PEEING IN THE SHOWER

The Law of Association

I’m finally making the time to write out what I believe God gave me days ago regarding the food abuse struggle. Another piece to the puzzle fell into place.

Surely you know you can ask God about anything! And He sometimes answers in very unusual ways.

Well, I was on my face before God, recently, in tears, after an overeating failure. I cried out, “God, what am I missing? What am I not getting? How can I possibly lead others when I don’t know what I’m doing?”

Just being transparent. I have self-doubts, just like anyone else.

I was so frustrated.

Sometime later, maybe a day or two, I stumbled on an article. It was a little like having to look when passing an accident on the freeway. The subject was peeing in the shower and why you shouldn’t do it.

You might think, “Ewww, gross, of course you shouldn’t do it!”. And possibly none of us will admit we’ve ever peed in the shower. But surely we’ve all felt like doing it. We’ve had the urge.

I don’t remember all the details, but the premise was that peeing in the shower contributes to overall pee problems experienced by many older women like me. Peeing in the shower is somehow not good for the pelvic floor (unless you are squatting, OMG), and when it is repeated over and over it creates an association. The Holy Spirit started talking.

Enter the LAW OF ASSOCIATION.

Which is not new to me, but is now clearly in focus as it pertains to addiction.

According to the article, and I believe it to be spot on, if you pee in the shower with any frequency, it creates an association IN YOUR BRAIN between showering and peeing, which will virtually ensure that when you shower you will feel the urge to pee.

Your brain is POWERFUL. You had better respect that!

Associations are not all bad. It is one of the leading ways we create positive HABITS. Like pairing morning with exercise, Sundays with going to church, reading with sleep, and coffee with spending time with Jesus.

But we are also prone to less positive associations. Some are even destructive:

Associating….

Drinking alcohol with the weekend, with stress, with parties, with vacation….

Smoking or vaping with waking up, with eating, with sex, with soothing…

Eating junk food with watching TV or a movie

Agitation and offense with the release of anger through an outburst

Holidays with indulgence

A particular grocery store with a certain trigger food

Winter with depression

Love with pain

And peeing in the shower, apparently. If you want to combat the urge to pee in the shower, you have to not pee in the shower!

And you have no doubt heard of other types of associations. Such as you are likely to become like the 5 people you are around the most often. Why is that? Association.

When I suffered a horrific break up, every favorite restaurant, every local coffee shop, even my office became painful to visit because they had become associated with the person I lost. I had to build new associations to reclaim those spaces as happy spots.

The brain often likes to maintain the status quo. For instance, studies show that muscle memory is a thing and can work against your progress in fitness. If you do the same workout all the time, your body adapts to it and the workout becomes less effective. Your body actually minimizes change. Variation is better because it breaks the association your brain has made with exercise.

As a young adult, I went on a diet with my mom called the “Rotation Diet.” It capitalized on this same idea, which produced great results. While many diets recommend a certain number of calories be consumed each day (1,000, 1,200, 1500, etc.) this diet counseled against that and instead recommended mixing it up. The wisdom is that you don’t want your body to know how many calories you’re going to eat next, so it doesn’t react by hoarding calories or body fat. Consuming a different number of calories each day did, in fact, help me lose weight.

Associations are pairings made in the brain through repetition, and they are very resistant to change.

In my food abuse course, Break Every Chain, I share a tip I learned from a fellow health coach: when enjoying a food treat, eat it outside your “trigger environment.” Why? Because your brain has built an association between eating comfort foods and certain places---maybe your car, your recliner, or your home in general. There may be an added association that pairs eating the food in the trigger environment with abandoning yourself to a binge. When you have a treat somewhere uncustomary or unusual it breaks the pattern, allowing you (at least theoretically) to be more present in the decision, rather than being on autopilot or in an association vortex.

When I was in the 12-step program, we learned to avoid “people, places, and things” associated with our addiction. We called those “triggers” because they were, well, triggering.

Back in the 80s, when I was battling an eating disorder, my counselor also coached me to break patterns associated with the disorder. Practices such as counting calories, weighing myself all the time, looking at myself in the mirror a certain way, feeling for my hip bones when lying in bed, and eyeing glossy magazine photos of models with perfect bodies all had to cease as part of my recovery. Purging was associated with bingeing, so I had to stop purging in order to stop bingeing. All those associations were like the fodder that fed the cancer.

So, the takeaway is this: Ask God to help you start noticing all the people, places, things, emotions, circumstances, behavior, and practices ASSOCIATED with your food/eating issues. Write them down, and start BREAKING those associations. Just refuse to do them. Do something else instead. Mix it up. Write the words “LAW OF ASSOCIATION” on your mental forehead to remind yourself to be aware and vigilant. The enemy knows how to trap you, and your brain just wants to stay the same. With the Holy Spirit’s help, we are smarter than the devil, and with time and repeated new behaviors, you can coax your brain to change.

Now a positive association is to associate healthy eating with PEACE!