It’s no secret humans despise feeling uncomfortable.
Whether it’s getting into an unexpected cold shower, feeling nauseous, or having to endure the seemingly never-ending pain of a papercut, we learn to avoid and push away that discomfort.
Humans also eschew uncomfortable emotions.
Whether it be feeling sad, nervous, or stressed, people will often claim they can’t ‘face’, ‘bear’, or ‘tolerate’ this emotional distress.
This intolerance often breeds a litany of problems, from blocking leading a fulfilling life and potentially harming various relationships – to not knowing how to deal with other crappy drivers on the road and how to react when you lose the TV remote.
More pertinently, it leads people to use food as a coping mechanism. Not only does this exacerbate that initial emotional discomfort but compounds an unhealthy relationship with food and bodies.
There lies a hidden truth within this within this emotional distress, however:
There is a salient difference between regarding unpleasant emotions as unbearable and needing to get rid of them and disliking unpleasant emotions but simultaneously accepting their inevitably and, instead, riding their tumultuous nature.
When we can work towards the latter, we start to cultivate healthier relationships, make progress with skills and behaviours, and, importantly, avoid turning to the cakes, sweets, and chocolate to deal with uncomfortable feelings and sensations.
Here’s how:
What Is Distress Intolerance?
Distress intolerance is defined as:
“A perceived inability to fully experience unpleasant, aversive or uncomfortable emotions, and is often accompanied by a desperate need to escape those uncomfortable emotions.”
Difficulties tolerating distress are often linked to a fear of experiencing ‘negative’ emotions.
-> It’s feeling overwhelmed and telling yourself to ‘stop being so stupid’.
-> It’s feeling angry and avoiding confrontation with your partner.
-> It’s feeling sad and turning to a nice big glass of refreshing wine.
It is not necessarily the intensity of the emotion itself but how much you fear it, how unpleasant it feels, how unbearable it seems, and how much you want to escape it that determines if you are intolerant of distress.
It’s also important to note that a ‘negative emotion’ in itself is not necessarily distressing.
We only begin to feel distressed when we evaluate our emotional experience as aversive.
For example, some people don’t mind feeling sad because it cultivates creative energy, or they may hold the attitude that ‘it’s good to cry every now and then’.
Emotions can be positive or negative depending on the situation and how we respond to them.
The myth of negative or positive emotions will actually make you less emotionally skilled, less competent, less functional — and, in the long run, less happy.
And herein lies part of the problem: you’ll tend to focus on the alleged positive ones and avoid the supposed negative ones, ruining your chances of developing a full range of emotional and social skills.
The Distress Intolerance Paradox
It appears to make sense to avoid and escape things that make us feel uncomfortable. Why would we want to feel angry, overwhelmed, or sad?
Unfortunately, when we apply this principle of escapism with emotions, it seems to backfire.
Avoiding your feelings never ends the way you want it to. In fact, the more you avoid distress or ‘will’ it to disappear, the worse it becomes.
Our bodies interpret avoidance as confirmation of danger, which triggers our internal alert system. The more energy we use to push emotions like anxiety or anger or sadness away, the more powerfully those emotions will spring back up.
This is the paradoxical nature of distress intolerance: suppressing your emotions only exacerbates the feelings attached to them.
Trying to avoid feeling a certain feeling is like trying to avoid thinking of a horse dancing the jive in a pink tutu.
All you end up doing is ruminating over that emotion – or thinking of that horse dancing the jive in a pink tutu.
By removing judgment from any thoughts you have, however, you will actually dampen their effect.
We benefit from substituting the notion of ‘I need to control my thoughts’ with ‘My thoughts are just thoughts’.
Instead of thinking, ‘I need to control my emotions’, we can remind ourselves that ‘It’s normal to have positive emotions and also normal to have negative emotions’.
Acceptance liberates us to fulfil a different path.
A Nice List Of Your Distress Intolerance Beliefs
Distress intolerance maintains a stronghold over people’s lives due to certain beliefs they have developed about experiencing negative emotions.
These beliefs tend to centre on the notion that negative emotion is ‘bad’ in some way. That they’re unbearable, unacceptable, or will lead to disastrous consequences.
These beliefs tend to make any negative emotions a highly distressing emotional experience and will often lead to more damaging situations in the future.
Here are a few common examples:
People will also attempt to evade their feelings in a number of ways.
Whether it be ‘situational avoidance’ – avoiding studying because you’re frustrated – or ‘suppression’ – telling yourself to ‘stop it’ as soon as you feel any distress – there are a number of ways people avoid the feelings at hand.
