What Are You Distracting Yourself From?

A little while ago I watched a presentation that got me thinking about something I see constantly in my work, and if I am honest, something I do myself. I can keep busy. I can move on to the next thing rather than sit with an uncomfortable feeling. So before I say anything else, I want to be upfront that I am not writing this from some place of having it all sorted. I am exploring this alongside you.

Here is the question I want us to sit with together. What do you do when you do not want to feel what you are feeling? Almost all of us do something. And most of the time we do not even notice we are doing it.

The Many Faces of Distraction

Some distractions are easy to spot. Food, alcohol, shopping and scrolling are the obvious ones. But there are quieter distractions that rarely get named, because they tend to look like good qualities rather than avoidance. Staying constantly busy. Looking after everybody else before yourself. Over-achieving. People pleasing. Needing to control everything around you. Endlessly analysing your own feelings rather than actually feeling them. Fixing everyone else’s problems so thoroughly that you never have to sit with your own. Never quite managing to sit still. And sometimes we do not distract by doing anything at all. We simply switch off, disconnect, or go numb.

None of these are character flaws. Most of them started out as something genuinely useful, a way of coping with a feeling that had nowhere else to go at the time. The trouble is that the strategy can quietly outlive its usefulness and keep running for years, sometimes decades, long after the original feeling has been forgotten.

The Problem Is Not Always the Problem

You might think the problem is overeating. Or procrastination. Or people pleasing. Or simply being unable to relax. Those are usually the things we come to therapy wanting fixed, and understandably so.

But very often, those are not the problem at all. They are the distraction. And the far more interesting question, the one I would love for you to genuinely sit with, is this: what am I actually distracting myself from?

A Week of Noticing

Here is somewhere to start. Choose one distraction, something that shows up often enough that you will have plenty of chances to notice it this week. Do not try to stop it yet. For now, your only job is to notice when you reach for it.

When you catch the urge, pause for a few seconds before you act on it, and ask yourself a few quiet questions.

• What am I feeling right now?
• Where do I feel it in my body?
• Can I breathe into it and let it be there for ten seconds without trying to change it?
• What was happening just before I wanted to distract myself?
• What does this distraction usually give me? Comfort, relief, control, connection, escape?
• What might I actually need right now instead?

Then, if you still want to, go ahead and do whatever you were going to do anyway. This is not about willpower or stopping yourself. It is about becoming curious rather than critical, and letting the distraction itself hand you some genuinely useful information.

Help Your Body Through the Feeling

Sometimes before we can even work out what a feeling is trying to tell us, we need to help the body settle a little first. A racing heart, a tight chest or a churning stomach make it very hard to think clearly or stay curious about anything. It is worth being clear about what these tools are actually for, though. We are not using them to make a feeling disappear or push it back down again, because that just delays it, and it tends to resurface later, often stronger than before. We are using them to lower the intensity just enough that we can stay present with the feeling long enough to hear what it is actually telling us. It is worth having two or three of these that you already know well, so they are there the moment you need them.

• Slow, deliberate breathing. Try breathing in for a count of four, holding for four, out for four and holding for four, a few rounds of what is sometimes called box breathing, or simply make your exhale a little longer than your inhale.
• Grounding through your senses. Notice five things you can see, four you can hear, three you can feel, two you can smell and one you can taste. It sounds simple, and it works because it brings your attention back into the room you are actually in.
• Tapping, sometimes known as EFT, gently tapping a sequence of points on the face, collarbone and hand while naming what you are feeling.
• Havening, a gentle self-soothing technique where you stroke your own upper arms, palms or face while your attention is elsewhere, developed specifically to help calm distress in the moment.
• The spin technique. Notice where a feeling seems to sit and spin in your body, then imagine slowing that spin down, or reversing its direction, until the feeling itself changes.
• Tracing your triple warmer meridian backwards, or giving yourself a hug over your spleen and triple warmer points, two simple energy techniques that can settle a stress response surprisingly quickly once you know them.
• Movement of any kind. A walk, a stretch, shaking out your hands and shoulders, or simply noticing where you are holding tension and consciously letting it soften.

You do not need to master all of these. Choose one or two that appeal, practise them when you are calm, and they will be far more useful to you the moment you actually need them.

Longer term, a regular meditation or self-hypnosis practice makes all of this easier, because you are training your nervous system to settle more readily even before a difficult feeling arrives. I will be teaching Seventh Path self-hypnosis soon for anyone who would like to learn to do this properly for themselves.

