Episode 51: Stop Turning Off the Lights

We all have moments when emotions feel too heavy, so we reach for something—our phones, food, shopping, Netflix—to take the edge off. It works for a minute, but those “buffers” don’t solve the mess, they just hide it. In this episode, I’ll help you start to notice some of your buffers, and start to understand how they might actually be limiting you more than helping you.  I'll share how you can keep the lights on--which may feel super uncomfortable in the moment--but it’s the path to real freedom.

• Discover more about buffering (for free!) in my recent 60 minute workshop

Stop Buffering:  The Truth about over-eating, over-scrolling, over-spending, and over-analyazing...and how to stop. 

Use the the code FIRSTMONTHFREE to get a 30 day trial of The Think New Thoughts Academy, where you can experience this workshop (and lots of other resources to help you live with more joy!)

• Learn more about my 8-week private coaching program for Christian moms. 

Full Transcript:

You're listening to the Think New Thoughts Podcast with Emily Ricks, episode number 51. Stop turning off the lights.

I'm Emily Ricks and this is Think New Thoughts, a life coaching podcast to help you find more joy in your relationships. In each episode, I'll share a simple idea that will help you see things in a new way so you can love God, your neighbor and yourself more deeply than you ever have before. If you're ready to literally change your mind, I think you'll like it here.

Okay, I want you to imagine walking into your kitchen and seeing a sink overflowing with dirty dishes, plates, cups, utensils.

It's piled high, maybe even spilling over onto the counter. What would you think in this situation? You could be super frustrated and think, oh, no one in this house ever cleans up after themselves. Or maybe you'd feel grateful because the mess reminds you of a fun dinner party.

Or you might roll up your sleeves, turn on some music and just get to work cleaning it up. Another option is you could just turn off the lights because if you can't see the mess, it's not there, right? Now here's the problem, and it's pretty obvious with the dishes. If you turn off the lights, the dishes won't actually go away.

They'll just keep piling up. And when the lights do come back on, the mess will be even bigger. Well, our emotions work the same way.

Sometimes we don't want to face them. We don't want to feel the discomfort. And so we turn off the lights by buffering.

Today, I want to share three things with you. One, what buffering is. Two, why we do it.

And three, how your life can improve in dramatic ways if you choose to stop buffering and start facing your emotions. So what is buffering? Buffering is when we use something outside of ourselves to avoid feeling an uncomfortable emotion. Some of the really obvious things people do to escape from having to feel their emotions are drugs, alcohol, pornography, but buffers can also look like eating, shopping, scrolling, binge watching Netflix, or even working.

Think of buffering kind of like bubble wrap, right? Like in the physical world, a buffer is something that absorbs shock or decreases friction or impact. So if you wrap something fragile in bubble wrap, then when it's being jostled around shipping, that bubble wrap acts as a buffer to make the impact less intense. Emotionally, we use buffers to soften feelings we don't want to deal with.

But just like turning off the kitchen lights doesn't clean up the dishes, buffering doesn't address your emotions. Buffering is like turning off the lights on your emotions, which makes it so that you can't clean them up because you can't see them or understand them. So let me give you some examples.

Let's say you feel overwhelmed by the mess in your house. So you grab your phone and scroll for a while. Now the mess is still there and you've lost an hour of your time.

Or maybe you feel insecure about your weight, so you eat dessert to feel better because you don't like that feeling, but the result is more weight gain, which isn't actually what you want in the end. Maybe you feel anxious about making a big decision, so you shop online instead of deciding. Now you've got credit card debt and the decision still isn't made.

So do you see what I'm saying? Buffering doesn't fix the emotion, it just delays it and usually adds more problems on top. So why do we buffer? The short answer is because it works. At least temporarily, right? When you're bored, scrolling on Instagram does take away the feeling of boredom.

When you're anxious, that brownie does give you a moment of comfort. If you feel insecure in a social setting, pulling out your phone rather than talking to people does ease that feeling of awkwardness. So buffers feel good in the moment, but they create what I call a net negative result.

The relief is temporary, but the cost is lasting. So if you overeat as a way to avoid facing uncomfortable emotions, you might end up weighing more than you want to. That's a net negative result.

