"I can't just sit there feeling it"

This is the belief that the whole habit rests on, and I'd like to spend some time on it. It says that the feeling is unbearable, or at least unpleasant enough that doing nothing about it isn't an option. Something has to happen, and the kitchen is what happens.

Start with what the alternative to the visit actually is. It isn't sitting there feeling it forever. It's sitting there feeling it for a few minutes. Verduyn's work, mentioned in chapter 4, found that feelings last longer when the situation is important and the feeling was strong at the start. Most of the feelings that send you to the kitchen aren't like that. The email is a nuisance, not a disaster. Boredom on the sofa is mild by definition. Even the Sunday sadness is a familiar, medium-sized thing that you've survived every fortnight for years. These feelings peak and fall, and the fall begins soon after the peak. What you've been doing is eating on the way down and crediting the food.

Now look at what pushing the feeling away does. Catharine Evers and colleagues induced negative feelings in people and then either told them to suppress the feeling, to hide it and push it down, or to reappraise it, meaning to think about the situation differently, or gave no instruction. Then they measured how much people ate in a taste test. Those told to suppress ate more, and specifically more of the comfort foods. The feelings themselves didn't cause the extra eating. The suppressing did. That's a small set of studies and a laboratory setting, but it points at something you may recognise. The visit isn't a response to the feeling. It's a response to the effort of not having the feeling.

That suggests a different move, and it's the one this book will ask for. Instead of pushing the feeling down and then eating, you turn towards it for a moment. You name it. "That's dread about the email." "That's boredom." "That's Mum." Naming it doesn't make it go away, and it isn't meant to. It makes it a known thing of a known size, and known things of known sizes are easier to sit with than a vague pressure that wants a cracker.

You'll find, I think, that the feeling is more bearable than you assumed, once you look at it. It's dread. You've had dread before. It's uncomfortable and it isn't dangerous. It's already fading. And you can do something about the email in a minute.

I'd add that "sit there" is the wrong picture. You don't have to sit. You can walk, or put the kettle on, or ring someone, or go and do the thing that caused it. Chapter 17 sets this out as ten minutes, and the ten minutes aren't a test of endurance. They're just long enough for the feeling to show you what it does when you don't feed it.