Emotional eating: Judson Brewer on how to stop stress eating

Emotional eating is eating to handle a feeling rather than hunger: stress, boredom, tiredness, loneliness or a low mood. To stop stress eating, don't fight the urge or add a food rule. Name the feeling when you reach for food without being hungry, then choose on purpose: eat it on a plate, sitting down, or spend ten minutes on something from a short list you wrote in advance. After a hard evening, answer with kindness, not a new restriction.

One night, Judson Brewer was eating gummy worms, a habit that, he told Hidden Brain, used to go from a few to "the whole bag, virtually every time," usually late at night, when he wasn't hungry. That night he tried something new. He ate them one at a time and paid attention. His first reaction: "this tastes like a slimy petroleum product." They were "too sickly sweet," and they stuck in his teeth. "I had never paid attention to that before," he said. "I was just busy shoveling them in my mouth" (Hidden Brain).

Brewer, a professor at Brown University's School of Public Health and Medical School, built that moment into his work with people who struggle with cravings, and later into his book The Hunger Habit (2024), which his publisher describes as a plan with "no willpower, calorie-counting, or restricted eating" (Penguin Random House). He has also developed app-based programs for emotional eating, smoking and anxiety, and founded MindSciences, a company that brings them to consumers and merged with Sharecare in 2020 (TED). Below: what the research says about who eats more when stressed, then six steps to map your loop, put a pause in it, and get through hard evenings without a new rule.

Does stress make everyone eat more?

No, and this changes what helps. A 2022 review of 54 studies with about 120,000 healthy adults found that stress went with a small rise in snack-type food and a small drop in fruit and vegetables, on average (Hill et al., 2022). More than half of the studies were rated weak in quality, and the review cites an earlier estimate that only 35 to 40% of people eat more under stress. The rest eat the same or less.

Lab experiments point the same way, with a twist. A 2018 review pooled 56 experiments with 3,670 people, mostly young women, who were put in a bad mood (with a sad film, for example) and then offered food. On average, a bad mood didn't change how much they ate. The exception was people who usually hold back hard on food, the group researchers call restrained eaters: they ate clearly more after feeling bad. Happy moods raised eating a little too (Evers et al., 2018).

Traci Mann, a psychologist who runs an eating lab at the University of Minnesota, reached a similar view. Summing up two decades of her lab's work, she said "nearly everything I studied (e.g., stress, distraction and others) caused dieters to lose control of their eating" (NPR).

So if you reach for food when the day goes wrong, it isn't a character flaw. And fixing it with a tighter rule may feed the loop you want to break.

Map your loop

Brewer's explanation of why food works so fast is simple. In his TED talk, he describes how the brain learns where food is and that it feels good: "See food, eat food, feel good, repeat. Trigger, behavior, reward." Then the brain tries the same move on a bad feeling, and it works, for a while: "Same process, just a different trigger" (TED, 0:57 and 1:56). That's his account of how habits form, not a trial result, but it gives you something to look for.

1. Name the feeling before the first bite

The first of Brewer's three steps is mapping the loop: when you reach for food, ask whether you're hungry, or whether you're lonely, bored, angry, frustrated or sleepy (Hidden Brain). You don't need to change anything yet. You just need the name.

In practice: it's 9 pm, you've eaten dinner, and you're at the kitchen cabinet. Before you open the bag, say the word: stressed, bored, tired, lonely, low. If the honest answer is "hungry," eat; our guide to eating at night covers hunger that builds when the day runs on too little.

For many people the trigger isn't a feeling at all: in a study that checked in through the day with 189 adults in a year-long weight program, slips were more likely when people were hungrier, felt more deprived or had tasty food in front of them (Forman et al., 2017).

2. Notice what the food actually gives you

Brewer's second step he calls developing disenchantment. You eat the food you reach for, but you pay full attention while you do: the taste, the texture, how you feel ten minutes later. His claim is that the brain keeps doing what it finds rewarding and drops what it doesn't, and that awareness is what updates it. He says it takes "only 10 to 15 times" of really paying attention, when a behavior isn't rewarding, for its pull to drop (Hidden Brain). That figure is his, from his clinical work and reinforcement-learning models, not from an eating trial.

It "doesn't change the taste of food," he says, "but it can actually help us much more easily stop when we're full." The question is whether the fourth handful still does what the first one did.

Put a pause between the feeling and the food

3. Get curious about the urge, without fighting it

Most advice on emotional eating is some version of resisting: distract yourself, hold on. Brewer tried these with the people he worked with and found that a craving fought or ignored keeps coming back. "We either run away, it runs after us, or we fight with it and it gets stronger," he told Hidden Brain.

His alternative is curiosity, and he pairs it with kindness: "I think of kindness and curiosity being best friends." When you get curious, he says in his TED talk, you notice that cravings are "simply made up of body sensations," like tightness, tension and restlessness, and "these body sensations come and go" (6:23).

The 1h Protocol to Lose Weight Sustainably turns this into a pause. The next time you reach for food without being hungry, name the feeling, then choose. You can eat it on a plate, sitting down, and enjoy it. Or you can do one thing from a short list for ten minutes. After that, it's your choice. Ten minutes is a starting point, not a test; if it feels too long, make it two.

The point of the pause is to choose, not to forbid.

4. Write your list, and keep it within reach

Brewer's third step is finding what he calls "the biggest, bestest offer": something that meets the need better than the food did. For him, gummy worms gave way to blueberries, which he says have the right amount of sweetness that he's "not craving the next one or the next pint."

