Binge eating can occur in people with borderline personality disorder, but less is known about how it is experienced in daily life.
A recent study looked at emptiness, negative emotions, and binge eating in 55 undergraduate students who had both elevated borderline personality disorder features and recent eating episodes involving loss of control.
In this study, binge eating was defined as eating with a sense of losing control. This means the focus was not only on how much food someone ate, but on whether they felt unable to stop or control their eating.
Emptiness referred to experiences of aloneness, absence from your own life, being forced to exist, and never feeling fulfilled no matter what you do.
For two weeks, researchers collected survey data six times per day. Participants were also asked to complete a survey after binge eating episodes.
Across daily life, emptiness and binge eating tended to cluster together. When participants reported eating with a sense of losing control, they also tended to report feeling empty in that same time window.
Emptiness also seemed to continue. When binge eating and emptiness occurred in the same survey time window, greater emptiness at the time of the binge was associated with greater emptiness at the next survey later that day.
The pattern with negative emotions was especially interesting. After binge episodes were reported, participants tended to describe a wide range of negative emotions, including feeling distressed, upset, guilty, scared, irritable, ashamed, nervous, jittery, and afraid.
The emotional picture was not one simple feeling. It looked more like a broad, hard-to-name state.
What stood out most to you about these findings? Did any part of this research resonate with your personal or professional experience?
Reference
Hein, K. E., Dennis, S. J., Folger, L. F., & Mullins-Sweatt, S. N. (2024). Emptiness and negative affect changes related to binge eating and borderline personality traits. Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment, 15(6), 446 to 456. https://doi.org/10.1037/per0000700