Today's prompt, and the companion piece behind it — free to read in full, today.

Stress Inventory

You’re eating more than usual. Before blaming the food, name your top three current stressors.

The Short Answer

When eating increases without explanation, stress is worth checking first — even if you don’t feel consciously stressed. There is a well-supported account in which the brain manages chronic stress partly by seeking calorie-dense food. This isn’t a character flaw; it’s biology. But you can’t address what you haven’t identified. Naming your stressors is the first step toward breaking the stress-eating cycle.

Something to Sit With

Your increased eating might be a signal, not a failure. Your body found a way to manage stress that worked in the short term. Now that you see the pattern, you can choose whether to continue using that strategy — or try something else.

What are your top three stressors right now? Not the ones you think you should have. The ones you actually have.

Learn More

Why stress makes you eat. In 2003, Mary Dallman and colleagues at UCSF published an influential paper proposing what they called the “chronic stress-response network.” It offers an explanation for why stressed people reach for comfort food — and why, temporarily, it may work.

Here’s the model they proposed: when you’re chronically stressed, your body produces elevated cortisol. This hormone, among other effects, increases the salience of calorie-dense “comfort” foods — particularly those high in sugar and fat. Eating those foods builds abdominal fat, and abdominal energy stores send signals back to the brain that inhibit the stress-response network. On this account, comfort food really does provide comfort.^[1]

Worth knowing how that was established. The feedback half of the loop — comfort food to abdominal fat to suppressed stress signaling — was measured in rats. The human evidence is a correlation pointing the same way: depressed people who overeat have lower stress-hormone activity than depressed people who eat less. And in humans the response runs both directions — chronic stress leads some people to eat more and gain weight, and others to eat less and lose it.^[1]

If the model holds, the problem is obvious: it is a self-reinforcing cycle. Stress drives eating, eating temporarily reduces stress, the cycle continues, and you gain weight — which often becomes its own source of stress.^[1]

The researchers stated it as a proposal, not a finding: “We propose that people eat comfort food in an attempt to reduce activity in the chronic stress-response network with its attendant anxiety.”^[1] If they are right, this isn’t weakness — it’s biology doing something useful in the short term at a long-term cost.

Why naming matters. Stress often operates below conscious awareness — it dampens prefrontal cortex activity and promotes automatic behaviors before you realize what’s happening.^[2] You might feel “fine” while your cortisol levels tell a different story. Common signs of unrecognized stress include:

• Sleep disruption
• Increased irritability
• Difficulty concentrating
• Physical tension (jaw, shoulders, stomach)
• And yes — increased appetite for calorie-dense food

The act of naming your stressors serves several functions:

It externalizes the problem. Vague anxiety becomes specific situations you can potentially address. “I’m stressed” becomes “I’m stressed about my presentation Thursday, my car making that noise, and my sister’s health.”

It interrupts automaticity. Stress eating often happens without conscious decision. Pausing to identify the underlying cause creates a gap between stimulus and response.^[3]

It opens alternative solutions. Once you know what you’re trying to soothe, you can reach for alternatives — exercise, relaxation practices, social connection — instead of defaulting to food.^[3]

The inventory process. When you notice increased eating, ask yourself:

Work: What deadlines, conflicts, or uncertainties are active? Are you carrying responsibilities you haven’t acknowledged?

Relationships: Any tension with partner, family, friends? Anything unsaid that’s taking up mental space?

Health: Your own health concerns? Worries about someone else? Sleep quality?

Finances: Bills, debt, job security? Even low-grade financial anxiety activates stress systems.

Environment: Noise, clutter, commute, living situation? Chronic minor irritations accumulate.

The unnamed: What are you avoiding thinking about? The stressors we don’t name often have the most power.

What to do with the list. Naming stressors isn’t the same as solving them. But it redirects your attention from “why am I eating so much?” to “what am I actually dealing with?” That shift matters.

Some stressors you can address directly. Others require acceptance and stress management rather than solution. But the path forward looks different when you know what you’re managing.

Addressing the root stressors is more effective than managing eating alone.^[3] Which puts the work upstream: whatever actually lowers the load you identified, rather than one more rule about food.

Further reading:

• Dallman MF et al., “Chronic stress and obesity: A new view of ‘comfort food’”^[4] — Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2003
• Tomiyama AJ et al., “Comfort food is comforting to those most stressed”^[5] — Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2011
• Adam TC, Epel ES, “Stress, eating and the reward system”^[6] — Physiology & Behavior, 2007
• Torres SJ, Nowson CA, “Relationship between stress, eating behavior, and obesity”^[7] — Nutrition, 2007

Written by AI, directed and approved by me. How this is made →