Why stress causes people to overeat | Hacker News Reader

Why stress causes people to overeat

health.harvard.edu

28 pointsal_ramich8 comments

Completely fails to answer the question 'Why do people stress eat?'

As close as it comes is "people who responded to stress with high cortisol levels in an experimental setting were more likely to snack in response to daily hassles in their regular lives than low-cortisol responders"

So there's a statistical association between high cortisol responses and snacking in response to stress. That is not "why", it's a correlation, and meaningless to an ordinary person.

If "stress" = "worrying about (something that may happen in) the future", then mightn't 'over eating' be a primitive physiological response? e.g. similar to how 'threat of imminent attack' -> 'fight or flight', perhaps 'threat of something bad in future' -> 'better pack on the kilojoules now in case we can't secure an adequate food supply'.

IMO more likely to be emergent behaviour. Stressed people generally have issues prioritising difficult long-term goals over tasks that yield short-term gratification.

so true. Stress leads to burn out state which has to be one of the biggest productivity issues. The body and mind go into this odd state where they are looking for instant small boosts to feel good. Food is an obvious feel-good with many obvious 'next stage' boosts that people opt to get 'rewards' from. You could write the same article about alcohol, excessive gaming or excessive social media consumption. Personally, keeping an eye on the level of burn out is one of the most important lessons so far.

>e.g. similar to how 'threat of imminent attack' -> 'fight or flight', perhaps 'threat of something bad in future' -> 'better pack on the kilojoules now in case we can't secure an adequate food supply'.

In that case it would the same response would also apply to skinny people, but the article says that this isn't the case. Also it says it's more common for women (to turn to food for stress), whereas men turn to alcohol and smoking and such, which would also not be explained by an primitive innate response.

I have the exact opposite problem -- when I'm stressed, I do not eat at all, so I lose weight.

That's actually covered in the article. Stress induces under-eating in the short run (loss of appetite) and over-eating in the longer run, when cortisol starts to take a toll on you.

I have had situations where I had been stressed for weeks and months at a time, and I never noticed a shift.

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