Binge Eating and Emotional Intelligence: Enhancing Emotional Awareness in Recovery
It’s common for people who struggle with binge eating to have low emotional awareness. Whether you’re in San Diego, California, London, UK, Florida, or Texas, it’s helpful to cultivate emotional awareness, which propels binge eating disorder recovery. The thing is, emotions are hard. They can go deep and feel really overwhelming. So it’s important to learn how to identify AND manage your emotions in order to reduce and eliminate the binge eating episodes. Here are some strategies to do it.
How to Identify Your Emotions
When you grapple with binge eating, there are a lot of emotions. You just may not feel them. Emotions like shame, embarrassment, fear, and sadness swirl around, just beneath the surface. Feeling numb during and after a binge eating episode is a common state, and that numbness is all-consuming. So learning how to identify emotions other than numbness means that you’re digging deeper into WHY you are binge eating as well as WHAT it is covering up.
What Is an Emotion Wheel?
An emotion wheel is an excellent tool that I have my clients use when they are struggling with identifying their emotions. I tell them to download John Gottman’s Feelings Wheel, as it captures both the depth and breadth of emotions.
How to Manage Your Emotions
Learning how to manage your emotions is not for the faint of heart. It’s actually really challenging. That’s why it’s important to use proven methods to help you. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is one of the top strategies for you to use to deal with emotions, big or small.
What is Dialectical Behavior Therapy?
DBT is a therapeutic approach based in mindfulness. I define mindfulness as moment-to-moment, nonjudgmental acceptance. Created by Dr. Marsha Linehan and based on secularized Buddhist principles, DBT skills help you stay in the present moment instead of feeling anxious about your past or about the future. Using such skills also calm down your nervous system so that you are better able to manage your emotions and stay in your “wise mind” instead of feeling hijacked by your “emotion mind.”
A couple of popular DBT skills are distraction and opposite action. You use distraction when you feel overwhelmed with emotions and it seems like you’re falling down a rabbit hole. Distracting yourself by looking at cat and baby goat videos on youtube, playing with your pet, and listening to music can give your brain a break and help you calm down and get into wise mind.
You can perform opposite action when you are feeling distressed and overwhelmed and you sense the urge to binge eat or do other eating disorder behaviors. Think of it like a fishing line. The urge hooks into you and starts reeling you into the behavior. Doing opposite action means that you clip the line and do the exact opposite of what you felt the urge to do. So, if you feel the urge to binge eat, do something else like walk outside or splash cold water on your face. If you feel the urge to overexercise, call a friend or take a nap.
DBT skills are POWERFUL tools that will get you on your way to recovery from binge eating, and other eating disorders such as bulimia.
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Disclaimers for My Work in Body Image, Binge Eating, and My Virtual Online Binge Eating Program
*DR. MARIANNE-LAND’S BINGE EATING RECOVERY MEMBERSHIP PROGRAM is online binge-eating education and private virtual group support via a Facebook Group. The aim of this course is to help people reduce and eliminate any type of distressed eating, such as binge eating or binge/purge behaviors via education, behavioral changes, and mindset shifts. DR. MARIANNE-LAND’S BINGE EATING RECOVERY MEMBERSHIP PROGRAM is not a clinical eating disorder therapy or eating disorder treatment program and is not intended to serve as such. In them, Dr. Marianne Miller works from her role as a binge-eating coach, not as a binge-eating therapist.
**The ELITE BINGE EATING RECOVERY METHOD is virtual binge eating education and LIVE virtual coaching support. The goal of this program is to help people stop any type of distressed eating, such as binge eating or binge/purge behaviors via education, behavioral changes, and mindset shifts. The ELITE BINGE EATING RECOVERY METHOD is not a clinical eating disorder therapy or eating disorder treatment program and is not intended to serve as such. In them, Dr. Marianne Miller works from her role as a binge-eating coach, not as a binge-eating therapist.