If I asked you to define mindfulness, what would you say? If you asked me to define it, I’d say: Mindfulness is what happens when you bring your full attention and awareness to your experience in the present moment without judgment.

Unfortunately, most of us aren’t in the present moment most of the time. We’re on autopilot, going through the motions of whatever we’re doing, such as eating, driving or even talking. Maybe all three at the same time.

If your mind is full, you probably aren’t being mindful. In fact, when the volume on your thinking is turned up, your awareness is turned down. Have you ever driven home on a very familiar route and realized you didn’t remember most of the trip? Have you ever eaten a meal or only to look down at the empty plate or bowl and wonder where the food went because you have no recollection of eating it?

Now, there are certain advantages to being able to perform familiar and essential activities on autopilot. (Would you want every time you drove a car to feel like the first time?) But it’s a shame to miss out on life and its pleasures — a pretty landscape, a good conversation with someone dear to us, or tasty food — as they unfold moment by moment.

Awareness is an important part of practicing mindfulness because you can’t be in the present moment if you don’t notice, and aren’t aware of, what you’re experiencing.

But as you become more aware of your thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and behaviors — especially behaviors and thought patterns that have become baked into full-fledged habits and emotions that feel like “too much” — you might not like some of what you discover. That’s why the “without judgment” part is so crucial.

Countering judgment with kindness

It doesn’t feel good to be judged, whether you or someone else is the judge. It can make you feel ashamed or guilty, and shame and guilt are not effective motivators for positive change. So, when you can start to simply notice judgments you have towards yourself and not hold on to them, you’re less likely to get in your own way.

So what do you do when you’re aware of what you’re thinking, feeling, or doing and then you judge yourself for those thoughts, feelings or actions — and maybe can’t let that judgment go? You meet that judgment with kindness and curiosity and acceptance.

Kindness is an antidote for judgment because it helps you see not just the behavior that you might feel judgmental about, but what might have led to the behavior.

For example, let’s say you had the Worst Day Ever and turned to food to comfort yourself because it seemed like the best, or only, option at the time, and you were so focused on feeling better that you didn’t notice how much you were eating.

Partnering kindness with curiosity allows you to explore what lies beneath the behavior you don’t feel good about with what I call the “Gentle ‘Why’?” Instead of asking yourself judgmentally, “Why did I DO that?!!!!” You can ask yourself gently, “Why did I do that? What else was going on?”

Putting your curiosity hat on can make it easier to be kind, rather than judgmental — to yourself and others — but it’s also important for mindfulness itself.

Curiosity won’t kill the cat — or you

When we practice being in the present moment, we do that to observe and learn about our experience in that moment. When we’re on autopilot — when we’re mindless — there’s no room for curiosity. Curiosity is the antidote for being on autopilot, as well as for boredom. We can become curious about anything if we choose to.

I also mentioned acceptance, because the art of being in the present moment is accepting what is happening in that moment, regardless of how we feel about it. “Wait a minute,” you might be thinking, “why would I accept something I don’t like?” That’s a good question.

Acceptance is something that many people struggle with, and I think part of the problem is how we often define acceptance.

Acceptance means realizing that a challenging thought, situation or person really is the way it is right now. It doesn’t mean that we like it, or that we are resigned to it never changing. (It also doesn’t mean that if you’re in an unsafe or uncomfortable situation and you have a way to extract yourself from it, that you won’t.) You can accept something and still not like it.

When you can’t accept that something is the way it is in the moment, you can waste a lot of time and energy trying to force things to be something other than what they are in the moment. This is usually very stressful, it’s often not useful, and it’s certainly not mindful.

Why? Because when you allow yourself to get hooked by an unhelpful thought instead of noticing, accepting, and letting the thought pass without judgment, you get pulled out of the present moment.

Freedom of choice

There’s no right or wrong way to eat, or one right reason to eat. Still, it would be unusual if thoughts and feelings never came up as a response to our food choices and our eating. Just like with mindfulness, part of mindful eating is noticing your thoughts, feelings and emotions as they arise, without judgment.

You can note that these thoughts and feelings are there, maybe get a little curious about them, and move on. For example, if you’re eating something and your inner critic puts out the thought that you “shouldn’t be eating it,” you can notice the thought, check in with your body and your senses for how you are experiencing eating the food, and use that present moment experience, rather than your thoughts and judgments, to guide your decision to continue eating or stop eating.

Becoming more aware of your thoughts, feelings and emotions gives you more choice in the actions you take. This has two important benefits.

One, it allows you to stop living on autopilot so you can begin to unhook from habitual, unhelpful patterns. Two, it makes it easier to respond rather than react to:

• Internal stimuli, such as a thoughts or a feelings (“I messed up today, and I’m feeling sad.”)
• External stimuli, such as people or situations that tends to trigger troublesome thoughts or feelings (“He never really listens to me, and it makes me so angry.”)

Reacting to such stimuli might look like catastrophic thinking, such as: “I’m a failure” or “He doesn’t care about me.” It might look like behaving on autopilot by lashing out, isolating yourself, or attempting to self-soothe in ways that leave you feeling worse, such as eating an entire pint of ice cream, quickly.

By contrast, responding to such stimuli might look like noticing and naming your feelings and showing yourself compassion for the pain you’re experiencing. For example, “It doesn’t feel good to make a mistake/feel like I’m not being heard” or “Everyone makes mistakes sometimes.” You might also think about if there is any meaningful action you need to take, like having a conversation to calmly express your needs or to make amends, and what you need in the moment to care for your hurt in a way that doesn’t cause you more pain.   

How does this relate to emotional eating?

Often, stress and emotional eating happens automatically. You might be feeling anxious, overwhelmed, sad, lonely, disrespected or scared. Before you know it, you’re eating, and let’s face it — you’re probably not reaching for broccoli to soothe your emotions.

When you’re trying to escape the pain of your stress or your emotions, and you are also telling yourself the food you’re reaching for is bad and you’re bad for eating it, that’s adding insult to injury.

When you’re mindlessly eating to self-soothe, using the food as a distraction or a way to numb out may be part of the package. When you eventually become aware of what you’re doing (or what you’ve done), you may start blaming and shaming yourself.

Even worse, whatever comfort or respite you might have experienced while eating has vanished, leaving you with a stomachache (possibly) and a vow that you will never do this again. Except you will, if you try to rely on willpower.

One benefit of mindfulness is that it can help you increase your awareness of physical sensations, such as muscle tension or rapid heartbeat, that tend to accompany stress and emotional states. This alone can have a direct effect on reducing stress and calming emotions, because research suggests that simply noticing, acknowledging and naming the emotion you’re experiencing can help take away some of its power and bring you relief. In other words, naming the emotion can help tame the emotion.

When you have greater awareness of emotional states and how they show up in your body, it’s easier to ask yourself this very important question when you find yourself reaching for food when you’re not hungry: What am I feeling, what do I need?

And that, dear reader, is a superpower.

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Carrie Dennett, MPH, RDN, is a Pacific Northwest-based registered dietitian nutritionist, journalist, intuitive eating counselor, author, and speaker. Her superpowers include busting nutrition myths and empowering women to feel better in their bodies and make food choices that support pleasure, nutrition and health. This post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute individualized nutrition or medical advice.

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