Summary 

In this episode of the Burn Stress, Lose Weight podcast, I’m diving deep into one of the four stress types: the Escapist. I’m explaining how stress can sabotage our progress not just on the scale, but in life. Through this insightful and relatable lens, I’ll share how the Escapist stress type triggers emotional eating, and why focusing purely on changing actions like snacking doesn’t work in the long run. Using the timeless think-feel-act cycle, you’ll learn how stress patterns develop, and most importantly, how we can change them at the root.

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What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• The 4 stress types and how they relate to your weight loss goals.
• Why emotions drive off-plan behaviors like snacking and overeating.
• How your brain is wired to escape stress, and how this shows up in daily habits.
• The importance of understanding your think-feel-act cycle.
• Strategies for breaking free from the Escapist stress cycle to achieve lasting results.

Listen to the Full Episode:

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Download the full transcript here.

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  Hey Unstoppable Friend, you're listening to the Burn Stress, Lose Weight podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Priyanka Venugopal, a physician turned stress and weight loss coach for professional working moms and the founder of the Burn Stress, Lose Weight, Feel Unstoppable small group coaching program. This podcast is going to inspire change at the root for you on and off the scale. I've lost a little over 60 pounds while being a busy physician mom with two young kids and an unpredictable schedule. And along my journey, which was full of many, many imperfect moments, I have learned how to skip past the fads and the gimmicks. I am on this mission now to share with you how you can have a real strategy and mindset skills to really have more of the life you want that you have worked so hard for. Let's get into it. Welcome back to the stress type miniseries we're having here on the podcast. Last week, I reintroduced the Unstoppable Mom Brain Podcast with a new name. And I highlighted one of the very real problems that most professional women who identify as overachievers just have not known how to deeply address you know, that stress gets in the way and we know this. Because we can look at our results both on and off the scale. You'll get that plan from your nutritionist or maybe your personal trainer. You get into a fight with your husband. You get a call from your principal about your kid, maybe your boss or a colleague sets an unrealistic, crazy deadline for a work project. Maybe your mother in law says something offhandedly that you felt hurt about. Or you're so used to being a productive overachiever that you're simply feeling bored and you find yourself feeling really restless. You name it, but as a professional woman, you're living in a soup of sticky, challenging moments. And if you take a look back at the last one year of your life challenges with the fine tooth comb, with the investigator's heart, which is truly objective and blame free, you will find that Every single off plan moment that you did not do what you said you were going to do in terms of how you eat, how you're showing up with your weight loss goal is always because of an emotion. Every single time that you ate past satiety, that you snacked, nibbled, licked, and tasted when you said you wouldn't. Anytime that you ate when your gut wasn't hungry and your body did not need nutrition was simply because you were taking a break from a real life stress. This is what is inspiring this entire series on the podcast, the four different stress types and how your brain as a human is naturally wired into these stress types. What we want to uncover in this series is that stress is actually normal. Stress is actually in small doses healthy. It's what gets you out of bed in the morning. It keeps you safe when you're driving to work. It keeps you aware of real life dangers. It gets you paying your bills on time. What we want to uncover on this podcast and in this series that we're doing this four part series is how we have allowed certain stresses to go unchecked. In a way that has created some maladaptive habits that's sabotaging our weight loss goals. If you didn't listen to last week's episode, I strongly encourage you to pause this episode and actually go back and start there so that you start right at the very beginning. There are four major stress types that I'm going to be covering on the podcast in this four part series. And all four of these stress types, whether you identify as one or maybe a little bit of all, we're going to uncover and really get to the bottom of how each Each of these stress types is specifically impacting your results on and off the scale. You might identify more with one of these stress types than others, or you might find in different phases of your life, you identified with one and then you started to shift into another. But what I have found in my experience is that women usually have all four of these stress types plank in their life. In little and big ways, our goal today and over the next four weeks is simply to become aware of your personal patterns, your habits that are driving you to show up the way that you're showing up that's creating your results on and off the scale is going to be something that you're going to feel so much more in control over when you understand where your behaviors are actually coming from, just being aware of your habits. And how you're showing up, the actions that you're taking in regards to your weight loss goal, your body goal, your life goal is going to start to create a custom roadmap for you. When you understand why you do what you do, you get to have this roadmap that will help walk you out of changing those actual patterns. Today, we're kicking off the series with the escapist stress type. So if you listen to last week's episode, I shared that there are four four different stress types that are driving snacking, nibbling, eating, going off plan. And this applies to not just weight loss. This will apply to any and every goal you have in the workplace, in your personal life, in your relationships. What we're talking about on this podcast is how these four stress types are impacting your body goals. And today we want to dive into the escapist. When we think about the four different stress types, which is fight, light, freeze and fawn. We want to first start with understanding that these four stress types are hardwired into your primitive brain as a survival mechanism. So we have to start there. We have to first validate and normalize that stress types are normal. If you see a lion or a bear outside of your cave and your brain is not triggered to run away, we know that your survival would be threatened, right? So we have to really first start with validating and normalizing that Light or what I'm calling the escapist is a very, very, very natural and normal tendency. If you are someone that identifies with that pattern and to describe this stress type in a lot more detail where you can, I want you to feel like you can wrap your arms around the concept today.

