In my early years as a young teacher, spread really thin, I found myself engaging in certain numbing behaviors after my students left for the day. I would tell myself it was time to decompress, then start reading online blogs for sometimes multiple hours. This then led to late nights and early mornings preparing for my classes. It was a vicious cycle, and it caused a lot of shame and overwhelm.
As you start to reflect on your own day-to-day life, what are some numbing behaviors you notice? In this episode I share what some of my coaching clients have dealt with – from phone scrolling to over-organizing. I will teach you my 3 N’s of numbing behaviors, as well as what this has looked like in my life and the life of a client, to show you that it’s possible to carry less fear and shame around these behaviors. But what if you want to continue a “numbing behavior?” When I teach you how to intentionally choose your choices, then I support that, too. These tools are meant to give you more ways to support yourself, in the ways that matter to you.
About a few other things…
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TRANSCRIPT
Monica: Welcome to About Progress. I’m Monica Packer, a regular mom and recovering perfectionist who uncovered the truest model to dramatic but lasting personal growth. It’s progress made practical. Join us to leave the extremes behind and instead learn how to do something to grow in ways that stick. Habits are there to support you.
Full stop. And if you need more supportive habits in your life, check out the Sticky Habit method. It’s my method to help real women form real habits that stick. You can find it at about progress.com/sticky habit method.
You might have heard me share before that I am a former middle school teacher. I only taught for three years, but I can promise you that I could write a whole book on what those three years contained, both personally and professionally with tons of anecdotes that will have you laughing and crying sometimes at the same time.
My first year was definitely the hardest. I was at a pretty rough school. It was an urban, suburban community, and parts of that I really, really loved. But what was hard for me was that I had 30 to 35 students in every class. I taught seven periods out of the eight periods the the day had, and six of those class periods were completely different classes.
For those of you who are not familiar with the teaching lingo, that meant I had six preps, which is basically unheard of. Imagine teaching and having to prepare every single day. Seventh grade English, seventh grade history, seventh grade reading was, was kind of like a literature class solely by itself.
Then eighth grade, English, eighth grade history, and eighth grade reading, and only one of those preps repeated. So that meant for me, between breaking up fights with my kids, which happened a lot, getting candy stolen by even the good kids from my prize closet. I’ll never forget that sad moment and simply trying to learn what it meant to be an authority figure for all these kids when I’m a 22 year old, brand new teacher who doesn’t even know how to discipline, I had to do six preps every single day.
As soon as that really long, really heavy day ended each day at 3:30, the bell would ring, all the kids would pile outta my classroom, and I’d close my classroom door and take a deep breath of the very stale and un deodorized air from my classroom, fall into my computer chair and proceed to read blogs for like an hour, and then sometimes two or more.
I knew I had so much I needed to get done. I wasn’t dumb. I was very aware of the sheer weight that entailed, the sheer time it entailed, and the sheer responsibility that I had to these kids to show up well for them. And I would honestly say now, because of all that pressure, I would sit down and find myself incapable of following through with what I knew I needed to do.
And I hated it. I hated how I could just somehow, without even intending to get sucked into doing something that while was helpful in to some extent, like giving myself a little break, a little time to myself when taken too far and again, so unintentionally. It was harmful. It was harmful to my stress level.
It didn’t alleviate it and made it worse. It was harmful to my own sense of capacity that I had to show up as the teacher these kids needed. I was also harmful with even my sleep because I eventually did have to get all that stuff done, and I did, but not without a lot of late nights, early mornings, and a few nervous breakdowns in between.
Me reading blogs is not immorally bad. It wasn’t then. It isn’t now, but it wasn’t helpful because it was something I call a numbing behavior. I’m gonna define that in a moment for you, but let me just start by saying numbing behaviors are part of all of our lives and they affect us all to some extent.
But a numbing behavior doesn’t have to be, become this uncontrollable cycle that fill our days and ourselves with dread and despair at worse, and just unproductivity at best. If you want to work on how bad your numbing behaviors have gotten, how often they’re happening, how unintentionally they’re happening, how intensely they’re happening, and to the detriment of other things in your life, that’s what I’m gonna help you with today.
You are gonna learn what a numbing behavior is, why it happens, how it works, and then what you can do about it.
