How to Stop Eating out of Stress or Boredom

If you drink alone, monitor how often you do this and consider why. If it becomes frequent, try to taper off or contact an alcohol addiction treatment center. Learning healthy coping skills, unfortunately, is not as intuitive as it might seem.

Fortunately, there are more ways than ever to connect with like-minded people who are fellow travelers on this path. Acute anxiety and depression from the withdrawal process can ease within a few days to a week. But for many people, lingering feelings of anxiety, depression, and general malaise can last weeks, months, or even longer. When serotonin and dopamine levels are low, we become less motivated and less interested in our surroundings.

Recently I spotted an interesting comment on my blog about feeling bored.

With a smaller quantity in front of you to see, you’re likely to eat slower and more thoughtfully. Make a plan for what snacks you’re going to have during the day and when. Set intentions for your new routine that you won’t break and snack with purpose. If your snacking is linked to an oral fixation, exercise your jaw muscles with a piece of chewing gum.

You might not be able to control the fact that you’re stressed, but you can create an environment where you’re less likely to turn to food. “Any type of physical activity can drinking out of boredom help keep the stress at bay and help regulate hormones,” says Oetken. If you’re bored and not physically hungry, go work out first and then eat if you still feel the urge.

Why do we resort to drinking out of boredom?

So drinking because you’re bored isn’t doing much for you in the long run. Instead, you should find ways to cope with your boredom that keep you productively occupied and are more fulfilling. There are online resources, such as the MyPlate guidelines, that help plan healthy meals.

But I’m going to explore solutions for people who sit at various points along the “sobriety is so boring” spectrum. My social circle changed when I got sober because I realized that many of my relationships were based on getting drunk together, and that was it. So it’s not that sobriety is inherently boring; it’s that your serotonin and dopamine levels are now very low. Health2wellnessblog.com is an online resource for peoples who want to live a healthier life. Our founders, along with a team of researchers and medical advisors, analyze a wide variety of topics and summarize the information in a clear and usable way.

Identifying Your Boredom Drinking Triggers

If you’re an artist you can always go and paint; if you’re a gamer there’s always going to be a game that you can play. These are the things where there’s not an infinite amount of leeway in them, I mean, if you sit and do these things all the time you’re going to be bored with them. Other research also notes an association between chewing gum and a more positive mood and sustained attention. Moreover, the minty flavor may cleanse the palate and make a person less tempted to snack. A simple strategy to stop eating when bored is to chew a piece of gum. Instead of eating, a person can treat themselves in other ways.

The reasons people start drinking alcohol is very different than the reasons they continue to drink alcohol. Boredom and isolation are known relapse https://ecosoberhouse.com/ triggers for people with substance use disorders. An important way to safeguard your sobriety is to be aware of this and take steps to mitigate it.