It has been shown repeatedly, for example, that, when dieters try to suppress their thoughts, they experience a significant thought rebound.
When the dieters in one study were told to just think about their intention to eat chocolate, however, they ate twice as fewer chocolates as when they tried not to think about chocolate before a taste test.
They were able to uncouple the act of eating chocolate from their desire to do so.
More commonly, people will also use ‘numbing and withdrawing’ strategies, often using food as their coping mechanism.
Its why people will often snack, overeat, or even binge eat to avoid confronting difficult emotions.
Unfortunately, food seldom fulfils our emotional or mental needs.
Not only do we assume we’re hungry and cannot discern what emotions we’re actually feeling, but working our way through the snack cupboard leads to the discomfort of overeating and experiencing those original emotions.
If we’ve continually learned to react in a ‘solution-based’ manner to emotions (i.e., not allowing time and space to feel something first), it sends the message that feelings are there to be solved, not felt.
And the easiest way to ‘solve’ an emotion is through eating and drinking.
If the emotion hasn’t had time to be recognised, sat with, and discharged, you likely haven’t solved the problem.
If you’re feeling sad but tell yourself, ‘What’s the point in feeling sad?’ – subsequently turning to food – does that remove the sadness or ensure you now feel more frustrated for feeling upset – and for eating?
Suppressing those feelings leads to a lack of control.
And the cycle quickly starts again.
The Problem With Avoiding Emotional Distress
It may be possible to suppress thoughts in the short term. But, while relying on thought suppression seems to run smoothly, seldom does that fragile restraint continue to outlast such deafening desires.
In the long term, however, such avoidance falls apart:
-> The escape strategy itself is damaging and causes other problems in your life
-> Your negative emotions typically get worse because you feel you haven’t ‘coped well’
-> By continually relying on your escape strategy, you fail to develop other, more beneficial ways of tolerating emotional distress
-> You never have the opportunity to stay with the emotional distress and, therefore, challenge the beliefs you hold about not being able to tolerate negative emotions
This ultimately boils down to emotional dysregulation: An inability to respond flexibly to and manage emotional states, resulting in intense and prolonged emotional reactions that deviate from social norms.
The Distress Intolerance Model
Your distress intolerance usually follows this pattern:
-> Trigger
Your trigger can be ‘big’ (e.g., breaking up with your partner) or ‘small’ (e.g., watching a distressing story on TV).
Either internal (e.g., noticing a thought, memory, emotion, or physical sensation etc.) or external (e.g., a particular situation, event, person, place, cue, etc.).
-> Negative Emotion
You start to feel some kind of emotion.
Remember, the emotion in and of itself is not necessarily distressing unless we also hold distress-intolerant beliefs which tell us the emotion is bad in some way and must be stopped.
For example, “I can’t stand this” or “I hate this feeling”.
-> Distress
As a result, we start to experience the emotion as highly distressing and upsetting.
You become ravaged with guilt and hopelessness, leading to further negative emotions, including a stronger response to the one that started the pattern.
-> Avoidance
You engage in unhelpful escape methods, whether it be eating, removing yourself from the situation, or harmful releases.
These maladaptive emotional regulation strategies mean it’s difficult to soothe yourself when you feel overwhelmed, sad, or angry, and you find it hard to return to ‘normal’ after these feelings arise.
-> Consequence
Escaping from that distress only works in the short term.
In the long-term, the discomfort gets worse, creates bigger life problems, and the opportunity to develop healthy ways to tolerate negative emotions or to test if your fears about experiencing a particular negative emotion are truly valid is missed.
Learning To Regulate Distress
Emotional tolerance refers to the ability to sit still with discomfort instead of reaching for food, or anything else, and using it as a buffer.
Tolerance for negative emotions helps you become the eye of the storm instead of getting swept into compulsion.
Emotional discomfort is impossible to get rid of, as it is an inevitable part of being human. Start learning to live with it, instead, and not let the fear of distress restrict how you live your life.
The more comprehensive the range of feelings we can regulate – if we can manage the frustration, disappointment, envy, and sadness – the more space we have to cultivate happiness and avoid reaching for food as the first port of call.
The act of pausing to explore your emotions with curiosity and patience is a crucial step in refining both emotional awareness and tolerance.
With each practice, you’re not only becoming more adept at recognising your emotions but also more resilient in facing them without succumbing to compulsion.
This consistent effort is what will lead to a long-term solution to compulsive eating.
Practicing Defusion
Imagine yourself as a tiny insect, sitting on a leaf floating down a stream. What would you see and feel?