Let’s start with defining numbing behavior. My definition for this is really similar to my definition for bad habits, and there is definitely crossover here, so that’s why I’m going to share that at the forefront. But let me define it for you. A numbing behavior is any avoidant behavior we unintentionally engage in that interferes with our values, our priorities, and our intentions.
Numbing behaviors can be confusing in some ways because even just with this definition, a lot of times we know numbing behaviors as bad habits, whether they’re scrolling our phone or procrastinating, but numbing behaviors can be confusing because they might not typically be those bad habits you can bring right up in your mind.
Numbing behaviors can include things that are more productive, apparently like organizing a closet or doing home projects or answering tons of emails. So this is why you need to know the definition of a numbing behavior, cuz it’s any avoidant behavior that we are unintentionally engaging in. So a behavior that makes you avoid, and the reason why these behaviors are bad is not because they’re inherently bad, just like I’ve talked about with bad habits.
These behaviors are bad because of the effect, because of how they interfere with our values, our priorities, and our intentions. We’ve defined what a numbing behavior is. Now let’s just, let’s talk about why they happen. I shared in the definition that numbing behaviors are avoidant behaviors, so that’s basically why they’re happening.
We are avoiding something. A lot of times we think it’s because we’re avoiding an action. Like if we’re procrastinating, we think I’m avoiding taking on that particular and specific task. But I want you to think deeper. There are deeper reasons behind why we are avoiding tasks. And it’s not the task themselves, it’s the feelings we are associating with the task or the feelings we’re associating with not just the task, but maybe an event that we have to go to or a particular thing that happens often.
Something like that. One more piece of this puzzle. Not only our avo, our numbing behaviors, our attempt to avoid bad feelings when we find ourselves getting into the cycle of engaging in numbing behavior often, and I would say chronically and almost uncontrollably. That is a big red flag. Not that you’re a bad person, but that you are severely undersupported in your life, both internally, like supporting yourself and externally with your circumstances.
I wanna give you that grace here because I. Numbing behaviors are pretty loaded in shame, and it’s really easy to spiral down in that shame, but that spiral only exacerbates those numbing behaviors more. So you want to really just acknowledge that you are avoiding some bad feelings and that if it’s happening pretty chronically, you are being undersupported.
The next thing I want you to do is not that you know better what numbing behaviors are and why they happen. You need to identify what numbing behaviors look like for you. When I go way back to my childhood, I can see ways that I used to try to avoid other things in my life. So in the old days, my numbing behaviors thing, like things like drawing late into the night, like I would, I have these weird self-portraits that I drew of myself late at night while looking in a mirror reading old journals and reading other things.
Also like playing. This video game on my parents’ computer, cuz we didn’t actually have video games, but we had some games on our computers. One of them was this Chex game, like it literally came from the Chex cereal box. And my whole family, like all my sisters became obsessed with it. But I found myself playing that a lot as an avoidant behavior.
Another funny one is watching Jerry Springer after school, which was definitely not allowed. So those were some of my childhood numbing behaviors. Later on as a young adult. Reading blogs was one of my numbing behaviors Online. Online shopping became an anav avoidant behavior for me, and I shared about that in April on when I was sharing an episode all about bad habits.
You can go back and listen to that one. Nowadays, I still have numbing behaviors. They include things like scrolling my phone, emotionally eating, walking in circles around my house, doing things at 10% completion, when really that’s just a false productivity of me just trying to avoid something else that I don’t wanna do because of the feelings I’m attaching to that theme.
Take it just a quick moment for yourself and think about what does numbing behavior look like for me? I’ve heard a ton of answers to that question when I’ve posed that to my clients, and oftentimes they come to me wanting to work on some, the most common is phone use. And I just wanna add here as a quick caveat.
Oh, it can be so shame driven too. Our, our, our, our feelings of phone scrolling. But just so you know, the reason why so many of us are. So easily drawn into that numbing behavior in particular is because scrolling a phone requires so little energy, and when you’re trying to numb, you’re gonna do the easiest way of numbing that behavior, cuz that’s seemingly the most effective.
So what are your numbing behaviors? Of the things I shared, I’m sure you can identify a few for yourself and just choose one of those that you want to have in mind as we work through the rest of this episode.
