Stress Eating

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Related Episodes:

• Food Craving vs. True Hunger
• Stress and Eating Habits
• Boredom Eating

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Full Episode Transcript:

Welcome welcome. I hope you’re loving this June weather as much as I am this year. June always seems like it should be fairly summer-y weather, but I’ve realized after living in Rhode Island for 10 years now, that it’s usually more of an extension of New England’s chilly, rainy spring. This year though, June has mostly been in the 70s and very sunny, and I imagine that it’s been a pretty warm June in other parts of the country as well. Hopefully.

So onto eating habits, today I want to talk with you about stress eating, which is something that most of us career women do at least on occasion, but oftentimes fairly frequently. Sometimes being aware after the fact, and other times, being completely unaware.

Before we completely dive into this one, if suspect or know for sure that you’re a stress eater, or any sort of emotional eater, like maybe you eat when you’re bored, worried, excited, irritated, all the things, I just want to take a moment to invite you personally to a free virtual workshop I’m hosting on July 14^th at 7pm ET. It’s specifically on How to Stop Emotionally Eating.

I’m going to talk about stress eating in today’s episode, but we are going to dive a little further into emotional eating at the workshop and I’m going to be coaching women at the workshop, on a volunteer basis of course. You can bring any question or challenge you’re having with your eating habits and I’ll help you with it. You don’t have to come on video, you can just type it in the chat box. You can also pre-submit your question or challenge ahead of time and I’ll answer those ones first. You also get a bonus if you come to the workshop.

I’m only opening it up to the first 50 career women to sign up though. So, grab your seat if you’re an emotional eater or suspect that you are an emotional eater. You can sign up at katemjohnston.com/workshop. I’ll also put the link in the show notes.

Alright, so when you take the normal stress of being an adult, and add on top of that additional stressors from your job, stress from certain difficult relationships, even from easy relationships, stress with bills, issues with the house, issues with your children, it all adds up, right? When you add in some stress that’s not from immediately around you, such as things going on in the community, your country, the world, it’s no wonder that we start looking for things to make us feel better.

We so often look to things outside of us, external things, to make us feel better and take the stress away. These can be a variety of things such as food, alcohol, pornography (okay, I hate that word, let’s just call it porn), drugs, social media, and even things like losing ourselves in movies, TV shows, and even books. Now, I don’t think that all of these things are bad, not at all. Well, maybe the drugs of course. However, these things only temporarily relieve stress, and the stress comes right back again once the “pleasure” has subsided from these external things, these things that you might be consuming.

Or, sometimes what can happen is the stress may not come back instantly, however when you keep trying to tamp it down with any of these things, the food, alcohol, porn, social media, etc., eventually it will come back up for you and often it will have built up to a level that is way harder to deal with.

So of course, since this is a podcast about eating habits, I am going to talk to you about how you may be dealing with stress by eating. More specifically, eating when you’re not really hungry, or your body is not really needing the food at the moment. Basically, eating in response only to the stress, not in response to actual true hunger.

First, I want to start out by telling you what exactly happens when your body is feeling stress. This is important to know, because it will help you understand WHY you may be stress eating. When you experience something, whatever it may be, and you feel the emotion or feeling of stress, a hormone called cortisol, which is commonly referred to as the stress hormone, is released in your body.

This produces very uncomfortable sensations. Oftentimes, you’ll feel it as tightness, tingling, flushing of your cheeks, shakiness, sweaty hands, increased heart rate, and sometimes even a headache or a buzzing sound or sensation in your head.

Can you think of right now some of the sensations that you normally feel when you’re stressed? This is actually really important to stop and take notice of, because once you have some awareness of the typical signals in your body or sensations in your body that you have while you’re stressed, you can sort of catch onto stress when it’s coming. When you have better awareness of when you’re feeling stress, your brain will go, “oh that’s stress.” I’ll share how this is going to be so helpful in a few minutes. So right now, just start to think about some of those physical sensations that you typically feel when you’re stressed.

