Uncompleted tasks add stress to your life and will trigger your eating disorder. Here's a simple way to complete your tasks, reduce your stress and strengthen your eating disorder recovery.

Situation - unfinished tasks:

Unfinished tasks confront you. You feel depressed and overwhelmed. You eat rather than begin your work.

Exercise:

• Pause.
• List your tasks.
• Complete a small task before you eat.
• Completing the task will let you experience power more satisfying than that which comes from overeating.
• The tasks may be too many and too complex for you.
• Break these large tasks into several small activities.
• Write them down.

Give yourself freedom to choose.

• Decide if you will put your effort into one task, working on all the activities until the task is completed.
• Or decide if you will put effort into several tasks, performing a few activities for each.
• As you complete an activity, check it off your list.

You are giving yourself freedom and power. You are giving yourself a reasonable structure. You are giving yourself a way to mobilize your power for your own benefit. You will appreciate your efforts when you see they lead you to fulfillment of your goals.

The beauty of this system is that you not only get the satisfaction from completing your tasks.  You also make progress on your path to eating disorder recovery.

What tasks are building up in your life? Can you breathe yourself into a calm enough state to make large tasks several or many small steps? Let us know how you are doing.