The aim with any of these tools is never to get rid of the feeling. It is to help yourself stay present enough to actually listen to it.

Our Feelings Are Trying to Help Us Meet Our Needs

As a human being, you have some important basic emotional needs. You need a sense of safety and security. You need purpose and meaning. You need to give and receive quality attention to and from other people. You need status, intimacy, a sense of community and connection to a wider group. You need a sense of control over your own life. And you need emotional connection to other people. Having these needs adequately met helps support our mental and emotional wellbeing.

Our feelings can help alert us whenever one of those needs is not being met. That is exactly why I do not like thinking of uncomfortable feelings as bad feelings that simply need to be switched off. They will not always accurately reflect what is happening right now, particularly when an old emotional pattern has been triggered, but they are still giving us information.

So the question becomes not simply how do I make this feeling go away, but what is this feeling trying to tell me I need.

But What If You Do Not Feel Anything?

Sometimes the problem is not that a feeling is too strong. Sometimes people tell me they feel very little at all. Numb, disconnected, flat, or as though they are watching their own life rather than fully living in it.

That does not necessarily mean there is nothing underneath. Numbing can be protective in exactly the same way distraction can. If feeling something once became overwhelming, unsafe, or simply too much, disconnecting from emotion altogether may have been the way you learned to cope.

So please do not force yourself to feel something just because you think you should. Instead, get curious about the numbness itself, the same way you would get curious about any other distraction. When do you notice it most? What was happening just before you switched off? Are there particular people, places or situations where feeling comes more easily than others? And what might feeling nothing be protecting you from feeling?

If you have felt emotionally numb or disconnected from yourself for a long time and cannot seem to shift it no matter what you try, that is another one of those times when getting the right professional support is far more useful than continuing to try harder on your own.

Name It, Work Out What It Is Telling You, Respond

Once you have settled a little, there is a simple three step process I teach, called the Feelings Indicator, that can help you actually use the information a feeling is offering. Step one is to name the feeling. Step two is to ask what it might be indicating. Step three is to plan a satisfying response.

A feeling rarely has one single fixed meaning, but these general patterns can offer a useful clue.

• Boredom may point towards a need for challenge, growth or something different.
• Anger may point towards something feeling unfair, and may call for assertiveness, a wider perspective, or a boundary.
• Guilt may point towards a sense that you have been unfair to somebody else, and may call for making amends or forgiving yourself.
• Sadness often reflects a loss, and may call for time to acknowledge and grieve what mattered.
• Loneliness indicates a need for human contact. A satisfying response might be calling a friend, visiting somebody, checking your emails, jumping on social media to connect with others, or finding another way to have meaningful contact with people.
• A feeling of inadequacy points towards a need to feel genuinely good enough.
• Stress often points towards difficulty managing everything you are carrying, and may call for organising, delegating, resting, or asking for help.
• Fear, anxiety and worry usually point towards a need for safety, information, preparation or support.
• Frustration usually means that what you are currently doing is not working, and a different approach may be needed.
• Feelings of depression, helplessness or hopelessness often point towards feeling ineffective, and can call for even one small constructive action, or appropriate help.

These are guides for reflection rather than rigid rules or a diagnosis. They come from something I teach called the Feelings Indicator, and the complete version is available as a free download from the Resources section of carolmacrae.com.

The Same Activity Can Be a Distraction or a Response

Here is something worth sitting with, using loneliness as the example. Loneliness points towards a need for genuine human contact, and a satisfying response might be calling a friend, visiting somebody, or reaching out on social media to actually connect, chat and catch up.

But notice that the very same behaviour can go two different ways. Somebody anxiously scrolling social media for two hours because they do not want to think about tomorrow’s meeting is very likely distracting themselves. Somebody who feels lonely and opens the same app to message friends, comment, and genuinely connect with other people may be doing something quite different. They may be meeting the exact need their loneliness was pointing towards.

So it is rarely the activity itself that makes something a distraction rather than a satisfying response. It is what you are using it for, and whether it actually meets the need underneath the feeling, or simply avoids feeling it at all.

A Worked Example: Comfort Eating

It can help to see this worked through with something concrete. Say you find yourself wanting to eat, and you already know it is not really hunger. Pause and ask what you are actually trying to get from the food. Very often the honest answer is comfort. So ask the next question. Why do you need comforting right now? What are you actually feeling underneath that? You might find anxiety, worry or fear sitting there. If so, the deeper need is very likely safety.

