The truth behind your afternoon cravings

I remember my days of working in an office.  I would spend my mornings running from meeting to meeting, wolf down my lunch as early as it was reasonably acceptable too and by 2:00PM, I was crashing.  Each day I would vow to eat better and fuel my body.  I would even promise myself I would go to bed earlier or get a workout in to help increase the blood flow, but rarely would that happen.  Instead, I would find myself in the breakroom scrounging for caffeine or at someone’s desk begging for chocolate.  At the time, I thought it was food related and I simply wasn’t giving my body what it needed.  While that may have been part of it, what I really wanted was for the chocolate and caffeine to lift me up enough that it would drown out the stress I was feeling.  

It’s actually a very natural reaction for our brain, when we are feeling an undesirable emotion, to crave something that is going to make us feel better in the moment.  Our brains are a little entitled like that and they think that we should feel happy and comfortable all the time.  So when we are feeling something like stress, that is undesirable to our brain, it starts searching for things that will give us a little dopamine hit.  Dopamine is a feel-good neurotransmitter that creates feelings of pleasure.

When we indulge the brain with that quick hit, we might feel good for an instant, but the underlying feeling still exists.  In fact, in many cases, now we feel stressed AND are filled with regret, so the negative feelings only intensify.  

So what if we just learned to accept the original feeling of stress for what it is?  When we are running from meeting to meeting, telling ourselves to always hurry up and that there is a mountain of work piling up at our desk, of course we are going to feel stress.  What if we just accept that’s the nature of work?  The day starts, the email builds, the meetings happen, fires get started, schedules move around and that’s all just part of what is “supposed to happen” at work.  Nothing is wrong here.  It doesn’t mean that we aren’t capable, that we are falling short and it doesn’t mean that we won’t succeed.  It simply means that work is working, as it should.  

At the same time, our brain may still serve up the desire to run for chocolate and we can choose to not indulge.  We can learn to feel the desire for a dopamine hit and simply breathe through it without acting on it.  

To summarize, when you are feeling emotions such as stress, frustration, overwhelm, fear, and confusion, it’s completely normal for your brain to respond by craving some kind of pleasure with things like sweets, caffeine, and even alcohol.  It’s simply a natural desire to avoid experiencing that negative emotion.  Instead of giving in, you can be aware of this desire and choose to experience it without acting on it.  

I can help with the process of uncovering the ways your brain might be seeking pleasure to avoid negative emotion and creating the freedom to experience all of it.  Schedule your free consultation to get started.