Self-regulation, co-regulation, and emotional eating, oh my!

As my co-author and I wrapped up the section of our book that challenges self-regulation as a gold-standard, universal mental health goal, we both admitted that we felt nervous about how it would be received in the current cultural climate. A few months later, I came across a social media post from an eating disorder clinician straight out of early-2000s-era diet culture suggesting that while eating when you're distressed might make you feel better temporarily, it's not a fix that's getting to the root of the issue, and thus you should avoid doing it. I felt irate. I want to talk about why.

Before diving in, let me be clear about my work: I am an eating disorder therapist, not an emotional eating therapist. While I believe both a) that every individual must assess for themselves whether something is a problem, and b) that we all benefit from defining eating disorder recovery for ourselves rather than adhering to a standardized definition, I also believe that what we consider a problem is heavily influenced by stigma. I will never tell someone who is distressed by their emotional eating that they don't have a problem, but I will ask them to explore what is underneath the distress and inform them that they will often find weight stigma, capitalism, and a lot of "shoulds" where they were expecting to find hyper-sensitivity and poor judgment. While I will respect whatever label resonates with you to describe your relationship with food, I do not consider "emotional eating" to be disordered by any means (more on why to come).

Many conversations about eating disorders, emotional eating, and mental health are built on an assumption we're implicitly taught not to question: the healthiest person is the one who can regulate themselves. They can calm themselves down without needing reassurance. They can process difficult emotions independently. They can meet their own needs without relying too heavily on others (bonus points if not at all). They are resilient, self-sufficient, and emotionally self-contained. If they can't do these things, they are encouraged to learn, and if distress tolerance skills training isn't adequate to give them access when the dysregulation happens, they are told they just need to practice when they're not dysregulated so that these skills get stored in muscle memory.

I notice that many people use "self-regulation" to mean returning oneself to baseline without needing another person, but that's actually a pretty extreme definition. Instead, I work with a broader definition that makes room for far more strategies: the ability to participate in regulation and to avoid overwhelming harm to the self or others. From this perspective, calling a friend, petting a dog, using a weighted blanket, eating, listening to music, attending therapy, taking medication, and seeking reassurance are all possible forms of regulation as long as they can be accessed reliably. They aren't purely internal.

Furthermore, I wonder if we've misunderstood the relationship between self-regulation and health all along. What if some of our ideas about eating disorders are shaped less by neuroscience than by cultural values about independence, productivity, and self-sufficiency?

The myth of the self-regulating human

You'd think the people who are most vocal about the dangers of AI would oppose the self-regulation promised land just as strongly, and yet, the latter is somehow a hot take. After all, the only entities that can stay at their baseline without any input or support from anyone else are robots.

Contemporary psychology treats self-regulation as a developmental destination. Children need co-regulation, and when they become adults, they should self-regulate. Just like children need their parents to drive them around, but once they can get a driver's license, they transition to doing that job, along with so many others they were once dependent on others to do for them, on their own. The implicit story is that healthy development involves gradually needing others less and less. But human beings actually never stop needing co-regulation. Adults continue to seek comfort, reassurance, touch, understanding, belonging, and companionship. We call friends when we're overwhelmed. We cry on our partners' shoulders. We feel calmer when someone sits with us through pain. Not all of these examples will resonate with everyone, and that's because of the reality of neurodiversity. We need different types of and levels of co-regulation; we are soothed by different stimuli; some of us need more or less social interaction, but no one besides a robot can get 100 percent of their needs met in solitude.

This isn't a sign of immaturity but of being alive. Research on attachment and affect regulation suggests that self-regulation develops through co-regulation. We learn to soothe ourselves because someone soothed us first. But this raises a question I've noticed psychology seems to often brush off as an irregularity or unimportant: what happens when that process never fully occurs?

