The ways to deal with stress have been changed a lot in modern age with the development of technology. Binge eating, binge watching and sleep dysregulation are just a few examples of unhealthy coping mechanism or unhealthy dealing with the stress. Let’s take a look how stress is related to these habits —
Binge Eating
Have you ever thought when you gulp down an entire tub of ice-cream prior to an exam or ravaged a pizza in the throes of heartbreak?
Binge eating is a kind of mental health disorder that involves excessive or overeating due stress, depression or anxiety. Eating in stress is a kind of coping mechanism that helps some people managing difficult emotions. Food gives them comfort and solace and helps through a difficult time. Most of us have experienced emotional eating time to time. However, sometimes it can be accompanied by feelings of shame, guilt, and self-critical thoughts later.
When we get involved in emotional eating, our relationship with food changes. When eating, due to stress food no longer is a need for energy or for hunger but it becomes our mood booster to feel better when we are feeling low.
How to Deal with Binge Eating
Mindful Eating- Eating small portions of meals throughout the day can help us keep from overeating a big amount in less time. It’s a tendency to eat without caring about quantity when we watch our favorite show or movie. Mindfulness helps us in taking care about how much we eat.
Food chart- A food chart can help us to keep a track about when we are most likely to binge. Is it the huger, the emotions, thoughts and our reactions to them?
— Drinking a glass of water before taking food — or intake of any other fluids like fresh juice will give a sensation of being full and help in reducing bingeing.
Binge-Watching
Watching Netflix and Amazon Prime are nighttime rituals now for most of us even in daytime too. Many of us binge-watch back to back episodes of web series whole night despite knowing the fact that next day we will be seeing the impact of this nightly ritual.
It goes on like no episode or the whole season in one night and no in-between. We need to understand the reason behind such extremes for watching TV Series.
1. Watching our favorite web series offer us an escape from boredom and dreary stressful lives to a new world.
2. Ignoring emotional turmoil- An even more strong reason is drowning out the internal chatter of anxiety, loneliness and self-doubt with external noise that is hard to ignore. It’s a way to keep mind occupied when we are alone.
3. As per psychologists when we binge-watch our favorite shows, our brain continually produces dopamine, a happy hormones, helping us feel good. In this process of keeping us hooked when one thing is over we search for next fix.
How to deal with it?
Setting time limits for the number of episodes and keeping setting time gaps between episodes by indulging in physical workout or outing with friends can help us in saving our physical as well as mental health, moderation is the key. Taking breaks will send the same dopamine to our brain and will help in maintaining a healthier coping mechanism when it comes to deal with stress.
Counselling for anxiety or depression counselling can also help you understand the patterns of stress eating and binge watching and the underlying issues causing them.