What happens next after you experience these really uncomfortable feelings or sensations, is that your brain instantly wants to solve the problem of that discomfort. Your brain wants to do this by taking away the discomfort, or the uncomfortable feelings or sensations. Just like if you burn your hand while cooking, your first instinct is to grab ice or run your hand under cold water. You want that discomfort to go away. This is a normal human instinct. Our brains were formed to protect our own bodies and part of that means making our body feel better when it is hurt.

So how does your brain want to solve the problem of the discomfort of that cortisol that is released from the stress? Well, some people have a really good awareness of their stress, and they know lots of techniques to decrease their stress, such as meditation, yoga, maybe counting and taking some deep breaths. However, unless you’re a master at these, and if you’re like most humans, you’re going to start looking for solutions outside of you. Meaning, food, alcohol, or some sort of distraction like social media or TV. I want you to know this is completely normal. It’s really only a small percentage of people who have honed the skills of managing their stress from within.

Since food is so readily available and such an instant pleasure, it’s an easy choice. The reason why it’s an easy pleasure, is because of dopamine, the “reward” hormone and what used to be called the “pleasure” hormone. This hormone is released with the anticipation of food, so even just with the thought of food. It’s also released when you see or smell the food, when you taste the food with your taste buds, and even from the sensation of how the food feels in your mouth and when you swallow it.

That’s a lot of opportunity for that dopamine to really have its effect on you! So, you can certainly see why food would be a very easy source of pleasure, and a very easy solution to decrease the discomfort from the stress.

And I just want to point out here that you aren’t typically going to be seeking out a bowl of kale to relieve your stress. I mean, maybe, but not likely at all. Almost always, it will be something sweet, like cookies and ice cream, salty like chips, or fatty like anything fried. Basically, something that really excites the tastebuds. Maybe kale does that for you. I don’t know. Also, when using food to relieve stress, the amount of food is oftentimes unmonitored, leading to overeating. This is because if it’s providing that bit of pleasure, you’re going to want to keep that pleasure coming, right? I mean, I certainly would. So, it’s very easy to lose track of how much you’re eating, when you’re eating to try to feel better in response to stress.

The interesting thing about eating to try to make yourself feel better or in the case of stress, to make the stress decrease or go away, is that your brain won’t even necessarily think about whether you’re hungry and if you truly need food right now. Its main focus is to decrease that discomfort. By decreasing the discomfort, our brains mistakenly are thinking that we’re decreasing the stress, but we’re really only decreasing symptoms of the stress which is the discomfort from the stress. Meaning, the physical sensations you personally experience from stress, like tension in your body, increased heart rate, things like that.

Said differently, by eating food in a moment of stress, you are only decreasing the physical discomfort from the stress and not decreasing the actual stress itself. You are only counteracting some of the discomfort from the cortisol that gets released during stress, with some pleasure from the dopamine that’s released from the anticipation and eating of the food. Stress occurs in your brain and the symptoms of stress occur in your body. So stress eating is really only addressing the symptoms.

So, as you can see, hopefully, is that the food isn’t really a “treatment“ of the underlying problem but rather a treatment just for the symptoms. Just like in medicine, it’s much better to treat a diagnosis by finding the underlying cause and treating that underlying cause, rather than just prescribing a medicine for the symptoms only. Otherwise, the underlying cause can keep getting worse.

Also, just like a medication not being as effective the longer you take it, food or amounts of food tend to be not as effective the longer you use it in response to stress. You’ll start needing more of it. More candy, chips, or ice cream, just to get the same effects. You may have already noticed that yourself. Especially if you feel that your stress levels just keep rising over time. You may need more and more treats or snacks to help you “feel better.”

Now you might think, “Well Kate, it’s not easy to treat the underlying cause of stress, so if you can get any sort of relief, even if it’s temporary relief from food, then why not eat when you’re stressed?”

Well, you can of course, but here’s why I wouldn’t recommend it. Besides what I mentioned early on in the episode that food or the act of eating when stressed is only temporary relief, and the stress will only return or sometimes even return down the road much stronger, there are some other reasons as well. One of the main ones is that your brain then starts to form that association between stress and feeling better from food, therefore whenever it feels those sensations or discomfort from stress, your brain is going to automatically seek out food and think that it needs the food to relieve that stress.

