Are you afraid to feel your emotions so you eat to numb them?
Do you want to know how to stop eating your feelings? Keep reading.
For many people, expressing difficult emotions or admitting they have “negative” feelings like sadness or anger feel difficult or even impossible. Most people, understandably, don’t want to feel anxious or hurt, or upset. So they choose to ignore or suppress these feelings. They numb their feelings with food, or distract themselves with the neverending cycle of overeating and restricting.
And the most significant reason they do this is because they’re afraid to feel their emotions.
In this post, I’ll discuss why we fear our uncomfortable emotions and how to learn to embrace our feelings. This will help you stop eating your feelings and have a better relationship with food.
Why do we fear our emotions?
It’s not simple to understand why so many people are afraid to feel strong, intense, or so-called negative emotions. But the primary reason is that for whatever reason, they were taught that these feelings are simply not acceptable.
This message might come from your parents or other caregivers at an early age, from a spouse or partner later in life, or a supervisor at work. A common mindset in our society is that you should just be strong and get over it. Period.
Mental health professionals around the world will tell you that “suck it up” is not a valid coping mechanism.
In fact, dismissing or ignoring feelings doesn’t make them go away. Instead, they’ll linger, unprocessed and misunderstood, and eventually, they’ll find new ways to manifest themselves. Over time, they’ll affect your mental, physical, and emotional well-being.
As a coping mechanism, you may start eating your feelings, i.e. suppressing or numbing them with food or distracting yourself with eating. This is the beginning of your emotional eating journey.
Emotions are often seen as a sign of weakness
In our society, emotions are often seen as a sign of weakness.
And when you don’t have much practice at handling these intense feelings, even just a small expression of them can feel terrifying. You may feel like you’ll suddenly fall apart and not be able to recover.
So, you just end up stuffing it down with food. Eating can distract you for a while and it makes you feel numb too.
We have been taught to suppress our feelings. Especially women. If a man is angry he is simply angry. If a woman is angry, she is a “bitch” or “hysterical”. When a man is sad, he is just sad. When a woman is sad, she is “being emotional” and “hormonal”.
Fear of how other people will see us is another reason why people choose to suppress their feelings. If you are perceived as emotional, you could be hurt or betrayed by others.
Our culture values happiness, and when we see others expressing sadness or fear, the most common reaction is to see them as weak instead of strong. We value happiness so much that many believe that if you have other emotions, your life is dysfunctional and you won’t be able to become satisfied or fulfilled.
Learning to Embrace Your Feelings
When you stop suppressing or numbing your emotions with food and learn to really experience and express them, you’ll see that it doesn’t make you unhappy. It actually gives you more energy and joy.
Always bottling up your emotions takes a lot of mental strength. When you learn to recognize and understand your emotions and FEEL them, you also learn that you can then move on from your feelings. Consequently, you’ll become much more productive and happier too.
Spending just a small amount of time experiencing, acknowledging, and processing all your emotions, not just the positive ones, can leave you with much more mental and emotional space than you would imagine. Why? Because you aren’t always worried and anxious about how you’ll deal with the unexpected or handle setbacks and disappointments anymore. You’ll know that you can handle any emotions.
How long will this feeling last if I let myself feel it?
Many people can´t stop eating their feelings because they’re scared if they let themselves feel their emotions that feeling will stick with them for a long time. Once you start feeling your feelings, you’ll experience that all feelings are temporary.
Neurologists found that emotions last only 90 seconds. The chemicals causing you to feel a certain emotion are flushed out of the system in ~90 seconds.
If you let the feeling just wash over you without acting on it, it will go away after a few minutes. It’s possible to sit with the feeling and watch it disappear after a while. It needs some practice but you can do it!
Feelings come in waves. They build up to a peak when they are most intense, and then they subside. It’s the same with your “positive”, pleasant feelings too. Have you ever been constantly happy or relaxed? Even during a happy, relaxed holiday, something can happen that shifts your mood. Your kids start to argue, it starts to rain, you lose something, or you don’t like the food you ordered in a restaurant. Your feelings change more often during a regular day. The waves of different emotions rise and fall frequently. They are all temporary.
Some feelings, like grief, heartbreak, and stress appear persistently but they are also temporary. They also have a peak, and then a less intense phase. It´s completely safe to just let them wash over you and let them subside.
But, if you live in fear of your emotions, they have too much power and control over everything you do.
How to stop eating your feelings
Most women are not even aware of how often they swallow their emotions until they’re asked to not do it anymore. So I want you to regularly check in with yourself.
What are you feeling now? What do you feel most often? Worried, sad, surprised, amused, tired, annoyed, loving, lonely, resentful, insecure, joyful, happy, hurt, helpless, jealous, glad, calm, excited, suspicious, angry, relieved, depleted, safe, comfortable, radiant, resentful, guarded, aroused, depressed?
Several times a day check in with your feelings and say to yourself: I feel ………………., and that´s ok.
It may feel silly and awkward at first, but this acknowledgement of your feelings will really help you quiet your self-critic, and help you stop suppressing your feelings with food, i.e. you’ll stop eating your feelings. As an added bonus, it´s easy to practice anywhere and anytime.
Don´t judge your feelings. All emotions provide value to your life. Accept them and just let them be.
If you fight your feelings you make them stronger
When you try to resist a feeling is like keeping a beach ball underwater. You can keep it down for a while but then you get tired. The beach ball “explodes” above water. The same happens with your suppressed feelings too. After a while, they “explode” and the experience is much more uncomfortable than it would’ve been if you let yourself feel them.
This is another reason for fearing our emotions. As we always resist them, we only experience this intense feeling when they explode.
Here’s a good metaphor from Brook Castillo, master life coach, from her book, If I’m So Smart, Why Can’t I Lose Weight? This metaphor sums this up nicely: Imagine your feelings like someone coming to your house to rob you. If you don´t expect them, they sneak in through the back door. If you still pretend they aren’t there, they’ll cause harm. But if you’re expecting them, sitting calmly on the sofa with policemen, you can let them in and peacefully watch them leaving with the policemen.
So sit with your uncomfortable feelings without fighting or “eating” them. Most of the time they pass in a few minutes, just like clouds moving across the sky. Your feelings can´t harm you. Even the worst feelings are only feelings, nothing more.
Meditation to help you feel your feelings
I’ve made a meditation to help you sit with your feelings when you have the urge to overeat. Listen to this meditation often and you’ll learn how to process your feelings. You’ll be presently surprised to find that you won’t need to eat to suppress or numb them anymore.
After a while, you won’t need to listen to this meditation. Feeling your feelings becomes automatic and you will be free from emotional eating triggered by negative feelings. You’ll start eating your feelings much less often.
Final Thoughts
When you stop trying to ignore or numb your uncomfortable feelings and embrace all the feelings, you will see that there isn’t anything to fear. And by expressing and experiencing them, your life becomes more enjoyable and satisfying, not less.
Feeling your feelings is only one aspect of breaking free from emotional eating. In my workbook below I give much more tips on how to discover what you are really hungry for, eliminate emotional or binge eating from your life and finally feel free and comfortable around food.
This free training shows you the exact steps to break free from emotional and binge eating.
If you would like to talk with me personally send me an email to hello@ritamayblog.com or book a free call here.
A 90-minute 1 on 1 Intensive is also available below. By the end of this session, we will find the reason for your overeating habit and you will have a set of tools to overcome it. I look forward to speaking with you 🙂