Lastly, before we go on to what to do with these numbing behaviors, we need to talk about how they work. We’ve defined them. We’ve shared why. We’ve shared what they are for you. Now let’s talk about how they in quotes work. Numbing behaviors are effective for some reason. It’s our brain and our body’s way of trying to cope with the bad emotions that we want to avoid.
It’s our poor attempt to try to numb and when I have talked to my clients about this, I next talk about how they feel when they engage in those numbing behaviors. So they have one in mind. They know what they wanna work on, whether it’s scrolling a phone, or online shopping, or emotional eating or organizing.
And I say, okay, now tell me, how do you feel when you’re engaging in this numbing behavior? The answers to this are wide and varied, but here are the most common. Monica, I feel guilty, I feel lost, dumb, ashamed, frustrated, silly, incapable, unreliable, childish. How do numbing behaviors make you feel when you’re engaging in that behavior?
I just asked you to narrow it down to what emotions and feelings come up for you in that process. I know when I’m scrolling my phone, I slowly feel like, Insecure and dumb and annoyed with myself. How do you feel? Here’s the kicker. We’re engaging in these numbing behaviors in our pursuit to numb the bad emotions we don’t wanna feel.
But in my years of asking that question to my clients, like, how do you feel when you’re engaging in numbing behavior? Guess what not one single person has said in response. Numb. Not one person has said that their numbing behavior makes them feel numb. How do they work? Well, not well. When you’re engaging in numbing behaviors, you’re actually replacing one bad feeling with another.
One of the common phrases we say in this community is that when we know better, we can do better. And that means we can do things differently. So right now we’re in the knowledge piece. We’re understanding this behavior better, and part of what I want you to embrace is this fact numbing behaviors are working but not very well.
They’re actually making you feel other bad feelings instead. So they’re not helpful and we want to tap down on them. So what should we do? Next up I’m gonna teach you the N’s of numbing behavior. There are three of them. They all start with N and as you learn to follow the ends of numbing behavior, you’ll not only be able to better control how often and how intensely these behaviors go on, you’ll be able to, with time, kick them to the curb that’s coming right up after the break.
One of the reasons why numbing behaviors feel so bad is because they are in direct conflict with our values. If you don’t know what yours are, like, if you can’t name them, that’s okay. It’s actually weirdly complicated to name those values for yourself. To help. I have a free resource for you. It’s called the Ultimate Values Exercise.
It will help you step by step, be able to recognize and name your values for yourself. You can get it for free at about progress.com/values. Again, that’s about progress.com/values Use.
It is time to review the N’s of numbing behaviors. I’m just gonna do a quick overview. I’m gonna break it down for you and then I’ll show you how I applied this to a client that I worked with. The three N’s of numbing behaviors are one, notice, two name, and three next, let’s do the breakdown. When you engage in numbing behavior, the first step is to notice the behavior.
This means that in the moment you need to call it out for what it is. This literally looks like you saying to yourself, this is a numbing behavior. I’m gonna give three short examples. When I’ve had a client that scrolls their phone, when they notice themselves doing it in the moment, they said to themselves, this is a numbing behavior.
I’ve had a client who gets caught in the trap of cleaning and organizing, and her first step in being able to tap down on it was to simply say to herself, I am trying to numb out. And third quick example here, another client who would get into the, into the loop of being on Marco Polo lot. She would stop in the moment and say to herself, I am numbing.
When you notice the behavior and you call it out for what it is, you’re giving yourself a little bit of time and space to recognize what you’re doing. Numbing behaviors are often so bad, not just because of the other piece of the puzzle I talked about, about it interfering with your values, priorities, intentions, but also because we don’t notice we’re doing them until they’ve gone on too long or too intensely in ways that are harming in the bigger picture ways. So just calling it out for what it is is really important. And the other piece to that is because it gives you a little bit of a space to then insert the, the, the next two N’s I have for you.
This is something I call the response gap. It is the space between stimulus and response, and I have a whole episode on that that I did a little while back that I will make sure I link in the show notes for you. So we’re just trying to give yourself a little bit more of a response gap. So again, the first end is to notice, call out the behavior for what it is.
The next N is to name. Now what you are going to do is try to pinpoint what feelings you are attempting to avoid with this numbing behavior because again, it’s not about the tasks you’re avoiding, it’s about the feelings you’ve associated with that task. It’s not about the person, it’s not about the place.
