"It's how I cope"

This one deserves more respect than the others, because it's often true. The day was stressful, the treat took the edge off, and you'd be worse company without it. There's a whole earlier book in this series about reaching for something the moment a feeling arrives, The feeling will pass without help, and I'll leave the mechanics of that to it. What I want to look at here is the word "cope", and what it means when it's daily.

Tanja Adam and Elissa Epel, reviewing the animal and human research on stress and eating, propose a model in which stress and pleasant food both release the body's own opioids, and the food's opioids damp down the stress response, so that eating under stress is, in a real sense, self-treatment. They also note that repeated stimulation of this loop, whether by stress or by the food, may lead to changes that make the eating harder to stop. That's a model, built largely on animal work, and the abstract is careful to say the human mechanisms are only starting to be understood. But take it at face value. It says the treat does something. It doesn't say the treat does anything about the stress.

That's the distinction. Coping with a thing and dealing with it are different. The glass copes with the day. It doesn't do anything to the day, which comes back tomorrow with the same shape, and gets the same glass. If the treat is how you cope, and it's daily, then there's a stress that's daily, and the treat has become the reason nobody has looked at it. Coping that's needed every day for a year isn't coping. It's maintenance on something that ought to be fixed or left.

I'd put it this way, and it's my view. The daily is a lid. It goes on at six and it keeps the day in, and the day is still in there. On the days when the stress is real and specific, a deadline, a difficult person, a worry, the lid is fair enough, and you can still choose it. On the days when there's nothing much under the lid, the lid goes on anyway, because that's what the hour does. And on the days when there's something under it that needs looking at, the lid is the one thing standing between you and looking. Chapter 15 is about that day.