Your Stress Response

Stress is the cue that causes you to have a predictable response. Do you know what your response is to stress? For a lot of us, it involves eating. You can alter that response if you begin to understand the cue and the reward.

Humans do things for one of two primary reasons: to avoid a threat or to get some benefit. I know it sounds primitive or even crass to think that all of your actions are dictated by these two basic emotions--fear and pleasure. But trust me, it's basic nature and allows us to survive and thrive. When something happens in our environment (at work, home, school, etc), we take in that information and process whether our response needs to be defensive to protect ourselves from a perceived threat or to react in a way that allows us to take advantage of a potential benefit.

Stress is a perceived threat for us. Overtime, we develop ways of coping with that stress. Some of these ways can be really healthy ways of decreasing the threat we feel-- taking a walk or doing some other type of exercise, meditation, engaging in a hobby, or doing something that allows you to escape for a while. Other times, we do things that are not always in our best long-term interest but nonetheless, help us feel safer or provide a sense of pleasure if only for a brief moment. Stress eating falls into this category. As we learn to associate a sense of pleasure with the foods we consume during stressful periods, it becomes a type of reward that reinforces the behavior. So at the end of a long day at work that was really taxing, you decide that you deserve to have that extra serving of food or that second glass of wine as a reward for dealing with your crazy boss. When this becomes a habit, meaning that it begins to happen almost involuntarily, then it becomes a real problem. How do you know it's a habit? When you find yourself finishing the bag of chips and you don't remember what was happening while you chomped away, that's what I mean by almost involuntary. Your brain is working on autopilot and going into "Soothe Me" mode. You've come to learn that salty, crunchy things take your mind off of your troubles for a while and magically make you feel better. So instinctively, when you feel bad, you start to crave these things and find yourself foraging for chips.

Next week, we'll get into that instinctive response and see if we can retrain our brains.