My wife has this delicious peanut butter and butterscotch cookie recipe which our family has dubbed “Emotion Cookies”. For the first few years of my marriage, the presence of the Bosch mixer in the dishwasher was something I looked for as it was a clear sign that she wasn’t in a good mood.

Between beefing up our communication skills, my wife and I worked on our own emotional eating habits. It wasn’t easy because it’s never easy to admit that you have a problem.

Identify Your Overeating Triggers

Much like those struggling with addiction, admitting you have a problem is the first step toward recovery. And overeating is a serious problem. In America alone, over ⅓ of adults are obese according to the Center For Disease Control and Prevention.

So it is even more important to find what is triggering this overeating epidemic. Some triggers I have come across in my personal life and in the lives of those whom I coach are:

• Stress Triggers- The number one trigger for emotional eating is stress. Whether that stress is induced by work or personal relationship struggles, many people turn to food to self-soothe when stressed.

• Cultural Triggers - There are many cultures where it is insulting to refuse food. My Italian grandmother to this day cannot help but push second and third helpings on everyone who enters her home. But cultural overeating may be behind your own overeating, as it has become linked with family, love, and heritage.

• Irregular Triggers - If you have made it a habit to skip meals and eat irregularly in large bursts, you may have trained yourself to overeat.

• Boredom Triggers - Many of us have likely found ourselves eating out of boredom. One moment you are binging a series on Netflix and the next, you find yourself rooting around the cupboards for that hidden bag of chips.

In the end, all these triggers are in some way linked to an emotion. From feeling stressed, pressured, or just plain bored, there are many emotional triggers to overeating.

Overcome Overeating With New Coping Habits

To break our emotional overeating habits, we need to develop new habits. I have found a combination of things have helped my clients overcome their overeating triggers.

• Targeted therapy - There are two types of therapy I like to recommend. Cognitive behavioral therapy helps you target and change specific behaviors, while talk therapy is the more traditional sit-down and talk to a therapist. Both can effective in overcoming overeating triggers.

• Physical stress - By inducing physical stress, you can give your body new outlets for your emotions. Not only will you enjoy the endorphin boost, but you can also carve out positive new habits to take the place of the negative overeating.

• Practice declining - It may sound silly, but it can be good to practice declining food in different situations. When you are put on the spot, it can be difficult to politely refuse someone who is offering you food. By crafting a few different refusals for various social circumstances, you can be prepared and avoid that overeating trigger.

• Eat fresh - No, that is not my way of recommending Subway. If you make yourself keep mostly fresh food in your home it becomes more difficult to overeat. And when you do want to eat, feel free to chow down on some bell pepper slices or other fresh foods.

Breaking habits we’ve developed over a lifetime can be difficult. If you relapse and have your form of “Emotion Cookies”, don’t beat yourself up. Forgive yourself, then keep working toward eliminating emotional eating.