The role of neurodivergent-specific needs

Many neurodivergent people spend our lives being told they are either "too much" or "not independent enough" because their regulatory needs are more visible than neuro-normative expectations. For example, someone may need sensory accommodations, predictable routines, recovery time, or another person to help them recover from overwhelm. Someone else may rely on body doubling, accountability, reminders, collaborative problem-solving, or external structure. These kinds of supports are often framed as crutches rather than recognized as legitimate forms of regulation.

Some of the most effective regulatory strategies for neurodivergent people involve other people. But our reliance on connection is frequently treated as evidence of insufficient self-regulation rather than evidence of a nervous system using the resources available it.

What if some people need more co-regulation than others?

A child who grows up emotionally neglected learns early on that their distress will not reliably be met with comfort, understanding, or support. They may become highly independent and appear self-sufficient, learning and implementing counting coping skills. Beneath this apparent competence, their nervous system may remain organized around an unmet need for relational safety. When they reach for connection as an adult and no one responds, they don't just experience disappointment but rather deprivation.

This may help explain why some people experience intense distress when friends don't respond to texts, when loved ones are available, or when attempts at connection go unanswered. Often clinicians look at this through the lens of rejection sensitivity, assuming the distress stems primarily from an inaccurate belief that one is being rejected, but there is another possibility: the distress may be coming from a failed bid for co-regulation and the stuckness that perpetuates, not from a misinterpretation of the situation. Not a reminder of past pain but a highlighting of present pain. If the nervous system is responding to the inability to access a resource it was needing and seeking, that doesn't mean the other person did anything wrong, but the problem of the unmet need remains.

The problem with "just learn to self-regulate"

We are often told that relying on others for regulation is unhealthy and that the solution is some version of self-soothing. Take a walk, journal, practice deep breathing, use grounding exercises, meditate. Could be helpful to some, sure, I won't knock it! But notice the assumption underneath these when they're suggestions: if you are sufficiently skilled, you should eventually be able to regulate yourself without needing another person. This sounds more like ideology than psychology, doesn't it? It aligns with the broader cultural narrative that independence is virtuous. Think about the ideal citizen, worker, patient, adult...all self-sufficient.

Dependence isn't something to outgrow, just as needs aren't meant to be minimized and pushed down. But some needs are relational by nature! The solution to loneliness is not deep breathing. The solution to not being seen is being seen.

Emotional eating and the hierarchy of coping

This framework becomes particularly visible in conversations about emotional eating. When someone is distressed and takes deep breaths, they are praised for their healthy self-regulation, but when they cope by eating a comforting meal, it's described as emotional eating, and they are warned, "It's ok, but make sure it's not the only tool in your toolbox!" Why is one behavior a demonstration of emotional competence and the other emotional dysfunction? The usual answer is that emotional eating only provides temporary relief; it's a band-aid that distracts from the underlying issue and prolongs the problem.

But wait...isn't all regulation temporary? Are we not going to eventually become dysregulated again at some point as a matter of fact? No one deep-breathes their way into permanent emotional equilibrium. No one meditates once and never crashes out again. Living beings continually encounter new stressors.

So perhaps "temporary" is not actually the concern. I find that people often mean when they vilify emotional eating is that it might create other difficulties later. That may be a legitimate concern sometimes, but it's a different argument entirely. For example, someone might use a particular food for comfort despite knowing that it worsens their health condition, triggers digestive symptoms, causes blood sugar swings they find unpleasant, or leaves them feeling physically unwell afterward. Those are real tradeoffs a person may reasonably consider when deciding how to cope. Notice that weight gain is absent from this list. That is intentional. Fatness is not a harm, and weight gain is not inherently a negative consequence that must be weighed against the benefits of a coping strategy. However, many people understandably factor their anticipated distress and the potential social consequences of gaining weight due to existing in a culture that stigmatizes fat bodies into their decision-making process.

A coping strategy having costs is not the same thing as it being evidence of dysfunction or failure. We make cost-benefit analyses about coping all the time; staying up late talking to a friend at the expense of sleep, taking a mental health day at the expense of income, skipping obligations to immerse ourselves in a favorite hobby. No strategy is cost-free, but some may serve u well enough in the moment to be worth that cost.

