Chronic stress drives evening snacking and drinking as your brain seeks the dopamine reward. Five steps break the cycle: exercise for the same buzz, use meditation to lower cortisol, laugh more, eat well, and sleep better. Identify your danger time and swap in healthier habits.
Stress is at an all-time high right now, and sadly too many people reach for food or alcohol as a coping mechanism to make them feel a bit better. But of course, this then plays havoc with their waistlines. So how does stress affect you? Do you eat as an emotional response to stress? Are you like so many others who find their most dangerous time is in the evening? You can be running around all day working and dealing with all the other things in your busy life, then literally as soon as you come home in the evening, food becomes the thing that relaxes you and helps you feel better. You have your dinner and then you're sitting down watching TV and all you want to do is snack. This is how at least 1 in 3 of the people I speak to recover from stress. But it's no good for their health and it becomes a habit because the TV becomes the trigger to start the snacking and the sofa becomes the cue for the brain to kick off the habit. When this happens, you have no power to stop it. The brain knows this is the time it gets its pleasure and reward for a hard day and it becomes trained to expect it. And the same thing happens with alcohol. So you can be brilliant all day, but you sabotage all your progress in the evenings, and it just becomes a living nightmare. But how do you stop this? How do you break this pattern? Because that's what it is, and that's what you have to do—break the pattern. The first step is to be aware of your danger time. When are you most vulnerable? When does that stress rear its ugly head? If it's when you sit down on the sofa, then do something different at that time, like exercise, for example. I know that might sound odd, but the brain gets the same buzz from exercise as it does from food. So if you do something physical at this point, your brain will learn that it can get its pleasure from something else. And, you know, not only that, exercise will make you feel so much better because you're doing something that will take you in a positive direction rather than making you feel bad. The key is to reduce the stress hormone cortisol that's in your body. Cortisol is now public health enemy number one. Our bodies need some cortisol, and it's an important hormone because it actually helps keep us alive. But when we're stressed, we overproduce cortisol, and this can mean weight gain. So having the right balance is absolutely essential. And here's 5 things that you can do to take control. Number 1, as I've already mentioned, is exercise, and it's crucial. Number 2, use a meditation or relaxation download. Our Chillpod is a great way of dealing with stress. Number 3, laugh a lot. Laughter is fabulous, and it stops stress and it lowers cortisol. Number 4, Eat healthily. And number 5, get more sleep. So there you go. It can be done if you take action. You can stop stress in its tracks right now.
