Latest / The XX Lab / How Stress Tricks Your Brain Into Eating When You’re Not Hungry | Dr. Sarah Hill
Transcript
- AUDIO SXX EPXX SAHIL EATING WHEN NOT HUNGRY EXPLAINER: Have you ever finished dinner, known perfectly well that you weren't hungry anymore, and then found yourself back in the kitchen 20 minutes later looking for a snack? Or maybe you've done the thing that I've done, where you're standing in the pantry and it's 3 30 in the afternoon and you're looking for something sweet or something crunchy, even though you just finished eating lunch two hours ago and you're not hungry at all. I'm Dr. Sarah Hill and I'm a research psychologist and professor. And I've studied health and behavior for more than 25 years. One of the things that I've spent my career really trying to understand is why we sometimes do things that sabotage our health goals, even when we know better. Now, if you're like me, the explanation that you've been given for this type of behavior is just that we lack willpower. We're not hungry, we don't need the food, and then you're eating it anyway. Therefore, apparently you have the self-control of a toddler or of a Labrador retriever left alone with a rotisserie chicken in the kitchen overnight. But research on stress, scarcity, and eating actually suggests that something far more interesting is going on. It's not just that we have low self-control. Eating when you're not hungry may actually be an old survival strategy that gets switched on by the wrong cues. In other words, it might be a feature of your brain, not a bug. And once you understand what flips that switch, you can actually start to interrupt it. The first thing that you need to understand is that your brain wasn't designed for a world with a pantry. Most of human history, food wasn't guaranteed. Our ancestors didn't have a Starbucks every four hundred yards or didn't have a Taco Bell in every corner. Their problem was getting through stretches when there wasn't enough to eat. They didn't have to worry about having too much to eat. The brain picked up on a pretty simple rule, and that is when things are uncertain and food is around, you should eat it. And this is true even if you're not hungry. The idea is you should stock up now because you might not get the chance later. Here's a way to picture it. Think about what your phone does when the battery drops to 15%. It doesn't wait until it's totally dead and out of juice to do something about it. It switches into low power mode. The screen dims. The background app shut off, it starts to protect itself from completely running out of juice. And it turns out that your brain has its own version of low power mode. And when it senses that resources might be running low, it changes its strategy to keep you from running out of juice. The difference is that for your brain, the move isn't to save energy, it's instead to take more energy in, eat while food is here. Here's the catch though, your brain doesn't have a battery meter for your life. It can't log into your bank account and open your refrigerator and conclude, Good news, Sarah, resources appear to be sufficient and bountiful, and therefore famine is not forthright. Instead, it uses a shortcut, and that shortcut is stress. For our ancestors, feeling stressed and on edge was oftentimes a sign that something was wrong. And a lot of times when something was wrong, it's that there wasn't enough food. And so when your stress response fires, your brain can read that as a warning sign that resources are running low, and this can get it to switch into low power mode. And this is what research suggests is actually going on. When we are stressed in our life or when our life feels uncertain, we tend to pay less attention to the hunger and fullness cues that come from inside of our bodies. And instead, we tend to pay more attention to the food that's in front of us. The question stops being, am I hungry? And instead, our brain just starts to ask itself, is there food here? Imagine you've had a terrible week, you're worried about money, you're fighting with your partner, your job feels shaky, or you're not sleeping well, and even though your refrigerator is full and there's no famine coming, your stress response is going off. And because of that, your brain takes that as a cue that right now is a time to eat while you can. And it doesn't take much to set it off because the fact is the system is built to be a little bit jumpy. Think about the smoke detector in your house. It's a lot like that. It's much better for your smoke detector to go off when you burn toast than it is to sit quiet when your house burns down. Smoke detectors are actually designed to be oversensitive. Burn the toast and the whole house starts screaming at you. Your stress system works the same way. It would much rather overreact than miss real trouble. A lousy week at work can set it off just like a real food shortage. Not every snack that you eat when you're not hungry is in sort of an ancient survival strategy. Sometimes we eat when we're not hungry because we're bored, and sometimes we eat when we're not hungry because the food is just really delicious. And sometimes we've just developed a bad habit of eating cereal straight out of the box when watching the Gilmore girls on Netflix. No judgment. But if you keep finding yourself eating when your body is not asking for food, especially when you're feeling stressed, it's really worth getting curious about what's going on. Right? So here are three things that I want you to do to get to the bottom of this in your life. The first thing you need to do is just change the question you ask yourself when you go to the pantry to eat when you're