Hey there, it's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, and this week I want to talk to you about personality styles and Bright Line Eating®. Is it possible that there are certain personality profiles, natural innate personality tendencies that just aren't a good fit for the Bright Line Eating way of life? I got this comment. It was actually a vlog suggestion that was sent in, I think quite a long time ago. I've got it in an Evernote on my phone here, so I'm going to read it off my phone because it's long and it's interesting, and I saved it. Back then it gave me quite a chuckle, and I'll explain why in a second. Jere's what the woman wrote in. I still don't know who it is. "I'm sorry if you've already covered this and I've missed it, but I'm finding the checklists and the boundaries to be a little too intense for my personality. I've analyzed and worked through the IFS," that's Internal Family Systems, "the IFS teaching here and elsewhere, and found it to be helpful in many ways. Also, I'm wondering though whether Susan has taken into account the different personality styles that people have as well. For example, a primarily phlegmatic scientific personality, EGA Myers-Briggs, ISTJ would love systematically working through each Bright Line Eating step and adhering to the rules. He or she would probably gain more and more energy and joy with each accomplished step. My husband has this personality, and he finds the way that this Bright Line Eating plan is organized and communicated is brilliant for him. However, a more sanguine creative personality type, EG Myers-Briggs, ENFP may find that the energy required to adhere to the rigid rules of Bright Line Eating can be so exhausting that it's harder for him or her to sustain the rigorous discipline. I believe that the bite-sized steps in the Bootcamp 2.0 modules are very helpful and enable each personality to go at their own pace, taking on board what they can when they are able. However, in the long term, I do wonder whether for some people, the resistance to sticking to the BLE plan has less to do with their parts and more to do with their God-given personality. If so, do you have any suggestions to help a more creative person to be successful with the Bright Line Eating principles without getting overwhelmed and exhausted by the rigid discipline of keeping absolute Bright Lines? Many thanks."
I was really laughing when I read this because I am an extremely strong ENFP, extremely strong. That's a rare personality profile. It's 5% of the population, and to have it be as extreme as I am on each of those dimensions, extremely strong, extremely strong, extremely strong F, extremely strong P, it's just exceedingly rare. I'm in the top 1% probably of personality profiles that are not well suited for the Bright Line Eating Program. So, it's just funny that this person wrote in because I hadn't really thought about it.
If you don't know anything about Myers-Briggs, in a nutshell, it's a measurement and it's been debated how valid it is, but it's a measurement that breaks people's personalities down along four different dimensions. The E versus I dimension that comes first is extrovert versus introvert. Actually, I would argue that extroverts do have a leg up in Bright Line Eating because we do encourage people to reach out for support and form friendships, and a lot of that type of activity can be easier for extroverts initially. I think that long term, the structures we offer in Bright Line Eating are equally suited to introverts and extroverts. We've got a lot of different options, and introverts just prefer fewer connections going deeper, and we don't have any hard and fast rules in Bright Line Eating about what or when, or how much, or how often you get yourself supported. We just say, get yourself supported and the buddy type relationship. That one-on-one relationship or a Mastermind Group relationship that goes deep over the long term can be really well suited to an introvert. I would say that extroverts on balance though, might have an easier time, especially initially even just contemplating all of the suggestions to reach out and get support.
The rest of the personality styles with Myers-Briggs, the next one is N versus S. The S's are very sensing, and N is intuitive, so the sensing folks are attached and attuned to their senses, their five senses, and take in information through their senses. It's just a little bit more of a concrete way of getting information about the world, literal way of getting information about the world. The N is intuitive, so picks up on subtle things that may not be coming through the five senses, might be through the heart waves, through a gut feeling, through an intuition, however that comes, and I'm a strong N.
Then the thinking versus feeling, that's the T versus F dimension in terms of processing thoughts and coming to conclusions, deciding how to act. A T will mostly do that with their head and their logic and their intellect and their reason, and an F will do it through their feeling, their heart, their emotion, maybe the people element of the situation or just their feelings about what feels best. Yeah, the NF combination that I have, it's a very touchy feely, woowoo intuitive kind of combination, which is interesting because I'm a scientist at the same time, but nonetheless, I'm a very strong NF.
