Emotional Eating is something that everybody has heard of, yet it is has no formal definition. Many people describe emotional eating as the process of eating particular foods that makes them feel better. Some people eat when they are sad or anxious. Others eat when they are overwhelmed. For many, the cue to eat may come when they are bored, lonely, angry or distressed. Although the reasons may vary, the results seems to be the same – “Food makes me feel better”.
The reason that food makes you feel better is because your brain is designed to give you that response. Your brain wants you to eat, and in order to do that, it must reward you for taking action and eating food. Although any food can stimulate the brain’s reward system, some foods give us “more reward”. These foods tend to be more reinforcing and thus we seek them out more. Highly rewarding foods are usually high in fat, sugar, and calories, and they provide the “feeling better” sensations that emotional eaters experience.
Everybody is an Emotional Eater
What people seem to misunderstand however, is that EVERYBODY is an emotional eater. We all eat food and everybody gets a release of reward chemicals in their brain for doing so. This is how humans have survived as a species. This is why we live today. Without this mechanism we would not seek out food. Everybody is an emotional eater because your brain is designed that way. It is designed to make you feel better when you eat, so you will do it again in the future.
Let me give you an example. Almost everybody has stuffed themselves so much that it almost made them sick. In fact for some people, this is quite a common occurrence! Do you know why you let yourself do this? You did it because you are an emotional eater, just like everybody else. Even in the absence of any hunger, your brain will give you a reward when you keep eating. That’s why sometimes it is hard to stop, because your brain wants you to keep eating!
The big problem however, is when people associate certain behaviors with an eating habit. They develop repetitive behaviors and always eat under certain circumstances. In essence they create a script that is imprinted in their brains and this behavior becomes so routine that they respond even before they are conscious of a stimulus. For example “every time I get stressed, I eat ice-cream”. This process is often unconscious. That is why sometimes you find yourself scraping the bottom of the ice-cream container without even realizing you have eaten anything at all!
This process is called “conditioned learning”. Basically, conditioned learning means that you have TRAINED your brain to react a specific way under specific circumstances. This is what people refer to when they say that they are “emotional eaters”. In fact eating when you are stressed or angry or lonely or sad is a learned behavior that you have created in your brain through association. It is a conditioned response.
Lets take another example. Ivan Pavlov, the great Russian scientist, found that salivation in response to the presentation of food could rapidly be transferred to another stimulus. In one of his fascinating experiments he found that a bell tone that is repeatedly associated with the presentation of food could elicit the identical physiological reactions to the presentation of food. So every time he rang the bell, it produced the physiological response of salivation, i.e the desire to eat food.
This process of association has the nice little tag line of “neurons that fire together wire together”. This is how your brain works. It makes associations by linking cognitive, motor and emotional aspects together into one chunk. This is a memory. Every time that you repeat the same sequence of events, such as always eating food under certain circumstances, you strengthen that connection in your brain. This repetition creates a formed habit, an unconscious response that you have developed over a period of time.
Emotional Eating is a Habit
The major difference here is that of goal-directed behavior verses habit-directed behavior. An example of goal directed behavior is thinking about cake, desiring cake, and then taking the deliberate steps to obtain cake. All of this requires a specific set of motivational neural circuits. If you walk into your house intent on getting some cake from the refrigerator, your activity is goal-directed and consciously reward-driven. You want that cake and you are going to act to obtain it.
But if you do that often enough, the mental process changes. It becomes a habit-driven behavior, less deliberate and more repetitive – and engages different neural circuitry. No longer motivated by a conscious desire for food, you consciously head for the refrigerator when you get home because it is a habit. Your motor behavior has become automatic.
This habit of stimulus-response is what causes overeating, not “emotional eating”. Remember, everybody is an emotional eater, but not everybody is an overeater. Every time you eat when you are angry, you strengthen the angry=eating habit. Every time you don’t eat when you get angry then you weaken the angry=eating habit. That’s neuroplasticity, and it is always in action.
Eliminate the Habit
The first step in eliminating these triggers that people call emotional eating is awareness. Try and identify your negative eating habits. For example “when X happens, then I want to eat Y and only Y.” If you can eliminate X then you are much less likely to eat Y. If you can’t eliminate X, then substitute Z for Y – a healthier option or some activity. At first you are not going to want to do this because breaking a habit can be very difficult.
But that’s what it is – a habit. You brain is a habit machine. It creates these habits for efficiency, because it likes to conserve energy. If you can change your negative eating habits by training new ones, you will escape the trap of of always desiring specific foods when you feel a certain way. Everybody is an emotional eater so your desire to overeat when you feel bad (or good) is a trained behavior. Eliminate the habit, and you will eliminate your “emotional eating”.