Quick summary: Difficult emotions such as stress, sadness and loneliness can push some people towards comfort food and leave others unable to eat at all, and research suggests both responses can start with the very same feeling. Short bursts of stress tend to suppress appetite, while prolonged stress and the brain’s reward systems can draw us towards foods high in sugar and fat, and our earliest experiences of being fed and cared for may shape how we look after ourselves when life gets hard. Treating changes in appetite as signals about emotional needs rather than failures of willpower can help people, and the practitioners who support them, respond with more curiosity and less judgement.
After a difficult day, we may suddenly crave foods that would not normally cross our minds. Even after dinner, we can find ourselves back in the kitchen looking for something to snack on, knowing full well that we are not really hungry. At other times the opposite happens. After feeling very upset or anxious, or after receiving bad news, we may suddenly realise that we have not eaten anything for hours. What is interesting is that both experiences can begin in the same place: an emotion.
We tend to link eating with hunger, but an empty stomach is not the only thing that decides when, what and how much we want to eat. Emotions such as stress, sadness, loneliness, boredom and anxiety can also change the way we eat, and studies of emotional eating and psychological distress keep coming back to this point. Negative emotions may lead some people to eat more and others to eat less. So when we are feeling low, it can be worth asking not only what we are eating, but what we are doing with food.
We are not hungry, but we eat
Emotional eating generally means eating in response to feelings rather than physical hunger. During stretches of stress, sadness or boredom, some people may eat more than they usually would or find themselves drawn towards particularly tasty and energy-dense foods. That pull often says more about our inner world than our appetite. Enjoyable foods interact with reward-related systems in the brain, and research suggests that during prolonged periods of stress, people may become more drawn towards rewarding foods that are high in sugar and fat.
Wanting chocolate after a hard day, then, does not always mean the body needs more energy. Macht (2008) suggests that the link between emotions and eating cannot be explained by a single mechanism, and in some situations eating may play a role in regulating how we feel. When we open the fridge, food may not be the only thing we are looking for. Eating can offer a brief sense of comfort, distraction or pleasure. Yet the very same difficult day can leave someone else with no appetite at all.
So why can’t we eat?
You may have found yourself unable to eat before an important exam or a difficult conversation, or after unexpected bad news. Under stress, the body gets itself ready to deal with whatever is happening. The physiological systems involved in the acute stress response can steer energy towards processes that seem more urgent, which is one reason acute stress has often been associated with reduced appetite.
How long the stress lasts may matter too. Short and intense periods of stress can suppress appetite in some people, while prolonged stress may have different effects on appetite and the desire for energy-dense foods. Cortisol and the brain’s reward systems are also part of this relationship. So the same person may respond to stress quite differently at different points in their life. And once we accept that food is not simply a biological need, another psychological layer starts to show.
Was food ever just food?
From the very beginning of our lives, food is tied to other people. None of us is born able to make our own meals. As babies, when we are hungry, we depend on someone else to notice that need and feed us, so feeding is never only about relieving hunger. It is also bound up with being cared for, needing another person and having someone respond to that need.
Developmental approaches to feeding have long stressed that eating develops within the relationship between a child and their caregiver, and later research has also suggested that attachment patterns may be related to eating behaviours. None of this means that every bite we take as adults is a symbol of our childhood. But it would be just as incomplete to think of our relationship with food as something that grew up entirely apart from our emotions and relationships.
Preparing food for ourselves, putting a meal on a plate, noticing that we are hungry and stopping what we are doing to eat all involve recognising a need in the body and answering it. In that sense, eating can also be one of the most ordinary forms of caring for ourselves.
When we struggle to feed ourselves
After an intense period of sadness, even making a meal can feel like more effort than it should. We may know we are hungry and still have no wish to get up and cook, or the food may already be in front of us and we feel no desire to eat it. Much of this can be explained by the direct physiological effects of stress on appetite. From a psychodynamic perspective, though, eating and not eating may also carry more personal meanings for some people, becoming tied up with experiences of needing others, receiving care, dependence, control and managing emotions.
Contemporary psychodynamic approaches, particularly in the context of clinical eating difficulties, consider eating symptoms alongside a person’s attachment experiences, ways of regulating emotions, relationships with others, and sense of self. Later research into attachment and eating disorders has also found links between insecure attachment, difficulties with emotion regulation, and eating-related symptoms.
It would be wrong to take these findings and assume a simple cause and effect behind everyday changes in appetite. Still, they raise an interesting question from a psychodynamic point of view: when we are struggling emotionally, might our relationship with caring for ourselves change as well? Some people move closer to others when times are hard, while others make their needs less visible. Asking for help, needing someone or accepting care can mean very different things to different people.
For some of us, feeding ourselves is usually no more than a response to hunger. At certain moments, however, it may also touch older experiences of giving and receiving care. Not eating does not automatically mean that someone is punishing themselves or rejecting care, but looking at where our relationship with food meets our needs, and the way we look after ourselves, can sometimes tell us more than appetite alone.
Same stomach, different story
One person may eat more than usual after a difficult day, while another loses their appetite completely in the same circumstances. The same person may even experience both responses at different times. This is less surprising than it first seems, because the relationship between emotions and eating does not run in one direction only. A meta-analysis of experimental research found that emotions can influence eating behaviour, but the effect varies depending on individual characteristics and the circumstances in which the emotion is experienced.
In one situation, food becomes comforting, rewarding or a way of shifting our attention. In another, the stress response dampens appetite. For some people, food also touches something more personal, to do with need, receiving care, control or looking after themselves. Perhaps that is why a hard emotional experience can send one of us towards the kitchen and another away from the dinner table. Hunger may begin in the stomach, but our relationship with food does not live there alone.
Selen Ercelik is a clinical psychologist and University of Derby postgraduate student focusing on psychodynamic and psychoanalytic approaches.
