: “I’m so overwhelmed” or “I’m really overwhelmed” or “Boy, am I overwhelmed.” Although I encourage clients to connect to their emotions, I don’t encourage them to keep reminding themselves of feelings they don’t need to be having.

Our brain more or less understands only commands and translates more complex ideas into them. It hears our self-talk and does what it thinks we want it to do. So that, “I’m overwhelmed” tells the brain to feel pressured, “I’m miserable” instructs it to be unhappy, and “I’m scared” signals it to feel fear. This is, of course, the exact opposite of what you want to be telling your brain when you’re overwhelmed, miserable or scared. 

Try an experiment. Set a timer and for one minute repeat to yourself that you’re overwhelmed, scared, miserable, sad, fatigued, or some other “negative” emotion. Make sure to say it as if you really mean it, the way you would when you actually feel it. When one minute is up, check your feelings. Notice your bodily sensations and posture and what you’re thinking about. Generally, people end up feeling what they’ve been saying. If you don’t, continue the experiment for five minutes and check in with yourself again.

Then, follow this procedure and this time tell yourself that you’re happy, proud, joyful or glad to be alive. Again, notice your bodily sensations and emotional state. Extend the experiment to five minutes if needed and do another assessment.

I’m not telling you to deny your emotions. You just want to be careful that you’re not causing an emotion to happen because you keep repeating that you feel a certain way. Obviously, if you’re feeling hurt or mistreated by someone, you don’t want to brush that off or turn it into a positive feeling because this is crucial information for your happiness. But, there’s a big difference between self-talk that allows you to explore, say, feeling hurt, betrayed, or invalidated and directing your brain to make you unhappy.

If you tend toward focusing on negative emotions, just be careful what you tell yourself and aren’t reinforcing them. Rather, tell yourself how you wish to be feeling, not how you currently feel. Turn “I can’t stand this” into “I can manage this” and “I’m overwhelmed” into “I’m really busy.” There’s even a big difference between calling yourself “overwhelmed” and “busy.” Use the past tense to describe how you don’t want to feel—“I’ve been unhappy”—and the present tense to direct your brain how you wish to feel—“I’m feeling better and better every day.”

Karen R. Koenig, M.Ed., LCSW, is an international, award-winning author of seven books on eating, weight and body image, a psychotherapist with 30 years of experience, a health educator, and a popular blogger. Her expertise is in eating psychology and helping over-eaters and binge-eaters improve their self-care and become “normal” eaters. She lives and practices in Sarasota, Florida.
Visit her website

Can You Have Too Much Compassion for Others?

Can You Have Too Much Compassion for Others?

Karen R. Koenig, M.Ed., LCSW

Photo by Dayne Topkin

I love the kind of days when the same themes keep re-appearing from one client to the other. Sometimes the theme is realizing that the most important approval comes from ourselves. Or that detachment is far superior than wanting to change someone. Or the theme that echoed through practically every session one particular Monday in late May.

Most of my clients learn about self-compassion from me and we have long discussions about it how they never learned it from their parents who didn’t possess it or why they never received much of it growing up. They understand that self-compassion—meeting suffering with kindness—is missing in them and generally do quite well in healing their eating and other problems by generated greater care and concern toward themselves. They find it quite amazing how a little self-compassion can go such a long way toward helping them have a better attitude and a better life.

On this particular Monday, the theme was not self-compassion, but compassion toward others and how having too much it can easily get in the way of seeing mistreatment—abuse or neglect—and stopping it dead in its tracks. Specifically, what came up talking with so many clients that day was how they could be so blinded by compassion, caring so much for others, or wanting desperately not to cause them pain, that they would willingly hurt themselves instead.

This may have happened to you. Someone tells you a sob story about their life and you feel so terrible for them that all you can think about is how to help them stop hurting. You’ll do almost anything to stop their pain, even ignore your own or the pain they’re inflicting on you. You’ll pay half their rent, feed them, buy them expensive toys, or lie for them. You’ll literally give them the shirt off your back and happily walk around without one because at least you could something for them.

Having compassion for others is a positive, humane quality, but it must be balanced out with compassion for self: I don’t want you to hurt and I don’t want to hurt either. It also must be balanced out with good judgment. I can’t tell you how many times clients tell me they’ve done inappropriate things for others all because “I felt badly for them.” What is missing in this reasoning is what any particular act will do to you. Sometimes it will harm you outwardly and sometimes it will take its toll inwardly, making you feel like a fool when you think you should have known better.

So, yes, show those who are suffering compassion, but watch that you don’t go overboard and end up hurting yourself.

Karen R. Koenig, M.Ed., LCSW, is an international, award-winning author of seven books on eating, weight and body image, a psychotherapist with 30 years of experience, a health educator, and a popular blogger. Her expertise is in eating psychology and helping over-eaters and binge-eaters improve their self-care and become “normal” eaters. She lives and practices in Sarasota, Florida.
Visit her website

You’re All Wrong About Anxiety

We Are All Wrong About Anxiety

Karen R. Koenig, M.Ed., LCSW

Most of my clients are anxious, whether they have dysregulated eating or not. They fret incessantly about how they’re doing in life compared to others, whether they’re making enough “right” decisions, and how they’ll manage if life doesn’t go exactly as they’ve planned. They’re so used to believing that it’s their worries and fears that keep the sky from crashing down upon them, that they never stop and think that anxiety is no more powerful than the Wizard of Oz or protective than the Emperor’s new clothes.

