We spend so much of our lives trying to feel good. We want to feel happy, excited, motivated, inspired, confident and energised, and when we don't, we often assume something has gone wrong. A quiet afternoon becomes "boring”, a flat day becomes a "bad day", and feeling a little restless becomes something we need to fix. We’ve forgotten that we don't actually need to feel amazing all the time, and learning to become comfortable in these times can be incredibly freeing. There is this enormous emotional space between feeling wonderful and feeling terrible, and the ability to simply be okay in this space without needing the feeling to be anything else is extremely powerful.

This doesn't mean becoming numb, suppressing your feelings or walking around completely unaffected by life. Quite the opposite, it means allowing yourself to experience whatever is here without immediately judging it or trying to change it. You can feel bored without needing to make the boredom disappear, you can feel disappointed without desperately trying to cheer yourself up. You can have an ordinary Tuesday where nothing particularly exciting happens and still feel content within yourself. Instead of constantly figuring out how to make yourself feel better, you begin practising something much more profound and that is accepting how you feel exactly in that moment.

When it comes to emotional eating this matters enormously because food is such an easy way to change how we feel. And sometimes we're not even particularly hungry or upset, we just don't want to feel the way we do in that moment. Food can relieve boredom when we’re looking for stimulation, give us something to look forward to, soften disappointment, fill an empty evening or provide comfort after a long day. But every time we automatically eat our way out of an uncomfortable or uneventful emotional state, we reinforce the idea that feelings themselves are somehow intolerable and shouldn’t exist. Detaching from our emotions teaches us the opposite, that we can have all these feelings and still be okay. We can allow them to exist, flow through us, and settle again with no harm done. Feelings are all part of being a human, after all.

And that is where a completely different kind of freedom around food begins. You don't need to eliminate difficult emotions to stop emotionally eating, you can just increase your capacity to simply be with them. The more comfortable you become with the ordinary, quiet and imperfect moments of life, the less urgently you need something outside of yourself to change them. Food can go back to being food instead of entertainment, distraction, comfort or emotional rescue. Perhaps the goal was never to feel good all the time. Perhaps the real goal is to know that you don’t have to feel better to be okay.