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.

That uncertainty does not come from work alone. We now live inside a shared emotional environment shaped by both legacy media and social media, one that consistently amplifies urgency, conflict, and fear. Importantly, exposure to this environment does not require active participation. You do not need to scroll endlessly or post frequently to be affected.

More than a decade ago, University of Pennsylvania computer scientist Lyle Ungar demonstrated that the emotional tone of social media language could predict rates of heart disease and other health outcomes across communities. His most unsettling finding was that these effects appeared even among people who did not actively use social media platforms themselves. Stress, it turns out, is socially transmissible. We absorb it through conversations, headlines overheard, anxious group norms, and the subtle ways uncertainty reshapes how people relate to one another.

The human nervous system does not distinguish cleanly between professional stress, social stress, and informational stress. It responds to uncertainty wherever it comes from. One of the first systems to be disrupted under sustained uncertainty is appetite regulation.

The stress no one trained us for

AI has intensified this dynamic by introducing a new category of stress, one rooted less in workload and more in ambiguity. Across roles and industries, people are quietly asking questions they were never required to ask before: Will my skills still matter? How fast will my role change? Does effort still translate into security? What does “doing well” even mean now?

Neuroscience shows that the brain finds uncertainty more stressful than bad news. When answers remain unclear, the body shifts into a state of low-grade vigilance. Cortisol rises. Digestion slows. Hunger cues become muted. This is not a failure of discipline. It is biology doing what it evolved to do under threat.

The problem is that this threat does not resolve quickly. The body was never designed to live indefinitely in this state and nutrition is often one of the earliest casualties.

Why eating patterns drift under uncertainty

Under chronic stress and ambient uncertainty, several predictable shifts occur. Hunger signals become unreliable. Executive function drops, making food decisions feel disproportionately effortful. Warm, nourishing meals feel like “too much.” People default to caffeine, sugar, or ultra-processed foods, not out of preference but because they require the least cognitive load.

Eating becomes delayed, rushed, or reactive. Over time, this creates a reinforcing loop: compromised nutrition worsens stress resilience, sleep quality, and mood, making uncertainty feel even harder to manage. Much conventional nutrition advice fails here because it assumes people are operating with intact signals and spare cognitive capacity. Under stress, neither assumption holds.

Why the browser is the right place to intervene

Stress rarely announces itself in a clinic or a wellness app. It accumulates where people spend their days: inside the browser. Email, documents, dashboards, meetings, messages, and AI tools are where cognitive load builds and where early nutritional disruption often begins.

A browser-based AI companion can notice patterns that frequently precede eating disruption without monitoring personal health data: long stretches without breaks, meeting clusters that crowd out meals, late-day productivity spikes, constant task switching, or escalating reliance on caffeine. These signals don’t indicate pathology. They simply suggest that vigilance may be overriding hunger.

From prescribing diets to restoring signals

The purpose of an AI-enabled nutrition companion is not to optimize intake or enforce rules. It is to help restore signal clarity. Done well, it can gently interrupt prolonged stress, normalize appetite changes as a physiological response, and offer low-friction nourishment suggestions when decision-making capacity is depleted.

When nutrition stabilizes, other benefits follow quietly but measurably: steadier energy, improved sleep, greater emotional regulation, and restored cognitive flexibility. In organizations, this shows up as better judgment and fewer errors. In individuals, it often shows up simply as, “I feel more like myself again.”

A different role for AI

Much of the public conversation frames AI as a source of stress or as a productivity amplifier that ignores human cost. There is another path. AI can be used to buffer humans from the biological toll of uncertainty.

At MakeUsWell, we believe the future of health support is context-aware and humane, meeting people where they are when stress has made it hard to hear themselves. In an era of accelerating technological change, wellbeing will not be preserved by resisting AI, but by using it to protect the human systems it so powerfully affects.

And sometimes, that begins with something as simple and as essential as remembering to eat.