  We're going to be using the think feel act cycle. This is a framework that has. literally been told. I mean, forever. It is hundreds of years old in cultures from all around the world in a way to actually describe our behavior. It's in cognitive behavioral therapy. And basically the premise of the think, feel act cycle is that your feelings don't just happen. Your actions don't just happen in a vacuum. They happen in response to a thought. Belief or perspective that you generate in your mind. Most of the time, these thoughts and beliefs are just happening in autopilot thousands and thousands of thoughts per day. And if you identify as a professional overachiever, you likely have more than your fair share of thousands of these thoughts, but they are happening in the subconscious parts of your mind. The unfortunate reality is that most high achievers actually try to change their habits. by just focusing on their actions. But if this worked, this would have worked, right? So an example of this is you might tell yourself, I'm not going to snack after dinner, right? We're focusing purely on the action of snacking after dinner. We might just say, no, I'm not going to do it. I'm going to be really strong. I'm going to have a plan. I'm going to set a timer. You might have like all kinds of gimmicks to drive you to not snack or eat after dinner. You can yell at yourself all you want in your mind, grit your teeth, muscle down, double down, push and force. But you and I both know, and we can look back at the last one year or probably the last many, many years and ask ourselves, how well did it work to simply focus on the action? The think, feel, act cycle is actually helping us. It's empowering us to not just look at the action line or just the behavior. What we want to do together on this podcast is actually get to the root. of why is it that we ever snack after dinner when we said we wouldn't? Why is it that we ever snack and nibble and lick and taste when our body is not actually hungry? I don't want you to just cut off some leaves off of weeds. I want you to be able to pull the weeds out at the root. And when we can start to understand our behavior, all of our Actions using the think, feel, act cycle as a framework, we are going to feel so much more empowered to make meaningful change that will create so many more lasting results. The other thing that we're going to really be emphasizing on today's episode is to really highlight what your brain is learning every time that you snack, nibble, taste, Eat when your brain is in an escapist stress cycle. You really want to uncover what your brain learns in that moment and why sometimes that habit of snacking or overeating when your body isn't hungry, why it feels so hard to break. As the name implies, the escapist is driven by highly uncomfortable emotions that you want to literally escape from an emotion like overwhelm, frustration, confusion, anger, embarrassment. You can pick your flavor of stress. Like you are in an ice cream parlor with a hundred types of ice cream. Many, many, many emotions feel uncomfortable. And I mean physically uncomfortable. Based on what uncomfortable emotion you're experiencing, your body will be experiencing a normal chemical cascade. There's actually a chemical cascade in your body that is driving you to feel that emotion. You might feel your heart racing with anxiety, or your hands sweat when you feel nervous. Maybe your face flushes when you are embarrassed or that pit in your stomach when you feel worry or dread. Maybe you're thinking about tomorrow's problems and you find yourself in rumination and doubt or that ache in your chest when you feel sadness. Or maybe your throat tighten up when you feel hurt. As I shared, there are literally hundreds of emotional flavors that I'm going to say fall under the umbrella or the category or the ice cream parlor of stress. And because your body physically experiences this discomfort, the most primitive part of your brain, remember primitive means it is not very evolved. It is hardwired for survival. It perceives a real threat. Let me just say that again, when your body experiences this physical discomfort of an emotion, your primitive brain, which is hardwired for survival, perceives a real threat. You've heard me use this example before, but your brain cannot tell the difference between a spreadsheet, that fight you had with your partner or colleague, the looming deadline, the project deadline that's coming up, the worry about your kid, And a deadly lion outside your cave.

