Common Emotional Eating Triggers to Avoid

If you are just starting out with an attempt to reduce your emotional eating responses, then you may already know a few issues causing it. For example, you may know that stress can trigger emotional eating responses.

What you may not know is that there are several common triggers to emotional eating that you may not be aware of in your own life. Here are a few of them, what you should know about reducing each one, and how you can avoid them in the future to help reduce emotional eating.

Toxic People

Everyone has someone in their life, a co-worker or even friend, that causes ongoing stress. They may do this with actions, with words, or both. Either way they bring a toxic environment to your life by causing constant emotional stress.

Ideally you would want to simply move these people out of your life. Unfortunately, you may not be able to remove them completely, leaving them still evident in your life as a trigger. In this case, acknowledging they are a toxic person in your life will help. Once you acknowledge this, you can move to removing your emotions from them. By not giving them the power to hurt or stress you, you can slowly remove them as a trigger from your day.

Overloading Your Schedule

One of the more common emotional eating triggers is to overload your schedule. You say yes to the parent teacher party, the church social, becoming a team leader on an upcoming project, and working extra to make those holiday expenses you have for gifts and family. When you add on too much to your schedule, you may begin to overlook the fact you can say no to certain things and back out of those commitments.

Everything begins to feel like something you have to do instead of something you wanted to do. To avoid this trigger, sit down and look at your schedule. Fill in your day with your sleep hours and work first. Then start adding things in according to priority, making sure you leave at least an hour at the start and end of each day for quiet downtime. Stick to that schedule. If something you want to do fits in, then add it. If not, then say no.

Negative Thoughts and Emotions

There are certain things in your life that cause you to have negative thoughts and emotions. In most cases, you likely deal with these by simply letting them run through your mind and thinking they will not affect your eating. A few minutes to a few hours later, you are in the middle of an emotional eating binge. Instead of letting the thoughts run through your hard, start writing them down.

You don’t have to journal about them. Simply write them down, dictate them into your phone, or make note of them. Go back to them and listen to or read what you noted. Now, look for what triggered those thoughts. Once you recognize the thoughts and emotions, then trace them to the trigger, you can remove the thoughts and replace them with something positive.

The key point to remember is to focus on you first. Even if you are a mother, father, or caregiver you should make sure you are taking care of yourself first. Do what is best for you, so you can be the best for others. To do this, start with avoiding these common triggers and redirecting them out of your life or to more positive directions.

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