Do you have ‘soft addictions’?

If you watch soap operas obsessively, have more shoes than you can wear or spend endless hours online, you may be hooked on a "soft addiction.

Such activities and some others, like playing video games, following celebrity gossip, looking at catalogues or reading romance novels, sound relatively harmless. So what's the big deal?

That's what's seductive about them: they're normal. But when overdone, they can mask your true feelings, dull your consciousness, zap your energy and keep you from true intimacy. They also rob you of time. People who say they don't have time to exercise often discover that tons of it are being taken up by these habits.

So how do you know if you're a "soft addict"? You feel numbed. If you find you are more alert and energized by an activity, are learning something or feel inspired, then that's a healthy passion as opposed to an addiction.

What gets us hooked like this? These numbing activities are like empty calories–they don't really meet your deeper need to feel comforted and loved, or to matter or belong. But in some way they seem to make you happier, more satisfied, less stressed, or help you "check out" for a bit when life is rough. It appears as though you are taking care of yourself.

How do you kick a soft addiction? Identify your ruts and routines, acknowledge what they are costing you, then start to replace them with more nourishing activities: meditating, reading, volunteering for a cause or expressing your creativity.

Binge eating solutions

You are sitting at home and you can’t stop thinking about food. You get up, look in the kitchen, close the door, and look in the refrigerator. You don’t know what you are looking for, but you feel obsessed with food, like you need to eat it because you are at home. You try not to eat it, because you know what will happen. It’s the same cycle as always: A little bite of something will turn into a binge eating session.

This happens to many people. Harmless snacking initially turns into a massive binge eating moment and they feel like they just cannot stop. It’s true that most of the time people do turn to food for comfort and because of some kind of emotional issue that happened to them in the past, but what about the people that can’t relate to that? These kinds of people just know that they really enjoy food and feel like they can’t stop eating, which always turns into a binge for them.

So when you want to learn how to stop binge eating and curb any cravings, what do you do?
1. Chew gum:- Many times we are bored and eating sounds like just the thing to do to pass time. Instead of leading to a potential binge with a trigger food, try chewing gum. The constant chewing of gum will trick your mind and you won’t find that you are drifting off to snacking.

2. Do something:- Working from home I find myself in the kitchen just because it’s convenient. It’s the same thing with people who work at an office. The community candy bowl or the kitchen seems to just be convenient, and before you know it, you’ve consumed food that you weren’t even hungry for. Instead of falling victim to convenience, why not remove yourself from the situation. If you are at home and the kitchen keeps calling your name, leave the house.

3. Find the alternative:- If you start to crave a food, don’t deprive yourself of it necessarily; just find a healthier version of it. If you can’t get sweets out of your mind, instead of reaching for the bag of chocolate, try an apple or another sweet fruit. Many times you will feel satisfaction because you are still fulfilling your sweet tooth… just in another way.

To your health (oops!)

You might want to step back–way back–when someone opens the bubbly for those wedding or celebratory toasts. A study found that in the United States, 20 per cent of eye injuries caused by bottles containing carbonated drinks came from champagne corks. (The other culprits are beer, soda or any other beverage that comes in a glass bottle and has a cap other than a screw-on.) To be safe, angle bottles of anything bubbly away from you and others and loosely wrap a kitchen towel over the cork. The study was published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.