For many people, emotional eating is a challenge that impacts our mood, weight, energy level, and our experience of life. We may know that we don’t want to emotionally eat, but that knowing isn’t usually enough to actually stop us.
The key to freeing yourself from emotional eating and finding greater peace with food is very simple:
Wisdom.
Meaning, we need to understand emotional eating more deeply.
And a great place to start is by examining one of the most important and misunderstood features about emotional eating.
It’s the thing we love most about food:
Pleasure.
The simple truth is, emotional eating and pleasure go hand in hand – and both can get out of hand.
In this article, I’ll talk about:
- Why we emotionally eat for pleasure
- The Hedonist Eating Archetype
- Finding balance between eating for pleasure, for hunger, and for health
I’ll also give you a 5-step process for managing pleasure and emotional eating I’ve been using with clients for decades and that we teach in our Mind Body Eating Coach Certification Program.
Emotional Eating Made Simple
Let’s begin our journey by taking a moment and getting on the same page about what emotional eating actually is.
Here’s the most simple and straightforward definition:
Emotional eating is the act of turning to food to help regulate uncomfortable emotions.
It’s a pretty universal phenomenon that human beings will reach for food to help manage anxiety, fear, stress, boredom, loneliness, disappointment, confusion, anger, lack of love, and more.
This is not necessarily a true problem when taken by itself. We always need to find strategies to deal with difficult life experiences and unwanted feelings.
So emotional eating is not inherently bad. And it’s not an indication that something is wrong with you.
Emotional eating becomes problematic though, when the drawbacks start to outweigh the benefits.
Meaning, emotional eating works against us when we find ourselves feeling shame. Or guilt. Or we notice that things start to get out of our control and we gain weight, feel heavy, and feel fatigued.
What we always need to keep in mind about emotional eating though, is this:
The deeper goal of all emotional eating is stress reduction and pleasure enhancement.
Allow me to state this in a different way:
- We emotionally eat to feel good.
- Feeling good means that we are creating pleasure chemistry.
- Pleasure chemistry is the natural antidote to stress chemistry.
- So emotional eating and the desire for pleasure are a package deal…
But what confuses so many people is this:
The desire for pleasure from food can often feel overwhelming.
We can feel as if we’re food addicts, or pleasure junkies, or that we’re somehow powerless in the face of our hunger for the foods that excite us.
The good news is though, we can find some important insights in the simple science of the body and the psychology of mind and emotions.
So let’s take a closer look at the psychobiology of pleasure…
Why We Eat for Pleasure
At the most fundamental level of creation, all creatures have a very similar core genetic programming:
We are designed to seek pleasure and avoid pain.
You can look at all animal and human behaviors through this lens.
When we eat, we are seeking the pleasure of food, of satiation, and we’re avoiding the pain of hunger or starvation.
In fact, the core imperatives of survival – eating and procreation – are so important that the wisdom of the universe has made sure that both feeding and breeding are quite pleasurable.
In other words, if these didn’t feel so good, we wouldn’t want to do them, and life and civilization would cease to exist.
So it’s important to truly understand and embrace this simple scientific truth:
We are literally, physiologically, and evolutionarily built for pleasure. We’re hardwired for it.
So it wouldn’t make any sense for us to judge pleasure, fight pleasure, or feel guilty that we enjoy pleasure and constantly seek it out. It’s how we are created.
Yes, we can find ourselves in an unhealthy relationship with pleasure. But this doesn’t change the fact that we are creatures of pleasure – and our job is to learn how to make pleasure work for and not against us.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at two core principles of pleasure chemistry.
Core Principle #1: Pleasure catalyzes a relaxation response.
This means that in the moments we begin to feel pleasure, our physiology shifts from the stress state – sympathetic nervous system dominance – to the relaxation response – parasympathetic nervous system dominance.
So, if you have a bad day at the office and you come home and get a massage, the pleasure of being touched will initiate a relaxation response.
Meaning, your heart rate and blood pressure will even out, stress hormones such as cortisol will decrease, and pleasure chemicals will be secreted throughout the body.
Likewise, if you’re not feeling so good about life, and you decide to eat a dessert that you love, the pleasure you receive from it can almost instantaneously move your body from the physiologic stress response to the physiologic relaxation response.
In other words, food makes us feel better at a cellular and emotional level.
That’s why we so consistently turn to food to feel better. It actually works. At least temporarily.
Core Principle #2: Stress desensitizes us to pleasure.
This is a very helpful metabolic distinction. It means that whenever you are feeling stressed, anxious, worried, or angry, your cellular receptors for pleasure biomolecules are blunted. More specifically, the hormone cortisol is the main substance that desensitizes our pleasure receptors.
The result of this is quite fascinating:
It takes more food, more chocolate, or more sugar to give you the same pleasure when you’re stressed compared to when you’re relaxed.
Can you see the problem here?
A stressed mind creates a pleasure-resistant metabolism, which can lead us to emotionally eat even more because we’re trying to find pleasure through food, and the body just isn’t registering pleasure in its normal and healthy way.
And why is the body designed this way?
Well, from an evolutionary perspective, when we’re in a full-blown stress response trying to escape a predator who’s looking to eat us, we don’t want to get sidetracked looking for dessert. We want all of our senses and efforts focused on survival. We actually need to feel some pain if we are injured.
But the survival portion of our brain does not distinguish between a real or imagined threat. So work stress or a relationship upset registers in us a stress response, which means that we need more of any pleasurable food or experience for pleasure chemistry to work its magic.
So, the key lessons we are learning about pleasure are these:
- We are genetically built for pleasure.
- The hunger for food and the hunger for pleasure from food are biologically intertwined.
- We cannot remove pleasure from food.
- Pleasure is designed to naturally relax us.
- Stress is designed to prevent us from fully feeling pleasure…
The Hedonist Eating Archetype
When it comes to a deeper understanding of pleasure, it’s helpful to look at the archetypes within us.
Think of an archetype as a sub-personality.
The simple truth is, you’re not just one singular person.
You’re more like a crowd.
Meaning, we have many different voices inside of us.
We may have the voice of the child, the parent, the warrior, the perfectionist, the hero, the best friend, the lover, the king, the queen, the nerd, the people pleaser, the health fanatic, and hundreds if not thousands more.
One of the key voices of pleasure within us is the Hedonist.
You can consider this voice as the champion of pleasure. It’s the part of us that:
- Loves and celebrates pleasure.
- Actively seeks out pleasurable experiences.
- Appreciates the good things in life.
- Can sometimes get into bad habits around pleasure.
So the Hedonist Eating Archetype is neither purely good nor purely bad.
It has propensities that truly serve us, and it can sometimes go overboard and become too indulgent and too pleasure focused.