It’s not about the thing. It’s that the feelings you are associating with those things. Let’s go back to some of the examples I gave to you in the first one. For my client that like to scroll often, she would first say, this is a numbing behavior. I’m engaging in this to avoid the overwhelm. I’m pairing with my to-dos for the day for that cleaning client.
I am trying to numb out because I’m feeling lonely for my Marco Polo client. I am numbing to try to get away from how both incapable and resentful I feel while making dinner for my family again. When you name the feelings you’re trying to avoid, it removes some of the shame from the numbing behavior itself.
Shame only perpetuates numbing behavior, I promise you. So when you call it out, you’re giving yourself more of that response gap to then name what’s really going on, and that alone is powerful. Notice, name. The third and final end of numbing behavior is next. This is where you choose what’s next. You’ve lengthened that response gap a bit.
You’ve identified what’s really going on, and now that you have both of those in hand, this is when you get to choose what’s next. You might have heard me say the word unintentional a lot when I’ve been talking about numbing behaviors. That to me is one of the biggest reasons why knowing behaviors don’t feel good is because it’s happening so unintentionally, and because of that we need to get into the mind and the body of making choices.
Okay. Doing things intentionally. The eventual goal for the next portion of this is that you choose a more supportive behavior. So instead of the numbing behavior, you’re gonna have more supportive behaviors that help you better cope with the feelings that you were trying to avoid in the first place.
Things like taking a deep breath, going for a walk, calling a friend, reading a poem that helps you calm down. Anything like that, that helps you better cope with those feelings. Here’s the real kicker though, in the beginning, as you are learning to follow the ends of numbing behavior, when you get to this third step, what’s next?
And you are making a choice and intentionally choosing a choice, guess what? One of the choices has to be that you are allowed to continue in that numbing behavior. I’m sure you’re gonna be surprised to hear me say that. Because, did I already expound on how damaging the numbing behavior is to the things that matter most to us?
Yes. But when you intentionally choose a behavior, two big things happen. First is that the shame that really perpetuates numbing behavior when that same behavior is chosen, the shame dissipates a bit, which also means that behavior kind of loses its hold over you as much as it used to have. It means you don’t go down that shame spiral as easily.
So most oftentimes, even when women choose to move forward with the same numbing behavior, but they’re intentionally choosing it, It will feel different. They will need to do less of it and they’ll be able to have more control over stopping it when they’re done. Let’s go to one of the three examples we shared with the other two stops along the way.
The scrolling numbing behavior, when you’ve noticed I’m numbing out through scrolling, and then you’ve named the feeling, I’m avoiding the resentfulness I feel with this activity that I’m avoiding. Next you choose what you’re gonna do from there. And if you say, I really do need a break, so I’m going to give myself 10 more minutes to keep scrolling, then that is a okay.
The second part of why intentionally choosing even the same behavior is a good thing is just brain science. You will be very unwilling to do the first end of the ends of numbing behavior Notice. If you believe that in noticing the numbing behavior, you have to stop it. So if you want to get better at noticing the behavior and eventually stopping it more over time, that means you have to give your brain permission to continue in the numbing behavior.
You will therefore be more inclined to even start with that first step and move through all three because your brain believes you that you won’t have to stop what is trying to help you cope with some hard feelings. This takes time to learn, and it’s okay if it doesn’t go perfectly in the beginning. In fact, as you’re learning to follow the ends of numbing behavior, I’d advise you only start with noticing.
Then with a little bit of time you can add in naming and then what’s next. And then with even more time, you will gradually do less of the numbing behavior naturally, and you’ll be able to feel more capable of choosing supportive behaviors instead. This is where supportive habits come into play, my friends, if you just keep falling for these numbing behaviors and you get caught in those cycles, and even if following the ends of numbing behavior over time, doesn’t work for you again.
Go back to that giant red flag. This means you are incredibly undersupported both internally and externally. And that’s where my sticky habit method comes into play with an internal support and half of the external support. When you’re able to better support yourself through supportive habits that will preempt the need for these numbing behaviors.
Before I leave you, I want to give you, some hope by sharing about a client who I helped do this all with. And I will say I’ve honestly done this with every single client I’ve ever worked with cuz every single client I’ve ever worked with has had at least one numbing behavior she wanted to work on. In this case, I’m gonna talk about a client who was struggling with emotional eating.
