{"id":4040,"date":"2019-07-10T13:01:42","date_gmt":"2019-07-10T20:01:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=4040"},"modified":"2019-07-10T13:01:42","modified_gmt":"2019-07-10T20:01:42","slug":"stress-eating-and-the-voice-of-justification","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=4040","title":{"rendered":"Stress eating and the voice of justification"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

https:\/\/www.psychologytoday.com\/intl\/blog\/never-binge-again\/201907\/how-stop-emotional-eating-coping-mechanism<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stress eating is a thing – and it’s related to how we mentally handle anxiety. Here’s a summary of what the psychologist did with his patient Johnny who was stress eating hot dogs:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I showed him some breathing techniques to help deactivate the sympathetic nervous system, which plays a strong role in producing the feeling one must urgently act on the impulse to overeat.  I also helped him more specifically label his emotions so he might gain more of a sense of control.  I also explained he might be approaching the entire issue with the wrong mindset. 

It’s only when emotions are allowed to become actual behavior that damage to your health (over-eating) is done, and this only happens when some type of rational justification makes it “OK” to act against your previously best laid plans. It turns out that when you make a very specific rule to accomplish an important health goal, there’s almost always a voice of justification that occurs which rationalizes crossing the line you previously swore not to cross.

Turns out, these were the very specific thoughts and situations which were poking a hole in his resolve, justifying crossing the eating goals, and acting on the emotions in a negative way.  To help arrest this behavior, I helped Johnny to label and very specifically dispute each one:

THOUGHT: “This is intolerable!  I shouldn’t have to put up with people like this (usually his boss).  The only <\/em>way to cope is with more frankfurters.”   
DISPUTATION:  “Almost everyone has to swallow some difficult treatment from their superiors.  Besides, frankfurters aren’t the only way to cope.  I could work it off in the gym, go for a walk, do some breathing exercises, or just sit with the anger<\/a> until it passes…which is almost always a lot quicker than I think it will be.”

At first, Johnny felt he couldn’t fight these thoughts even though he could identify them.  So I had him carry around a little card with the specific disputations for each one, and I asked him to keep a little journal each morning where he wrote down any new<\/em> rationalizations he felt brewing in his head.   After a while, these thoughts lost their power, and Johnny indeed stuck with his three frankfurter rule. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

https:\/\/www.psychologytoday.com\/intl\/blog\/never-binge-again\/201907\/how-stop-emotional-eating-coping-mechanism Stress eating is a thing – and it’s related to how we mentally handle anxiety. Here’s a summary of what the psychologist did with his patient Johnny who was stress eating hot dogs: I showed him some breathing techniques to help deactivate the sympathetic nervous system, which plays a strong role in producing the feeling one must urgently act on the impulse to overeat.  I also helped him more specifically label his emotions so he might gain more of a…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4WECr-13a","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4040"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4041,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4040\/revisions\/4041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}