Tidings of Comfort & Joy: Emotional eating part 1
Confession: this blog post (and my professional interest in this topic) was inspired by my own personal experience with emotional eating. Eating is something I remember vividly using as a kid to comfort myself in difficult situations. When my family was having issues, when I was having friend problems, or when I felt lonely during those long after school hours, I would eat. Often it was in secret, and often it was foods that were pretty rich. It was something I felt so much shame about - even as a fifth grader. Fast forward 25 years…and I’m standing in the kitchen in the dark, 6 weeks postpartum with my first baby, finding myself mindlessly and mechanically munching on a bag of Trader Joe’s white cheddar corn puffs after a particularly challenging day learning to be a mom, waiting for my husband to come home after a very long work day. It felt SO familiar. But after years of practice and understanding about WHY I was doing this and what to do instead, I was able to find compassion and kindness for myself instead of shame and disgust - as well as get to the bottom of why it was happening!
Emotional eating (or as I often call it, comfort eating), is a topic that is deeply misunderstood and uncomfortable for many of us to talk about. We joke about “eating our feelings” after a breakup or diving headfirst into a pint of ice cream after a rough work week. We often feel guilt and shame for using food as a tool to comfort ourselves. But at the same time most of us ignore the WHY behind our actions and fail to look for the lesson in the behaviors. So today we’ll take a look at comfort eating from the scientific perspective so as to understand the driving forces behind this behavior. Next week we’ll talk about how to use what we know about emotional eating to make better decisions for our bodies and minds without shame or judgment.
THE SCIENCE OF EMOTIONAL EATING
One of the things I noticed when I became a mom was that sometimes my daughter wants to nurse or eat for reasons other than physical hunger. Sometimes she wants to nurse when she’s tired, or has just bonked her head on the ground, or feels overstimulated in a room of new people. She gets excited to eat when she’s bored or she sees that we are eating. She’s only 7 months old, so I know this is a trait she was born with - it’s in her biology to eat for comfort, novelty, and enjoyment. But why is that? If we only need food to fuel our bodies, why do we eat for reasons other than physical hunger?
Here’s what we know: when we eat, our brains get excited. They release dopamine, the neurotransmitter that makes us feel good and more likely to repeat whatever the action was that we triggered the dopamine hit. This happens when we eat any food, but there are some foods that stimulate a bigger dopamine release; particularly foods that are higher in fat and sugar. For some people, this pattern also applies to overeating or the feeling of being overfull. In fact, binge eating can trigger a dopamine response similar to that of illegal drugs like cocaine. It may seem counterintuitive, but from a species survival perspective this makes sense. Higher calorie foods would benefit the human body in an environment where starvation was a major risk (read: most of human history). The bigger the caloric input, the more likely a person would be to survive the winter.
Here’s the thing: our “lizard brains” don’t know that today, a significant portion of the world has ample access to an overabundance of calories. We have ancient, powerful, deeply integrated neurophysiological systems driving us to find food, eat food, and store body fat - but we live in a world where those behaviors aren’t needed like they once were. In fact, obesity is a far greater health risk than starvation for most of the United States.
SO, WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH EMOTIONAL EATING?
For most of us, negative emotions can drive us to seek out a dopamine “hit.” There are many ways to achieve this, and some that benefit us more than others. For example exercise, listening to music, sunlight, completing a task we’ve been working on, meditation, and petting dogs (!!!!) can release dopamine in our brains! On the other hand, things like gambling, video games, alcohol, sex, shopping, drug use, excessive social media use, and overeating can also give us the dopamine we are craving. Few people enjoy experiencing or sitting with negative emotions like sadness, loneliness, anger, disappointment, or regret. We’re hard wired to avoid those negative emotions and many of us opt to numb them out or chase happy feelings instead.
So, in a very real way, food CAN be very physically and emotionally comforting. It provides us with tangible, measurable increases in one of the most powerful “drugs” we know of - dopamine! For some people, eating in response to negative emotions can be the way they regulate those emotions. This trend tends to be more common in people with obesity, and emotional eating behaviors are positively associated with increases in BMI in men and women. Interestingly, some people exhibit the opposite behavior and struggle to eat when stress or negative emotions are high. In one study, 38% of people reported overeating in response to stress whereas 30% of the participants reported skipping meals due to stress. We’re not quite sure why people differ in these traits. Also of interest - Millennials are reportedly more likely to engage in emotional eating than any of their older counterparts.
DEALING WITH EMOTIONAL EATING
Emotional eating can be extremely uncomfortable and cause lots of shame and stress. If you find yourself standing in a dark kitchen looking for food to cope with stress or difficult feelings, know you are not alone. And recall that it’s physiologically normal to feel comforted by eating. Be kind to yourself. Next week we’ll discuss ways to manage emotional eating with compassion and zero judgment.
As a starting point this week, think about how you handle stress and/or negative emotions. Do you find yourself avoiding or running from difficult feelings? Do you find yourself seeking out dopamine hits from food or using food to regulate your emotions? The first step toward building a peaceful relationship with food that is free from the compulsory drive of emotional eating is to bring awareness to negative emotions. It can help to simply notice and name what you’re feeling. Someone cut you off on the freeway? Name the anger! Had a hard conversation with a family member? Name that, too. No need to try to change the feeling - for now, just bring attention to it.
It’s my hope that understanding the why behind our emotional eating behaviors will help us be able to care for our bodies, minds, and emotions better. Stay tuned for part two about practical strategies!
UNTIL NEXT TIME - COACH SARAH