The question has now changed from how do I stop eating, to what is making me feel unsafe or anxious right now, and what would genuinely help me feel safer. Perhaps you need information about something. Perhaps you need reassurance or connection. Perhaps there is something you have been avoiding that needs a conversation or a decision. Or perhaps the anxiety feels old, automatic, or larger than what is actually happening today, and you cannot quite identify why it is there. Food can give you real, temporary comfort. It cannot resolve the reason comfort was needed in the first place.

Sometimes a Healthy Distraction Is Exactly Right

None of this means you always have to sit down and process a feeling the moment it appears. Sometimes you are at work, looking after children, driving, or simply do not have the emotional space for it right then, and that is completely okay.

There is a real difference between unconsciously reaching for an old coping habit and consciously choosing a healthy distraction until you are in a better position to deal with the feeling properly. A useful distraction is something you turn to knowingly, not something food, alcohol or another compulsive behaviour quietly turns into. It should be something pleasant enough that you would happily do it again, never anything illegal, immoral or likely to create a new problem for you later. And it only earns the name healthy distraction if you stay honest with yourself that you are postponing the feeling rather than pretending it has gone away, because if the underlying cause is never addressed, it tends to come back, and can lead to real frustration or even depression over time.

With that in mind, some genuinely good options include calling a friend, spending time with a pet, going for a walk, reading something uplifting, listening to music, learning something new, being creative, gardening, meditating, praying, or practising self-hypnosis. Choose whatever genuinely lifts you, and come back to the feeling itself once you have the time and space to actually deal with it.

Knowing Is Not the Same as Changing

This is one of the things I have learned most clearly through years of clinical hypnotherapy training, particularly through the 5-PATH approach: simply hearing and understanding something is not necessarily going to change it on its own. We can understand ourselves brilliantly. We can know exactly why we overeat, why we keep busy, why we avoid conflict, or why we cannot seem to relax. We can read the books, watch the videos, analyse our own childhood, and explain our patterns perfectly to anyone who asks.

But conscious understanding and emotional change are not always the same thing. If part of you is still responding to an old experience as though it is happening now, more information is often not enough. Something has to change in the way you actually experience it, the meaning you have attached to it, or the perspective you are viewing it from. This is something we see constantly in hypnosis. The conscious mind can know, I am safe now. The emotional, subconscious mind can still respond as though it is not.

So the goal of everything in this article is not simply to understand your distractions better, useful as that is. It is to actually listen to what a feeling is telling you, respond to the need where you genuinely can, and, when necessary, change the emotional learning or perspective that has kept the old response running.

You Do Not Have to Feel It Alone

We already know that emotional connection is one of our basic human needs. That is exactly what makes the next part so significant. Many of the feelings we distract from were first felt in isolation, and isolation does not necessarily mean being physically alone. A child can be surrounded by people and still be entirely alone with a fear, a grief, a shame or a confusion that felt too big to hold. Sometimes what we are still carrying is not only the original feeling, but the aloneness that came with it.

There is a useful distinction worth making here. Today’s loneliness may simply be telling you that you need human contact, and reaching towards somebody is usually exactly the right response. But sometimes there is an older kind of aloneness sitting underneath it. Perhaps when you originally felt frightened, ashamed, hurt or confused, nobody was genuinely emotionally present with you at the time, even if people were physically in the room. You learnt to cope by yourself. And now, even when real support is available to you, you might find yourself automatically withdrawing, distracting, or telling everybody you are fine. Hughes makes a lovely point about this: you cannot process aloneness alone.

A simple thing to try is choosing one person who can listen without immediately advising, fixing or dismissing what you tell them. You might even say to them directly, I do not need you to solve this, I just need you to listen for a few minutes. For anyone who has always coped by themselves, even that small experiment can feel surprisingly significant.

Finding the Pattern Underneath

Once you have spent a little time simply noticing, you can go a layer deeper with the same distraction. These questions tend to open something up, so there is no need to force an answer. Sometimes simply asking begins the process of noticing, and noticing matters, because an automatic pattern cannot be changed until it can be seen.

• What does this behaviour protect me from?
• What am I afraid might happen if I did not do it?
• Does this feeling seem familiar from somewhere else in my life?
• What did I once learn I needed to do, to feel safe, loved or accepted?
• How did that strategy help me at the time?
• What is it costing me now?
• Is there something I am particularly afraid of other people seeing or thinking about me?
• What would it mean to me if somebody did see me that way?
• What would I rather be able to do instead?

