Since starting travel work in April, I have been eating like shit. I have been driving a lot and staying with a friend and so I’ve been eating a lot of fast food, ordering a lot of fried food on DoorDash, and not prepping my own lunches and dinners. At this point I’m starting to feel it, and it feels bad. Tuesday night I ordered a shrimp po boy and mozzarella sticks, and all morning on Wednesday, I was feeling bloated. I’ve been on a mission for a while to free myself from my vices, or at the very least, severely limit my exposure to them. I have cut out cannabis and am limiting alcohol and shortform content. I still struggle with online shopping, pornography, mindlessly using my smartphone and eating fried food. I have to take this objective one day at a time. I accept that some days are going to be better than others, and these things tend to come in waves. I’ll go through periods with no social media, and then a week will come where I am dealing with something and it causes me to get really deep into social media to distract or cope, and then I lay off it again. I’ll have weeks where I’m eating healthy, feeling great, and then one “cheat day” trip to Raising Cane’s knocks me off the horse, and suddenly I’m having fried chicken or mozzarella sticks multiple days in a row. I’m only human and these off weeks are natural, and I try to accept that and not get too hard on myself. The best I can do is identify when I’m in a spiral with one of my vices, and course-correct. This is a practice I learned through meditation – identify the thought, redirect your attention to your breath. I’ve found this can be applied to things in my life like interacting with my vices – identify when I’m getting carried away with something, redirect my attention toward something better. Because relying on vices can often be an unconscious thing, I don’t often realize when I’ve been eating fried food for dinner 4 days in a row until I stop and listen to my body – how am I feeling? Well, I’m bloated and my chest hurts. Then I have to stop and ask myself, when’s the last time I had a vegetable?
I’ve been thinking a lot about radical acceptance. Radical acceptance is a technique used in behavioral therapy that teaches you to look at situations you cannot control without judgment in order to cope with emotional distress. This framework of thought has dramatically changed my life. The world today is full of horrors beyond comprehension. Every day there is some new thing accelerating the collapse of modern society and our descent into technofascism. Constant, 24-hour access to all the information in the world within my pockets has exhausted me, made me tired from feeling angry about things that didn’t involve me. Every day it is something new – the government cuts some vital program, someone says something stupid on social media for the purpose of inciting rage, a brand I’ve decided to be loyal to does something I don’t like. Before I let my emotions carry me away, I stop and ask myself: is this something within my control, something I can change? Almost always, the answer is no. And because it’s not something I can change, I choose to respond, not react, with acceptance. I sit with that information and decide to move on. If there’s nothing I can do, there’s no point in getting upset. Had I not stopped to ask myself this question, I would react – not respond – with anger, frustration, rage. This is a simple practice I’ve implemented into my life that has really helped me when it comes to regulating my emotions. As I said earlier, meditation teaches us to identify, then redirect. I can identify if this is something that is worth getting emotional about. Is it something that directly impacts me? Something I have the power to change? If not, time to accept this for what it is and redirect my focus to what is within my control.
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