The Science Behind Emotional Eating

For some people, no matter how hard they try to eat healthfully, seeking food for comfort seems inevitable when intense emotions arise. We reach for food, hoping that it will make us feel better, but more often than not, we end up feeling worse than we did before. Maintaining a healthy relationship with food becomes problematic when used as a coping mechanism, but why do some people turn to food when stressed while others don’t? Is it because our brains are wired differently?

How Does Stress Affect Our Appetite?

Interestingly, when stressed out, the natural biological response in all mammals, including humans, is NOT to eat! Stress causes the body to release cortisol, which signals the brain to shut the digestive system down. That means that, biologically, stress should make us lose our desire for food. Animals, for example, refuse to eat when they feel any form of stress, be it sickness or fear. This also explains why some people tend to lose their appetite and experience weight loss after going through a physical or emotional trauma.

However, in our modern life, the majority of people complain about the tendency to overeat or binge eat when they’re under stress, which is the complete opposite of what the body is designed to do. This happens when cortisol causes insulin to spike, which results in us craving more food. Stress creates a compulsive eating tendency, and with that, we lose the ability to feel satiated. We crave more, eat more, and constantly think about food.

Why You Should Never Reward Kids With Cookies?

Aside from the chemical changes that drive the brain to seek more food, our upbringing also impacts our eating behaviors. Many of us, consciously or unconsciously, are reared from a young age to use food as a reward to comfort ourselves and feel better. Kids who were given ice cream or a cookie when they behaved well are more likely to reach for ice cream or cookies in adulthood when life gets overwhelming. Such people are wired to reach for comfort in food not because they are hungry but because their brain’s reward system gets activated. In other words, the compulsive tendency to overeat occurs due to the release of neurochemicals that make us temporarily feel better. Food becomes a tool for self-medication that releases dopamine in the brain, similar to what happens when someone uses drugs.

In most cases, after that initial period of euphoria, feelings of shame and guilt take place, and it becomes a vicious cycle of overeating followed by regret and food restriction. Food has now become a popular coping mechanism in most parts of the world because of its accessibility and its social acceptance. It is much easier and socially tolerated to reach for a second or third piece of cake than to overuse drugs and alcohol in public.

Why Some People Don’t Struggle With Emotional Eating?

The type of people who don’t reach for food and forget to eat during stressful situations are more likely to have been raised in a household where sweets were used simply as treats, not as rewards or as a way to comfort an upset child. Their relationship with food is wholesome; they tend to it as a source of nourishment, not a way to suppress emotions or fill a void. Such people choose to hyper-focus on the stressor instead, whether it’s a deadline or a situation, and that gives them enough adrenaline to function without needing to eat much.

There are a few reasons why we perceive food as rewarding – the most obvious one is because food is a necessary source of energy for us to live. It also provides a personal reward because we often associate it with a specific person, place, emotion, or memory. Repeated indulgence in eating as a way of coping with stress and reinforcing this rewarding behavior, again and again, moves it to the Basal Ganglia, the part of the brain associated with habit formation. When such behavior gets repeated and overtrained, it becomes automated, and we stop connecting it with the sense of reward that once was the initial reason we reached for comfort food. If every time you’re stressed at work, you demolish a packet of cookies, even when you’re not hungry and you don’t physically need it, you’re still likely to eat it all because it’s what your brain has been trained to do as a coping mechanism. People with emotional eating tendencies train their brains to cope in ways that they know are harmful to them.

Emotional eaters know their tendencies are harmful, but the problem is that they often focus on the behavior they are engaging in instead of how it’s serving them. They now see it as the problem, not the tool they chose to solve the initial problem, which is their emotional distress. They start scolding themselves for indulging and losing control, which takes away the component of compassion, understanding, and attention to the real problem that still needs solving. When we find compassion towards ourselves, we find more loving solutions to fill the emotional gaps in ways other than numbing ourselves with food. Change will happen when we start taking the advice we would give to someone we care about. It’s a very private process we need to go through, and there will be short-term discomfort in the form of intense cravings. Pay attention to how you speak to yourself, and try to understand whether these predictable urges are turning into commands you are obeying or are able to distract yourself until they fade.

In conclusion, emotional eating is connected mainly to deep-seated emotional coping mechanisms and the brain’s reward system. It also has to do with whether, as children, we were unknowingly groomed to eat comfort foods when we were sad. The next time you beat yourself up over that extra piece of cake or a bowl of fries, remember that the reasons behind your choice may go far deeper than just your ability to say ‘no.’