Emotional eating, sometimes called stress eating, is when someone eats in response to emotional cues. Triggers can be negative, positive, or neutral, but when eating is repeatedly done in response to difficult situations, it can become problematic.
In many cases, food is used to cope with or soothe emotions that arise from stressful or traumatic experiences. In these instances, it’s important to learn how to stop emotional eating and find appropriate help.
Understanding Eating and Emotions
The connection between food and emotions is ancient, vast, and extremely complex.
At its base level, food is necessary for survival, but it also plays an important role in countless cultural and social experiences and traditions. Eating can be a source of comfort, pleasure, and positive memories. But food can also symbolize status or self-control.
The physical experience of eating sets off a physiological chain reaction, sending various chemicals and hormones throughout the body, which can significantly impact mood and mindset.
Many people develop a taste for certain “comfort foods” throughout their lives—dishes that evoke nostalgia, cultural connection, or simply taste good. When someone struggles with emotional eating, they may turn to these foods or others in times of distress in an attempt to feel better.
Over time, this pattern can become learned and eventually feel compulsive or out of someone’s control, trapping them in an emotional eating cycle.5 Once this happens, or when someone has trouble separating the feelings of emotional and physical hunger, it may indicate a deeper problem that requires treatment.
What Causes Emotional Eating?
Emotional eating can be caused by a number of sources, but in many cases, the issue is a learned behavior. Repeatedly using food to feel better can develop a sense of expectation in the mind that food will be delivered during similar experiences moving forward, and this response can eventually become compulsive or done without thinking.5
But there are also biological drivers that make so many people reach for food in times of stress—or work to reinforce the habit.
Eating activates something in the body called the parasympathetic nervous system. While operating under this system, the physical focus is on the “rest and digest” response, an equal-but-opposite experience of the “fight or flight” response that occurs during times of stress. Some people may associate this calming effect with eating when they feel upset.1
Studies have also found that people are especially prone to eating highly palatable foods high in fat, salt, and sugar when feeling stressed. These same foods have been connected to higher levels of “feel good” chemicals in the body and to the development of binge eating behavior.2
Emotional Eating Triggers
As the name suggests, emotional eating generally happens when someone feels emotionally triggered. This can occur for any number of reasons, including:4
- Work stressors
- Financial stressors
- Strained or difficult relationships
- Health issues
- Fatigue
However, not all situations that trigger emotional eating are negative. Someone may associate a particular food with a specific occasion—such as a cake on their birthday—and the anticipation of that food can make it hard to tell the difference between physical and emotional hunger.
Some triggers can also be neutral. Advertising frequently acts as an emotional eating trigger, and boredom can also set people looking for food, whether or not they’re physically hungry.
Emotional Eating vs. Eating Disorders
It’s normal for anyone to eat in response to a stressful situation, but this behavior can lead to deeper issues.
Emotional eating is not an eating disorder in and of itself, though it could be considered a form of disordered eating, especially when it happens repeatedly. From a clinical perspective, emotional eating is only one type of behavior, whereas a full-blown eating disorder involves a number of connected behaviors.
It’s possible for emotional eating to lead to disordered eating.
Thoughts associated with the behavior are also important considerations when addressing emotional eating vs. eating disorders. Aside from uncomfortable emotions, people struggling with eating disorders also generally experience chronic low self-esteem and a distorted body image, which also drive their desire to control food intake.
Still, it’s possible for emotional eating to lead to disordered eating behavior. This is especially true when eating involves significant amounts of food eaten during a relatively short time, which is a key symptom of binge eating disorder and other eating disorders.
How to Stop Emotional Eating
Overcoming emotional eating can be an important goal, even before the behavior becomes part of a full-blown eating disorder. For individuals who want to stop the cycle or work on developing healthier coping mechanisms, there are several steps that can be taken.
Keeping a food diary is a simple way to start changing the way you think about food.
Start by tracking what you eat and when, and add notes on how you felt at the time or any potentially upsetting events that may have happened before eating.
After some time, you can look back and start identifying potential habits or patterns, which can point you in the direction of changes that need to be made.
Mindful eating encourages developing a sense of presence when you eat. This means keeping your focus on the present moment and the physical sensations of eating.3
Mindful eating may ask someone to think about and savor the taste, temperature, feel, or smell of the food. The overall idea is to slow down through the process, which gives the body a chance to communicate effectively with the brain.
Mindfulness has also been found to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, so practicing mindfulness in any form can help encourage the same “rest and digest” sensation that people get from eating when they’re upset.1
Other tools can help someone separate their physical hunger from their emotional hunger and learn to control their emotional eating.
The hunger/satiety scale is designed to help people consider how hungry they actually are. There are varying versions of the scale, but each one asks people to rate how hungry (or full) they feel on a scale of 1 to 10.
The idea is to develop the habit of mentally checking in with yourself before eating. Are you really hungry, or are you eating as an emotional or learned response to stress?
Speaking with a mental health professional is a great way to help with emotional eating or other issues related to disordered eating or emotional struggles.
Certain types of therapy have been found particularly helpful for these behaviors, including cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT), and dialectic behavioral therapy (DBT).
Through these sessions, patients are taught to recognize not just their food cravings but also the disordered thoughts or complex relationships that may be driving them. Each offers a set of tools to help patients repair these relationships or redirect these thoughts to build a healthier coping response to stress.
If you or a loved one are struggling with emotional eating on a regular basis, it may be time to seek out help. Remember: It’s never too late, and recovery is always possible.
Resources
- Cherpak CE. (2019). Mindful Eating: A Review Of How The Stress-Digestion-Mindfulness Triad May Modulate And Improve Gastrointestinal And Digestive Function. Integrative medicine (Encinitas, Calif.); 18(4):48–53.
- Adam T, Epel E. (2007). Stress, eating and the reward system. Physiology & Behavior; 91(4):449-458.
- Nelson JB. (2017). Mindful Eating: The Art of Presence While You Eat. Diabetes Spectrum; 30(3):171–174.
- Weight loss: Gain control of emotional eating. (n.d.) Mayo Clinic. Accessed July 2024.
- Reichenberger J, Schnepper R, Arend AK, Blechert J. (2020). Emotional eating in healthy individuals and patients with an eating disorder: evidence from psychometric, experimental and naturalistic studies. The Proceedings of the Nutrition Society; 79(3):290–299.