How to Get Through Emotional Eating Trigger Season

by | Dec 12, 2025 | Blocks to Emotional Eating, coping mechanism, Emotional Eating, Emotional Eating Triggers, Emotional Health, healing emotional eating, Trauma Informed

Hello love,

If you feel like you’re emotional eating intensifies during the holiday seasons, you’re not going crazy. There’s a real reason why this is happening. 

This season tends to bring up old patterns and emotional eating is one of those big patterns. 

Let’s dive in and explore why this happens and what you can do instead. 

So trigger season, as I like to affectionately call it, is any time you’re put back into situations that bring up your old triggers. This can be the holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving, family get togethers, or the start of the school year. It can be because the weather is changing – we have less sunlight, it’s colder. We’re socializing more and interacting with others. 

So these are the situations that bring up our triggers more intensely. It’s because there is more pressure, there’s more stress and there’s more emotional activation. You’re interacting with some of the people that created your earliest triggers. So, of course, this can be a season, that emotional eating spikes. 

If you find that during these times of year, your emotional eating feels like it’s more out of control, it’s not that you lack discipline. It’s that you’re going back to a coping mechanism that helped you to soothe and feel okay in these situations. 

It’s such an ingrained pattern, and when we’re in these situations that are activating deeper emotions, we’re going to automatically go back to food if you haven’t done the deeper work to really explore and resolve it. 

You’re using food to soothe and help you cope with this distress, discomfort, overwhelming emotions, more pressure and more stress, and it’s your way of calming your nervous system and regulating yourself. 

So why does your emotional eating spike during this time? 

Let’s dive in

  • 1:55 Reasons your emotional eating spikes more at certain times of year.
  • 2:53 Are you trying harder to not emotionally eat? Why this backfires. 
  • 3:41 What you can do that moves the needle with emotional eating. 
  • 4:40 The doorway to what you actually need vs. using food. 
  • 5:37 Meeting your deeper needs and not using food as a bandaid. 
  • 6:31 How I started to shift my emotional eating during trigger season step by step.
  • 8:00 Free resources and next steps

Next Steps

1. If you are ready to start your journey to resolving your Emotional Eating you can download my free guide “What Are You Truly Hungry For?” to start discerning true from emotional hunger and catching your triggers HERE.

2. If you are ready to transform your emotional eating so that you can get to ease, peace and confidence around food and in your body with a step by step process and guidance then find out more about The Emotional Eating Evolution Program HERE.

To resolution,

Michelle

Certified Holistic Nutritionist Specializing in Emotional Eating