Q&A: Breaking Up with Nighttime Eating on the Couch | TMOHP Episode 179

Hey everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. Today is the first of a series of podcasts that I've decided to record taking questions that I'm hearing all the time from listeners, and members of my community, and answering them as an episode of the podcast.

Today, I want to share a question that I hear a version of just about every week, and I'm wondering if you can relate. Okay, here's the question.

Hey, Dr. Melissa. Every night after the house is finally quiet, I find myself heading to the kitchen and I'm not even hungry. I just want a moment or something to myself, and somehow that moment always turns into chips or cookies. Usually chips eating them on the couch. It's like the only time of the day that is mine.

But then I feel gross and I feel frustrated with myself afterwards and ugh, especially the next morning. Why do I keep doing this and how do I change it?

Ever been there? Can you relate to the listener's question?

Listen, there's nothing wrong with a treat at the end of the day, or anytime else. And believe me, I love a good bowl of ice cream when the day is done. I love a good bowl of ice cream period, but the habit is what the problem is here when a habit feels bad. Or when you've got that cognitive dissonance going on where you want to do something, but you also don't want to do it, and then you have the after effects of feeling bad or guilty or physically uncomfortable.

If it's a problem that you regret or feel awful about afterward, then it is a problem. And this is a problem for this listener, right?

So why is this habit so hard to break? Overeating at night, at the end of the day has a lot of layers to it. This is not going to be the last episode that I do on overeating at night, but here is the really important piece that I want to cover today.

You are not eating because your body needs food.

In this circumstance, what's going on here, at least for this listener, you're not eating because your body needs food. You're eating because something else, some other part of you needs something. This is one of the most common patterns I hear about, and you're going to hear me talk about it a lot on the podcast.

Here's something that I think is really important. Yes, you're eating for a reason. There's something going on. There's a part of you that needs something. This does not mean that you have a deeper issue that is going to be harder, or really complicated, or really painful to solve.

This is important because I know that there are a lot of people when they start thinking about, okay, what is the real reason I'm eating? Or what am I numbing? Or what am I covering up? Or why am I reaching for this food? It can feel intimidating. It can feel like, oh my gosh, I don't know if I want to open this Pandora's Box.

Beginning to examine the reasons that you're overeating does not need to be a big, huge, hard, grueling process. And I don't want you to look at it this way.

What I said is in this listener's example, where she is ending the day, eating on the couch, eating food that she really doesn't want, that her body doesn't need. She's eating because she needs something else. And the important thing to understand here is that most likely if you're trying to break a pattern of overeating at night, you're probably funneling your energy into trying to solve the wrong problem.

This Eating at night isn't a discipline problem. It is not about needing more willpower. It's about recognizing what this moment of eating on the couch at the end of the day is really trying to give you.

What it is that you are trying to give yourself by reaching for something to eat, and then going in for more, and maybe even more. After a long day, especially for high performing women who are constantly taking care of others, the evening can be that only little piece of time that feels like yours. And for so many women, food becomes the band aid or the stand-in for comfort, or reward, or decompression, or even rebellion. It's not about the chips or the ice cream or the cookies. Those chips are just the delivery mechanism. The way you give yourself, or try to give yourself what it is that you need. That moment on the couch, that might be the first time all day that nobody needs you.

Or that you feel free from the voice in your head that's telling you that everybody needs you. That moment on the couch with the chips, that might be the first time you're not pushing or fixing, or feeling like you are supposed to be pushing or fixing.

This might be the first moment, or one of the few moments all day where you really let yourself feel your feelings. And those feelings might include exhaustion. And here's the thing, our brains are smart, we have trained them well. If you have used food to create relief. Or to signal the end of the day or to signal that, oh, I have permission to stop and let down.

Now your brain is going to remember that. It's going to say, Hey, it's time for that little dopamine hit right now. Let's grab the chips. Right? We, we grow these patterns in our brain.

So again, this isn't about willpower. This is about learning to listen, learning how to listen to yourself. End of the day, eating isn't random. It's a response to hidden hungers. You've heard me talk about hidden hungers. Hidden hungers are unmet needs. Emotional needs, mental needs that we've learned to, to bypass, or suppress, or solve with food, or try to push down with food because we don't have another tool or because we've been taught to, or because we're out of bandwidth.