Then the P versus J is the dimension that absolutely has a huge impact on someone's preference for living the Bright Line Eating way. The words don't really capture it. Judging versus perceiving. Really what the J likes is structure. That's what it's about. They like to plan ahead. They feel calmer. If a vacation is coming up in a month, if everything's already booked, the flights, the hotels, even an itinerary is blocked out. Even some of the restaurants they're going to eat at. If it's all blocked out in advance, a J feels calm. A P on the other hand will sometimes I feel like the P is for procrastinate. The P will put off and just resist locking those details down. Kind of the feeling is like, I don't want to be hemmed in. I don't want to, what if I just don't know yet how soon I would want to leave on that trip? Maybe I'd want to leave on Wednesday. Maybe I'd want to leave on Thursday. I'm just not sure. A P starts to feel anxious as they put stuff on their calendar. It feels like blocking off options, and they just want to keep their options open till the last minute. J's really like and feel calmer when things are planned out and mapped out. As you can imagine, it can be very, very tricky and fraught and conflict ridden for P's and J's to travel together because that's, or to do something like plan a wedding together or something, but Js tend to prefer the structure of Bright Line Eating and feel really relaxed by it and nurtured by it. And I mean, I guess those words aren't even J type words, but they just appreciate the structure that it's all laid out so clearly.
I don't have the name of whoever wrote in that comment, but whoever you are out there in the world, I hope you're listening to this because I really hear you. I really hear you. It is a thing when you're a personality profile that's just more freewheeling, more easygoing, more wanting to take life spontaneously. I think that that is a very, very common struggle for people when doing Bright Line Eating is the feeling of loss of spontaneity when you have to plan your meals in advance, especially if you travel in social circles, if you operate within a family dynamic and the unspoken, but very clear year family contract for years, decades has been, we figure out what we want to eat in the moment and we take it on the fly. That's how most people live their life these days is they wake up having no idea what they're going to eat for the day. They step out of the house having no idea of what they're going to eat for the day, and they're always just asking themselves, what do I feel like eating now?
A scientist once measured it and found that the average person is literally making 211 food-related decisions every day. It's all day a constant judgment call, figuring it out, game day decision moment by moment impulse of what am I going to eat? Of course, if you haven't been getting the results that you want with your food and your weight and making last minute decisions always seems to result in eating the higher calorie density thing, which is what the brain does. It actually, without you even knowing it, beelines toward the higher calorie density options. In our society, they're everywhere, and you can just end up eating too much of things that aren't going to be conducive to health or happiness or well-being for the long term. You can just end up doing that all the time. It's not a recipe for success, I think personality profiles aside, what feels like a tremendous death of spontaneity is a, it is a huge deal for people doing Bright Line Eating.
I have another vlog I really recommend people watch. You can watch all of the past vlogs by going to brightlineeating.com and just clicking on vlog, and then there's a search bar there. If you put in the Hour Glass Shape of Recovery, just the word hourglass, H-O-U-R-G-L-A-S-S, the shape of an hourglass, that figure that it starts wide, it goes in narrow, and then it comes out wide. That death of spontaneity is the feeling of the hourglass narrowing to a narrow, narrow, narrow point. It feels like being hemmed in and your life getting smaller and not feeling comfortable socializing and not having a lot of degrees of freedom or room for options, and it feels awful. It feels like you're, it feels like solitary confinement is what it feels like. It feels like living in a little box, that feeling doesn't last. What happens is as you get used to planning your food and committing it and sticking with it, automaticity builds up, which is really the lifesaver of everything we're talking about today.
