Has this happened to you?
You go out with friends, and have a nice meal. You enjoy the company and the conversation, but when you get home the first thing you do is head to the fridge and find something to eat.
Despite having eaten a good dinner, you snack on one thing after the next, until your body is too tired and you head to bed.
If you double click on what happened here, you may find yourself experiencing some of the following:
There is too much emotional charge in your body, and with no way to be aware of what you are sensing or feeling, food comes in as a shield against anything that might be happening somatically or emotionally. This may be directly connected to the evening out, but can also be an accumulation from the events of your day.
You’re exquisitely sensitive and you’ve picked up on some uncomfortable dynamics around you. Perhaps a friend is struggling with something that resonates deeply on the body level, and now your body is unsettled, not knowing how to differentiate between what’s yours and not yours to feel.
There are unhelpful thoughts about the events of the night – “I should have said this differently…”, or “I should have worn my other dress…”. Silencing those thoughts and replacing them with thoughts about late night eating and the plans about tomorrow’s “better” way to eat is a habit that got formed a long time ago to protect from difficult thoughts.
You got overstimulated and can’t just rest right away. Depending on the venue, the commute and what you did, your sensory system may be completely overloaded. To come down from the stimulation, you may need to attend to your body and nervous system state, but food is a faster way to “just shut it all down and numb out”.
You need to process the day in relationship, but it’s late and there is no one to talk to.
In How to Find Peace with Food, my intro workshop, I teach about how we complete the stress response cycle – in relationship.
Whether you want to process the events of the day, or what happened over dinner – your nervous system is programmed to connect. When it’s late at night and everyone is done with their day, you may find yourself alone and unable to share what would help you complete the day and get settled for bed.
While skills like journaling are wonderful, they don’t stimulate the same nerves as speaking, laughing and crying while being witnessed by another human being.
Food on the other hand, directly, through the actions of chewing and swallowing, stimulates the same nerves mimicking the effect of connection. You’ve gotten the electrical fix and now you can sleep, just like a baby would.
There are as reasons to turn to food when full as there are human beings, so the list above does not pretend to be complete, but I hope it can start a new process inside of you.
A process of understanding just how perfectly we are wired both for connection and for protection!
with love and in peace with food:
Galina
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