Perhaps you’d see the green of the leaf, the blue and white of the sky, and feel the movement of the running water. If you left the leaf, to perch yourself on the edge of a tree, you’d now be able to see many more leaves floating alongside the one you were just on.
When you were seated on that one leaf, that was all you could see and feel. However, looking down on the stream from above allowed you to observe other numerous leaves also floating along.
You were able to zoom out and survey the many additional objects, colours, and activities going on apace with the one leaf you were previously sat on.
That one leaf is representative of your one, often negative, thought/emotion in that moment.
For example, craving a piece of chocolate, wanting to avoid the gym, or believing you’re a failure.
The rest of the stream represents the many other thoughts and events that are also happening – for example, the desire for a piece of fruit, or remembering your values.
Gaining distance from the one leaf denoting a single thought, feeling, or sensation – and recognising it for what it is – allows you to make decisions aligned with reality.
You’re not confined to that one emotion in that given moment because you know there are many other, concurrent thoughts and sensations around you.
By allowing your mind to identify any negative thoughts, you can reframe them in a positive way and choose alternative behaviours.
This is what’s known as defusion.
Allowing yourself to feel a desire enables you to then act independently of the experience.
When you’re ‘fused’ with your thoughts and feelings, you automatically act on them (for example, craving, then immediately also devouring the chocolate). When you’re ‘defused’ from your thoughts and feelings, you can act independently from them (craving but not devouring the chocolate).
Defusion is simply separating yourself – and your actions – from your thoughts.
How To Practice Defusion And Other Emotional Eating Coping Mechanisms
If we can focus on embracing irrepressible feelings, we’ll not only be more content with our healthy eating efforts, but also able to keep moving forward in the face of adversity.
Studies have shown that accepting one’s thoughts and feelings as normal – rather than as things that necessarily need to be changed – predicts greater life satisfaction, as well as reducing stress and sadness.
Rather than avoiding emotions we’d rather not face, we need to make a shift.
We need to say to ourselves, “[Anxiety/anger/sadness] is not my enemy. My [anxiety/anger/sadness] is allowed to be here. I can tolerate my discomfort.”
So, how can we do this?
Luckily, I created my Emotional Eating Workbook exactly for this reason.
When you purchase your copy – packed with over twenty specific emotional eating exercises and all the information you need to conquer your emotional eating tendencies – you’ll finally be armed with the tools and strategies to not only accept and deal with your emotions in a healthy way, but also be able to avoid turning to the cake and wine as your primary coping mechanism.
-> Do you want a step-by-step and clear-cut process to always turn to when you find yourself embroiled in a surge of uncomfortable and burning emotions?
- Then you’ll want a copy of the unique and straightforward ‘Emotional Eating Flowchart’ that you can carry around with you – and implement – wherever you go or whatever you’re doing (Page 19)
-> Do you want to learn how to identify and then separate yourself from the whirlwind of thoughts and feelings that prevent you from doing the things you actually want to do?
- Then you’ll want to learn the exact strategies to ‘Identify & Label Your Emotions‘ and ‘Defuse From Your Thoughts’ (Pages 64 and 84)
-> Are you still seeking that instant gratification from food, and, before you know it, finding yourself 3000 calories down and ravaged by feelings of guilt but don’t know how to combat those cravings?
- Then you’ll want to practice and implement the bulletproof ‘Surf Your Urge’ and ‘Acknowledge, Validate, & Permit’ strategies (Pages 87 and 88)
-> Do you want to recognise, embrace, and then actually know what to do with your ‘emotional eating triggers?’
- Then you’ll want to familiarise yourself with all the possible ‘Emotional Eating Triggers’ and the ‘Reasons for Overeating Pyramid’ to decipher what’s going on in YOUR life (Pages 27 and 31)
-> Do you want to completely overhaul your beliefs around food and your emotions, so you’re not left vulnerable to those relentless and guileful thoughts and can actually make calm, rational decisions in the midst of an emotional storm?
- Then you’ll want to work on and practice the ‘Dispute Your Beliefs’ and ‘Identifying Cognitive Distortions’activities (Pages 95 and 101)
-> Do you want to avoid using food, alcohol, and anything else lurking in your cupboards as your coping mechanism when shit hits the fan, and you don’t know how to deal with the stresses of daily life?
- Then you’ll want to teach yourself about ‘Self-Enjoyment Schedules’ and ‘Self-Compassion Tactics’ (Pages 117 and 124)
You can grab your copy by heading here:
The Emotional Eating Workbook