Automaticity, when it's really established, takes all of these things that otherwise feel like such a chore. These habits, these tools, these disciplines, the phone calls, the planning of the food, and it just puts it into the background because it's just what you do now, and it happens as seamlessly as you get into the shower and you're not feeling overburdened by all the things you have to do in the shower. I mean, if you think about all the things you have to do in the shower, it's a lot of things. The shampoo and the soap and the shaving and the blah, blah, blah. But you've done it so many times in that same order, in that same way that it's almost as if you're not doing it at all. I mean, really, you get it all for free. There's no cognitive load, there's no emotional load anymore to doing that stuff. There's no focus to doing it. It just happens. As the hourglass shape opens back out because of automaticity, you're now getting what felt like discipline, rigid structure, lack of spontaneity, all that's happening easily and freely now, and you're more practiced with sticking to your Bright Lines and going out to eat spontaneously with your family, because sometimes that happens on a Saturday or Sunday. I can't plan what David and our three children are going to want to do. Sometimes the weather will have turned nice. We'll go to a public pool and swim for a bit, and then we're going to decide to go out to dinner, and maybe I wrote that I'd be having X, Y, Z food at home, but I'm going to go out to dinner with my family, and I know how to eat out Bright and responsibly in a restaurant. Most of the restaurants, almost for sure a restaurant we're going to decide to go to, I've eaten out Bright many times before, so I even know what I'm going to order when we get there, and I know I'm going to have a Bright meal, so there's nothing. I am able to go with that flow. I wasn't in the first 90 days of my recovery, I didn't make, I said, "No, I want to go home and eat my meal at home." That's what I did. I paid my dues, and that was as the hourglass was getting more narrow. As it opens back out, things just loosen up again.
The thing about the personality profiles is very real, though. My freewheeling, spontaneous, creative structure resistant way has for me resulted in me choosing to leave this structured disciplined way of life many times. What I often imagine to myself is I'm going to keep weighing and measuring my food. I know I need to do that. I'm going to stay off sugar and flour. I know I need to do that, but I'm just going to abandon the program part. All of these rules and tools and disciplines, I'm going to abandon that. What happens is my food loosens up, and before I know it, I'm back to eating. I feel way more lonely because I've cut myself off from the support that's amazing around here. What I imagine in my mind is that I'll reclaim the morning hours and enjoy my life a lot more because I won't have to meditate and do this rigid morning routine. But what ends up happening is I end up oversleeping because of the excess food that I ate the night before and feeling more and more depressed, getting less and less done. I find myself sinking into quicksand. I've run that experiment many times. What I've come to conclude about myself is that I, while I'm an extremely strong P, someone who prefers to put off decisions, procrastinate, stay spontaneous, stay freewheeling, there's actually a side of me that's a closet J, because what I really long for is a life that works.
My food addiction is strong enough that my life just doesn't work unless I adhere to the structures of this program. It just doesn't. I've run that experiment so many times that now the sweet spot for me seems to be that I stick with my disciplines and my tools and my habits the way Bright Line Eating teaches me to. Then I take my spontaneity and creativity as I can in other ways, and I think this is something I've heard about creativity in general, like the people who are the most creative, the Stephen Kings and Pablo Picassos and Frida Kahlos of the world, and I could go on. The Madonnas and all these people, who are, Prince, all these people who are creative and prolific, they have created their own form of structure and discipline around their creativity. My understanding is that Stephen King is like a Navy Seal when it comes to his writing that he's up at dawn and writing until noon. I forget what his rituals are, but people who crank out books, they write like a job, like they're at their desk at certain times and writing and creativity blossoms within structured frameworks. Typically, the creative who thinks "I?ll just get to my art when I feel like it" doesn't produce much and isn't, they're an artist who's tortured and not creating the artists who are creating create structure around their art.