And frankly, we just don't want to deal with it right now because food is so easy to use.

Because the world gives us extra credit, quite honestly, for being productive instead of being present. Because we never learned how to hear what our body or our mind was asking for, or because we've gotten out of practice of listening to that, or because we've gotten a lot of rewards for ignoring it. So let's talk about hidden hungers and what they might be in that moment that you reach for the chips.

It could be anything, and you're going to want to find your own reason, but here are some ideas that might help your mind start playing with curiosity. , At the end of the day, you might be craving quiet or space or some time alone. Time to yourself. You might be needing comfort, you might be needing that bookend. That signifies, okay, the stressful time is over.

It's like a transition, right? You might be feeling like you haven't been recognized all day, and food is the one thing that you give yourself that is a reward for you that you don't have to ask for. You might be bored. You might be bored, but too tired to do the whole long list of things in your head that you're thinking, "well, I could do this or could do that", but honestly you're out of bandwidth.

And that brings me to what is perfectly normal to feel at the end of the day, which might be your primary trigger for eating. Or it might be a hidden hunger that contributes to the other things that are going on and makes them harder to manage.

You might be exhausted. You might be exhausted, but also not quite willing to give yourself permission to end the day, and go to bed, go to sleep, stop working. Let it be done. Maybe you are procrastinating, ending, or doing more, or trying to silence the voices in your head that tell you you should be doing more with the chips.

When you start to get clearer, and identify, and then accept what's really going on. You can start to make shifts. And as you start to do that, as you start to get clearer on the reason that you are sitting there on the couch with the chips, the reason that the habit has developed over time, you begin to make shifts in how you handle that.

And that urge to eat the chips loses its grip, and then you don't have to fight with it anymore.

 Even better, those shifts that you start to make as you pay more attention to what could be going on and what your hidden hungers are, they actually address the hidden hungers. So not only does the power that the chips has start to deflate. But your life gets better because you're addressing the hidden hunger for sleep, or you're addressing the boredom, or you are addressing the feelings that you have instead of trying to ignore them or push them down, or blame yourself for feeling them.

 So if you want to break that habit of collapsing on the couch at the end of the day, eating the stuff you're not really hungry for, and that you then get mad at yourself for eating, here's the big shift. And this goes back to what I said about not wanting to waste your valuable energy, trying to solve the wrong problem.

The power. Your power is not in resisting the chips. The power that you have is in recognizing, learning how to recognize, getting better at recognizing step by step by step, what you're actually hungry for.

And I want to circle back to what I said before because here is the part that most plans to curb overeating. I hate that word, but that's what the approach really is. Here's the part that most of these plans miss entirely. When you start to meet your real needs. The reason that you're there on the couch with the chips.

When you start to meet those real needs in small doable ways, when you start to believe that your comfort, your pleasure, your rest, your emotions matter. When you have compassion in the way that you address them, you don't have to rely on food to speak for you or to shut you up or to numb you out. This is the shift that you're going to start to notice. You're going to start to notice that instead of telling yourself, don't eat those chips, you start asking yourself, what am I really needing right now? What's going on?

What am I really needing right now? It might be something soothing like a hot bath, and yes, I know all of that. Talk about bubble baths for self-care starts to be a bit much, but sometimes it's helpful. It might be silence. It might be 10 minutes alone with a book that has nothing to do with self-improvement.

It might be putting your phone down and lying on the couch and staring at the ceiling. It might be as simple, and also as challenging as acknowledging that you're tired. And that the chips are just a way of delaying going to bed, giving yourself permission to stop and rest.

All of this is valid, and all of this is so worth listening to. The solution to the overeating at night problem in this question, it isn't stricter rules. The solution lies in solving. A different problem than your brain is telling you that you need to solve. A problem that you probably haven't been taught to see.

Because the truth is you don't need to control your urges. You need to hear what they are trying to tell you. You are not a problem to fix. You're a whole person with needs that matter. And the more you start to recognize your hidden hungers, the more peace you are going to find around food.

And the more peace you're going to create in yourself.

 So the next time you find yourself in the pantry, at the end of the night, try this.

Take a pause, just a few moments and ask yourself, what do I know about what I really need right now? And give yourself a chance to answer honestly. Be compassionate with yourself. Just listen to yourself. You might be surprised what you learn.

I'll talk with you soon.