Many people turn to a huge bowl of ice cream when they are depressed, pizza when they are happy and chips when watching favorite TV shows. Emotional eating is essentially a response to our emotional condition. It means that we eat due to our feelings, instead of our actual hunger. This is a common cause of weight gain. There are different triggers, such as loneliness, anxiety, boredom, resentment, anger, excitement and pure joy. In many social settings, over-excitement can cause people to eat more than necessary. During special occasion or party, it is easy for people to find themselves get caught up.
When people feel pure joy or sadness, they could neglect their actual hunger level, causing them to eat more calories than necessary. During social events, people often need to eat more to allow them to fit in. Over-excitement or excessive sadness could happen when people are not being centered or grounded. Intense emotions, whatever they are, could cause people to lose connection with themselves. It is important to make sure that people can feel enmeshment with those around them. When it happens, boundaries can immediately disappear. We are more likely to eat, if the crowd is also eating.
In this case, we should be able to keep a portion of our awareness when we are engaging with others. It is important that we always identify our personal boundaries while interacting with others. We should ensure that these boundaries are always present. Resentment and anger are also detrimental emotions that we need to suppress whenever possible. However, when suppressing any negative emotion, we should do it in a healthier way. In fact, using alcohol and drugs can be seen as an act of violence to our own body. Anger is a basic emotion and many of our actions are based on it.
Even the nicest people are essentially angry, but they could transform the emotion into something constructive and positive. Instead of being angry with our kids, bosses, spouses, parents and ourselves; we should be positively angry to specific conditions and immediately look for ways to improve them. If we want to avoid being distressed, we should respond to our own limitations. As an example, we should sleep when we become tired and eat when our body needs enough fuel. The majority of our anger could come from our inability to cope with our own limitations.
Instead of eatng excessively, we should use journal or other things that can validate the presence of anger and other bad emotions. Stressful emotions can be quite agitating and in a long period of time, anxiety could start to emerge. We could avoid overeating by removing ourselves from any stressful environment. By having more pleasure in our lives, we could be better nourished on a much deeper level. Simple methods can be performed to manage our stress, such as breathing deeply, sit and ask ourselves what we should do.
