DIET | DETECTIVE^®

Last week my husband and I were in Turkey traveling with friends. While on a fairly long ferry ride, I saw an older man who was constantly fingering his worry beads. I asked our friends whether many people still used worry beads. I had seen them for sale but thought they were for the tourists. Our friend told me that not only were they common, he himself had three different strands at home. 

“Do you use them?” I asked. “All the time,” he replied. “They really decrease stress and sometimes when I have had a difficult day at work, I find using them helps me relax in the evening.”  Since Naim (not his real name) is a highly respected scientist who does research on brain chemistry, so I take what he says very seriously.

“You see,” he went on, “when you constantly move the beads with your thumb and index finger, there may be an effect on the brain which decreases stress. The repetitive motion of the fingers is very soothing and may even date back to sucking our thumbs as babies.”

Worry beads. Maybe that is the answer to mindless snacking.  I thought of many of our weight-loss clients who described eating an entire box of cereal or gigantic bowls of chips or peanuts while fretting about a problem. Their fingers would go from box to mouth constantly; only when the container was empty would they realize how much they had eaten. Everyone who eats popcorn in a movie theater does this. Eyes are riveted on the screen and fingers automatically move from carton to mouth and back to the popcorn again. The scarier the movie, the faster the fingers go from box to mouth.

It is known that the soothing effect of eating carbs like cereal and popcorn are due to the brain making more of the calming chemical serotonin. But the mindless eater is consuming far beyond the amount of carbohydrate needed to produce serotonin. The constant movement of the fingers traveling from the food to the mouth and back to the food again may be imparting their own soothing effect.

So why not use worry beads to stop snacking? Mine (of course I bought a strand) are sitting right beside my computer. I have noticed that they work. Before, when I used to get stuck writing, I would get up, wander into the kitchen, look around and then go back to the computer. Sometimes, I would do more than just look. But now when I have trouble thinking of what to write, I just push the beads around the string for a few minutes and get back to writing.  However, I stopped calling them worry beads. They are my calming beads.

Bookmark:

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (2)

Subscribe to this comment's feed