Emotional Vices and Issues

I have a confession to make. I am someone who allows my emotions to influence a LOT that I do. I am an emotional eater, for example, and an emotional spender. As one can imagine, these can have a lot of detrimental and harmful effects on my health, both physically and financially, and I'm tired of it. At some point, something has GOT to give, but it's something that I'm going to have to work on from the inside rather than externally.

I live in the land of extremes. I am either living in Emotional Mind or Rational Mind. Much of the time, I am not operating from my Wise Mind, which is a balance of both Emotional and Rational thinking. In order to defeat the beast within, I need to practice walking the tightrope of my emotions and rational mind more often.

I think that I engage in these emotional vices and issues because I am afraid to let go of distractions to face what is real. Experiencing life can be painful at times, and this is how I learned to handle that pain, or avoid it... but I want to do better. If I continue living in fear of having these very normal human experiences, I'll miss out on a lot of life, and I don't want to let my life pass me by. It looks like I'll need to consult my DBT handbook once more to review how I can practice more distress tolerance.