It’s Mental Health Awareness Week. A great opportunity for sharing and learning ways to improve our mental health. So in this blog, I’m going to look at how mental worry can be a trigger for unintended eating.
I’ll share what happens when worrying drives us to reach for food. You’ll see why this happens, and you’ll learn a simple, evidence-based technique to stop it happening.
A common problem
Pooja has a secret problem around eating.
Her friends think she has it all – a lovely home, close supportive family and a top-flight job in industry, where she’s admired and respected. But Pooja struggles to enjoy it.
She’s a secret worrier and struggles on a daily basis. If her friends knew, they’d be astonished. When her worries get too much, rather than share them, she turns to food.
She’s now desperate to lose weight as she’s giving a keynote speech at a conference in a few months’ time, but focusing on her size has become just one more thing to worry about.
Worry-driven eating is a pattern I’ve seen often, particularly in people who are highly perfectionistic and conscientious. Which means they do really well in certain areas, like work. But like Pooja they are stuck in a cycle of relentless torment.
The psychology of worry
Worry is a normal feature of mental life, and it’s something we can learn to use. We vary in how prone we are to worrying. For some of us it gets out of hand, so that rather than helping us solve problems, it actually gets in the way.
Worry is a pattern of thinking that is associated with feelings of distress. It involves a cyclical pattern of thoughts, as the same issue returns over and again.
This recurrence is your brain telling you that the thing has not yet been resolved. But that it matters to you and it needs some attention. Worry feeds off an exaggerated sense of danger or threat. When you look at the content of your worries, you’ll probably see quite a catastrophic element to what could happen.
For Pooja, the catastrophisation is that she’ll embarrass herself and everyone will think badly of her. This expands into how, if colleagues and superiors think less of her, she’s not going to get further promotions and her career will hit the buffers.
Here’s a clue to why we worry…
Much worry is an attempt to avoid possible future distress. You anticipate some future thing that could happen, and then you rehearse particular (bad) scenarios.
In theory, these future scenarios could help you work out solutions to the problem, but all too often, the scene loops on the terrible outcome.
Why does worry get connected with eating?
Eating comes into the picture if you find it offers an effective distraction from the worry – seeking out food or biting or chewing may help shift your attention onto something more immediate and physical, so your worries are nudged down a notch.
Anything that helps in this way is stored by the brain as a solution, so we’re more likely to turn to food again when worry shows up in future.
Why does unwanted worry keep happening?
If you’re a worrier, chances are that when a negative thought first pops into your head, you believe it – you accept it as true, you engage with it and focus on it. Maybe trying to argue your way out of it, but even this involves focusing on it.
All this mental activity unfortunately only makes the original negative thought more prominent. Whether you believe the thought, fight it or even try to suppress it, each of these is still a form of focusing on it. Rather than eliminating the worry, this brings it to the fore.
Trying to rid yourself of a negative thought does not work – there is no delete button in the brain.
Eating itself doesn’t make the worry worse. But it also doesn’t help you learn different ways of responding to the negative thought that will actually help.
The additional eating may even add to your stock of things to worry about.
What can you do?
- Remind yourself that worries are not facts – they are your brain’s attempt to help you cope with future possible distress.
- Equip yourself with really simple kit – a timer, a notebook and a pen. This technique is called ‘worry time’. You allocate a particular part of the day (about 20 minutes) where you will focus on your worries. This worry time is a daily thing, preferably at a consistent time. Choose a time when won’t be interrupted.
- Get your notebook and pen at the allocated time. Set the time for 20 minutes, and for that 20 minutes, just write down all your current worries – the ones that are going round in your head right now. It doesn’t need to be neat, or grammatical. Don’t hold back. This is your chance to get things out on to paper.
- If you have worries in different domains of your life – say work, family, friendships – you might want to write each type on a different page. This is just to organise things a bit more.
- At the end of the 20 minutes, look back over what you’ve written. Notice which things are soluble – by which I mean which are in any way under your control. And notice which are insoluble – out of your control. For Pooja, the quality of her presentation and the clarity of her slides were both under her control. Whilst what people think of her is totally out of her control.
- The timer has gone off. You’ve looked at which are soluble. If there is something, however small, that you could do to address one of the soluble problems, then make a note of what you will do and when. Put the notebook and pen away until tomorrow’s worry time. You’ll go through the same process tomorrow for 20 minutes. At any time in the 24 hours between now and then, whenever a worry starts, remind yourself that you have a scheduled time to focus on the worry so you can postpone thinking about it for now.
You are training your brain that there is allocated time to focus on your worries, so it is free to do anything else in the rest of the day. Your brain knows you are taking the worries seriously, whilst reducing the hours you might otherwise spend.
What do you do with the insoluble worries?
These need to be accepted as insoluble – however long you think about them, there won’t be an answer that you can influence. So you need to find a way of letting them go. Maybe by reminding yourself, “This particular worry is out of my hands, and I need to focus instead on things I can influence.”
Worry time has been shown to be effective in helping people reduce their overall levels of worry*.
This means you have an effective alternative to eating in response to worry.
Want more help dealing to change unhelpful eating patterns?
I’ve created an online course all about the psychology of why you overeat, and how you can achieve freedom around food.
The course has 4 modules and you get lifetime access.
It is only available to buy for a limited period, so if you’re interested, please don’t delay. The link for more details is here.
Youtube video on worry-driven eating
If you’d like to share the contents of this blog, please check out my 10-minute youtube video on this topic which you can share with anyone you think may be interested.
Reference
* McGowan, S. K., & Behar, E. (2012). A Preliminary Investigation of Stimulus Control Training for Worry: Effects on Anxiety and Insomnia. Behavior Modification, 37(1), 90-112. https://doi.org/10.1177/0145445512455661
Photo by Valentina Ivanova for Unsplash