Emotional Tolerance: How to Develop Your Ability to Hold Space for Discomfort & Stop Compulsive Eating

Anytime you feel the urge to keep eating past fullness or reach for food without hunger—and you already know that you’re adequately nourishing yourself—follow these steps:

• Stop: When you are aware that you’re reaching for food for reasons of non-physical hunger, pause. Promise yourself that you can still have the food if that’s what you really want after this practice, which prevents the SDF from becoming another form of restriction.
• Drop: Ideally go to another room with a chair or place to lie down and drop into your body. Then, get curious about how you’re feeling.
• Feel: Try to let your emotions bubble up without intellectualizing them. Just notice what comes up, and make space for what does. Sometimes nothing will come up, and that’s okay! Emotional awareness is a skill that needs practice, too.

For some people, this practice can be very disappointing if nothing comes up. If that happens to you, keep trying. Emotional awareness precedes emotional tolerance. We need awareness to know what’s there before we can begin to hold space for what’s there. And the good news is that both are skills that improve with repetition. Even if the Stop, Drop, & Feel doesn’t produce a tangible result like stopping a binge, rest assured that you’re placing a drop in the jug.

Then for other people, this practice can immediately be very uncomfortable. The emotions that drive compulsion are often the ones you least want to feel—which is exactly why avoiding them can become so automatic. Sitting with them for even “just” two minutes is actually a really big task.

Pema Chödrön describes this beautifully:

“So even if the hot loneliness is there, and for 1.6 seconds we sit with that restlessness when yesterday we couldn’t sit for even one, that’s the journey of the warrior.”

5 Things Research Tells Us About Emotions and Overeating

Now that you know what emotional tolerance is and how to put it into practice, let’s dig into the research, because there’s actually a lot of evidence in support of this practice, even if indirectly.

1. Emotions and Eating Really Are Connected

First things first: yes, there is a true connection between struggling with emotions and struggling with normal eating. A large meta-analysis published in 2019 found that people tended to struggle more with eating when they also had greater difficulty identifying emotions clearly, accepting them, shifting perspective, or finding constructive ways to respond. Emotional avoidance, rumination, and suppression were also part of the picture.^[1]

This type of research cannot tell us that emotional difficulty causes compulsive eating, but it does tell us that the connection shows up repeatedly across many different studies.

2. Distress Often Builds Before a Binge

Here’s where things get juicy.

A 2025 analysis pulled together 42 studies that tracked emotions and eating repeatedly in people’s everyday lives rather than asking them to remember later how they had felt. A remarkably consistent pattern emerged: emotional states tended to get worse in the period leading up to a binge.^[2]

That does not mean everyone consciously thinks, “I am upset, so now I am going to eat.” In fact, this research fits beautifully with something many people experience: the emotional shift may be subtle, gradual, or difficult to name, while the urge for food becomes much easier to recognize.

Eating did not reliably return people to emotional equilibrium afterward. I personally think we can all relate to this: even though we may reach for food for comfort, we rarely feel better after the comfort eating has happened. We usually feel much, much worse because now we feel bad about our eating habits, too.

3. What We Do With a Feeling Can Change How Much We Eat

Here’s another interesting piece of the puzzle: it may not be just the difficult emotion that matters, but what we do with it.

In one study, researchers deliberately put women into a negative mood and then taught them to respond in one of two ways. One group was told to suppress what they were feeling, while the other was taught to look at the experience from another perspective. Then everyone participated in a food taste test.

The women who were told to suppress their emotions ate more than the women who were taught to reframe them.^[3]

Now, reframing an emotion is not the same thing as emotional tolerance. But I still find this study fascinating because researchers changed one thing—how people responded to an uncomfortable emotion—and then saw a measurable difference in how much food they actually ate.

4. People Can Learn Emotional Skills—and Their Eating Can Change

In a randomized study of 101 people with binge-eating disorder, researchers specifically taught emotion-regulation skills. The people who received the training had a greater reduction in binge episodes than those on a waitlist, and that advantage was still present six months later.

They also ate less during a laboratory taste test. Perhaps most interestingly, improvements in their emotion-regulation skills partly explained why their binge eating improved.^[4]

A later study involving 576 adults with recurrent binge eating found something similar using a smartphone program that taught dialectical behavior therapy skills. After six weeks, participants using the program reported fewer binge episodes and fewer overall eating-disorder symptoms than those on a waitlist.^[5]

Not every emotional skill improved equally, which actually makes sense to me. Compulsive eating probably does not have one single psychological switch that we just need to flip. Emotional awareness, acceptance, mindfulness, reduced automaticity, and the ability to stay with discomfort may all be pieces of the same puzzle.

But the larger point is wonderfully hopeful: the way you respond to your inner experience is not set in stone. These are skills you can practice—and as those skills change, your eating can change, too.

5. Zooming Out, the Overall Pattern Still Looks Encouraging

And when researchers zoom out and look across many studies instead of just one or two, the same basic pattern is still there.

A 2026 review looked across 38 studies of programs designed to help people who binge eat work differently with their emotions. Overall, these approaches reduced binge eating.^[6]

They generally worked better than receiving no intervention and about as well as other psychological approaches. Even better, the improvements tended to stick around when researchers checked back anywhere from one month to a year later.

Of course, these studies do not all examine emotional tolerance specifically. But taken together, I think they offer compelling indirect support for it. Again and again, we see that the way people notice, accept, tolerate, and respond to difficult emotions is connected to what happens with food.

Making Room for the Full Experience

To me, emotional tolerance is ultimately about making room for the full range of your experience—not only the feelings you would choose.

Pema Chödrön writes, “The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”

The goal is not to become endlessly calm or somehow rise above difficult emotions. It is to become more willing to let sadness, loneliness, anger, disappointment, and general edginess exist without needing to buffer with something like food.

Peace with food does not require stripping eating of its emotional meaning. Food can still comfort you, and it can (and should!) still be pleasurable.

What changes is that there can be a little more room between the feeling and the response—enough room to stay present with yourself instead of automatically reaching for relief.