"I'm stressed, I need something"

Stress is the visit's most respectable reason. You've had a day. The client email, two meetings that overran, a child's form due tomorrow. By ten to four you're stretched thin, and the body seems to be asking for fuel.

It's worth knowing what stress does to eating, because it isn't what most people think. Arthur Stone and Kelly Brownell had a hundred and fifty-eight adults keep daily records of stress and eating for eighty-four days. On stressful days people were much more likely to eat less than usual than to eat more. As stress got worse, the chance of eating less went up and the chance of eating more didn't. A large majority of people were consistent, either eating less under stress or eating more, but not both. So stress doesn't make bodies hungry as a rule. For most people, it does the opposite.

There is a more specific pathway that Tanja Adam and Elissa Epel described in a review. Stress raises cortisol, and cortisol, along with the brain's reward system, can increase the drive for rich, palatable food. Eating such food seems to damp the stress response for a while, which is why it feels helpful. Their concern was that repeating this over months could make the pattern compulsive. I mention it because it's the biological version of what you've noticed. The pull under stress is real, it wants particular things, and it gives short relief. What it doesn't do is anything about the stress.

So separate the two things that were happening at ten to four. Your body wasn't short of fuel. You'd had lunch at one. What you were short of was a break, and possibly a way to stop the email from sitting on your chest. The pull turned up because the body under stress is inclined to reach for something rewarding, and the kitchen is where the rewarding things are. The visit was a break disguised as hunger.

I'd put it this way, and it's my reasoning and not a finding. Under stress you have two needs. One is for the pressure to come off for a few minutes. The other is for the thing causing it to be dealt with. Food meets the first badly and the second not at all. A four-minute walk to the end of the road meets the first as well or better, and leaves you in a fit state for the second. Chapter 16 has more on this, and chapter 9 deals with the objection that eating is the only break you're allowed.

There's a version of stress eating that's worth a separate word. Some people don't eat under stress at all, and then eat a great deal when the stress lifts, at seven in the evening when the day is finally done. That's the same habit at a different hour. The feeling then is something like exhaustion and relief mixed, and food is being asked to mark the end of the day. Chapter 20 has a section on evenings.