And so, I do think absolutely there are personality styles that will resist this way of living more than others. And I happen to have one of them. I am one of those personality styles. What I think that consigns us to is a long journey of testing it, sorting it out, deciding do we really want this? And it really also comes down to how high are we on the Susceptibility Scale. Can we skate by without doing this stuff? I can't. My life doesn't work if I am not Bright and structured. I've tried it over and over and over and over and over again. Oh my gosh, I've run that experiment. It doesn't work. I like having a life that works. I prefer being happy to being depressed. I prefer being connected to being isolated and lonely. I prefer a Bright day to a day of binging and misery with the food. I prefer a day where I meditate first thing in the morning to a day where I don't, I prefer a month or a year where I'm diligently writing a gratitude list at night, then a month or a year where I'm not. The savior in all this is automaticity. The struggle is when I'm not doing the actions consistently enough for them ever to become automatic, and it's always a debate and a struggle with myself. Am I going to meditate today? I hate that thought. When am I going to meditate? Am I going to get in my meditation? I hate, hate that thought. So, I get in my meditation every morning before 6:30 AM so that I never have to be living my day thinking, am I going to meditate today? Once in a blue moon, something will happen. I don't know. Like the other morning it did, one of my kids had a horrible night and was up all night and was in a lot of distress and came to get me at five something in the morning when I would typically be meditating, and I immediately turn my attention to her fair. Of course, of course. That's what I did. The upshot is I didn't meditate when I normally would. Then I got to experience again what it's like to have a day where all day I'm thinking, when am I going to fit in my meditation? Am I going to meditate today? Am I going to get it in? When am I going to get it in? It's a horrible loop to be stuck in my head. It's an energy leak. It's a drain. It's a bummer.
I guess to the person who wrote this question in, I just want to invite you to consider is it that you don't like doing these actions or is it that you've resisted setting up structures that are automatizable around them, like doing them consistently the same time of day every day so that you've never achieved any automaticity with it? Because I would agree, living a day where you've got four or five habits, you're going to try to write down your food, you're going to try to meditate, you're going to try to write a gratitude journal, you're going to try to reach out to someone in the Bright Line Eating Program, and you are not clear on when during the day you're doing them, and you've got no habit built up around it. That would be a nightmare. Doing that day after day would be unsustainable. But in Bright Line Eating, we teach you to build in those habits one at a time slowly, and to really lock them in to a morning habit stack and an evening habit stack and repeat them. And yes, you've got to suffer through the 2, 3, 4 months till it really becomes automatic. But then, that's like the 90 days that I did not eat out. I would've told my family, "No, I'm not going to go out to eat. I need to go home. I need to eat the food that I committed the night before." You pay your dues in this program upfront, and then the gift that you give your future self by doing that is a lifetime of freedom, effectiveness, health, well-being.
For those of us who have personalities that are not suited to this much discipline or structure, automaticity is what frees us up. Because it doesn't feel like structure if you're not thinking about it. It doesn't feel like structure if you're doing it without even noticing sing. My guess is that none of the creatives and the freewheeling personalities who've built up the habit of brushing their teeth morning and night, go through adulthood thinking, why am I hemmed in by having to brush my teeth morning and night? The only people who are thinking that are people who resisted the habit so much that they never made it automatic. They go to bed every night thinking, "Really? I got to brush my teeth. I'm lying in bed already. Am I going to get up out of bed and go brush my teeth? What a pain. I don't want to do it. I'm not going to do it." They go to bed and there's another day where they've resisted building automaticity, and they're giving their future self the curse of always wrangling with whether or not they're going to brush their teeth before bed. Those of us who suck it up buttercup and just do it religiously for a while, we give our future selves the gift of having a peaceful bedtime when it comes to the teeth brushing question, because the teeth are just always brushed, and they never even thought about it in the first place.
So, it's not really the question of the behavior or the structure, it's really a question of automaticity and are you building it in or not? And if you're not, then of course it's going to feel awful. From one ENFP to another, my dear, I feel you. I feel you. I feel you. It is a thing. It is a thing. It is a thing. And yes, I would say maybe not the is TJs, but the TJs out there in the world have the perfect personality type for Bright Line Eating, God bless y'all. Those who just are controller-led and manager-led and love the structure, and they start doing Bright Line Eating and their hearts sing. They put their little gold star on the food journal page every night marking the Bright day, and it's just easy peasy for them. Those of us who don't have that personality type have to come around at the back way and really probably push the boundaries, make sure that we really need this, and if we do, automaticity is the answer. That's the weekly vlog. Great to connect with you. I'll see you next week.