  The key word here though, is that your primitive brain is perceiving threat and you're not in fact in actual danger. And this is the trap. The trap is how real this perception feels. When you aren't aware of how this perception is unconsciously driving you, you are going to find yourself thinking something like, I just need to get through this phase. I can't feel this way right now. I need a break from this emotion. When this part of my life is over, then I'll get to feel better. Your brain will start to create very convenient, compelling, and convincing reasons to take a break from those very real, uncomfortable emotions. And most often, because this is how we are driven, we will pick the lowest effort way to take a break. Enter food and alcohol. And so when you're not aware of it, when you're unconsciously living in the escapist stress cycle, you could have the Cadillac of nutrition plans, but you will find yourself taking a little wander into the kitchen, a little walk to the office break room in the evenings. Once the kid are in bed to snack, nibble and eat when your gut is just not hungry. And here's what happens. Your primitive brain starts to learn that this is how it's supposed to be. Every time that you eat as a break. Whereas an escape from your flavor of life stress, your primitive brain gets hardwired because your actions speak louder than your words. What you do every time your body is experiencing an uncomfortable emotion is teaching your primitive brain a lesson. So when you stay in the escapist stress cycle and you keep snacking and nibbling and drinking alcohol every time to escape real life emotions, your brain learns This uncomfortable emotions is a problem that is too much for us. Worse yet, you start to believe I just cannot be in control around food when I feel stressed. And it's like this, because you know, I love a good analogy. It's like, you've said no to your kids for having lollipops before dinner. And maybe if you're like me, you know, we're like, we're not going to do candy on the weekdays. We're not having lollipops before dinner. The answer is no, but then enter a any number of life circumstances that come before your kid and they maybe feel a really big uncomfortable feeling for who knows what reason enter any flavor or reason and then they throw a tantrum and just to stop the kid from tantruming because their emotions feel too big for us we were like fine just have the lollipop stop crying Here's what the kid learns. The kid learns that the rules don't apply when I'm having a big, uncomfortable feeling. Because our actions speak louder than our words. When I say that my actions speak louder than my words, my kid is not learning any lessons from me because I said no. What they're actually learning is she's saying no to the lollipop, but what she means is yes, when I cry, when I have a tantrum, this is obviously just a really exaggerated example, but it's to highlight the fact that our primitive brain. And this is all of us, right? This is not just our children. This is our adult brain is learning lessons. And the lessons we are learning are driven by actions. Any actions we take is teaching our brain a lesson. So if you've lost trust with yourself, because maybe you have had a plan for however many Monday mornings of the past, and you haven't consistently executed or followed through on them, This is exactly why the reason that you might have a lack of trust with yourself and following through on the plan is simply because your brain has learned from your behavior that you're not going to follow through, but the best news. And really what I want to encourage on this podcast is for you to know that this. Is completely changeable. So let's get into the escapist stress type and break down what's actually happening using the think, feel act cycle and how over the past many years, we have simply learned that we need to escape certain emotions.

  I think about busy, high achieving, working moms with work life and mom life. You might've had the thought after a really busy day, after a really busy week, after a really busy season of your life, I just need a break. Can we just take a second? How many of us have thought that if you're driving you can just like give a vehement nod? I know that for me I'm raising my hand. I have absolutely thought so many times I need a break. Now let's just use that thought, that sentence that we tell ourselves as our example. Maybe you've had a really long work day. You've dealt with some tough conversations in the workplace with a colleague or boss. Maybe you have a client or a patient who was really challenging and then you come home and now you're navigating life with your family, chauffeuring the kids around, handling homework, thinking about your aging parents, handling family and work dynamics. The list goes on and on and on. It's not at all a surprise that Given the course of your day, you have had all kinds of emotions that you have had to navigate through. And at a very subconscious level, which means you're not actively aware of it until this episode, you will have the thought, I need a break. And when you think that sentence in your mind, I need a break. Here's what happens. Two neurons in your brain fire. Every time you have a sentence like that in your mind, two neurons fire and it releases a chemical cascade in your body, generating an emotion, an emotion like an urge. You'll feel that feeling where you feel compelled to take an action and action like going and pouring a glass of wine, meandering into the pantry, grabbing a couple of cookies or chips. This is the think, feel, act cycle. So the thought is, I need a break. The feeling is an urge. And the actions that you're taking are driving you to snack and nibble and grab the glass of wine. When we are in this think, feel, act cycle repeatedly, right? And on repeat, this think, feel, act cycle, since you are living literally the life of a ninja. If you fall under the escapist stress type, you will find that the size of your pants correlates with the size of your life stresses. Now here's the gem. Your brain has simply learned a habit. It's learned that certain emotions are too much for you. And the more that we perpetuate our fear of these emotions, that they're too much for us, that they're too big for us, that we can't handle them, we start to take more and more escapist behaviors. Now there are two things.