Now, as someone who has a history of eating disorders, meaning me, I am going to be very transparent in that I know my boundaries as a coach. I’m not a therapist. I’m not an eating disorder therapist for sure, or counselor, and I don’t coach women on eating disorders. When I’ve had clients who have tendencies towards those things, I advise them to get professional counseling.
Now, why this client was different was because her emotional eating was purely a numbing behavior problem and not disordered eating or eating disorder behavior, and how we knew that was because it was very tied to specific circumstances for her. She found she was engaging on the numbing behavior of emotional eating around her family getting together in her home, usually most Sundays.
So on these Sundays, before, during, and after her family’s arrival in her home, this client would find herself gravitating to the pantry and munching away her feelings. And this was confusing to her because she didn’t find herself doing this behavior other days and other times. But there was something about that event that propelled her into this very particular numbing behavior.
So we dug into it more. And she was able to connect that in the numbing behavior she was trying to avoid, feeling some emotional weight she typically carries when her children and grandchildren are over. Now as much as she loves and adores ’em and wants ’em over, she found that she feels this emotional weight of being responsible for their feelings.
Basically she’s carrying the weight of every person’s happiness on her shoulders. And emotional eating was a way for her to try to numb that weight. And yeah, it wasn’t very effective and it didn’t make her feel very good. And it actually helped her feel not helped. It made her feel less present when she was around the very people that she cared the most about.
So initially I just taught this client about the ends of numbing behavior and over the course of working together for four months, she initially started with just noticing the behavior, then gradually naming the feelings, and then with time choosing what was next. By the way, we worked together for four months, not just because of this numbing behavior.
There were many other things we worked on. This was just one piece of the puzzle we worked on together. But by the end of those four months, let me tell you where she’s at initially. She still found herself emotionally eating on those Sundays, but, but because she knew better how that behavior was trying to help her.
However, ineptly it was, she carried less fear and shame around the behavior, which meant there tend to be less of it, or she was able to make it less of an intense thing. Gradually she was able to then choose more supportive behaviors to help her process the emotional weight we identified for her. And now those events that she has don’t create nearly as much of a numbing spiral as they did in the past.
She still sometimes finds herself in the pantry before, during, and after her family coming over. But again, not as often and not at the same intensity. She feels more internally supported, and she also feels like she’s able to choose better how she wants to even engage in that behavior. One last final thought for you.
When we work on numbing behaviors, we are playing the long game. I wish it were different. I really do. Even me like my numbing behaviors, I would love if they could just disappear overnight, but when we play the long game, we’re playing the right game. The kind that will create lasting change over time.
And I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of change I’ll take on any day of the week.
I hope this episode gave you the hug and kick in the pants you need to grow. And I’m now gonna share the progress pointers from this episode. These are the notes I took so you don’t have to. And those on my Go-Getter newsletter. Get them in a graphic form each week. You can get that newsletter by going to about progress.com/newsletter.
Number one, numbing behaviors are any avoidant behaviors we unintentionally engage in that interfere with our values, our priorities, and our intentions. They include bad habits, but also some that might not appear to be bad, but are bad for us. Number two, when you find yourself engaging in more numbing behaviors, that’s a giant flag that you are being undersupported in your life.
Number three, numbing behaviors don’t actually numb you out. They simply replace some bad feelings with others. Number four, instead take on the ends of numbing behavior. A, notice the numbing behavior. B. Name. Name the feelings you’re attempting to avoid through that behavior. And C next. Choose what’s next.
Your Do Something challenge for this week is to start with just noticing, go back to us training our brains, and all you have to do is say, this is a numbing behavior. You don’t have to change the behavior. You don’t have to name the feelings yet. Just notice that might take just a few days for you to get into that pattern of lengthening that response gap between Simmons and response and just being able to notice the behavior.
But when you’re ready, Again, might be a few days, might be a few weeks. Then you’ll be able to add that next step of name and then eventually next, what’s next? If you do that, do something challenged. I would love to hear about it. You can DM me, you can email me and you can share on social media and tag me, and I try to pull from those shares and do a progressive spotlight in our Gross Spur episodes.
So again, I’d love to hear from you. Thank you so much for listening. Now go and do something with what you learned today
of antidotes in antidotes, antidotes, antidotes.
