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.

Beating the Stress Cookie Monster

Remember Cookie Monster from Sesame Street? Do you ever feel like attacking some chocolate chip cookies with the tenacity that he does? Most of us have probably felt that way on a very stressful day-- just let me at 'em! Last week, I blogged about how stress leads to weight gain. Now, we'll take a look at how to handle that stress differently.

The first key is hidden in the last sentence of the previous paragraph. It's the recognition that you will have to deal with the stress. It's an active proposition; stress can't handle you-- you have to handle stress. For some of us, we feel utterly helpless, and the stress of life can be as terrible as the poor cookies must feel as the Cookie Monster is ripping through the package. This feeling of helplessness causes us to hope for some period where our lives will be stress-free and go according to our perfect plan, but generally speaking, this never happens. Stress can ebb and flow, but it seems to always be there. Understanding that you can deal with it effectively is the first step to being effective in dealing with stress. As many others have said in the past, if you don't think you can, you probably won't.

The other equally critical component that people fail to consider in dealing with stress is the perception of stress. Do you realize that you actually create stress for yourself! Things happen to you all the time...what you do with that information and how you process those events leads to the feeling of stress and thus your emotional, physical, and behavioral response.

There is no denying that your perception is your reality, so you should work on shaping your perception so that your reality results in less stress in your life. It's really the classic glass half full or half empty issue. Some of us look at the upside of everything while others of us look at the downside. If you feel stressed and out of control, take a minute to see how you interpret the things that are happening around you. Contemplate the things that you can control and for those things that you can't control, let them go. When everything in your world seems out of control, food is one of those things that you can exert some control over. So you decide to "reward" yourself by making the choice that you want no matter what anyone says. You have the power to do that with so many other areas of your life! Why exert that control to only hurt yourself more? Don't be afraid to exert that power to do something good for yourself.  You'll find that the Cookie Monster can be tamed, and that he likes other things besides cookies.

In your journal this week, identify things that caused you to feel stressed. Try to figure out why you perceived it as stressful, how much control you had in that situation, and what types of choices you made as a result of the control you had. I'll be interested to hear what you find.

Running from Tigers and Bears

At least 75% of our patients identify stress as a major factor in causing weight gain for them. Dealing with stress effectively can make a huge difference in your ability to manage your eating behaviors and your weight. A lot of the solution boils down to being able to self-soothe without food.

Why does stress lead to weight gain? The basic explanation is that we are hard-wired to respond to stressful situations in a way that makes us ready to defend our lives. Back in the day, our stressors were things like tigers and bears. Nowadays, our stressors are unreasonable bosses and crazy family members. While we don’t have to outrun them or get into physical fights (or least we try not to), our bodies still respond in a way that makes us feel like we need to be prepared for that possibility. To be prepared, our bodies get signals from hormones and chemicals that we synthesize to fuel up for the impending danger. However, we our access to food is ever-present and much more calorically dense than when we were running from tigers and bears. So instead of foraging for nuts and berries, we forage at the vending machine, choosing the 650 calorie honey bun and the 200 calorie soda to get through the afternoon.

Another part of the explanation of how stress leads to weight gain is the behavioral reinforcement to which we unknowingly fall a victim.  Remember when you had a bad day at school and your mother offered you a piece of cake to “make it all better”? That type of experience conditioned you to associate feelings of comfort and solace with cake. The cake didn’t necessarily have anything in it that was a mood altering substance—I don’t think she would have slipped you some Prozac; however, your mother’s comfort and concern for you were linked to the cake. We have the ability to associate memories and emotions with inanimate objects like food. This is especially true for food because the sight, smell, and taste can be an incredibly powerful stimulus.  So now as an adult 40 years later, you’re still looking for a piece of cake when you get home from a tough day at work or after arguing with your significant other.

So if we know all of this, why can’t we simply change how we respond to stress and stop eating? This is a central question to why obesity is so challenging to treat effectively. Food is powerfully consistent in its effects on your brain. Part of this is due to the fact that a lot of our manufactured food is designed to be exactly the same bite after bite. So you know that the last bag of candy you ate is going to taste just like the next one. Even though you intellectually understand that you shouldn’t go for the chocolate just because you are upset, you still do it because you can count on it making you feel a certain way, even if only temporarily. Until you can identify something that helps you soothe yourself and relieve stress as reliably and immediately as food, it’s hard to beat the feeling you get from that food.

All hope is not forsaken though…