SS - I had an IDEA:
Something just popped into my head; might help with all those activities - and the emotions associated with them.
Because most of my "triggers" for smoking are emotional, I've been working on separating the reflex - smoking - from the emotion. Waiting 5-10 minutes from the time the emotion pops up: restlessness, boredom, anger, whatever. Then, I can smoke. It's a type of "practice" - to separate the behavior I'm trying to change from the emotion that I used to obscure with smoking.
I've also been working on refining emotional boundaries... and it just went "ding-ding-ding" in my head that part of this smoking thing is related to my not learning about boundaries properly. When you're not allowed to have boundaries from other people in your FOO, you never learn that WITHIN yourself, you need some boundaries, too. Conscious decisions about health habits - nutrition, smoking, drinking... behavioral things... because without those "inner" boundaries - anything is permitted; anything fair game.... and we learned that there was unpredictability and powerlessness in that place without boundaries... all that stuff became "beyond our control"... because we didn't know we needed to tell ourselves "no" or "this is better".
I wonder what would happen, if when the feelings come up associated with normal activities, you just gave the feelings 2-5 minutes of time BEFORE starting your chosen activity? If that would separate the feeling from the doing? Keep the feeling from intruding on the process?
Something you said about doing 1 thing... connected with me... we learned multi-tasking really, really early... because we were always trying to decode what our parents were doing, we were struggling with our feelings, and trying to fulfill those expectations - all at one time. It was too much coming at us to process it all at once. But it was familiar; what we were used to; it was also how we were vulnerable, I think.
