The anti- setActionThread?

To my knowledge, stopThread() is the opposite of playThread(). Does setActionThread() have an equivalent?

What I am trying to do is to get my player to get out of its looping eat cycle and return to its idle cycle. I've tried using playThread & stopThread...

$globalPlayer.playThread(0,"eat");
$globalPlayer.stopThread(0);
$globalPlayer.playThread(1,"idle");

...except that when I do so, 1) the eat cycle stops immediately after it is activated as if it zooms through all the animations, and 2) the idle cycle tries to play while I am running around the world after the whole sequence, as if the run animation is conflicting with the idle.

I've generally had a better experience with setActionThread when it comes to playing cyclic animations, but is there a way to make them stop? If I had something like...

function playerEat()
{
  $globalPlayer.setActionThread(eat);
  schedule(4000, 0, playerIdle, $globalPlayer);
}

function playerIdle()
{
  $globalPlayer.setActionThread(idle);
}

...the idle animation wouldn't even play. I figure trying to stop the eat animation within the playerIdle() would solve this problem. I also tried using $globalPlayer.stop(), but that didn't work either.