Comfort food

If COVID-19 has you staying at home more (it should be) and finding yourself bored or stressed or lonely — or any combination of uncomfortable experiences, then you may be turning to food for comfort. You may have some favorite “comfort foods”. And I’m here to say that I’m all for it. Comfort food is not “bad” in the way that watching reality TV or wearing your favorite sweatpants for the third day in a row is not “bad”. Those behaviors reliably soothe you, which is why you engage in them. Could you allow yourself to experience that fun and comfort more fully by dropping the judgment around these decisions? Specifically, I’m not in the business of moralizing any foods, because I don’t think it’s helpful, healthy, empowering or liberating. And especially during a global pandemic, when what is being asked of us is unprecedented, why would you deny yourself your reliable comforts? (The answer to this question may be worth exploring in therapy.) 

We all have our own toolbox of ways to experience joy, comfort and self-care, and this can range from baking warm gooey cookies to writing to hiking to gardening to online shopping to gabbing with friends to practicing sanity-preserving solitude -- the list of "tools" goes on for basically ever, because we are each unique and therefore have our own unique ways of caring for ourselves. And we all need to eat. If, of course, what normally brings you comfort is stressing you out, not working as effectively or causing another set of emotional problems, then I encourage you to trust yourself to know when you might want to talk and sort through that with a therapist.