Fear and Hunger is a horror dungeon crawl role-playing video game. I’ve seen it described as wallowing in pain, decay, and death – something to be survived, not enjoyed. Why would anyone play it? It sounds terrible. And yet it has players who come back again and again.
Sometimes humans have an appetite for the horrible. And sometimes we gravitate toward things that feel familiar. In families that deny food to certain members or can’t provide for everyone, life experience may tangle fear and hunger to the degree that when either is out of balance, we feel as though we’re wallowing in pain that may threaten death.
If hunger triggers fear, you may eat when you’re not hungry in order to avoid the opportunity to feel frightened. If fear triggers hunger, you may choose fried food to help calm yourself down. Or you may have other nuanced appetite alterations without knowing why.
It’s easy to forget how interconnected our emotional and physical needs are when we rarely even acknowledge how connected our physical parts are. We tend to forget that a foot injury may make our hip hurt. We often fail to examine the effect of family discord on our appetite or ability to tolerate certain food. Whether or not we acknowledge it, those relationships exist and affect the choices we make.
We all know the term stress eating, but rarely do we pause long enough to explore ways to shift, reframe, or eliminate our stressors. Instead, we try a shortcut we call willpower to avoid stress eating. And why wouldn’t we? Western medicine has taught us to prioritize treating symptoms rather than underlying disease.
And so, we come back to the game again and again – fear and hunger, hunger and fear. Or fear that prevents us from feeling hunger. It’s a merry-go-round. And it becomes apparent about this time every year when resolutions dissolve into stupid ideas in the first place.
Every journey begins with one step. What’s the first step off the fear and hunger merry-go-round?
Scheduling. Narrow your meal and snack times to small windows each day during which you eat. Over time, your body will adjust to this schedule. This can help you avoid the excess acid production that can cause ulcers.
If that step is difficult for you, begin with something different.
Disrupting. Change something, anything. If you like salty food, eat sweet food. If you like bananas, eat apples. If you like cereal for breakfast, eat yogurt. It’s easier to connect with our senses when we get out of a rut because we have to pay attention.
Once you’ve changed something, change something else. Carefully evaluate how you feel during and after each change.
Feeling it. One way to dissipate a level of fear is to stick with it until it’s gone. This requires some courage and practice. In the beginning, you may feel nauseated. You may have to distract yourself quickly. But eventually, you will be able to feel your way past fear. That can change your experience of food and eating.
Describing it to yourself. Yes, I’m suggesting you talk to yourself. Describe how your mouth feels when you chew a carrot. Describe how your stomach feels after you eat. Describe each sensation you become aware of.
Once you’re familiar with the sensations, see if any of them are attached to a specific emotion. Add the emotion to your description.
Reframing. Becoming familiar with physical sensations and their attached emotions will put you in a position to experiment. See if you can reframe the emotion attached to a certain sensation. If not, it’s okay.
If you can, practice attaching a different meaning to a familiar sensation. That pain I feel in my solar plexus is the same pain I felt yesterday when I wondered if this was what they mean by chest pains that precede a heart attack. I felt really scared. Now I wonder whether I will feel it every time I eat in a hurry like I did both days?
These steps are not the only ones you can take to begin to disentangle fear and hunger (or other sensations and emotions). Anything that works for you is fine. You get to make the rules of the game. You also get to change them as you go to make them more effective.
As you slowly explore, experience, and reframe, you will gain more and more ability to make and stick to choices that improve your eating and your life. Bye-bye fear and hunger!
