The psychology behind why we overeat when stressed

Do you overeat when stressed? Do you use food to help you calm down and feel better?  Do you overeat consistently? Do you eat too much at mealtimes, going past the point of being comfortably full? 

Maybe you are on the go a lot, rushing around after children and family, and you don’t have time to cook from scratch, so you grab something quick and filling, but not the healthiest. Perhaps you are dealing with work pressures, and they are overwhelming.  

You might have been on many diets to try to change your eating; however, they only work for the short term. You’ve tried so many ways to change, and you always come back to the same way of eating. It’s frustrating. 

We develop behaviours to cope with stress, often maladaptive behaviours. These feel good whilst doing them. These behaviours allow us to release a little of that stress. The trouble is, because they are maladaptive, we do not want them, so when we do them, and we can’t stop this adds to our frustration and stress.

Our biological response to stress

The biological part is that when we are stressed, our brain produces cortisol, which triggers us to crave higher-calorie foods that are high in sugar and fat. Stress slows down our metabolism and increases insulin, which leads to a higher calorie intake and lets us accumulate fat. This is for our survival. 

Stress often induces poor sleep, which leaves us feeling tired, and we are therefore less likely to want to do any physical exercise.

It leaves us feeling stressed with no outlet. We can find ourselves stuck in the same cycles of behaviour unless we can understand the reasons that are causing our stress. 

Psychological theories

Here are some psychological theories as to why we eat when feeling stressed.

Reward system

When we feel a negative emotion, if we cannot regulate our emotions intrinsically, we often look for a way to do that outside of ourselves. We don’t go looking for a substance; we happen to fall upon one, or one finds us. For some of us, we find food in the cupboard. It will often be higher-calorie foods like chocolate or biscuits. 

Higher-calorie foods not only taste good, but also give us a mental boost with a hit of dopamine and give us a short burst of energy. The brain learns that this feels good. We get a reward from eating food. 

Hypnotherapy helps us to identify and specify what the reward is for us. Using techniques we learn to develop that reward intrinsically without the food. 

Behaviourism

Behaviourism is based on the theory that we learn behaviours through our interactions with the environment. 

An event happens that causes us to feel a negative feeling. We turn to food unconsciously because we have learnt that food helps us to regulate our emotions. For instance, the food calms us down. The food reduces the intensity of the negative emotion. Because this feels good, we repeat the behaviour of eating when we experience the negative emotion. This sets up the association between food and feeling good.

The feeling-good part is known as a conditioned response. We do not see the association; we only see the result of the association, which is us overeating. Each time we repeat the behaviour, we strengthen the association between food and the positive feeling or the lessening of the intensity of the negative emotion. 

Think of association like the response we have when we see a red traffic light. When we see a red light, we automatically stop. We don’t think about it, we just do it. Now, say if stopping was a behaviour that we didn’t want. How do we go about undoing that unconscious behaviour?

Working with a hypnotherapist helps you to identify the associations you have set up. By being aware of the role food plays in your emotional state, you can learn to break the associations. Hypnotherapy helps you to bring in the positive emotion yourself. It also helps you to lessen the intensity of the negative emotion, which thus breaks the association. 

CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy)

The CBT theory suggests that stressful situations induce maladaptive cognitions. Meaning we develop thoughts and beliefs that help us cope with stress. Being maladaptive, they are not helpful in the long term.

An example might be, you feel stressed, so you automatically think oh sod it, I’ll have some cake, I deserve a treat. It is these thoughts and beliefs that lead us to our maladaptive behaviour, such as overeating. The role of CBT is to help you to identify these thought processes and recognise how they are leading to your unwanted behaviour. 

A hypnotherapist can help you to identify these thought patterns. These can be hard to identify on our own, as we are not aware of them. The hypnotherapist helps you to develop new patterns of thought that lead to a new desired behaviour. Hypnotherapy can help you to visualise these new thought patterns and behaviours so that they become automatic. 

DBT (dialectical behavioural therapy) 

DBT posits that stressful situations, plus our inability to cope with those stressful situations, cause us to develop maladaptive behaviours. The stressful situation lessens our ability to access our positive coping strategies. 

Hypnotherapy helps us to develop our positive coping strategies and helps us to find ways to lessen our response to stress, therefore being able to access our new coping strategies when under stress. Under hypnosis, we can visualise our new coping strategies, which increases our confidence in using them. 

Psychodynamic theory

Psychodynamic theory suggests that early attachment problems due to negligent, abusive or inconsistent caregivers, or ACE (adverse childhood experiences), can lead us to have negative emotions. When these are unresolved, they are pushed into the unconscious to allow us to continue with our day-to-day life.  

Unwanted behaviours that reward us, such as overeating, can help us to keep these unwanted emotions suppressed so that we do not have to feel them or acknowledge them, which could result in painful feelings. 

Hypnotherapy can help us to address these suppressed emotions in a safe way. The therapist is trained to hold the space for you, which allows you to feel safe and comfortable processing these suppressed emotions. By processing them, it helps to resolve them, so we no longer need to use food to keep the emotion suppressed.

Hypnotherapy brings a feeling of comfort and safety. It also increases our confidence, which allows us to drop old behaviours and adopt new ones in a way that feels natural to us. 

Hypnotherapy and stress 

Helping us to deal with our stress, hypnotherapy helps us to access a state of deep relaxation. This results in our sympathetic nervous system decreasing its activity, which allows for the parasympathetic system to take over. This results in the body learning how to relax. 

Hypnotherapy helps us to develop the ability to stop and become the observer of our patterns. We learn to do this with compassion and without judgment. Through being relaxed, we develop resilience. We learn to be our own support system. We also learn to reframe old behaviours, which enables new behaviours to develop easily. 

When we learn to decrease our stress and build new coping strategies for dealing with new stressful situations, we no longer need to reach out for food to cope. Associations get broken, and we are left feeling more confident and happier within ourselves.