If you’ve ever found yourself standing at the refrigerator grasping for something to eat when you’re not actually hungry, you’re far from alone. Emotional eating is not only extremely common — it’s NORMAL and WISE. So how can you reduce shame around emotional eating?

In a culture that is terrified of fatness, emotional eating is often positioned as something to overcome, defeat, resist, or shame. That’s why emotional eating carries heavy stigma, painted as a personal failure or lack of willpower. But these shaming messages often backfire, fueling more pain and moving us further away from ourselves in the process.

In this post, we explore emotional eating through a more compassionate lens. When we understand where the behavior stems from, new insights emerge for relating to it kindly rather than berating ourselves. Self-compassion, not shame, invites us to return home to ourselves.

As infants, we’re born with only one way to regulate overwhelming feelings — by crying until our overwhelming sensations get soothed through caretakers’ food and nurturing. Food is not only our first experience of regulating difficult emotions, but getting fed is our primary source of touch, bonding, attachment, and closeness.

Emotional eating is crucial to healthy development of our body, brain, nervous system, and ability to relate with others.

As we grow, many caregivers continue using food to calm fussy, bored, or distressed children. It’s also often a way to celebrate meaningful events and milestones like birthdays, graduations, baptisms, and team wins.

For many people throughout time, eating is ritual, culture, community, and belonging. Diane Poole Heller’s research shows that sharing in ingestion behaviors (eating and drinking together) is one of the five forms of contact nutrition that allows for co-regulation.

Food also stimulates the brain’s reward system, releasing feel-good neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins.

Our biological programming means eating can be a wise, trusted source of soothing ourselves, at least temporarily, rather than a personal failing or a lack of self-control. We were born with this pathway to regulate our emotions.

While food can briefly dampen negative emotions, it doesn’t resolve their underlying causes. But resolution isn’t always immediately possible and temporary relief may be exactly what’s needed in a given moment. Still, emotional eating won’t likely offer deeper healing. If an emotion gets stuffed down rather than processed, it eventually resurfaces, often amplified. This is how the cycle of emotional eating can move us away from agency and choice – a place where some people feel out of control and choiceless.

Because emotional eating is so vilified, shame and self-criticism tend to intensify as the cycle continues. The more someone berates themselves for lacking willpower or emotional fortitude, the more distress accumulates, which perpetuates more emotional eating.

Additionally, numbing one’s emotions through eating desensitizes someone to their own inner experiences. Over time it becomes harder to identify when hunger arises from genuine physiological need versus psychological triggers.

This is not to say emotional eating is bad, but a wise coping strategy can become a source of pain if other tools and options are not available.

We want to stress again that emotional eating is not bad or wrong. The goal should not be to remove it entirely from your toolbox for navigating life’s complexities.

Instead, if you find emotional eating triggers shame or you don’t have other ways to process and cope with intense emotions, it can help to practice turning towards your experiences with kindness and curiosity. You can learn to:

1) Recognize your emotions without judgment.

Emotions aren’t good or bad — they simply are data for your nervous system. All emotions serve protective functions for survival. The more curiosity and acceptance you can cultivate towards intense feelings, the less likely they are to get really big and overwhelming.

2) Identify your emotional hunger signals.

Pay attention to when you get cravings, binge, or eat mindlessly. What feelings were you experiencing beforehand? Anxiety, boredom, loneliness, fear? Get curious about underlying emotions you may have been trying to numb or avoid. Another question you can ask yourself is what am I really hungry for? Sometimes it’s touch, connection, love, safety, slowing down, or a desire to feel good. Turning towards your hunger with compassion can help you to suss out if your body is actually in need of food or if there’s something else that needs attention and food feels like the easiest stand-in. (And again, if, in the moment, food is what’s available, it’s OK to eat.)

3) Self-soothe with compassion

Rather than criticizing yourself for emotional eating, try responding with the care you’d show a dear friend or child in distress. Place a hand over your heart and offer yourself validation, soothing words, or a warm embrace. Pause and take some calming breaths. Nurture yourself through the difficult emotion. It can help to take a few bites of something to see if that satisfies you and then check back in. Sometimes we just need permission to eat the thing and once we have a bite or two, we feel satisfied and can move towards other coping strategies. Breaking up with the all-or-nothing, “this is the last time” rigid thinking can go a long way to opening up new, more nuanced possibilities.

4) Explore additional coping strategies.

Emotional eating is a valid, effective coping strategy. It does not need to be removed or banned from your toolbox. However, if it’s often the only option available to you, it can create a greater sense of agency and freedom to explore additional coping strategies for when things feel hard or overwhelming. A few things to try might include listening to music, journaling, calling a friend, chatting in an online forum, getting outside, playing a game, engaging in a creative activity, meditating, stretching, dancing, or shaking/moving energy through your body.

The more we beat ourselves up, the deeper we reinforce patterns of shame, self-criticism, and unworthiness.

Emotional eating becomes problematic when other parts of your life feel unfulfilling or stressful. Rather than judging yourself, consider what needs exist within you that you’re seeking to meet or mute feelings about. Listen to your body’s wisdom — it may be signaling therapeutic work is needed in areas like:

• – Processing grief, trauma, or adverse childhood experiences
• – Treating depression, anxiety, or other mental health struggles
• – Finding more work-life balance and stress management tools
• – Improving self-esteem, assertiveness, and boundary setting
• – Prioritizing self-nurturing and meaningful self-expression

A trained therapist can help you to reduce shame, increase self-compassion, and develop a wider range of tools and strategies for the inevitable overwhelm of life inside of capitalism and systemic oppression.

And remember – this is not a you thing. It is a human thing that is part of normal eating. Eating to soothe, to celebrate, to mourn, to connect and communicate is something communities and families have done for millenia. We often feel bad about our emotional eating because it’s done in secret. Try emotional eating alongside others and see how it transforms the experience from one of shame to one of connection and meaning.