By Michael J. Critelli | MakeUsWell Newsletter, 

Many of the behaviors we label as “self-destructive” don’t begin as mistakes. They begin as solutions.

Food choices, patterns of overwork, avoidance, late-night habits, or compulsive behaviors often trace back to moments when they served an important purpose.providing comfort, pleasure, relief, belonging, or a sense of independence. Over time, the original context fades, but the behavior remains. What looks irrational in the present is often deeply loyal to the past.

This is why awareness alone so often fails. People can understand nutritional guidelines, stress physiology, and long-term health risks and still find themselves making choices they later regret. The issue is not ignorance. It is that many decisions are made in moments when old motivations quietly take the wheel.

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By Michael J. Critelli | MakeUsWell Newsletter, 

For decades, healthy eating has been defined by rules. Eat more vegetables. Reduce sugar. Choose whole grains. Avoid processed foods. These guidelines are directionally correct, but they leave many people confused and frustrated when the results don’t match the effort.

People follow the rules and still experience fatigue, blood sugar swings, weight gain, digestive discomfort, or poor sleep. The problem is rarely a lack of discipline. It’s that rule-based nutrition assumes food affects everyone the same way.

Precision nutrition starts from a different premise: The same food can produce very different outcomes depending on the person, the context, and the conditions under which it is eaten.

More importantly, precision nutrition is not a new diet or a collection of optimized food lists. It is a method, a way to learn systematically what works in your body and adjust accordingly.

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By Michael J. Critelli | MakeUsWell Newsletter, 

In conversations with friends, family members, and colleagues, a common observation keeps surfacing: daily life feels more stressful than it did even a few years ago, even when no single variable seems worse. Workloads may not be heavier. Hours may not be longer. Social lives may even be quieter. Yet something feels more strained, more brittle, harder to name.

This pressure shows up not only at work, but in social interactions as well. People describe being less patient in conversations, more distracted at meals, and more depleted after ordinary exchanges. The stress feels ambient rather than acute, less like a crisis and more like a constant background hum. For many, the first place this shift becomes visible is not in medical diagnoses or burnout surveys, but in eating patterns that quietly drift off course.

Meals get skipped without intention. Appetite fades during the day and reappears late at night. Coffee replaces food. Energy feels uneven rather than steady. These changes rarely reflect indifference to health. They are better understood as downstream effects of a nervous system operating under sustained uncertainty.

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By Michael J. Critelli | MakeUsWell Newsletter, 

We’ve spent years telling people what to eat when they’re stressed. The emerging science suggests we’ve been asking the wrong question.

The real issue isn’t stress alone. It’s unpredictable stress and most of it is designed into modern work.

Why Unpredictability Matters More Than Pressure

Human beings can tolerate intense effort remarkably well when stress is bounded and predictable. Deadlines, big goals, even sustained hard work don’t automatically derail health.

What does far more damage is volatility:

• Constant interruptions
• Surprise escalations
• Shifting priorities
• A sense that anything can become urgent at any moment

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By Michael J. Critelli | MakeUsWell Newsletter, 

Over many decades, particularly when I led Pitney Bowes, I was puzzled about different health profiles among employees and other people in the community who had very similar diets. Some of the least healthy people had what appeared to be healthy eating habits. Did that mean that what we were told by public health authorities about nutrition was wrong? Were they secretly eating unhealthy foods?

In recent years, I learned that research supported the hypothesis that chronic stress was more important to overall health, even for those who adhered to good eating habits and engaged in vigorous physical activity. 

Most conversations about stress reduction focus on individual coping: mindfulness, resilience, better habits. But emerging research suggests that the most damaging stressors are not emotional, they are structural. Two factors dominate:

1. The frequency and perceived importance of emergencies
2. Whether people have adequate time and resources to do what is expected of them

These are not abstract workplace design problems. They directly influence how the body processes food. When emergencies proliferate and capacity is mismatched to demands, stress physiology overwhelms nutrition physiology. Even excellent diets stop working as intended.

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