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With summer coming to a close, it’s time to shift from vacation mode to school and work. The blissful ease of beach days, barbecues, and bonfires gives way to non-stop projects and tight deadlines.
As a result, work isn’t the only thing ramping up: so are your stress levels, along with some less-than-healthy coping strategies.
But who can blame you? Whatever self-control you have left after a long workday is sapped in evening traffic…And when you get home hangry and exhausted, those chips on the counter feel way more comforting than your meal-prepped chicken and veggies.
The only catch: reaching the bottom of the family-sized bag of Lay’s brings more remorse than comfort, sabotaging your diet one day at a time.
If you’re ready to finally break the cycle of emotional eating, you’re in the right place. This article will equip you with actionable tips to break the bad habit for good–so you can cultivate a healthier relationship with food and hit your diet goals even during high-stress seasons.
Emotional eating often operates on autopilot: one minute you’re arguing with your partner, and the next you’re half-way through a pint of ice cream.
As such, stress eating follows the same habit loop as any type of habit, which can be harnessed to help stop it:
The first step to changing the behavior is awareness. And that awareness goes beyond the simple–but crucial–acknowledgement that you do, indeed, engage in stress eating. It also involves observing your behavior mindfully, so you can identify patterns over time.
Maybe your emotional eating only happens when you’re feeling overwhelmed by work deadlines, or experiencing anxiety around a presentation or exam. You might find that a specific situation reliably spurs stress eating–like evening work calls, driving in traffic, or talking with that annoying co-worker.
To help you get a more granular idea of your triggers and trends, consider keeping a journal of your hunger levels, eating behaviors, emotions, and life events.
Once you’ve gathered sufficient awareness around your stress eating behaviors, you can work on preventing them with a few proactive changes:
While not always the most feasible strategy, it can be helpful to minimize your exposure to events that consistently cause stress eating. For instance, if traffic is your main trigger, you could leave work earlier or later so as to avoid it–or consider listening to a fun podcast or calming music in the car to make traffic feel less stressful.
You can’t turn to cookies or candy for comfort if they aren’t in your house. That said, if you’re not ready to remove those items from your kitchen, you can also make them less accessible and visible–for instance, by moving your go-to comfort foods to the back of the cabinet or fridge. You can also purchase single-serving packages, which you’re likely to binge on than family-sized options.
Stress is an inevitable part of life, so it’s best to have a plan in place for when you do feel the urge to stress eat. Instead of using sheer willpower to suppress the bad habit, aim to swap stress eating for a healthier alternative: sip on some warm tea, go for a walk, or do a quick meditation. Once you’ve decided on a better routine, frame it in the form of an implementation intention–an if-then statement that more concretely specifies your strategy. For instance, “If I feel the urge to eat after a stressful work mee I will make a warm cup of chamomile tea.” Planning ahead with implementation intentions removes last-minute decision-making when stressed.
Preparation is only part of the story if you’re looking to stop stress eating. You also need to navigate your real-time stress response skillfully. Here are five tips you can implement when you’re in the midst of stress and striving to break the cycle:
When you feel the urge to stress eat, take a mindful moment to observe what’s really going on. What are you feeling? Are you truly hungry–or are you feeling anxious, frustrated, or sad?
Many stress eaters have poor emotional awareness and trouble tuning into their body’s signals, which may cause them to confuse stress with real hunger. Practicing mindfulness can make you better at detecting internal hunger cues and differentiating emotions, thereby reducing emotional eating to support better weight management.
Staying mindful during meals is just as important, so aim to eat without distractions and chew your food both slowly and thoroughly.
As you become aware of your emotional experience and impulse to stress eat, label it with words. You can even say out loud, “I’m feeling overwhelmed right now and really want to eat some candy for comfort.” Using language to describe your feelings not only reinforces self-awareness, but also helps activate the prefrontal cortex–a brain region essential for decision-making, self-control, and emotion regulation.
Unpleasant emotions are a normal part of the human experience–not something to be avoided. With stress eating, food offers an escape or distraction from these feelings. But what you resist persists: avoiding negative emotions actually tends to magnify them. A better approach? Accepting your emotional experience as it is, and surfing the wave until it passes.
Mistakes, like negative emotions, are inherent to the human condition. Caving to your cravings one time won’t undo all your progress. Instead of using one slip-up as an excuse to demolish your diet, let go and move on. Better yet, try to learn from the experience by figuring out what went wrong and how to avoid repeating it.
Instances of emotional eating are frequently followed by shame and guilt, which only perpetuate the bad habit. To help break the cycle, show yourself kindness and remind yourself that you aren’t alone. In fact, roughly one in two people struggle with stress eating. Fortunately, self-compassion has been found to support better eating behaviors and can prevent you from going off the rails after an initial indulgence.
When school and work return in full force, stress is unavoidable.
And although food may be your go-to during tough times, it isn’t the solution: it’s a temporary relief that only reinforces the cycle of stress eating.
Such an ingrained behavior won’t dissolve overnight. But like any habit, it can be unlearned with the right approach.
By building awareness, planning ahead, and adopting healthier stress coping strategies, you can break free of emotional eating, one choice at a time.
Choose acceptance over avoidance; mindfulness over distraction; self-compassion over shame.
By learning to regulate your emotions, you’re doing more than just breaking a bad habit. You’re building a healthy relationship with your emotions, with food, and–ultimately–with yourself.
Looking for a flexible, science-backed tool to stay on track–even when life gets stressful? Download the Carbon app for a simple, stress-free approach that works with your life, not against it.
