What are you distracting yourself from?

At the beginning of this year, late in my third trimester of being pregnant with my second baby, I found out I had gestational diabetes. In a last-ditch effort to stay off of insulin, I tried the Keto Diet, a restrictive and socially awkward diet where I removed sugar and almost all carbohydrates from my diet, (my carbohydrate intake was restricted to two cups of spinach or broccoli a day).

The most challenging part of the diet for me was the first two weeks when I lost all interest in attending social gatherings or engaging with my family or friends at all because life just didn't seem as fun without the freedom to eat whatever I wanted, (or at least that's what I thought at the time). I didn't know it then, but every time we eat, our brain releases dopamine to let us know that we're partaking in a pleasurable activity and that we should keep doing it. On the most natural level, dopamine is a survival chemical in our brains released to keep us engaged in activities like eating and mating. 

Taking naturally pleasurable activities and manipulating them to release higher amounts of dopamine can make these activities so highly pleasurable that they can easily become habitual, second nature, and even addictive to us. The more pleasure you feel from eating certain foods, the more instinctive it becomes to eat those foods whenever you see them. And most importantly, there are certain foods and combinations of flavors and ingredients, (and the food industry and marketers know this), that release concentrated dopamine, tricking you into thinking these are the most important foods for survival. That’s why we crave some foods more than others. Our brain is signaling to us we need them to survive.

Life didn't seem like fun for me because the dense amount of dopamine I was used to receiving from my diet, (which had carbohydrates and sugar as a staple!), was no longer being released in the same dose it had been in the previous weeks, months, and years of my life. The fascinating discovery was, after two weeks of detoxing from the concentrated dopamine doses, my life not only became fun again, it became the freest and full I had experienced in a long time. 

Without any additional manipulated dopamine coming from my food, I began easily navigate things that felt really, truly good to me, and almost as important, what felt bad to me that I was previously distracting myself from knowing. I was left with no choice but to acknowledge my feelings fully and then become conscious about what the next best steps were to feel better.   With each choice I made, I began to feel more awake, more alive, and more myself.

And then, one day, I had an epiphany:  When we fill our lives with dopamine from manipulated sources, we not only distract our internal compass from leading us in a naturally joyful direction, we distract our intuitive guidance system from knowing what actually feels bad because we're covering up our feelings with a comfortable and thick blanket of manipulated false pleasures.  Then, when the dopamine rush from the manipulated source is over, we actually are left feeling back to where we were, or sometimes even worse because it was never a true source of joy, to begin with.  So what do we do? We repeat the cycle, (seeking instant, concentrated, easy, and manipulated sources of dopamine to feel better at the moment), and keep ourselves unknowingly stuck in the longer run.

My aha moment: The false pleasure I was previously receiving from food was distracting me and keeping me from knowing when I was in and out of alignment with myself.

I quickly got curious about how else I was distracting myself with other forms of concentrated dopamine. The answers were obvious and straightforward. Too much of any of these activities: drinking caffeine, checking email, drinking alcohol, watching TV, texting, snacking all the time, checking my phone and notifications, social media usage, internet browsing, online shopping, complaining (and listening to other people complaining), keeping a cluttered space, staying too busy, going from one activity to the next without pause, and so on.

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Aligned + Kind was formed to help people get to the heart of how they feel inside so they can navigate their life in authentic alignment by focusing on what feels good and knowing what feels bad so preferences can be updated and more clarity can be given to our creation. When we distract ourselves from connecting with our feelings, we interrupt the ultimate guidance system we were born with and make less conscious decisions that can often leave us feeling worse.

What are you using to distract yourself from feeling and knowing yourself? How do you feel these distractions are getting in the way? Are you willing to change or limit those behaviors in exchange for getting to know yourself and your internal guidance system on a deeper level? Does the thought of modifying the amount of time you spend distracting yourself scare you or excite you? (are you already thinking of all the excuses of why you can't follow through?) How would you feel without these distractions?

My proposition is simple: Limit the amount of time you spend getting dosed with concentrated and engineered dopamine and discover where your real pleasures of life are, and just as important, where things are signaling you to seek a change.

I never before thought a life without unlimited amounts of carbohydrates, snacking freely all day, wine on the weekends, and tv at night to relax would be something I’d be interested in. In fact, I was a big advocate for enjoying “everything in moderation,” “you only live once,” and “follow what feels good in the moment”. But this little taste of what life was like without one of those things, opened me to the knowledge that I can’t unknow now that I’ve experienced it. I know how full life actually is when I don’t continuously distract myself from it with false and additional dopamine hits from my food and other highly manipulated activities.

My hope isn’t that you never again enjoy these activities again. I still engage in all of them. But now, I'm choosing to try my best to enjoy them in smaller, more intentional increments VS having them choose me unconsciously. My intention is to get you to notice how much you fill your life with these manipulated forms of enjoyment and to start questioning what you would truly enjoy if those things didn’t exist. Only you know the answer and self-awareness is the key to creating change.