Are “Junk Emotions” Worse For You Than Junk Food?

We love this fascinating perspective on negative emotions from the authors and psychologists behind Psychological Nutrition. In their new book, Dr. Shoba Sreenivasan and Dr. Linda Weinberger use the same language we use to describe our diets - like junk food and "empty calories" - to describe the way we should be managing our emotions and refer to our relationships as either "nutritious" or "malnourishing" - interesting, right? 

These doctors know just how many of us have kept a food journal to become more aware of the kinds of calories we're consuming daily. Their goal is to help us apply that same way of thinking to how we're managing our psychological and emotional "intake" daily too.  

Is it possible that keeping an emotional journal can help us break bad habits? It's certainly worked for many of us when it comes to food and better managing our diets, so we're willing to give it a shot. Here are the authors with a unique look at how to better manage "high fat" emotions like anger and resentment and "nutrient dense" emotions like joy!

We know junk food when we see it: It’s often high in calories and low in nutrition. If we consume a diet of junk food, we’re likely to end up feeling lethargic, being overweight, having low energy and possibly experiencing medical issues such as diabetes and heart disease.

But what about our emotional "diets"? There are junk emotions, just like junk food. Junk emotions don’t bring out our best - we need to get rid of them.

As clinical psychologists, we wondered what would happen if we began thinking about our emotions just like we were thinking about the ingredients that we feed ourselves. We developed the concept of psychological nutrition - not about food at all, but about how to assess and monitor the emotions that we consume.

In order to get rid of junk emotions, we have to be mindful of the emotions we are consuming; we have to deliberately restrict our diet of high-fat negative emotions (for example, fear, anger, worry, sadness, envy) and increase our consumption of low-fat positive emotions (for example, joy, calmness, optimism). Just like replacing potato chips with braised rainbow carrots, we have to begin a habit of “eating” psychologically nourishing emotions.

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