Helping Clients Identify and Re-Route Impulsive Behavior Based on Mood
Helping clients identify and re-route impulsive behavior based on mood can be challenging. Humans have many learned set behaviors that come about as coping mechanisms through life experience. Those behaviors are attached to a mood. For example, a mood around not feeling healthy can lead people to work more, eat more and drink more. Cognitively if someone attaches the feeling of not being healthy to any one of these things then the impulse response is to always turn to that one thing as a way of coping or soothing oneself. This is what can lead to addictions to drugs or alcohol.
Identifying behaviors
Identifying behaviors you want to change can be challenging. We do what we do and for most of our lives we have reasons for doing those things. For example, what does your daily morning routine look like? If it’s pretty much the same everyday why is it like that? Is your morning routine effective for you or have you never really thought about it?
There several scenarios for identifying behaviors:
- A person is very quick to realize when behaviors aren’t working and quickly makes a change
- A person bumps up again adversity with a behavior and works to figure out how to change it
- A person figures out how to be more aware in everyday life of their behaviors to know what behaviors are working or not working
- People continue doing things the same way their entire life without any awareness
For the purpose of this blog we are going to use scenario number three. How does someone figure out how to be more aware in everyday life of their behaviors to know what behaviors are working or not working? There are several ways awareness comes about but mainly education, therapy or through the socialization process. We generally learn through changing our thought process what may be working and what may not be working. Education can also include fitness professionals. You can help people target and identify behaviors they want to change aside from fitness. For example, you will talk to client’s about cardio for heart health and weight lifting for muscle strength but take it a step further and educate your clients on the psychological benefits of exercise; a good night’s sleep. A good night’s sleep can lend itself to a more productive days, leading to a shorter day, a better dinner, a better diet, less illness and fewer doctor expenses. Help your client define behaviors outside of fitness (better sleep, better work production, shorter work days, eating better, feeling better and fewer doctor visits) that they want to work on. Add one or two of those onto your goal fitness goal setting and also help your client set goals around those.
Impulsive behaviors
How often have you grabbed something, anything out of the fridge for dinner, at the end of a long day without even thinking about it? Impulsive behaviors just happen. They happen often for clients and most time they do not know what to do about it. Just as many beginning exercisers have no sense about how to begin an exercise program many people do not know what to do with their impulses. ‘The cake was there and I couldn’t stop myself’. How many times have you heard something similar?
Most impulsive behaviors are in our control. Sure they may be buried under years of coping and life experience but they are not involuntary. If you were to look in the dictionary one of the definitions of impulsive states that it is the influence of a particular feeling or mental state. Impulsive behaviors are attached to and influenced by certain moods as part of our system for coping. For example, one of my clients who struggles with eating bad foods late at night thought that grabbing for cookies or chips was out of his control. In actuality he was displaying a level of impulsiveness. Although there were several factors leading to his bad late night eating, he blamed it on the stress he felt from working late nights from home. Most of his life he probably impulsively grabbed for cookies or chips during stressful times which made it feel out of his control.
Kids figure out sometimes impulsive ways to deal or cope with usually ordinary everyday events. Some are more effective than others. As adults we usually continue to carry those impulses with us because that is all we know. Impulsivity can be exhibited as part of ADHD and it also attaches itself to instant gratification.
Mood
At the root of everything we do there is a mood; a conscious state of mind or predominant emotion and a prevailing attitude. My client experienced mood states that included: anxiety, frustration, nervous, worried, etc. That mood attached itself to impulsivity to eat bad foods late at night. This left the client blue and worse in all the mood states he was initially experience due to the stress of working late nights from home
Conclusion
My client bumped up against adversity and is figuring out how to change it. He decided that something wasn’t working for him and decided to see me to get this figured out. A big piece of what was happening with this client’s mood was associated with bad eating habits. By the time this client got home from work he was tired and hungry and thought the best food for him to eat was frozen food. He finally realized that his frozen food was empty calories and mainly sugar. This pattern of frozen food eating, pared with late night stress is what left him wanting more sugar hence late night impulsive eating; sometimes bingeing. Once the client started eating a better dinner his blood sugar leveled, his mood leveled and so did his impulsivity.
Other than getting to the root(s) of an issue people can re-train their brain to think and respond differently. One of the challenges in this is finding those different ways to respond to break the cycle and set new ways of responding. Although late night eating for this client leveled off it didn’t necessarily go away but here are a couple of tips he used to remind his brain that he didn’t need to impulsively grab for cookies or chips: post sticky notes in high stress areas and on his computer. Add a note to computer and cell phone wall paper. Place a healthy snack alternative near the area he is doing work. Doing this over and over will then start to feel involuntary and will build a new blue print in your brain for the desired behavior.
I hope you have a great week!
Dr. Michelle
Photo credit: *lynne*