This is often where the phrase the problem is not always the problem really starts to land. Maybe food is not the problem. Maybe busyness is not the problem. Maybe people pleasing is not the problem. Maybe even the inability to relax is not the problem. They may simply be the distraction, and the feeling underneath, or the fear of being seen a certain way, is the thing that has actually been asking for your attention all along.

Now Practise Something Different

Awareness matters, but awareness on its own does not always create change. Once you can name what a distraction has been giving you, and what the feeling underneath it actually needs, resist the urge to simply swap one coping behaviour for another. The aim is not a better distraction. It is to actually respond to the need.

If you distract yourself because you need comfort, ask what genuine comfort might actually look like, and offer yourself that instead. If keeping busy stops you feeling anxious, practise short periods of stopping, rather than expecting yourself to suddenly spend an hour doing nothing, and notice what the anxiety is actually asking for. If people pleasing protects you from somebody being disappointed or angry with you, practise one small, safe boundary, and pay attention to what safety would really require. If you automatically fix everybody else’s problems because being needed makes you feel secure, experiment with listening without taking responsibility for fixing. If you avoid asking for help because vulnerability feels uncomfortable, ask for something small and simply notice what happens inside you.

The important part is not just doing something different. Stay aware of whatever feeling shows up when you do, because that feeling is information too. You might say no and immediately feel guilty. You might rest and become restless. You might ask for help and feel exposed. You might allow somebody to be disappointed and feel an overwhelming urge to fix it and make everything okay again. Instead of taking that discomfort as proof that the new response is wrong, pause, breathe, and notice it. Remind yourself that discomfort does not necessarily mean the new response is wrong. Sometimes it simply feels uncomfortable because it is unfamiliar. Stay curious about what the feeling is telling you, rather than immediately retreating to the old response.

Start small. We are not trying to rip away a strategy that may have been protecting you for years. We are simply giving your mind and body repeated experiences of discovering that there are other ways to meet the same need. Afterwards, it is worth asking yourself what happened, whether the thing you feared actually occurred, whether you could have handled it if it had, and what you learned about yourself in the process. Change tends to begin when noticing turns into experimenting, and experimenting gradually builds a new experience to draw on.

When You Understand It and It Still Does Not Shift

Sometimes self awareness and practice get you a long way on their own, and I hope everything above genuinely helps. But sometimes you can understand a pattern perfectly, and even practise a different response deliberately, and still find the old one is stronger and more automatic than you expected. You might know that you people please to avoid conflict, that you eat when you are upset, or that you keep yourself constantly busy because stopping feels uncomfortable. Knowing that consciously, and even working at it, does not always fully change it.

This is not a failure of self-help. It usually just means the pattern was never really about conscious understanding in the first place. This is where our MBM Hypnosis approach can go further. Rather than focusing only on stopping the distraction, we get curious about the feeling underneath it. Your conscious mind may have a perfectly logical explanation for the problem. It knows the story, and being able to tell that story and genuinely be heard can be valuable in itself, particularly if you have never quite felt heard before. But the conscious explanation is not always where the answer actually lives. In hypnosis, rather than deciding in advance what caused something, we can work directly with the feeling itself, follow it gently, and allow your own subconscious mind to make the associations it needs to make. Getting the right kind of help is often exactly how the cause finally clears, rather than continuing to manage around it. And sometimes, that is where the gold is.

Two Invitations

First, try noticing this week. Pick one distraction and simply pay attention to it, with curiosity rather than judgement. You may be surprised by what it tells you.

Second, if you recognise the distraction clearly but the same feeling or pattern keeps returning no matter how well you understand it, that is exactly the kind of deeper pattern MBM Hypnosis is designed to work with. You do not need to have it all figured out before you come and see me. Sometimes the most useful place to start is simply, I know exactly what I do, I just do not know what I am doing it to avoid.

This article was inspired in part by a fascinating presentation I mentioned at the start, by behavioural expert Chase Hughes, called Why You Can’t Relax, Emotional Debt. It prompted me to think more deeply about distraction, emotional processing, and how these ideas relate to the work we do through Mind-Body-Magic. If you would like to watch it yourself, you can find it here: Why You Can’t Relax, Emotional Debt

Carol x