Theories Of Stress Eating

When stress enters my life, I begin to eat… a lot. The more stressed out I become, the more I eat. It is this mindless eating that occurs as I work on projects or school work. School work and similar activities seem to trigger the eating more than any other stress, although, family and social stress have also triggered my stress eating response. It does not even really matter what the food is, salty, or sweet, it does not matter, whatever is at hand is fair game.
Psychoanalytic Perspective From the psychoanalytic perspective, my stress eating may be seen as a manifestation of fixation at the oral stage of psychosexual development. Oral fixation is classified as behaviors involving the mouth, such as smoking, alcoholism, overeating, or talking
Stress eating may fall under the stage trust vs. mistrust. Trust vs. Mistrust is in the initial stage of development that children learn whether or not they can trust the world. The child will either learn to trust when their needs are consistently met the child will learn that he or she can trust the people that are caring for her or her, or they learn to mistrust their caregivers if their needs are not properly met. One major milestone in this stage of development is feeding, as in if the caregiver feeds the child when they required food (McAdams, 2009). Stress eating seems to fit the positive outcome of trust vs. mistrust as when a child is fed properly, they experience a positive emotion, that positive emotion and the positive memories remain with the person. These positive feelings associated with eating carry over into adulthood and during times of unpleasant emotions, such as stress, they turn to something associated with pleasant emotions, in my case
The best defense mechanism that may explain my stress eating would be reaction formation. Reaction formation is when one unconsciously takes a negative feeling and flips it to a positive feeling (McAdams, 2009). This could be similar to the trust vs. mistrust from Erikson’s psychosocial development. Stress eating replaces stress with food in an attempt to feel more in control of their emotions. Freud’s psychosexual stages of development, and defense mechanisms intertwine nicely with Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development. All of these theories of psychoanalytic theory could explain my stress eating in a very similar