Welcome back to Part 2 of this series: Your Go-To Guide on Dealing with Emotional Eating. Part 1 was all about navigating and getting to the root of emotional eating by brining awareness to thoughts, feelings and behaviors. In this post, we’ll cover how you can develop emotional-care coping skills to help with negative emotions in a constructive and intentional way, as well as how food can be used as an emotional-care tool in a positive way.
Before you read on, have you read part 1 yet? If you haven’t, go back and take a peak, because it will help you understand how to identify emotional eating triggers. And it’s when you’ve ruled out any contributing non-emotional triggers, such as restriction and hunger, and you’ve identified what you’re feeling and what you might need to help cope with that feeling, that you can call upon your emotional care coping menu.
What’s an Emotional-Care Coping Menu?
It’s a place where you keep a menu of several different emotional coping skills that you can select from during times of sadness, stress, boredom or anxiety and so forth. And it’s a collection that has a variety of skills, because not every skill will be useful for every situation. They fall into several categories depending on what you feel you might need to help cope with that emotion: connection, comfort, pleasure, energy, processing, etc.
Come up with several emotional coping skills you think might be useful. To help get you started, here are some ideas for your emotional-care coping menu. Included are some of my fav things and some other examples.
Connection:
What are some things that offer a feeling of connection – whether it be found in the ones you love, your neighbors, your co-workers, or your community?
- Meeting up with a friend for an outing – coffee, a walk in the park or around the neighborhood, a local event like an art fair or street fest
- Do something you think would be fun with your partner or family – game night, a cooking class, frisbee in the park, a picnic, putt-putt golf, movie night with snuggles on the couch
- Happy hours, hang-outs, intramural activities, social clubs – join some friends for some social time
- Do an act of kindness for someone else – a small act of kindness can go a long way in someone’s day.
- Write a letter to a friend or family member. We’ve grown very accustomed to corresponding electronically. So it makes receiving a personal card or letter via snail mail all the more special.
- Dial up or video chat with your fav people
- Drop off some home baked goods to a friendly neighbor or bring them into work
Pleasure:
What brings you joy and a big smile to your face?
- Go to a movie, a play, museum or concert
- Turn on a comedy podcast, a Netflix comedy special, or a funny sitcom/movie
- Go to the beach, farmers market, bowling, a comedy club, pottery class, paint and sip, kite flying
- Play with your dog/cat/pets
- Charades, karaoke, board or card games
- Go through old photos
- Flex your green thumb – garden, plant herbs in a windowsill, nurture some house plants
- Go for a drive or take a short road trip – find pretty tree lined roads, old bridges, random local stops, historic landmarks
Energy:
What are some things you can do to make you feel energized?
- Crank up your fav tunes and sing along or dance like no one can hear or see
- Get outside and take a walk or go for a jog
- Take a nature hike
- Make an upbeat and uplifting playlist
- If you enjoy naps, take a “power nap.”
- Go to a vinyasa yoga, dance, cycling or other fav workout class
- Turn up the music or put on a podcast and do some yardwork or indoor chores
- Drink some cold water, iced tea or cold brew
- Eat something you know typically leaves you feeling energized – I’m personally and currently into snacking on chilled crisp cucumbers with herbed goat cheese and wheat crackers. Or fresh mango with chia pudding and toasted coconut.
Comfort:
What are some tools that help soothe, comfort, calm and ground you?
- Get cozy with a pet or a fav fuzzy blanket and sip on some hot tea
- Mediate – try a free app to help guide you, like Insight Timer or Smiling Mind
- Try a deep breathing practice or hold restorative yoga poses for a few minutes, such as child’s pose, corpse pose, half frog or legs up the wall while taking deep breathes
- Bake or cook something you love
- Take a hot bubble bath
- Place a cold washcloth on your forehead, use a weighted eye mask, or wrap a heat compress pad/pillow around your neck or shoulders
- Put on your fav comfy sweater, light a candle and read a good book
- Listen to calming music – instrumental, acoustic, jazz or whatever relaxing type of music you prefer
- Watch the sunset or the ripples/waves in the water (if you live near water)
Process
What tools might help you address and work through your emotion?
- Journaling or writing it out
- Sit with your feelings – get comfortable in a quiet space where you can take several minutes to be curious about any feelings and explore the experience that was emotionally triggering.
- Call a trusted friend or family member to vent out what’s going on
- Schedule a therapy session
- Punch a punching bag or pillow
- Allow yourself to have a good cry
- Draw or paint how you’re feeling
Food
If you remember from part 1 of this series, food rarely fixes what’s wrong, but it CAN and absolutely should be an option on your emotional-care menu. When the choice to emotionally eat is done so with an awareness of the emotional experience while paying attention to the sensory experience of the food (like taste, aroma, texture, etc.), the eating experience becomes intentional. And you increase the likelihood of food actually providing some emotional relief – whether it be to help comfort, soothe, energize or give you some joy.
What are some ways you can eat to help soothe your emotions in a way that is productive, mindful and actually makes you feel a little better?
- Prepare a nostalgic recipe – goulash, tuna over toast, lasagna, and chocolate chip cookies made from the Betty Crocker circa 1978 cookbook come to mind for me
- Take yourself out to lunch or dinner to break up the monotony of break room lunches or nights at home
- Pick up your fav fancy iced coffee or an ice cream cone on a hot sunny day
- Prepare a comforting bowl of soup and eat it under the covers
- Relax on the couch with some TV and takeout after an exhausting and stressful week
- Meet a friend for a fav fun food, like doughnuts, after a blow of bad news at work.
How to Use Your Emotional-Care Coping Menu
And any time you find yourself reaching for food or craving food, stop for a moment to notice and appreciate that this urge is actually coming from within. It’s letting you know that there is a need within that requires your attention. Bring awareness to these moments and contemplate what that need might be: Physical nourishment? Permission to enjoy food without judgement? More satisfying eating experiences? An emotional need? And if you find yourself struggling with an unpleasant and uncomfortable emotion, take out your emotional-care coping menu. What coping tool can you use that might help fulfill that emotional need?
Cultivate your emotional-care coping menu so that it fits your everchanging emotional needs.
It might be helpful to keep your menu close by (like in your phone or at your work desk), so you can draw from it when in the throes of an intense emotion. You can add to it and remove skills that you consistently find don’t help you.
And because every situation is different, the emotional coping skill you choose may be helpful at times, while other times not so much. So just like when you grab a hammer when what you really needed was a screwdriver, it may take some trial and error to figure out the right emotional-care skill for the job. And as you practice using your menu, you’ll begin to learn what skills are most effective for your different emotions. So when one coping skill doesn’t seem to be helping, it’s okay to pause, investigate further and go back to your menu try something else.
Interested in individualized support? The truth is there are many nuances to emotional eating that may benefit from deeper exploration on an individual level. No two person’s struggle is the same. I offer virtual nutrition and wellness coaching across the US! Book a discovery call and we can chat more about it.
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