Dr. Eliana Violetti
- Psychologist
- Psychotherapist
- Cognitive behavioral psychotherapy
- Functional Coach
Scientific research has found that, during the lockdown period, about 20% of the adult population developed psychological issues, mainly
depression, anxiety, sleep disorders and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
We were locked at home from one day to the next, between remote work, small children to take care of, worry for parents and family members often far away, work uncertainties, the break from sports and recreational activities, from our affective relationships, social deprivation, outings with friends and not always clear information.
All this generated, especially in more fragile subjects, a state of hyper-alertness with consequent loss of one's ability to manage stressful events.
The lockdown measure, both partial like the one we are living today, and total like the one experienced in March, has evoked feelings of alarm, sadness, worry, loneliness, which represent specific physiological reactions that can however turn into actual psychological disorders.
Lockdown meant for everyone losing the certainty of one's daily rhythms (from family ones to professional, from sports to spiritual), the fear of others, of contagion, of death, considerably changing our habits because we were forced to stay home.
We have lost our daily organization, that is those habits that engage us throughout the day, whether going to work, doing groceries, taking children to school, going to the gym, pursuing our passions. You slip into boredom, into not knowing what to do during the day anymore, and so to fill the time, you spend it on cooking, experimenting and eating.
Why eating?
"Eating" can relax, calm, give a sensation of instant well-being, helps us alleviate negative emotions but also prolong positive ones, because eating makes us feel good and we don't want that feeling to fade.
Therefore food becomes a source of immediate pleasure, a momentary escape from a distressing reality. When we talk about food in these cases, we are talking about "comfort food", that is foods that help us face and manage difficult situations.
It happens, then, to eat without being really hungry.
Imagine this behavior repeated over time and several times a day.
What happens if we eat without being hungry? We gain weight!
Most people who have problems with excess body weight eat without being hungry.
Food is always at the center of our attention: we eat for hunger, we eat at parties, we celebrate our birthdays with food, we offer food to our guests, we eat when we are happy, sad, nervous, stressed.
It is clear that we associate food with social and emotional events that have nothing to do with hunger.
There is no better solution than food when we want to "compensate" for negative emotions.
This behavior is called "emotional eating" and is an eating behavior in which food is used to make us feel better: eating to fill emotional "voids", rather than to fill the stomach.
It often happens without our awareness and automatically.
Unfortunately "emotional eating" does not solve our emotional problems, indeed it usually makes them worse.
Not only does the negative emotion remain but, on top of that, the guilt for having eaten "too much" or for having eaten unnecessary or even harmful things adds up.
Learning to recognize the emotion that triggers emotional eating behavior is the first step to manage this dependence on food and change the habits that have sabotaged our diets in the past.
To be clear: using food, occasionally, to feel better, is not in itself a wrong thing. When, however, it happens often and every time you are angry, tired, disappointed, the first impulse is to open the fridge, then it is necessary to understand the reasons for this behavior and address it.
In other words, you eat when the negative emotion is not "labeled".
In light of this second lockdown, how can we avoid falling back into the vortex of emotional eating?
Diet alone is not enough because if we cannot understand what triggers emotional hunger, we fall into the same mistakes, whether it is a lockdown or a stressful situation.
Diet professionals rarely explain how to replace food with other pleasant activities able to comfort us, nor how to face emotional hunger; without these elements, losing weight and maintaining it over time becomes quite difficult.
My role as a psychologist within the EasyNature program is to offer help and support to the diet; I use tools that help manage problematic eating behaviors.
Therefore, to face this second lockdown, even if partial, we will need to use the techniques of "strategies to face emotional hunger":
- Distinguish physical hunger from emotional hunger by paying attention to the hunger signals coming from your stomach; eat only if and when you are hungry.
- Set up your home and work environment for the diet, eliminating the "comfort foods" that make you lose control, and replace them with healthier alternatives.
- Eat sitting down, slowly, in a calm setting and with awareness of every single bite, avoiding distractions.
- Recognize your negative emotions, who or what triggered them, because those are what lead us to eat more.
- Learn to manage emotional eating by finding alternative strategies to food, that is other ways to satisfy emotions.
"You cannot learn to swim while you are drowning: you have to already be a good swimmer to face the very high waves of emotions."