When done over and over again, what do you think happens? A habit forms. A habit that then strengthens each time it’s repeated. And of course it’s going to be repeated if it’s already a habit, right?

Now luckily, you can break that bad habit, no matter how strong it is. That’s what I help career women do specifically. However, as you know, having “bad” eating habits leads to less desirable outcomes like weight gain, health problems down the road, even negative thoughts and feelings about yourself and your eating habits. We don’t want that.

Now, I just want to mention too that it doesn’t necessarily have to be a solid food when it comes to stress eating. It can also be a beverage, either an alcoholic or nonalcoholic beverage. Let’s just keep it nonalcoholic and use soda or a super sugary latté as an example. These will do the same things as the food. You get that dopamine hit from the sugar in the soda or the sugary drink, which provides some pleasure to help counteract the uncomfortable feelings and sensations from the cortisol that’s released when you’re stressed. Again, this doesn’t last very long, so the dopamine drops, and the stress rears its ugly head again.

I do want to mention that eating and even drinking beverages like soda as a response to stress can be fairly subtle. If you aren’t having strong physical sensations of stress and you’re not quite aware of the fact that you are stressed, you might still be stress eating nonetheless. A way to tell if you’re stress eating is, next time you eat something sugary, salty, or fatty, (basically anything that’s a treat or a comfort food) notice if you had normal hunger signals that cued or triggered you to eat. Signals such as those hunger pangs, growling in your belly, or even a slight nausea or headache. If you didn’t really have those hunger signals, then it was probably more of a desire to eat. A desire to eat usually shows up as a thought in your brain such as “oh I really want that.“ A desire is also known as a craving or an urge.

If you suspect it was more of a desire, or a craving or urge, then just ask yourself how you were feeling or what emotion you were feeling right before you had that desire. Did you see or hear something that upset you and may have caused some stress? Or sometimes it might even be physical pain that causes some stress in the body. So just pausing to have that awareness and asking yourself some questions, can be really helpful with this.

I just want to tell a quick story that I think will be helpful. You can probably relate to this to some degree. In my younger days, I was never really one to go overboard on candy, however I was feeling a lot of stress, much of which was due to high levels of anxiety, in my twenties. At my very demanding and intense job at the time, I started eating peanut M&Ms that one of the medical assistants brought in to share with everyone in the office every day. She would have them either in a bowl or in the bag and everyone was reaching into this bag midafternoon, myself included. I found myself doing it because eating the candy would provide a little bit of pleasure. Probably at the time, I would’ve termed it as a little bit of happiness, momentarily, but it felt good enough that I kept eating these peanut M&Ms every day. I knew they weren’t good for me, but my thought was “well they make me feel better during a stressful day and it helps me get through the day.”

It started to become a habit to just reach into that bag of peanut M&Ms and not even think about it. I wasn’t paying attention to how many I was eating; I wasn’t paying attention to how frequently I was eating them either. At that point, my stress was so uncomfortable that I didn’t even care. Until I started gaining weight. Then I cared. I also noticed that I didn’t really feel any better with eating the peanut M&Ms. My stress was only getting worse. I was gaining weight. And then I was having thoughts like “how could you just let yourself eat candy every day when you know better?” Which of course, is not a helpful thought to have, as thoughts like that are only going to make you feel worse, and for me they did.

This is actually one of the biggest problems that I see women having from developing “bad” eating habits. The resultant negative thoughts that end up going through your head, which only make you want to eat more of the foods that were making you feel good temporarily. It’s this vicious cycle that can seem like one you can’t get out of. But I promise you, you can. Just as that habit forms via neural pathways in your brain, which are just the communication paths between the nerve cells in your brain, you can also weaken or “break” those neural pathways.

