by Mike Critelli, 

For a sizable part of the global population that has enough money to buy healthy foods and beverages, but chooses to eat unhealthy foods and beverages, one motivation is the way we have been wired to link unhealthy foods and beverages with positive emotions.

We will explore one of them today: “comfort.” Next week, we will explore the link between foods and celebratory occasions.

The Comfort Response

When we are stressed out, we often are induced to eat unhealthy and junky food which either we or a person offering it to us calls “comfort food.”

This is not a new phenomenon and it actually was not linked to food a few generations ago. Our parents and grandparents often pursued comfort and calm through an alcoholic beverage before, during or after dinner every day. In many households in the 1950’s and 1960’s, supposedly the golden age of American life, adults felt a need to drink an alcoholic beverage to calm their nerves after what routinely was a stressful work environment or, in the case of stay-at-home moms, a stressful day at home.

Some took tranquilizers or pain killers to deal with the physiological effects of stress. A scan of 1950’s advertising shows that even cigarettes were marketed as stress relievers and that some doctors were heavy tobacco users.

Food as the Modern Crutch

We are certainly better off not behaving as if alcohol, tobacco or drugs are the best solutions to stress, but too many people have substituted foods as their stress relief mechanisms. But it begs the question: what do we do to wean ourselves away from unhealthy foods or the additives and preservatives that give them the label “comfort foods?” More importantly, what chronic stressors trigger the excessive need for “comfort foods?”

As someone who has fallen victim to the marketing of comfort foods—usually, in my case, by consuming breads, rolls, cookies, muffins or bagels—I eventually realized that what I really needed to do was to assess why I needed the illusory comfort those foods provided. I was fortunate in one respect: my body often signaled to me that I was experiencing excess stress by visiting gastro-intestinal conditions on me when I consumed these foods in excess.

My immune system was not able to contain the pathogens that resided in my gut because many of these additives and preservatives destroyed the healthy bacteria that fought them off. I did not know that at the time, but learned in recent years that the so-called “comfort foods” were setting me up to be less resistant to long-term chronic diseases and short-term illnesses.

A Personal Example of Stress and Food

Figuring out what stresses us out enough to gorge on these so-called “comfort foods” is not always easy. In early 1995, I was Pitney Bowes’ Vice Chairman. Among my other responsibilities was the International Mailing Division. I gorged on “comfort foods” trying to stay awake after taking an overnight flight the night before from New York to Hannover, Germany to attend the CEBIT trade fair.

After a full day of meetings, I retired to a bedroom in a house our company had rented to house all our attendees at CEBIT. I could not fall asleep because of the stress I was feeling, but was no longer able to eat or drink “comfort foods” where I was staying.

At about 3am, I gave up trying to sleep, sat up in the bed, pulled out a yellow pad and began thinking about everything that was stressing me out. 30 minutes into this exercise, after I had listed 14 items about which I could do something, I zeroed in on one stressor that required an intervention by my boss, the CEO. I resolved to meet with him as soon after returning to the US as I could. I got the meeting scheduled, and we jointly addressed the issue.

Workplace Stress and “Comfort Eating”

Employee engagement surveys in virtually every organization often yield findings among many employees that the biggest source of stress and dissatisfaction is the gap between what is expected of them and what the tools and resources they have at their disposal enable them to accomplish. This mismatch can occur at home, in the community, or in relationships among friends. We often take on burdens or have burdens placed on us that we cannot meet.

We know from employee engagement surveys that work presents many other stressors as well that are revealed to leaders:

• Am I going to be employed at this firm a year from now?
  

• Does my manager care about my wellbeing?
  

• Do I have one or more friends at work?

Those who provide negative answers to these questions are not only stressed out, but are likely to resort to eating “comfort foods” far more often.

A Better Path Forward

We need to disconnect the decision to eat, drink or ingest other substances into our bodies from the stresses that may be triggering that decision. One of the roles our AI platform should play in guiding us away from unhealthy foods and beverages is to provide a tool for us to understand what is causing us to gravitate to “comfort foods.”

The flip side of needing the crutch of unhealthy foods to deal with stress is to be engaged in activities for which we feel a sense of “flow.” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote a landmark book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience in 1990 in which he popularized the term “flow.” He was a renowned Hungarian-American psychologist who advocated that we stop thinking of avoiding mental illness or depression and begin framing the goal as determining what makes life worth living, including happiness, creativity, and fulfillment.

If food is the primary crutch to help us deal with emotional challenges, its role is mismatched to what we need for healthy living.

Food as Fuel, Not Fix

Food should give us the right level of energy to achieve this state of “flow,” as that term has come to mean a state of happiness, creativity and fulfillment. We need to frame the goal of improved health differently to reduce stress-induced eating and drinking.

Instead of asking how we reduce the consumption of “comfort foods,” we need to ask: “How do we create work and personal experiences that reduce the incidence of excessive breaks to consume foods or beverages?” In a 2003 study by Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, participants in high-flow work environments reported less awareness of bodily needs during peak engagement.

The more we incorporate purpose and excitement into our work and our non-work pursuits, we will pursue the need for “comfort foods” less frequently and less intensively.