not hungry. Right. Most of us ask ourselves the wrong question when we're standing in front of an open pantry or refrigerator. We see the box of cookies and we ask ourselves, should I eat this? And immediately we've turned eating into a morality play. Is the cookie bad? Have I been good today? Do I deserve the cookie? Can I afford the calories? Let's see. For breakfast, I had oatmeal and fruit, and that's about 400 calories. And then there was that handful of nuts, and that's about 300 calories. And then I had that mocha. And all of a sudden you're doing the kind of math that would have saved you from failing freshman algebra. It's like you're holding a congressional hearing in your head about whether or not you can eat a Fucking cookie. Enough of this. Instead of asking yourself, do I deserve this? I want you to ask yourself, what am I feeling right now? That's it. Ask yourself, am I hungry? Am I stressed? Am I bored? Am I tired? Am I anxious? Did something just happen that made me feel unsettled? Or am I actually physically hungry? Or did I just run into an opportunity to eat and I've nothing better to do? I especially want you to ask yourself this in the middle of the afternoon and after a hard day. Right, these are the three moments when a lot of us tend to reach for food without ever checking in with what our bodies are actually asking for and what they're actually telling us. And here's the key: you are not telling yourself that you cannot have the cookie. That isn't the exercise. You just need to ask yourself the question and then eat it if you want to. Right. Right now, we're not trying to control the behavior. We're just collecting data about it. Then at the end of the week, I want you to look back and ask yourself. What keeps showing up right before I want to eat when I'm not hungry? Maybe it turns out that for you, most of the time when you want to eat, it's actually because you're hungry. And that's really good information to know. But for a lot of us, you might notice that five of the seven times you've had a stressful day, or you had a fight with your partner, or you were feeling exhausted, or you're feeling worried about money. Everybody's triggers are a little bit different. You need to be looking for yours. Once you know your cues, you can catch them in real time. Right? You can be standing in front of the pantry and you'll think to yourself, wait, I'm not actually hungry and I actually know what this is. Today was a shit show. My stress response is completely lit up, and my brain is telling me to eat because there's food here. It's running, it's low battery mode. This doesn't mean you can't eat the cookie. It just means that the urge isn't mysterious to you anymore. You've put a little bit of space between you and the food cue and then the response. And in that space, you get to choose what do you want to do? And maybe you want to eat the cookie because you genuinely want the cookie. And that's fine. But you're no longer mistaking a stress response for physical hunger. The second thing that you need to do is you need to learn to get better at listening to your body. Now, asking, what am I feeling? only works if you can actually tell what you're feeling. And it turns out that's a skill. And there's actually a term for this about the ability to pick up on signals coming from inside your body. It's called interreception. And it includes noticing things like your heartbeat. Your breathing, your temperature, your muscle tension, your thirst, your fatigue, your hunger, and whether or not you might be coming down with a cold. And research links poorer awareness of these internal signals with dysregulated eating. And this makes sense. If you want to be able to tell the difference between my body needs food and my stress response system wants me to grab food while it's here, you have to be able to listen to what your body is saying to you. The good news is that body awareness is actually something that you can practice. And the better that you get at it, the less likely you are to eat when you're not hungry. So today, right now, we are going to practice listening to our bodies. And I'm gonna be warning you, this is gonna feel a little bit weird, but it's helpful. For the next 60 seconds, I want you to stop listening to me and I want you to pay attention to your body. Right? Don't change anything. Don't breathe differently. Don't try to relax. We are not trying to achieve enlightenment right here. Right, we are just collecting data and I want you to sit and just feel. Start with your feet, right? What do you feel? Is there pressure, warmth, cold? Now move on to your legs. Is there pressure anywhere? What about your stomach? Are you hungry? Are you full? Is it empty? Can you feel your breathing? Can you feel your heartbeat? See if you can locate it in your fingers or on your wrist or in your neck? How does your chin feel? How does your jaw feel? How does your forehead feel? We're going to sit and sense these sensations for 60 seconds and just collect data. You're trying to listen to your body. How does it feel? How does your hip feel? How does your other hip feel? How do your knees feel? Learning to tune into your body's cues can be an incredibly useful tool to learn interreceptive acuity. And again, you aren't trying to fix anything. You're just trying to notice it. That's it. That's the exercise. And if your response was Dr. Hill, I could not feel half of those things, that's totally fine. That's actually really useful information to have because any skill, you're going to get better at it by practicing. And one minute a day is really all that you need. Which brings us to the third thing that you're going to do. And