Top 9 Emotions that lead to addiction

[MajestyJo]

Top Emotions that lead to overeating/addiction


#1 Stress - In a September 29, 2003, the Washington Post documented a study that finally makes the link between stress and our need for comfort food. "In highly industrialized countries, people do apparently seem to feel more stressed -- more under the gun," said Mary F. Dallman, a professor of physiology at the University of California at San Francisco, who outlined her theory in a paper to be published in an upcoming issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"And they certainly are eating a lot more." It is no joke, when you feel stress out you reach for "comfort food" in an attempt to get grounded again and regain your bearings. One of the options to profoundly eradicate stress is meditation. While there are scores of medical benefit to meditation, the key regarding overeating is that there is no such thing as a calm and harmonious bingeing.


#2 Boredom - Boredom is the facade we use to avoid other hidden emotions, such as disappointment, shame, anxiety, the blues or frustration. It is easy to formulate activities to avoid the boredom but in the end any activities is a form of self-rejection, a mere postponement, and for an emotional eating a postponement to over-eat. The key is to ask: "What am I trying to avoid?" "What emotional pain am I running away from?" It is not a matter of formulating any activities but of learning to be with the hidden pain.


#3 Loneliness - Loneliness is the profound separation we feel in this society, sometimes even amidst a crowd or in the middle of a party. Calling a friend instead of blindly overeating does help. Building deep, meaningful relationships is not only important while losing weight, it is one of the cornerstones of a full and meaningful life. But to create the most healing insight we have to be willing to look at our side of the equation when it comes to having meaningful and nurturing friendships. Do we feel worth loving? Do we feel we are worth having as a friend? Do we have issues of inadequacy? Only when we own and understand these questions can we feel connected to our communities, churches, families, friends, neighbors, every human being that we contact on a daily basis. Loneliness at its source is the ultimate form of self-rejection. For many of us is the disappointment of not being good enough. Through the healing power of self-love we can finally drive out the emptiness that we want to fill with food.


#4 Anxiety - Underlying much of our personal anxiety is fear. The fear that we are not good enough, attractive enough, smart enough. Those fears then motivate many of us to take on more than any human being should take on. The initial step to lowering our anxiety is to clarify our priorities. If we don't find ourselves as the primary priority in our lives, we have to examine why that is and also define what is ‘quality of life’ for us. Choices to meditate, exercise, choose foods to support our vitality are driven by self-love. And the manifestation of self-love is how we choose to invest our time. Having ourselves as a priority keep us from over-committing our time at work, with our kids, spouses, house chores, volunteering and wasting time with unfulfilling TV shows.


#5 Disappointment - In most cases pride gets in the way of us being able to with our disappointment. We must be willing to be with implication of why we are disappointed and feel the sadness, the shame, the lost of control, the helplessness. When we truly feel these emotions, the emotional hunger is totally eradicated. Hunger doesn't co-exist in a body when we are feeling our emotions in their full industrial strength.


# 6 Control - An issue that causes lots of anxiety is the desire to gain control over our environment and other people's behavior. We construct a world with specific rules and guidelines and when they don't measure up to our expectations our anxiety level goes up. We then need food to calm down. Once again we must go back to the fear underlying our control issues. Do you know how stressed out most of us get after being in traffic for thirty minutes longer than what they had anticipated? We must be either accepting of the traffic or of our need to be right about long a commute takes. Some of the fear is not based on control of the traffic but of being fired if we are late for work. Once I learn to get pass the anxiety and learn to sit with the underlying fear of the most horrible scenario, e.g., getting fired for being late, loosing my house, I was able to face the fear of not being able to find another job. Then, paradoxically, I felt a tremendous sense of peace. I was driven and motivated by my illusion of control and the only way I knew to cope with it was by eating.

# 7 Anger – It is not healthy, or normal, to live in constant conflict and having anger as one of the driving forces in our lives. The most profound step we can take is to discover the fuel that is feeding the fire. At its source anger is truly helplessness and until it is experience as such in our bodies, it will be repress with food.

# 8 The blues - The feeling that we don’t want to do anything, that nothing sounds appealing, the blues, does lead many of us to overeat. Whenever I sat with what masked itself as the blues, I felt a mixture of boredom, disappointment and sadness. There was never a pure and clear feeling that I could call the blues. So, like boredom and sadness, it must be confronted by not running away from it. We must learn to feel these feelings fully and unequivocally, that is the only way to extinguish the fuel that drives the emotional hunger.

# 9 Fatigue – When we are tired all of our resources are compromised and once we are too tired to invoke reason, we are too tired to say, “No”, to food. If you are chronically tired, the critical step is to remove the causes. The primary cause of chronic tiredness is due to not getting a good night sleep. This is typically caused by poor sleeping hygiene, lack of exercise and/or an overactive/stressed out mind that doesn’t seem to quiet down at sleep time. Sleep hygiene is having a fixed sleep and wake-up time, a cozy bedroom, no bedroom plants, and not drinking anything two hours prior to sleeping. Lack of exercise is typically attributed to the illusion of lack of time, when the reality is not making ourselves a priority, which is truly lack of self-love. Meditation is a profound option to address the issue of a mind that refuses to quiet down at sleep time. a crowd or in the middle of a party. Calling a friend instead of blindly overeating does help. Building deep, meaningful relationships is not only important while losing weight, it is one of the cornerstones of a full and meaningful life. But to create the most healing insight we have to be willing to look at our side of the equation when it comes to having meaningful and nurturing friendships. Do we feel worth loving? Do we feel we are worth having as a friend? Do we have issues of inadequacy?


Only when we own and understand these questions can we feel connected to our communities, churches, families, friends, neighbors, every human being that we contact on a daily basis. Loneliness at its source is the ultimate form of self-rejection. For many of us is the disappointment of not being good enough. Through the healing power of self-love we can finally drive out the emptiness that we want to fill with food.

How many times I have 'ate' to someone else's health, with an attitude of "I'll just show them, I don't care!"

A drug is a drug. I had the same feelings when it came to pills and alcohol. Food can be a drug, if it becomes an obsessive, compulsive dis-ease that makes our life unmanageable and jeopardizes our lives. Emotions like resentment, guilt, anger, shame, blame, etc. can lead us reach out for something to fill the void, to help us cope, or that something that makes us feel better. We need to face everything and recover.

A good list to go through when doing a 10th Step.