  The more that we escape from our big, uncomfortable emotions with snacking, nibbling, drinking alcohol, even scrolling your phone to escape an emotion, there are two things. that we are not doing. The first one, every time we go grab the wine, grab the chips, nibble on the food, snack and scroll through our phone. The first thing that we are not doing is we are never challenging our thoughts, beliefs, and perspectives. That's actually creating the flavor of stress that you're in. Any of these stress feelings that you have in the workplace or in your mom life, we get to unravel them. And in coaching, we challenge the thoughts at the root. This is why we burn stress at the root so that you feel more empowered in your life. So the first thing that we are not doing every time we snack and nibble, we are not challenging our thoughts and beliefs, creating our feeling of stress. But the second equally important thing that we are not doing every time we snack and nibble in response to escape from life stress, is we are not recognizing and validating the big, uncomfortable emotions as normal. Feeling disappointed and embarrassed, rejected, angry, sad, frustrated, discouraged, worried is normal. And in fact, our brain, every time we escape from these emotions, every time we think we need a break from one of these emotions, our primitive brain simply learns, I can be rewarded with food and alcohol. This is often why you might find yourself keeping stress patterns and keeping certain thoughts that are keeping you in this stress cycle. It's because your primitive brain is saying, whenever I have a tantrum, I'm going to get rewarded with a lollipop. Now, if you are someone, because I was like this too, if you have not been recognizing and validating those big, uncomfortable emotions, Don't worry, you're not alone. Big reason for this is that we are literally not taught this skill. I can remember so many memories from my youngest years where I would come home, maybe feeling alone, like I had no friends or disappointed in my grades or worried about trying out for some sports team or. Getting into college or medical school, maybe embarrassed about something around, you know, somebody not showing up to my party or not getting invited to something. I would have a big, uncomfortable emotion. And as a young person, the solution that I learned that I think many of us learn is just try harder. Do more, be funnier, work smarter, study harder. So we learn that the solution is to just try harder. But the truth is being a human, especially a professional mom with some overachieving tendencies, that is just not reality. It's messy being human. It's messy. Listen, going into the ice cream shop and having flavors of frustration and overwhelm and worry. is messy. And if you're anything like me, I love to feel in control. I love to feel confident and certainty. And like, I love to feel those really positive, good feelings. Motivation. I love motivation, excitement. I love excitement, joy, fun. I love, love, love feeling good because I know when I feel those emotions, I'm driven to show up in a very different way. We want to, at the same time, walk the really fine and nuanced line that when we are not feeling those emotions, when we're feeling not motivated, when we're feeling down and discouraged and frustrated and overwhelmed, that nothing is actually going wrong. We're just experiencing the very normal 50 percent of our life that feels a little bit messy. And the way to feel those big, uncomfortable, messy emotions, to navigate those sticky, stressful feelings. in a way that actually gets us to our goal that stops us from sabotaging our dream body wins is to create safety to feel anything.

