PhronesisEating is a biological necessity that in healthy functioning is governed by interoceptive hunger signals and ceases upon satiation. Chronic emotional eating is reconceptualised here within the Displacement Framework as a wrong attractor W_ CEE in the landscape of affective functioning — a locally stable configuration in which food consumption is systematically recruited as the primary instrument of affect regulation, displacing the ground state S^0_ CAR, Calibrated Affective Regulation: the capacity to recognise emotional states accurately, tolerate their intensity without emergency action, and apply differentiated regulation strategies proportionate to the affective signal.
The central paradox formalised here is that eating to regulate emotion provides brief and genuine relief while simultaneously amplifying underlying emotional dysregulation, because it forecloses the development of the internal regulation capacity that makes relief sustainable. Food delivers a transient reduction in felt distress through multiple neurobiological channels — dopaminergic reward, opioid comfort, parasympathetic shift, and oral-motor soothing — but none of these channels processes the emotional information that generated the distress.
The affect state A(t) is temporarily suppressed, not resolved, while food intake F(t) accumulates without building regulation capacity R(t). Three sustaining mechanisms are identified, formalised, and examined in detail. Food-as-comfort encoding is the process by which repeated co-occurrence of food and distress-relief produces a conditioned association that recruits food automatically when emotional arousal reaches threshold.
Emotion-as-intolerable-without-outlet is the acquired belief that emotional states above moderate intensity cannot be survived without external intervention, which makes the natural tolerance window feel like danger. Satiation conflation is the systematic confusion between physical satiety and emotional resolution: the person stops eating not because the emotion has been processed but because the body is full, yet experiences this as “feeling better,” a misattribution that encodes food as effective.
Nine propositions formalise these mechanisms, the dynamics of the satiation-bypass basin, the role of shame in deepening the wrong attractor, the formal model of affect-food- regulation interaction, and the return paths through interoceptive training, affect tolerance skills, emotion-differentiation practice, and the gradual uncoupling of food from emotional function. The paper draws on Bruch's foundational work on hunger awareness, Fairburn's cognitive-behavioural model of eating disorders, Gross's process model of emotion regulation, Craig's interoceptive predictive coding account, Linehan's dialectical behaviour therapy framework, and attachment-based accounts of comfort eating in early development.