We were asked In class once "how do you celebrate?" Instantly my mind went to 'treat food' my first thought was 'dinner out' and then 'buying things I want' and thought - why? I was so stumped as to why, because I would love to not be so tied to celebrating with food (could it be that sneaky scale of food addiction?)

Most people had similar ways of celebrating, drinks-cakes-outings only 1 or 2 had something more along the lines of self-care acts.

How do you even celebrate with out stuff? (another one of my thoughts that bothered me)

When talking to a fellow health coach about this notion they picked up on something cool! I said "My go to was to celebrate with a coffee out but even when thinking about it I feel like I don't really want to…maybe I'll just celebrate with my emotions". But it was that little off hand comment that my colleague picked up on and was like "and what is that?" I thought a little bit and it was "just being happy and positive" it felt good and I thought "holy shit can I just celebrate things with being happy?"- It sounds totally banal…but yeah…probably.

I've thought more on this topic as I've gone through each celebration since trying to analyse what drives the choices I make. Looking at my progress and stagnations. I know sabotage is at play somewhere but I don't really get why. You'll hear me bring up values a lot and how at the root of a lot of things our values hold clues for us. This is one of those 'value mix ups' times, where the neural pathways are subtly hijacking things.

Of course celebrating with food isn't a problem if you actually don't have a problem with it, for me it was as I was getting too much processed food creep and sometimes I really felt like it wasn't adding to the celebration vibe or it was just wildly disappointing.

So lets take a look Dinner out? Whats the reward?-family fun, not having to cook- time, less overwhelmed (time is something I value a lot).

Buying things I want?- Shiny, new, novelty, beauty, visuals, distraction- distraction from being overwhelmed (aesthetics and visually cool stuff is a big value for me). Breaking this down was interesting for me because I could see two things in common around avoiding being overwhelmed!\

Now before I really hadn't thought about this, but the elation of celebration is very similar to anxiety and depending on neural pathways it could be positive or negative an in my case the wires are crossed and results in my brain is trying to protect me even when I don't need it. Ultimately excitement is a stress response (a fun one) My body hasn't separated the excitement to "oh something cools happening don't panic" and registers "OVERWHELMED" and then because of the strong negative pathways (that I've been working on) being the most efficient in my brain it takes me to stress eating! Wild but helpful now to know.

For anyone reading ask yourself: "How do you celebrate?" What comes to mind?

-Saz