Yet discussions of emotional eating often carry a moral undertone that discussions of breathing exercises do not. The former is frequently treated as evidence of having lost control, while the latter is celebrated as evidence of maintaining control. Breathing to cope is discreet; eating to cope is visible. This suggests our evaluations of coping are not based solely on function of effectiveness but also by cultural attitudes toward bodies, dependence, self-discipline, and what kinds of needs are considered acceptable to have.

Food as a regulatory resource

Food occupies a particularly interesting position because it sits at the intersection of self-regulation and co-regulation. Eating as a solitary act cannot be separated from all that we've come to associate with it: developmentally, food is one of our earliest experiences of co-regulation. An infant is fed by a caregiver. Food arrives alongside warmth, touch, proximity, safety, and relief. For many of us, food continues to carry these associations throughout life, so when someone eats for comfort, they may be regulating emotional, physiological, or attachment distress, even if they don't have conscious awareness of any intention or rationale beyond "feel better."

Sometimes food functions as a stand-in for the comfort that is unavailable elsewhere. For neurodivergent folks in particular, there are a whole host of additional needs it might meet: sensory regulation, novelty-seeking, stimulation, predictability, grounding, or relief from overwhelm. A lens on emotional eating that treats it as avoidance may miss the fact that food is serving multiple functions simultaneously. The behavior is not just reducing emotional distress but also helping the nervous system organize itself in ways that other strategies can't easily replicate.

The battery problem

Imagine charging your phone. Some charging methods are easy to access but provide a smaller charge, and others require more effort but last longer. Co-regulation with another person may sometimes provide the deepest recharge of all. The problem is that the most effective source of regulation is often the least controllable because it depends on another person's availability, willingness, and capacity. That creates major vulnerability for someone whose nervous system has learned that co-regulation is the most (or even only) effective form of relief. The absence of another person (physically or emotionally) can feel like being stranded in an unfamiliar or unsafe place with a dead cell phone.

It's okay to need help—but not like that!

Back to the big unasked question underlying pop psychology narratives about regulation: what if some people require more than our culture considers acceptable? What if emotional neglect creates lifelong vulnerabilities that cannot be entirely compensated for through individual effort?

Hang on, hang on...I'm not saying people can't learn skills! I'm not saying healing isn't possible. I'm not saying that anyone should get a waiver of accountability for harmful behavior that results from their dysregulation. I am acknowledging that the amount of co-regulation nervous system needs will vary from one person to the next and that some people may never become as self-sufficient as cultural ideals demand.

Neurodivergent folks in particular tend to find themselves at the center of these debates because our support needs are often more difficult to hide, more highly stigmatized, and dismissed as a matter of entitlement, especially when they inconvenience the majority. We are told the answer is to work toward becoming more independent as though independence is a neutral concept and not one that reflects political values.

Why is a need for support so often interpreted as evidence of personal deficiency rather than evidence that humans are fundamentally interdependent? Neurodivergent experiences go beyond mere difficulty meeting conventional self-regulation standards; explaining them may actually force us to say the quiet part out loud: that regulation has always been relational, and some of us are just less able to hide it.

The goal was never independence

Eating disorder recovery does not have to be about becoming a person who needs no one (no matter how skillfully you can use your DBT skills). If you're aiming to replace co-regulation with self-regulation, I implore you to reflect on why.

Recovery for so many looks like building the widest possible range of regulatory options while acknowledging that some needs remain relational. The question is not whether we should learn self-regulation; if we can, why not? Sure! There's plenty of reasons to want to develop this ability that aren't about pulling yourself up by the bootstraps: relational resources are limited in this season of life; you have a strong preference for solitude; you want to increase your sense of agency. The question is why we treat needing others as though it means something has gone wrong. Interdependence is a reasonable vision for mental health that doesn't require us to eliminate need but rather to learn how to live with it in a world where everyone has needs of their own.