When Food Is Comfort. Julie M. Simon

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       It’s All in Your Head

      One of the most striking peculiarities of the human brain is the great development of the frontal lobes — they are much less developed in other primates and hardly evident at all in other mammals. They are the part of the brain that grows and develops most after birth.

      — Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars

      It’s your mind that gets you into trouble when it comes to overeating. On your way home from another exhausting day at work, you can’t stop thinking about pizza, so you stop and buy one. You did well at managing your eating all day, and you had the best of intentions when making that last stop at the supermarket to pick up some fruit and vegetables. But somehow that cheesecake sampler ended up in your cart. You know these foods aren’t the healthiest choices and that buying more than a serving size of any of them isn’t wise. You rationalize that you’ll just have one piece of pizza and one slice of cheesecake and save the rest for later. And that Zumba class you were going to take — well, you’re just too tired tonight, but you’ll go tomorrow for sure.

      When tomorrow comes and your friend invites you to dinner, you accept the invitation without hesitation and once again skip the dance class. After all, you still have many more days this week to fit in exercise. On the drive to the restaurant, you promise yourself that you’ll order soup and salad — you almost don’t remember ordering the cheesy noodle dish and that second glass of wine. What happened between making that promise to yourself and now? Truly, you want to do better, but something always gets in the way.

      It’s your brain. And it’s not your fault! When we have not received consistent and sufficient emotional nurturance during our early years, we are at greater risk of seeking it from external sources, like food and alcohol, later in life. Many of us have been raised to interpret undisciplined behavior patterns, like overeating and underexercising, as a sign of character weakness or laziness and a general lack of control. This kind of judgmental labeling is not only inaccurate — many overeaters I work with are extremely disciplined in many areas of their lives — but also unhelpful. Disordered eating patterns represent resourceful survival strategies for regulating emotional or physical arousal (or lack of arousal), coping with adverse experiences, and increasing pleasure. Understanding this takes the shame out of recovery and shows us the way forward.

      When you have a strong urge to detach from unpleasant emotions or bodily sensations, turn off painful thoughts, distract yourself, numb out, and comfort, soothe, and pleasure yourself with food, the part of you that turns to food is very, very young. You can’t manage or modify your behavior with logical arguments, because that very young part of you doesn’t respond to reason. You are under the influence of an emotionally dominant part of your brain about the shape and size of an almond, called the amygdala (pronounced uh-MIG-duh-luh).

      This part of the brain is like your central alarm system, and it plays a key role in the way you respond emotionally and behaviorally to perceived threats (in this case, a stressful day at work). This young part of you wants what she wants, when she wants it. She doesn’t care about health or weight consequences. She doesn’t care about fitting into the outfit you bought last month. She lives in this moment, and right now she is unsatisfied and demanding. Her motto is “I don’t care; I want it now.”

      The mid to lower part of your brain (the limbic region), which houses the amygdala, runs from the brain stem, at the top of your neck, to about the level of the bridge of your nose. Although it’s already well developed at birth, it’s sometimes referred to as primitive, because it’s responsible for regulating basic functions like breathing, heart rate, digestion, and wake and sleep cycles. It’s ready at a moment’s notice to activate the body’s fight, flight, or freeze response. This part of the brain allows you to act before you think. It’s responsible for strong emotions, impulses, and instincts, like the intense fear you feel and your quick reaction when your toddler runs out into a busy street, or the panic that sets in when you see a coyote cross your front lawn and you frantically search for your cat. This part of the brain is the source of our reactivity, and while it’s lifesaving at times, it can also get us into trouble.

      The upstairs part of your brain comes online later in development. This outer layer, called the cortex, runs from your forehead to the back of your head, covering the lower brain, and it doesn’t reach full maturity until we’re in our mid-twenties. The cortex, and more specifically an area called the prefrontal cortex, is part of our self-regulation system, and it depends on properly working connections and input from lower parts of the brain. This area of the brain is responsible for cognitive, emotional, and relational skills: it helps you regulate your emotions, observe your thoughts, take in insight, adjust your behaviors, learn from your mistakes, stay flexible and adaptive, make wise decisions and plans, and feel empathy and compassion for yourself and others.

      This part of the brain allows you to think before you act and to evaluate emotionally driven impulses — like the urge to eat more than a couple of slices of pizza or buy an entire cheesecake sampler. With normal development and sufficient early nurturance, integrative circuits grow and strengthen between our upstairs and downstairs brain regions. We gradually develop the ability to apply mature, top-down control strategies that help us regulate our behaviors. When the downstairs part of the brain sends out signals to grab the pizza and the cheesecake, the upstairs part might remind us about an upcoming social event and the outfit we want to fit into. It might help us access a nurturing, limit-setting adult voice that reminds us we can have pizza and cheesecake if we like, but it’s best to buy single servings. This area of the brain can become compromised, however, by insufficient, stressful, or adverse early experiences with caregivers. It may feel inaccessible when we are experiencing intense emotions and stress, especially if we are fatigued or sleep deprived.

      Self-regulation, or the ability to manage our emotions, moods, thoughts, impulses, and behaviors, is a developmental achievement. Life experiences activate certain pathways in and between different regions of the brain, strengthening existing connections and creating new ones. Developing and connecting, or integrating, the proper brain circuitry for self-regulation requires certain conditions. In his book The Developing Mind, Daniel Siegel states that “optimal relationships are likely to stimulate the growth of integrative fibers in the brain, whereas neglectful and abusive relationships specifically inhibit the healthy growth of neural integration in the young child. Experience early in СКАЧАТЬ