So, another of the specific downsides to stress eating is that because we’re trying to “treat “our stress with food, we aren’t actually addressing that underlying issue. We’re not actually “treating“ the stress in the appropriate, longer-lasting way. So certainly, meditation, deep breathing, yoga, talking to someone, can all be really helpful for stress in the short term and also long-term. If you do any of these, that’s fantastic. I will say that for many career women, tackling stress can sometimes seem overwhelming, and that overwhelming thought certainly doesn’t make things any better when you’re already feeling stress. However just knowing that there are a few things that you can do in the moment for stress, can be really helpful. One of the easiest things to do is to take several long, slow, deep breaths. This will slow down your heartrate and activate your parasympathetic nervous system, which helps calm you down.

How to really start getting control of that stress eating is with the awareness of the stress and physical sensations of stress itself. And then, just the awareness of the fact that food is only providing a very temporary relief of those physical sensations and it’s not a “treatment” for the stress itself. This awareness can be so powerful because it enables you to pause and make a decision from your prefrontal cortex, a portion of the brain that is a higher level of thinking, and more future focused, rather than that more primitive portion of the brain that just wants that instant gratification of feeling better.

So, my first recommendation for how to stop stress eating is that awareness. Just get really curious on what your specific physical sensations are when you’re feeling stressed and get familiar with these. Next, you are also going to want to make sure that you’re really clear on the understanding that food is just a very short-term pleasure and won’t last. If you need to listen to the podcast episode again to be really clear on that, then please do so. Then, if you can, take a few long, slow, deep breaths to elicit that parasympathetic nervous system, so you can feel a little more relaxed.

Once you get pretty good at doing these simple things, stress eating loosens its grip. You’ll be less likely to go automatically from stress to eating. Now, just to be clear though, it’s okay for it to not be “perfect” and you might find yourself stress eating on occasion, but that’s perfectly normal and not anything to be upset at yourself about. I do still sometimes catch myself wanting something really tasty when I’m stressed, but because I have really good awareness that I am stressed and that the tasty treat is only treating those physical symptoms or sensations of the stress, it really makes me think twice about eating that particular food.

Now, sometimes I will actually decide to still eat a treat (usually something sweet like a homemade cookie.) I really love baking cookies and my husband and stepson love it when I get into baking mom mode. What’s happening here though is that I have awareness that I’m stressed, I then have the thought that I really want to have a cookie, and I purposefully decide if I’m still going to have the cookie or not, knowing full well that I’m most likely desiring it because I’m stressed. Now, I no longer have a habit of eating when stressed, however sometimes I decide on purpose, yes, I am going to have a cookie after that stressful situation or stressful day, knowing full well that it only is going to taste good and feel good in the moment and does not provide any long-term relief.

Since I’m fully aware of this, and since I only do this very very occasionally, I’m in control. That’s the difference between me being in control of my actions rather than the food being in control of my actions. Same thing for you. That’ll be the difference between you being in control, rather than food controlling you.

So that’s what I’d like for you to practice. Practice getting in that control of your eating, rather than your eating habits controlling you. Especially, when stress comes up so frequently for people in general. Perhaps even more so for career women because we are so driven and often have careers that we care really deeply about. Because we care really deeply about our careers and have a lot of attachment to how well we perform, there can also be a lot of negative emotion like stress that comes with that.

I just want to leave on this. Stress will always come up in your life, always. If you always respond by eating, you’re just going to cause more stress because of the effects that particular eating habit forms. You can break that habit though. It starts just with those simple steps of the awareness of your stress and understanding that food is temporary relief. You can get really good at both of these quickly. Your brain probably already understands that food is a temporary relief just after listening to this episode. Over the next couple of weeks, you are likely to be a master at knowing what your physical stress sensations are. Then, you can join me in the virtual workshop coming up where we can do a deeper dive. So again, if you want one of those 50 spots before they’re filled, then head over to katemjohnston.com/workshop or you can find the link in the show notes.

If you enjoyed the show, can you do me a favor and leave a review? That helps me to know that I’m giving you what you want and that it’s helpful content. That way, I’ll continue to do so. Additionally, it helps to make the show more discoverable to other women who can benefit from listening to it too. Thank you so so much, and I’ll talk with you soon.