  If you identify as the escapist stress type, here's what to do. I'm going to call this a B C D. I'm going to get into what Each of these letters mean, but I want you to imagine it like you're walking across a bridge. We want to walk you from experiencing a big, uncomfortable emotion that you're feeling that has driven you to escape and instead of escaping, we're going to do something different where you can walk to the other side without escaping, walk yourself through the experience so you stop sabotaging your goals on and off the scale. A is awareness, B is breathing, C is courage and D is do it anyway. Let me get into each of these in a little bit more detail. A, becoming aware. Becoming aware of that big uncomfortable emotion and actually naming it is going to actually take you out of being unconscious and almost Wake you up. Research has shown that simply naming your emotion and identifying it in real time decreases stress signals in your amygdala, which is the part of your brain that's responsible for fear, for anger, for a lot of your emotions, just naming your emotion in real time will take you out of that unconscious way of being that autopilot mode, and it will wake you up. It's going to make you conscious and put you into manual. The next step in the bridge is B for breathe. I'm using breathe because I simply want to encourage you and invite you to take a pause. It can be any grounding action that pauses you from taking action. We want to introduce a pause. space between you feeling your flavor of life stress to automatically, in autopilot mode, meandering the pantry, grabbing the glass of wine, snacking and nibbling on food. So instead of you feel stress, you go grab the bag of chips. Now we want to remember a, this is stress. We're going to name it, become aware. This is me feeling stress. And B, take a pause, take a beat, take a breath, take a few, maybe go for a walk outside, look outside, be with nature for just a few moments and introduce a pause so that you have some space before you take action. C is courage. This is the one that is literally going to game change everything for you on and off the scale. I want to invite you to practice. Feeling courage when you are facing fear or worry or frustration, you have to actually show yourself that you're not in real danger, that you're safe, that this is just an emotion. And we can practice feeling courage to allow ourselves to feel and face those emotions. And then D do it anyway. When I say do it anyway, I mean, put in the reps, do your plan. If you said, if you decided in advance, I'm not going to snack and nibble and graze between my meals. I'm not going to snack, nibble and graze after dinner. Follow your plan. Like you said, you would. When you've done parts A, B and C. When you have become aware of your emotions, when you have introduced a pause with breathing, when you're catching that feeling of courage for yourself, you will now realize that there is no emergency that's driving you to the bag of chips or to the glass of alcohol. You can actually pause and recognize you're safe. You're okay. Nothing is going wrong. You can stick to your plan without snacking, nibbling, and grazing. The key with being able to do D, this is how you're able to follow through on your plan without willpowering and muscling down and grinding your teeth, is because you have done steps A, B, and C. So all four of these work together. together for you to walk yourself through a big, uncomfortable emotion to create safety that you don't have to escape these big feelings anymore. And in fact, you're safe to allow them and take your actions and follow through anyway. So in summary, thinking that you need a break.

  Every time you feel a big, uncomfortable emotion has created some unintentional outcomes. It has taught us that big, uncomfortable emotions are too big to handle. And we've never challenged the thoughts, beliefs, and perspectives that are creating those stress cycles to begin with. When we stay in the escapist stress type, instead of feeling more resilient, we end up feeling less in control and on and on and on the cycle continues. You'll notice that it doesn't matter whether you have that amazing plan from your nutritionist or the amazing plan from your personal trainer or whatever you downloaded off the internet. That plan will collect dust in a drawer if we are escaping big, uncomfortable emotions. And I want to place a caveat here. When I say big, uncomfortable emotions, sometimes you might simply be escaping boredom. So by big and uncomfortable, it doesn't have to be deep. And you know, really intense, like an emotion like grief or anger, it could be something really small. Maybe you just hate feeling bored and you get restless and you want to escape that feeling as well. The solution to the escapist stress cycle is the ABCD bridge. Become aware in real time, catch it and name the emotion that you're experiencing. Breathe, introduce a pause. C, practice feeling courage, show yourself that you're safe, that you're a badass that has literally figured out everything up until now in your life. You can figure this one out too. And D, stick with your plan. Do it anyway. Your brain is constantly learning from the actions that you're taking and it is also, as we have uncovered on this episode, learning from your actions. inactions. It has learned everything up until this point, which means it is also possible to retrain your brain with new behavior. And the best news is that you can do this without doubling down and gritting your teeth and muscling through your plan. If you enjoyed today's episode, and if you are resonating with the escapist stress type, then I want to hear from you. Drop me a message over on Instagram @burnstressloseweight. Or send me an email [email protected] and share with me, if you identify as the escapist stress type, and then tell me in two or three sentences, if you practiced the ABCD bridge, instead of escaping the stress that you're, you're feeling, you know, your ice cream flavor of stress, if you stopped escaping from it and you practice the ABCD bridge, I want to hear from you, what would be the impact for you on the scale? I hope you all loved today's episode and I will see you next week where we talk about the fight stress type or what I like to call the advocate. If you have ever felt a little righteous, a little entitled, you have those, I deserve it thoughts like I'm working so hard and I deserve, you know, enter your flavor of food and alcohol. You're going to want to tune into next week's episode. I hope you have an amazing week, my unstoppable friend. Bye. Thanks for spending this time with me on the Burn Stress Lose Weight podcast today. I hope that you are leaving today's podcast episode feeling a little lighter and more inspired than when we started.

  It turns out, That you don't need to have a stress free life to hit your goals on and off the scale. But when you feel more empowered to respond to your real life stresses with true strategy, we will game change how we show up and how we hit our goals. If you want to take what you're learning here on the podcast and put it into real life implementation, it might be time for us to work together in the Burn Stress, Lose Weight, Feel Unstoppable group coaching program. Head over to burnstressloseweight.com and you can learn all about it. All of the details, the nuts, the bolts, when the next group is starting and exactly how you can join. Okay, friend, I'll see you next time.