Emotional Eating: Definition & How to Overcome It

By Charlie Huntington, M.A., Ph. D. Candidate
​Reviewed by Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.
Emotional eating is a common, often unconscious behavior, with real consequences for our waistlines and our moods. Read on to learn what emotional eating is and how to overcome it.
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Have you ever casually told somebody that you were going to go “eat your feelings”? Have you come home late from work and ended up eating something entirely different from what you planned to have for dinner? Or maybe you have a ritual involving your favorite TV show and cookies, ice cream, or potato chips?​​
Feelings and eating are closely connected for virtually all of us. For Americans, the taste of a hot dog might evoke the feelings of a happy summer’s day, while roast turkey might conjure up warm memories of Thanksgiving dinners past. But for many of us, it’s not just positive emotions that are associated with foods. Sometimes our emotions aren’t the byproduct of eating, but the driving force behind it. In this article, you’ll learn about the definition and scientific background of this behavior, called emotional eating, as well as what you can do with a therapist or on your own to overcome emotional eating.
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What Is Emotional Eating? (A Definition)

Emotional eating is when we eat as a response to experiencing negative emotions or stress (Arnow et al., 1994). Eating food when we feel bad – especially foods that are highly rewarding and satisfying, such as those high in fat or sugar – gives us temporary relief from the negative emotions we’re experiencing. In fact, there are few solutions for negative feelings that are more potent and more easily enacted than grabbing some comfort food.

Emotional eating, in other words, is driven by emotions, not by hunger. People can emotionally eat when they are already full or ate recently. I’ll tell you what this looks like for me: Sometimes I arrive home after dinner out with some friends, feeling pleasantly full from our meal together. However, as I get home, I start to feel lonely; I wish the evening wasn’t over and that I was still with my friends. When I notice that my housemate made cookies while I was out, I can’t help but think about how eating a couple would give me a little mood boost. Maybe then I wouldn’t miss my friends as much.

Examples of Emotional Eating

Examples of emotional eating abound in our lives. What might first come to mind is the stereotypical romantic comedy scene of a woman returning home from an unsuccessful date and plopping down on the couch with a pint of ice cream to watch an old movie. Or you might think of a football fan who can’t stop eating the chips and dip as his team tries to stage a last-minute rally to win the game.

Although situations like these are often played for laughs in TV and the movies, moments of emotional eating are often quite private and personal. It could be your work colleague wolfing down another doughnut in their office before they have to make a big presentation, a security guard finishing a whole bag of potato chips out of boredom, or an overworked therapist sneaking in handfuls of dark chocolate between clients.
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I’ll share another example from my own life. Any time I attend an event with free food that is full of people I don’t know, I’m liable to overeat. While I might rationalize my behavior and say to myself, “I’m not sure what to do with my hands” or “this food is just too tasty to go to waste”, deep down I’m feeling a little socially anxious and choosing to regulate that anxiety by eating. Since the food I’m eating is probably salty and high in carbohydrates or fat, I’m liable to overeat while I’m at it, too.

Signs of Emotional Eating

We can identify whether emotional eating is happening by paying attention to the emotional context of our eating. Any situation that involves negative emotions could trigger somebody to emotionally eat. This is because two common strategies we use to deal with negative feelings – strategies that are more common in people who emotionally eat (Spoor et al., 2007) – are trying to cope with the emotion directly or avoiding the emotion altogether. In other words, we emotionally eat to head off a bad feeling that’s coming down the road, or deal with one that’s already here.

You can try this out on yourself. Try to think of the last time you ate when you clearly weren’t hungry. Were you craving a high-fat or high-sugar food for no reason you could identify (Ganley, 1989)? Perhaps you were feeling something, even slightly, that you weren’t quite aware of. Maybe you were getting bored of your current work task, fixated on a conversation from the day before, or frustrated by the behavior of one of your children.

Emotional eating is also more common in people who have trouble identifying their feelings, regulating their emotions, and who are highly susceptible to getting stressed out (van Strien, 2018). One study found some gender differences in the likelihood of emotional eating: women were more likely to emotionally eat when stressed out, while men were more likely to emotionally eat when bored or anxious (Bennett et al., 2012).

Is Emotional Eating a Disorder?

Emotional eating is not an official disorder you can find in a medical volume such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (commonly referred to as the DSM). However, it functions in a similar way to “traditional” eating disorders such as binge-eating disorder (BED). Researchers have found that many people with BED also are emotional eaters, but not all of them. And the reverse is true as well: most emotional eaters do not have a diagnosed eating disorder (Lindeman & Stark, 2001).
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While emotional eating isn’t a disorder, people who emotionally eat are more likely to be overweight or obese (Frayn & Knauper, 2017). They are also at greater risk of becoming someone who binge eats than are people who don’t emotionally eat (Arnow et al., 1994; Ricca et al., 2009).

