Hi Galaway mum, I clicked on the link on your tagline and I feel the article is a great one, I am posting it here so I can read it a bit at a time over the week.
Living in the Moment
What does it mean to "live in the moment"? Your willpower is held accountable for acting with or against your feelings,
at the moment the decision is made. This is the critical concept of the "moment".
There is a tendency for the "will" to adopt a life strategy that is independent of the variations that occur in feelings from one time to another. If feelings did not change much, or only changed very slowly, then the "moment" would not matter, and instead of "living in the moment", we could just "live". But, for any number of reasons, feelings do change from moment to moment. For some people they change more than for others, and perhaps it is this group of people who have more reason to take the kind of advice being given here.
A simple example of a feeling that changes is hunger. We feel hungry before we eat. After we have eaten, we might not feel hungry at all. A decision to diet may be based on feelings about the consequences of being too fat, and these feelings may be relatively constant. But the constant feelings in favour of the diet are in conflict with the varying feelings of hunger, which leads to the on-again off-again nature of the diet.
The primary error, of
not living in the moment, is to act as if your willpower is held accountable for feelings at some moment other than the moment that a decision is being made. If might seem reasonable to account for future feelings, especially as many of our feelings are themselves feelings about expectations of the future,
but this is not how the system works.
How the system does work is that you are expected to make decisions now about the future, in the context of the feelings that you have
now about the future,
not in the context of the feelings that you might expect to have when that future comes.
Example: The Diet
So how does this apply to a diet?
- At some time you have feelings about the desirability of losing weight, and you make a decision to go on a diet. Unfortunately a diet is something that by definition goes on for an extended period of time – it is not a single decision, but rather a series of decisions. But you cannot make future decisions in the present. So it can make sense to decide to be on a diet in the present moment, and it can make sense to think about the consequences of dieting or not dieting in the future, but a mistake is made when you assume that your present decision is also a future decision (or a series of future decisions). Your future decisions cannot be made now, because they must be made in the context of your future feelings, and your future feelings have not happened yet.
- At some later time, an opportunity to eat arises. Your feeling of being hungry is now stronger than your desire to diet. Your willpower may persist with its plan, but this decision must be remade each time the situation occurs, and each time the decision is made against the feelings of hunger, your willpower is "punished" for making that decision.
- Eventually, in the face of this punishment, your willpower must relent, and the food gets eaten. At this point, you may make a further mistake, which is to try and suppress your feelings about wanting to diet and not wanting to be overweight. Too often we want our life plan to be either one thing or the other. Either you are dieting to lose weight, or, you are eating because you enjoy your food. If you continued to have feelings about the badness of being overweight while you were eating your food, that would "spoil" your enjoyment. But feelings are there for a reason, and they cannot be wished away. If they could be wished away, then willpower would be "in charge", and as we have already seen, this would undermine the crucial role that feelings play in holding willpower accountable for the success of biological goals.
- After you have eaten, (and probably eaten too much) you no longer feel hungry, but now you feel bad about having broken your diet, your "failure" to do what you "wanted" to do. So what should you be feeling? It does make sense at this point to feel bad about the consequences of your over-eating on your weight. But feeling bad about the failure of your willpower serves no useful purpose. Any plan that requires persistent willpower is going to fail, and feeling bad about that is as pointless as feeling bad about the rising and setting of the sun. It is pointless because it is based on an invalid assumption about feelings and willpower: that somehow willpower can be held accountable for decisions made at one moment by feelings that are felt at a different moment. As I have already stated, it just doesn't work this way.
So what is the correct "living in the moment" approach? The correct approach is to have feelings about the desirability of not being overweight, and to have feelings of hunger when you are hungry, and to only ever expect to make decisions in the context of the feelings you have at the times those decisions are being made. So:
- At some point in time, you think about the negative consequences of being overweight, and you have feelings about those consequences. You think about the relationship between your eating behaviour and your weight, but you do not expect to be able to control your future behaviour.
- When food becomes available, the feeling of hunger may exceed your feelings of concern about your weight. If this happens, then eat. But do not suppress your feelings about your weight. If those concerns reduce your enjoyment of the food, then so be it.
- As you eat, you feelings of hunger will naturally reduce. At some point your weight concerns will once again exceed your hunger, and at this point you can stop eating, without any application of willpower.
- Even though your concerns about weight reduced your enjoyment of the food, and perhaps reduced how much you ate, quite possibly you still ate too much. This will make you feel bad about the effect of that over-eating on your weight. Allow yourself to feel this bad feeling. Do not try to suppress it. Also do not try to exaggerate it, in the hope that doing so can "control" your future eating behaviour.
- There is of course more to weight loss that just eating less. Even if your feelings about not wanting to be overweight do not prevent over-eating, they may be sufficient sometimes to help you choose to eat food that is less bad for you, or to choose to do a little exercise (but don't fall into the trap of "deciding" on a long-term exercise plan involving a long-term gym membership or an expensive mail-order exercise machine).
If we could somehow "even out" our feelings, then they would become more constant, and we could avoid the requirement to live in the moment, and our life strategies would become simpler. But our feelings cannot be forcibly evened out, because they are what they are when they are. If you are on an attempted diet, it might seem more "rational" to feel bad about over-eating
before you do it, but the cruel torture of the diet is that most of the bad feelings come
after the eating, when it is apparently too late.
There is, however, always a next time. You can't decide now to keep to your diet next time, but if your allow yourself to feel badly about over-eating on one occasion, these bad feelings will persist, and they will reduce your enthusiasm for eating too much in the future. It may be that the diet "yo-yo" cannot be completely suppressed, but if you allow yourself to feel your feelings at all times, then those feelings will persist enough that the yo-yo will flatten itself a little. Exactly how much will flatten itself? Probably enough to achieve a somewhat stable equilibrium – knowing that at each moment you are making a decision consistent with the feelings that you have at that moment. You may or may not lose weight, but your weight concerns will probably have
some effect on your eating habits, and, what is important, you will not be constantly bouncing back and forth between "beating yourself up" about not being on a diet when you think you should be and "indulging" yourself by breaking a diet that you are supposedly on.
