Your work deadlines are overwhelming, your kids are whining and you haven’t had a decent night’s sleep all week. Yes, those chocolate frosted cookies will make you feel better!
More often than you’d like, you respond to work frustration, family demands, everyday tension, sadness or other feelings with emotional eating. Why? Because it does make you feel temporarily better.
Any habit that is rewarding, despite it’s temporary feel-good, is reinforcing. You can break that cycle and weaken the habit. But you have to retrain yourself to respond differently when the not-so-fun emotions arise.
So, the next time you feel tense, sad, angry, bored, frustrated…
- STOP! It often helps to visualize a big red stop sign in front of you.
- Then, take several deep abdominal breaths. Practice these when you are calm so you can more effectively do them when in a higher emotional state.
- Next, rate your physical hunger from 1 (ravenous) to 5 (no hunger). By now a few minutes have passed and waiting is often enough to break the craving.
- Write down just one word about how you feel. Not too overwhelming, is it? Putting a name to the feeling is sometimes enough to stop the pattern.
Remember that turning to food to comfort yourself is truly a patterned behavior learned from being rewarded sometime in the past. Each time you stop the pattern, you weaken it. If you see a pattern of wanting to eat every time you are bored, you can now make a plan for those times. Whatever you have previously learned, you can replace with more effective patterns of behavior.