Overcoming picky eating to experience the spice of life

We all need to be picky eaters in some respects. We need to pick food that is sustaining, healthy and tasty. But some people take food fussiness to the extreme. You know the type of person who always seems to create a scene at a restaurant or who barely conceals their disgust when invited round to dinner and confronted with some edible that doesn’t fit their narrow definition of what “I like”. I’m not talking about people with genuine food intolerances but I am talking about a kind of intolerance. Why would an adult be like that? Well, they might have learned in childhood that food time was also ‘attention time’ if they routinely kicked up a fuss. In adulthood this unconscious link between eating and getting a bigger share of the ‘notice me’ pie may have persisted. Or perhaps they just have never developed curiosity or a sense of exploration around food. Maybe trying new things really does feel threatening – after all, some people don’t like to travel or extend their ‘comfort zone’ in other ways. The Picky eater download is for people who recognize this fussiness in themselves and want to do something about it.

Fear of thunder and updating personal psychology

Talking of childhood conditioning that can (if not dealt with) echo through a whole lifetime, I recall being in school during a thunderstorm when I was seven. To my amazement, one of the other boys began to scream and hid under his desk. This lad was normally quiet and not at all the sort to draw attention to himself. That was probably my first ever exposure to a phobia in action. I have no idea if he still has that fear of thunder all these years later, but many people do. That’s the thing about fear. It can persist even after we have developed a rational understanding of what’s really happening. Thunder sounds dramatic, all bluster and puff, but is seldom any real threat at all.  While getting from the early perception that this great noise in the sky must signify that ‘the gods are angry’ to a scientific understanding that this is the sound made by lightning, our awe can all too easily turn to terror. It’s a curious thing that bits of a person can mature while other bits of them can remain stuck in responding exactly as they did years and even decades before. The Fear of thunder download seeks to bring that ‘quaking under the table’ fear of thunder up to date with the rest of the person’s psychology.

How to stop daydreaming yourself into passivity

Being able to daydream in the context of imagining a preferred future and envisaging the steps needed to actually get to that future is vital for human beings. Furthermore, the capacity to daydream while seeking to understand something can also be useful, as when Albert Einstein imagined, in a daydream, what it would be like to travel on a beam of light, which later led him to formulate new understandings of the nature of light. But like any ‘tool’, daydreaming can be

• misapplied
• over-used.

Self help products that just use applied daydreaming of success (as opposed to hypnotic rehearsal of the actual steps to get there) may prove disappointing. Research at the University of California (1) found that students who strongly daydreamed having done well in upcoming exams (as opposed to strongly daydreaming that they were studying hard) were less likely to actually do well. One reason for this may be that enjoying a strong sense of accomplishment before you’ve actually done the task can reduce the feeling of urgency that should push you to work hard. This effect has been found in many different situations, from daydreaming positively about being with your secret crush to losing weight. Positive daydreaming, if over-applied, can lead to less real success, not more. In another experiment Gabriele Oettingen and Thomas Wadden of the University of Pennsylvania noticed that final year students who reported frequently daydreaming about having got their dream job after leaving university made fewer job applications, received a lower number of job offers and had significantly smaller salaries than their less day-dreamy classmates (2). This is not to say that positive end-result daydreaming isn’t a powerful tool in its place. After all, what is hope if not a daydream of a better future? But the point of the new session Stop day dreaming is to do it in such a way that it makes real success more likely and not less.

(1) L.B. Pham and S.E Taylor (1999). ‘From thought to action: Effects of process-versus outcome based mental stimulation on performance. Personality and social psychology bulletin, 25, pages 250-60.

(2) Oettingen, G. (1996). Positive fantasy and motivation. In P.M. Gollwitzer & J.A. Bargh (eds), The psychology of action: Linking cognition and motivation to behavior (pp.236-259). New York: Guilford