This realization dawned up on me while talking with a client one day. She grew up very anxious with a strict mother who brooked little dissent and made my client think there was a right way—and, of course, a wrong way—to do everything. Hence, my client’s worry about whether she should leave a job that she (more or less) hated or stick around because it produced a pretty decent paycheck. The way she figured it, her anxiety kept her constantly thinking about what was right and wrong and that’s what had contributed to her success at her job. Therefore, she was having a deuce of a time giving it up, even when it made her miserable.

However, when we delved into whether or not her anxiety was the real power behind her success at work, my client was surprised to realize that this was hardly the case. Without much prodding, she recognized that she was conscientious and tried to do her best, not just for approval, but because she valued how it felt when she did. She acknowledged that she was an excellent planner and, in spite of not liking her job, a superb problem solver. She had a gift of being tuned into others (she had learned to be, in order to not rile her mother’s ire) and turned out to be an award-winning salesperson.

She had no idea that it was these attributes, not her constant anxiety, that made her successful in her career. Here, all along she’d thought it was because she thought so carefully about what was “right” and “wrong.” She’d attributed her success to her constant hypervigilance, when it turns out that she had some stellar life and work skills.

Do you credit anxiety for things going well in your life? Do you fear that if you give it up, you stop succeeding? Anxiety might have been useful long ago, and it may have actually made you do as well as you do, but its teaching days are long over. If it taught you to plan well and consider consequences, good for it. If it made you have a bit of self-doubt and the ability to see two sides of an issue, bravo. If it pushed you to go slowly and assess your options, hurray. Now that you’ve honed these qualities, it’s time to enjoy what they do for you and let your useless anxiety go.

Having compassion for others is a positive, humane quality, but it must be balanced out with compassion for self: I don’t want you to hurt and I don’t want to hurt either. It also must be balanced out with good judgment. I can’t tell you how many times clients tell me they’ve done inappropriate things for others all because “I felt badly for them.” What is missing in this reasoning is what any particular act will do to you. Sometimes it will harm you outwardly and sometimes it will take its toll inwardly, making you feel like a fool when you think you should have known better.

So, yes, show those who are suffering compassion, but watch that you don’t go overboard and end up hurting yourself.

Karen R. Koenig, M.Ed., LCSW, is an international, award-winning author of seven books on eating, weight and body image, a psychotherapist with 30 years of experience, a health educator, and a popular blogger. Her expertise is in eating psychology and helping over-eaters and binge-eaters improve their self-care and become “normal” eaters. She lives and practices in Sarasota, Florida.
Visit her website

Good and Bad Don't Apply to Eating

Good and Bad Don't Apply to Eating

Karen R. Koenig, M.Ed., LCSW

Sometimes we can’t help overhearing conversations, especially when someone is talking really loudly on their cell phone, as if they’re alone in the room. That happened to me recently, and I was dumbstruck over what I was hearing. A man was telling someone about an upcoming doctor’s appointment and this is what I heard: “My doctor is going to be really mad at me because I’ve been really bad. I’m eating all the wrong things when I promised him I’d be good. Man, have I been bad.”

If I hadn’t seen that this speaker was a middle-age guy, I would have sworn I was listening to a child between 6 and 12. That’s the age when we’re often preoccupied with wishing to be good and fearing being bad. That’s the age when we don’t have a huge vocabulary and use words like “good” and “bad” because we don’t have better, more appropriate words readily available in our vocabulary.

At the same time as I felt sorry for this man who truly sounded fearful of what his doctor might say to him about his “bad” eating, I had several other thoughts and feelings as well. Why is this man so worried about what his doctor will think of him rather than feel disappointed in himself that he wasn’t eating more healthfully? Would his doctor actually use the word “bad,” as if he was talking to a kid misbehaving? If this man promised his doctor that he’d be “good,” what was the purpose of such a promise? And what did the doctor say to his patient promising something?

Two intense feelings overshadowed all my others. I was angry that we’re still stuck in this good/bad food mentality which makes us feel and sound like children and gets us nowhere in feeding ourselves more nutritiously and intuitively. And, I was frightened that maybe doctors were fostering these beliefs and making a moral judgment on someone’s eating by implying goodness or badness. I couldn’t imagine doctors actually telling patients that they’re “good” or “bad,” but maybe I’m out of touch.  

I will keep repeating this message as long as I continue to hear these words applied to eating: Good and bad are moral terms. Eating a salad doesn’t make you good and eating cheesecake and Fritos doesn’t make you bad. How and what you feed yourself doesn’t make you more or less of a valuable person and says nothing about your integrity or ethics. Honesty, bravery, fair-mindedness, and loyalty are aspects of morality. Feeding yourself is a self-care and nutritional issue and, though you may treat yourself well or poorly, even that doesn’t make you a good or bad person.

So, could all of you who are reading this please take a pledge, on your own behalf and for the benefit of others, to avoid applying these words to your eating or fitness behaviors? And, if a health care provider uses them to describe you or your behavior based on your efforts in these arenas, please give them this blog to read and tell them about my new book, "Helping Patients Outsmart Overeating: Psychological Strategies for Doctors and Health Care Providers."

Karen R. Koenig, M.Ed., LCSW, is an international, award-winning author of seven books on eating, weight and body image, a psychotherapist with 30 years of experience, a health educator, and a popular blogger. Her expertise is in eating psychology and helping over-eaters and binge-eaters improve their self-care and become “normal” eaters. She lives and practices in Sarasota, Florida.
Visit her website