Why Am I Stress Eating?
Today, when I finish my overseas conference call at 9:56 pm and find out I still got lots of unfinished projects on my to-do list, I want to eat something. I am not hungry, but I just have the desire for food. I opened a bag of chips and texted my friend: I think I am gonna stress-eating right now. It is interesting that I realized it, but I cannot control myself. Well, the first thing I need to understand is what stress is and why am I feeling it right now.
Thirty-five years ago (1984), two great psychologist Lazarus and Folkman defined stress as the unbalanced relationship between the person and the environment. We may find something is exceeding our resources and endangering our well-being. In my situation, I am overwhelmed by my projects, and the resource I am lacking is time. I think this might be why in English, people call deadline as "dead"-line, because it "endangers our wellbeing."
Then why stress leads to eating, here we may introduce the concept of "comfort eating." Consumption can satisfy people both physically and psychologically, at least temporarily. In a revolutionary psychology point of view, animals have the pressure of finding food, so when they have food, they will eat as much as they can to maintain their wellbeing, while for human, our body probably act like this: if we cannot use another thing to comfort our body, at least food is an easy access. As a consequence, in a stressful situation, we tend to eat more. Hige-calories, high-sugar and high-fat food can appease our stressful and vulnerable body.
However, if stress eating becomes a habit, then eating disorder comes into play. Disorders like binge eating and bulimia nervosa can cause serious health problems. Binge eating is closely related to obesity and bulimia nervosa is not only a health problem but a severe mental problem.By thinking about all of this, I put down the potato chips and started to work on my projects. Eventually, stress eating cannot release the stress at all; only keep working and try to find the balance between you and your environment can.
If you want to know more about stress eating, the article wrote in 2018 below is a good start.
Araiza, A. M., & Lobel, M. (2018). Stress and eating: Definitions, findings, explanations, and implications. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 12(4), e12378.