I can’t remember where I first stumbled across this term. I think it may have been on a mental health community Facebook page. “Doughnut” was used to describe the feeling of being hollow and empty inside – the feeling of a void that won’t go away.
Today was a doughnut day. I felt as if I was walking at work frozen. I don’t know why this should particularly have been today. I had a nice day on Saturday with a very good friend whom I hadn’t seen for quite some time. Yesterday I was ill with a virus but I slept a lot and caught up on rest.
I felt so dragged down by this aching emptiness that I was exhausted. My brain would not “go” properly and I felt as though I was fighting through water to speak to anyone. All I wanted was to go home and hide and curl up under my blanket. I desperately wanted a hug and someone to tell me it would be alright.
I was angry with myself because the slightest task should not seem so hard and because I should just be able to get on with things, and because trying to fight through the water was making me irritated. I don’t do irritated, or anger, without punishing myself.
I’m really missing someone I care for very much, who I think no longer wants to know me. Perhaps that’s part of it.
Ginny xx
Dignity Beyond Trauma 
I’ve never heard of donut day. I don’t think I’ve ever felt like a donut either. I do know I overeat and often people say that’s to fill an emotional void. Maybe I mistake donut feelings for hunger. I know you have the opposite feelings. It’s so good you talk about your feelings. I just stuff myself.
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That’s a very interesting comment about a link between ‘doughnut’ feelings and hunger. Although I’ve probably mentioned more my food restriction and purging in response to emotions, I do comfort-eat as well and in the past would binge eat. I think I’d agree that sometimes we want to eat when we have the ‘doughnut’ feelings and probably really do feel hungry at these times. Writing this, it just occurred to me how, when we use metaphors to describe our emotional needs and emptiness, we may actually talk about longing for or being hungry for something (love, comfort and so on). I think there’s a more literal relationship in hunger too when we are in these states!
I wish I could remember and accredit the place that I first came across the use of the term ‘doughnut’. I think ‘doughnut day’ is my description but the use of the term ‘doughnut’ with this meeting I definitely came across on someone else’s page.
xx
xx
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So many of s struggle with food/emotional issues.
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It’s very true. I am sure that many more people than we realise are fighting with this. I also worry how really quite extreme eating or exercise practices seem more and more to be regarded as normal, or even promoted in magazines and diet products and so on. In the last office I worked in, a large number of the women in the 20s and 30s age group were regularly following eating and exercise regimes which I thought would have met all the diagnostic criteria for an eating disorder even if their weights were not in the anorexic weight range. It was an ‘accepted’ thing and probably not very visible in their bodily appearances but I think they must have been going through a lot of emotional pain. On the one hand it’s not a bad thing that talking about what they were/weren’t eating, how they were purging or exercising etc, was not ‘taboo’ and hidden, but it worried me greatly that it was considered to be almost necessary and the danger not acknowledged and recognised.
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