Eat & Flourish by Mary Beth Albright

Author:Mary Beth Albright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Countryman Press
Published: 2022-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

Emotions and Inflammation

Emotion researchers have grouped all our emotions into foundational human emotions based on extensive research spanning decades. Foundational human emotions are ones we share across cultures, geographies, and time based on factors like universal facial expressions and effects on the body. Psychologists debate the exact number, but there are likely somewhere between four and seven foundational human emotions. The Pixar movie Inside Out, which animated the emotions going on inside an adolescent girl’s mind used research to settle on five emotions for its main characters: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust. Without getting too into the ongoing debate, some psychologists claim that disgust is a subset of fear, leaving four foundational emotions: mad, sad, glad, and scared.

It’s helpful to categorize our feelings into the four foundational emotions because it can make it easier to identify what we’re feeling, to then understand what’s happening inside our bodies in response to that emotion.

These physical effects of emotions happen across races, ethnicities, and borders to prepare our bodies to act in response to how we feel. Of course, what triggers the emotions can vary widely, given each individual’s different experiences. Recognizing your emotions can help you understand what is happening in your body and help you use the science of emotional eating in your everyday life. Your emotions can alter both what your mind wants and what your body needs, and you can eat in a way that satisfies both.

There is compelling science that your body needs more of certain nutrients when you’re in certain emotional states—more magnesium when you’re stressed, for example, and zinc when you’re sad—which we will discuss in more detail later. But it can be harder to make those food choices when you’re in an intensely emotional state. Research shows that people feeling emotions they perceive as negative are more likely to make health-supporting food choices if they thought the negative feeling was fleeting. And other evidence shows that the ability to come out of a negative emotional state is likelier if you make certain food choices. Again, we see that the food-emotion cycle can be vicious or virtuous.

Eating for emotional health can do the same thing. It can help you be mad but not hostile, to be glad but not boastful, to be scared but not paralyzed, to be sad but not disconsolate. And that resilience is underpinned by the knowledge that how you feel right now is not how you’ll feel forever. The ability to process emotions as they arise, without retreating from reality, creates a path for a better overall mood in which life’s inevitable problems won’t determine your sense of self.

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