Are you feeding your feelings?

It can be hard to sit with uncomfortable feelings.  Often we just want to hurry them along or stuff them away.  Many people turn to comfort foods or emotional eat in response to stress, in an attempt to soothe, comfort, or distract themselves from an uncomfortable feeling or state.  When you are not practiced at acknowledging and accepting feelings or using them as a guide, they can feel overwhelming.

When you find yourself “feeding a feeling” with food, as in emotional eating and comfort eating, in an attempt to soothe or distract yourself or make the uncomfortable feeling go away; pause for a minute and try some of these instead.

1. Take a series of deep breaths.
2. Take a moment to check in and see if you can identify the feeling.  Is it anger, sadness, hurt, resentment, bitterness, frustration, shame, guilt, fear, loneliness, disappointment… What are you feeling?
3. Once you have become aware of the feeling and identified it.  Rate it, is it intense or mild?  If one was the feeling you would have in response to dropping your car keys and five was the feeling you have from missing your bus and ten is the feeling you have from missing your flight.
4. Take a moment to consider how you would like to manage yourself through this feeling. Understand that in response to feelings and stress a different part of your brain will take charge depending on the intensity of the stress.  If for example you are in danger or if you are under attack, you will be preparing yourself to fight, flight, freeze or faint.
5. Pause and consider, before taking action.  What if any, is the action you need to take?  You have effectively slowed down the decision making process long enough for poise, you have taken a moment to slow down your impulses.  Sometimes it will be perfectly appropriate to act quickly and definitively in response to an emergency, sometimes it will be perfectly appropriate to eat.  Get practiced at meeting yourself at the point of need.  Is there a need that must be met: safety, being seen or heard, being soothed, being nourished, being expressed?