Q&A 30 – Is fear making us fat?

When we don’t understand the nature of Thought, our thinking can (innocently) be fearful, to greater or lesser degrees. This, in turn, causes us to need to comfort and distract ourselves with unwanted habits like overeating. Alternatively, when we learn about the nature of Thought our unwanted habits become unnecessary and fall away.You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below. Show Notes* How our thinking can be fearful, even when we don’t notice it * Our problem-solving brain is always trying to keep us safe * How our unwanted habits distract us (temporarily) from our thinking * When we see the nature of though our unwanted habits dissolveTranscript of episodeHello explorers, and welcome to Q&A episode 30 of Unbroken. My name is Alexandra Amor. I’m really happy to haveyou here with me today. Today the question is: is fear making us fat?This was something that crossed my mind the other day that I really wanted to share with you as a way of looking toward the understanding that I share here on the podcast and toward this inside out understanding of the way that we work, and how everything that we’re experiencing is coming to us via thought. It occurred to me the other day, I was just thinking about my thinking. And I realized that so much of my thinking is insecure, or fearful. We often talk about how our thinking is so often in the future or in the past. And it’s really clear to me that so often when we’re thinking about the future, when I’m planning things, or thinking about what might happen, or what could happen, or what should happen, or what I should be doing in any given situation, that thinking is quite fearful. We might not necessarily label it as such, unless we’re aware that we live in the world of our thinking, not in the world of our circumstances. I started reflecting on the quality of my thoughts, or the nature of my thoughts even when I feel like things are relatively peaceful, inside my head, and calm and quiet, and things are fairly settled. And I realized that even then, my thinking can be quite fearful. This makes sense, because our brains ability to problem solve, I always call them big problem-solving machines. It’s their nature to want to look out into the world into what might be happening, and then solve that problem. Where does that come from? That comes from a place of insecurity or fear. There might be a situation that I as a human might encounter in the next 10 minutes. And my brain, being a problem-solving machine, wants to get out ahead of that problem, and it wants to fix it before it can happen. It wants to anticipate what might occur in order to keep me safe. And this, of course, makes total sense. I’m not judging my brain, or my thinking at all. It’s doing its job, and it’s doing its very best to try to protect me and keep me safe. And you as well, of course, we’re all designed the same way. So given that problem solving nature of our brains and our thinking, so much of our thinking can be like I said, insecure or fearful, even when we’re really calm and quiet. And then what can happen – and this is where I see anxiety start to occur in people – is that thinking kind of builds on itself. It gets even more sped up and more sped up and more sped up. And now we’re spending a lot more time in that worried or anxious state. It’s like a river running faster and being really turned up. That can become an unwanted habit as well, I realize. We get into this unwanted habit of being anxious and having these layers and layers of insecure an anxious thinking.