Emotional Eating Quiz

Here is a scale I created for you to get a sense of how much of a role emotional eating might play in your life. Note down the response that best answers how often that statement is true for you. Then add up your total. The bigger the sum is, the more emotional eating you probably engage in.
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Rarely or Never (1), Occasionally (2), Sometimes (3), Often (4)

  1. I often eat more of a food than I planned to.
  2. When I feel depressed or sad, I find myself eating to feel better.
  3. If I’m bored, eating is one of the first things I think of doing.
  4. In stressful times, I eat more.
  5. If I’m alone, I’m likely to eat larger amounts of my favorite foods than I would if I was around other people.
  6. It’s hard to control my eating late at night, or after a long day of work.
  7. There are particular foods I find myself craving again and again.
  8. I can calm myself down from anger or anxiety by eating.

How to Stop Emotional Eating

The following are some science-based steps to reducing your emotional eating.

1)    Get in touch with your hunger signals. Some people may emotionally eat because they are not aware of the signals that their body is actually hungry (Tan & Chow, 2014). For example, some people may misinterpret their body’s reaction to stress as a signal that they need to eat. Or, you may have difficulty noticing signs that you have eaten enough, which will make it harder to recognize emotional eating as unnecessary.  

2)    Get suspicious of your impulse to eat. First, a caveat: this is not a recommendation that you second-guess every thought about food you have. However, it is clear that people who emotionally eat may not recognize the link between their emotional state and their urge to eat (Kemp & Kopp, 2011). So my advice is simple: the next time you’re hungry and it’s not a mealtime, get curious: what else am I experiencing right now? Are there feelings I’m having but not really acknowledging? If I ate something, would that feeling go away?
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3)    Minimize temptation. You’ve probably never heard anybody complain that they went overboard on mindlessly eating kale, have you? The foods that most of us crave when we emotionally eat are tempting for good reason: they deliver a quick, powerful rush of satisfaction (Ganley, 1989). If you want to reduce the likelihood that you will emotionally eat, you may need to remove some of the chief suspects – your favorite snack foods – from your home, your office, or even your car. This is something I’ve personally experienced: I can only emotionally eat potato chips, brownies, or pretzels if I actually buy and bring them home, so I do my best not to.  ​

What to Do Instead of Emotional Eating

If you think you’re about to emotionally eat, or you already are doing it, name the behavior to yourself. It is powerful to simply state the reality of one’s situation. To return to my earlier example: “I was feeling sad about our fun night together being over, and now I’m realizing that I want to eat this leftover slice of pizza. I’m not actually hungry – I just don’t want to feel sad.”

Then, to the best of your ability, let yourself express the feeling. Really feel it. When I’m sad about being alone at the end of the night, I try to step into the feeling: “It makes sense that I feel this way. I was having lots of fun with my friends, and it’s a letdown to end the night alone. I will probably feel better in the morning, but right now I feel lonely.”

Finally, I would suggest trying out one of your healthier coping strategies. Instead of eating, write in your journal, look at silly cat memes, or take a refreshing shower. In the situation I’ve just described, I might text one of those friends to thank them for a special time, or look at my calendar to remind myself that my next social engagement isn’t far away.

If you’d like a more detailed plan for tackling your emotional eating, I recommend watching the video below. Many of us have been spending more and more time at home since the COVID-19 pandemic began. This can cause more stress and leave us more vulnerable to our stocked pantries and refrigerators. If you’ve been struggling with emotional eating during the pandemic, you’re far from alone – know that this video is just one of many excellent resources available to you online.

Video: How to Take Control of Emotional Eating

Therapy for Emotional Eating

Although emotional eating is not an official mental health disorder, many therapeutic methods for treating emotional eating have been developed. First of all, interventions that use mindfulness meditation are known to help people reduce their emotional eating (Katterman et al., 2014). Through building mindfulness skills, self-acceptance, and emotional awareness, people can become more aware of what triggers them to want to emotionally eat, then respond more effectively to those negative emotions (Kristeller et al., 2014).

Another intervention has used elements of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to treat emotional eating (Forman et al., 2013). In this treatment, participants focus on learning to tolerate distressing feelings, become aware of their experience, and act in ways that align with their values.
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Finally, interventions that focus on skills such as emotion regulation can help people reduce their emotional eating (van Strien, 2018). Therapists have treated emotional eating effectively with emotion regulation and other tools from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, a type of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (Roosen et al., 2012).

Articles Related to Emotional Eating

Want to learn more? Here are some related articles that might be helpful.

Books Related to Emotional Eating

To keep learning, here are some books to explore:​​

Final Thoughts on Emotional Eating

All of us have likely engaged in emotional eating at some point. Food is so effective at changing our moods and so easy to access that it’s almost inevitable. I hope you do not feel shame or guilt if this article has helped you recognize that you are an emotional eater. I most certainly am, too.
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Thankfully, this is a behavioral pattern that we can recognize and change. Each time you catch yourself emotionally eating is an opportunity to learn something about yourself. What emotions are hard for you to handle? What other coping skills would you like to strengthen? With time and effort, you may see changes that go beyond your eating habits or your waistline.

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