Feelings and Emotional Eating

Years ago, if you had asked me if I was feeling my feelings, I would have answered yes. I really thought I was feeling them. In reality, I was basically a floating head: lots of thinking and not a lot of feeling. I believed that if I allowed myself to feel my feelings then I’d fall into a black hole and never make it back. Having that belief led me to resisting feeling my feelings, which caused a lot of tension in my body.

Just in the past few years I learned 2 important and fun facts:

Fun fact 1: Feelings are simply vibrations in our bodies, caused by what we think.

Fun fact 2: Feelings pass through our bodies in about 90 seconds.

I used to think that my emotions just popped up, or were caused by what was happening in my life. I thought that I needed to do certain things to escape feeling “scary” feelings…. like eat or overwork. When an uncomfortable feeling arose in my body, I’d turn to an activity to distract myself.

I didn’t have the awareness that my thoughts caused my feelings, and that I could change my thoughts at any time.

The first step to getting out of the cycle of emotional eating was to slow down and pay attention to myself. As simple as this sounds, it was a challenge for me because I was so used to go-go-going to avoid being with myself and my thoughts.

An idea to start this journey is to set an alarm on your phone to ask how you’re feeling, and answer. This brings feelings into our consciousness.

And that’s a great first step!