Emotions are the feelings we get as we interact with ourselves and the world. We experience them as sensations in our bodies and changes in our thoughts. Emotions tell us when we’ve found something good, safe or fun, and they alert us to danger and things we should avoid or protect ourselves from. In short, they help guide our responses and reactions to people, situations and ourselves.

But dealing with emotions can be difficult. We need to be shown how to recognise and respond to our emotions (this usually happens when we’re very young), and we need to be in an environment that is accepting of them. For instance, feeling sadness or anger can be unpleasant. If we don’t recognise these emotions, or if we are in a situation that doesn’t encourage or allow us to express them, we might struggle to know how to respond to them and end up feeling confused or overwhelmed. Sometimes this is referred to as ‘emotional dysregulation’ or ‘struggling with emotion regulation’.

If this happens too often, we can end up turning to less helpful ways of coping with our emotions, like self harm, compulsive checking, or under or over-eating. For some people, controlling food and eating feels like it protects them from unpleasant memories or experiences by managing or even getting rid of unwanted emotions. Using food and eating as a way of soothing or managing emotions that we don’t recognise or know how to respond to is very common. We all do it from time to time – just think about the last time you had a bad day and someone suggested a cup of tea and a biscuit!

But for some people, controlling food and eating can become the primary way of managing emotions that are difficult to understand or know how to respond to. Patterns of controlling food or eating can then become hard to give up and other areas of the person’s life might start to suffer as a result.