If you overspend as a way of avoiding emotions you don't want to deal with, you may end up having debt. If you over scroll on your phone as a way of avoiding emotion, then the net negative result is that you've wasted your time and maybe stalled your progress on goals that actually matter a lot more to you than the latest reels that you've been watching instead. So here's the key.

Buffers steal long-term growth by giving you short-term comfort. So here's what I want you to know. If you sometimes don't want to feel your emotions and you turn to a buffer to feel better, congratulations, you're human.

We all do it. And also here's what I want you to know. If you want to stop trading long-term growth for short-term comfort, then I have a couple of ideas that could be helpful to you.

How do we stop buffering? Well, the first step is awareness. Start noticing. What do you reach for when you feel an emotion you don't like? Do you grab your phone when you're bored? Do you head to the fridge when you're stressed? Do you stay busy instead of sitting with grief? Once you start noticing, you might realize, oh wow, I actually do that a lot.

And that's okay. What I want to encourage you, rather than judging yourself, which is tempting for a lot of people, once we start to notice some of the things we do that we didn't realize before, then we go, oh, I'm the worst. I can't believe I do that.

That's so bad. That's so wrong. And I don't find that to be very useful.

What is really, really helpful is to be fascinated. Oh my gosh, that's so interesting. I didn't realize that I was doing that.

So then see if you can find out what is the emotion that I'm running from when I reach for that buffer. What is the feeling that I'm willing to spend so much energy, so much time, so much money to avoid feeling? That'll start giving you some awareness. Then the more you start to understand it, see if you like the exchange.

Once you realize, okay, I'm spending time to avoid feeling overwhelmed in the moment, but then I actually feel even more overwhelmed in the long-term. I don't think I like this exchange. The second part, if you want to create different results with a better exchange.

So we had awareness now add to that willingness. And this is the hard part. The currency of creating the results you actually want in your life is willingness to feel negative emotions all the way through instead of turning out the lights and reaching for a buffer.

That means when insecurity, boredom, uncertainty, or overwhelm shows up, you keep the lights on, you face it, you sit with it. And you ask, what am I feeling right now? And you choose to feel it. And this is where real growth happens.

Instead of trading discomfort for a buffer, you let the discomfort do its job, which is to show you what's going on in your mind, in your heart. Now, let me be clear. Here's the truth.

When you give up your buffers, you will feel the emotion you've been trying so hard not to feel, and it's not going to feel good. It is a chemical vibration in your body that will feel unpleasant. But that emotion has some really important information for you.

That emotion that you've been trying not to feel that you've been buffering can tell you what you are thinking. If you listen, buffering is what we do to avoid pain. So when you stop buffering, you're going to feel pain.

And this is important to remember. The pain, the negative vibrations in your body is not caused by lack of buffering. It is revealed by lack of buffering.

So is it uncomfortable to face emotions instead of buffer? Yeah. That's why a lot of times we choose to buffer instead, because it's uncomfortable, but it's the discomfort that leads to growth and clarity, because now the lights are on. And with the lights on, you can begin to understand yourself and see the other options you have and see your life change in dramatic ways.

As you make different choices and create totally new outcomes that your buffers were keeping you from being able to create. So here's my challenge to you this week. Notice when you're reaching for a buffer before you grab your phone, before you open the fridge, before you hit, add to cart, pause and just ask yourself, what am I really feeling right now? What if I just chose to feel it instead of buffering that moment of awareness is like turning on the lights in your kitchen.

You finally see the mess for what it is, and now you can choose to deal with it. So don't turn off the lights, keep them on face the mess, do the dishes and watch how your life slowly begins to change. We do a workshop inside the Think New Thoughts Academy every month.

And our August workshop was about buffering. If you want to dive deeper into this and get some help gaining awareness of your buffers and gaining some leverage to start letting them go. You can watch that replay inside the Academy for the next few weeks.

You can use the code first month free to get a 30 day trial of the Academy. You can have a look around for a month. You can access that workshop and dozens of others.

Again, that code is first month free, and you can use it at checkout when you go to EmilyRicksCoaching.com/join. And you can see if the Think New Thoughts Academy is something that would bless your life. Thanks so much for joining me today.