this is going to be providing your brain with evidence that you're safe. And the first two steps that we talked about work on one side of the problem, and that is noticing when the alarm is going off and telling that alarm apart from real hunger. This solution actually works on the other side of the equation. What if you could deliberately give your brain more information that says resources are here, things are predictable, you are safe, you are okay. You actually can do this. And I call this safety and security journaling. And you've probably heard of gratitude journaling where you write down three things every day that you're grateful for, and then over time you start to notice more good things because you're attuned to the gratitude signals in your environment. This is very similar, but it's going to be focusing on cues to safety and security. Every night, what I want you to do is I want you to write down three pieces of evidence that your life was safe, predictable, adequately resourced, and okay. And these don't need to be profound facts, right? And in fact, boring is good. Things like there is food in my refrigerator. I paid my electric bill. I walked from my office to my car safely. When I called my best friend, she answered the phone call. I know where I'm sleeping tonight. I have enough gas to get to work today, tomorrow, and the rest of the week. My partner showed up when he said he would. We're not trying to convince ourselves that That nothing bad is ever gonna happen or that we live in some fairy tale perfect life. You're just collecting evidence. And here's why it matters. When you are feeling anxious, your brain can turn into an investigative journalist who exclusively covers bad news. It notices everything that's uncertain, everything that might go wrong, everything that you don't have that everybody else has. Meanwhile, the fact that you have running water, a safe place to stay, food for tomorrow, and three people who'd pick you up if you needed help. All of that barely registers. These things are boring. Our brain just takes them as background noise. But boring is exactly what safety looks like. And we need to bring that to the forefront of the brain by writing it down. Every night, three pieces of evidence, write it down. Here's how to put it all together. Please do not watch this and decide that you're going to completely transform your relationship with food by tomorrow morning and then try to do all three things at once. Because the fact is We want to make this stupidly easy and not uncomfortable. And when we try to make too many changes at once, our brain freaks out. It doesn't like that. And what does our brain do when it freaks out? It likes to go to the pantry and eat snacks when we're not hungry. So let's do this one week at a time. Week one, once a day, before you eat something outside of a meal, I just want you to ask yourself, what am I feeling right now? And then at the end of the week, I want you to look at your pattern. That's it. No judgment, no changes in your behavior. Week two. I want you to keep doing that and add in the 60-second body scan once a day. So we're going to be working the problem from both directions. You're going to be catching the moments when stress sets off the alarm bells, and then you're going to be feeding your brain evidence that the world is more predictable than your stress response is making it feel. At the end of the month, I want you to look back and ask, can you spot your trigger sooner? Is it easier to tell physical hunger from a stress-triggered urge to eat? Are you catching yourself before you automatically go into the pantry and run the stress response program and start eating when you're not hungry? And maybe nothing will change. I want to be really clear about that because eating behavior is incredibly complicated and people eat for a whole lot of different reasons. If there's no three minute journaling exercise. That's going to be able to magically fix everybody's really oftentimes toxic relationship with food. But you will have done something incredibly useful for yourself. You'll have gone from why the hell do I keep doing this? why do I keep eating when I'm not hungry? to, I know what this is. This is my stress response telling my body to stock up on food when food is available because it thinks that there's a famine underway. So here's what I want you to walk away with from our little one sided conversation with one another. I want you to understand that eating when you're not hungry doesn't necessarily mean that you have terrible self-control. Sometimes stress and uncertainty are just switching on an old program that we have inherited from our ancestors that once made perfect sense. If resources are uncertain and food is available, you should eat it. Your job is to learn when that program is running and to give your brain some good reasons to stand down. And the goal is not to become someone who never eats when she's not hungry. I mean, birthday cake is a thing. French fries are a thing, and sometimes we eat because eating is one of life's greatest pleasures. The goal is simply to know the difference between choosing to eat because you want to, and then running an old script because stress flipped on the switch. If you notice that your hunger reliably changes at a particular point in your menstrual cycle, talking to the ladies, especially the week before your period, that may be a different process altogether. Hormones can change your appetite and your energy needs across the menstrual cycle. And I made an entire episode about what's happening there. And so you should go ahead and check it out below if you're interested. Thanks for tuning in.