For a feeling, the better offer is usually not another food. Write three things you could do in ten minutes where the feeling tends to arrive: a walk around the block, a message to a friend, a shower, some music, a cup of tea, a stretch. Match them to your feelings. Boredom wants something to do; loneliness wants a person; tiredness may want bed. Then make the list the easy option: the tea by the kettle, the walking shoes by the door.

A review of 23 randomized trials with 1,203 adults with a higher weight looked at programs that taught other ways to handle feelings, such as cognitive behavioral and mindfulness-based approaches. Eating for comfort was a little lower right after the programs and more so at three months, but by six months the difference had gone, though only three trials looked that far ahead (Chew et al., 2022).

Drop the rule, keep the kindness

5. Don't answer a hard evening with a new rule

After an evening of eating more than you meant, the usual reflex is a stricter tomorrow: no sugar, no snacks, nothing after 7 pm. Brewer describes a woman he worked with who lived by a long list of food rules: she would break one, "put herself in jail" for it, and then "beat herself up for not being able to resist the urges." Her craving, she said, started as a whisper and got louder the more she ignored it.

The lab evidence points the same way. In the 2018 review, the people who ate more after a bad mood were the ones holding back hardest on food (Evers et al., 2018). That rests on 12 short experiments, and in a handful of studies the 2022 stress review found the opposite for snack foods, so read it as a likely pattern, not a law. If your hard evenings follow a run of "being good," our guide to cheat days and all-or-nothing eating covers that pattern on its own.

6. Say the kind sentence, then make the next meal ordinary

What to do instead is surprisingly specific. In one experiment, 84 women students ate a doughnut, and some then heard a short kind message along the lines of "I hope you won't be hard on yourself. Everyone eats unhealthy sometimes." Among those who usually restrict their eating strictly, the ones who heard it ate less chocolate afterward. A review of 20 studies of self-compassion in weight programs found eating behavior improved in 15 of the 18 that measured it, though most studies were small (Brenton-Peters et al., 2021).

So after a hard day's eating, say what you'd say to a friend: "That was a hard day. Tomorrow is an ordinary one." Then make your next meal a normal one, with no skipping to make up for it.

Start with the next time you reach

Brewer didn't beat the gummy worms by holding out. He paid attention, found they weren't giving him what he thought, and found something he liked better. That's the method in small: see the loop, notice what you get from it, make the better option easy. The same curiosity works on a drink; our guide to alcohol cravings covers that side. For the wider picture of habits that last, see how to lose weight sustainably.

To build this into your own day, try the 1h Protocol to Lose Weight Sustainably. It's practical education, not a diet. The first chapter is free: a few questions find your pattern, and one of the four, the Comfort, is for when food is how hard moments get handled. You leave it with one first step to try. The full program takes about an hour and walks one day with you, from waking to sleep, at your own times, with a plan for the "just one" moment. You can write your own goal, a weight goal included; the program never sets a target, calories or a diet. You leave with your chosen changes on one page, a moment card for your lock screen, a fourteen-day sheet, and days 7 and 14 in your calendar. Four short check-ins follow by email on days 1, 7, 14 and 30. Start free

Frequently asked questions

What is emotional eating?

Eating to handle a feeling rather than hunger, such as stress, boredom, loneliness or a low mood. It's common, and Brewer describes it as a learned loop: feel bad, eat something good, feel better, repeat (TED). The program isn't for anyone who is pregnant or breastfeeding, or living with an eating disorder, now or in the past.

How do I stop emotional eating?

Name the feeling, then choose: a plate and a seat, or ten minutes with something from your list. Answer a hard evening with kindness, not a stricter rule. If eating still feels out of your control after two weeks, talk to someone you trust.

Is boredom eating a real thing?

Yes, for some people. In a study that checked in with 189 adults through the day, people who reported more boredom, stress or sadness overall slipped more often, though in the moment hunger, feeling deprived and having tasty food around were the clearer signals (Forman et al., 2017). If boredom is your trigger, your list needs something to do, not something to eat.

Does stress make everyone eat more?

No. Across 54 studies of healthy adults, stress went with only a small rise in snack-type food on average, and the review cites an estimate that 35 to 40% of people eat more under stress while the rest eat the same or less (Hill et al., 2022). In lab experiments, the clearest rise came in people who restrict what they eat (Evers et al., 2018).

Does mindful eating help?

For eating on impulse, a little; for weight on its own, the evidence is weak. A review of 12 small trials found mindfulness training reduced impulsive eating but didn't change weight (Ruffault et al., 2017). A 2026 review found mindful eating cut how much people ate by a small amount in lab tests, with almost no effect in everyday settings (Ahmadyar et al., 2026), and most trials of mindful eating programs found no clear change in how much people ate (Grider et al., 2021). Use it as a way to notice, not as a plan in itself.

Sources

This article draws on Judson Brewer's interview on Hidden Brain, his TED talk and his publisher's description of his book, Traci Mann's interview with NPR, and the studies and reviews listed below.

• The Curious Science of Cravings (podcast episode with Judson Brewer, Hidden Brain, 2024)
• Judson Brewer, A simple way to break a bad habit (TED talk, recorded 2015)
• Judson Brewer, The Hunger Habit (book, publisher page, 2024)
• In 'Eating Lab,' a psychologist spills secrets on why diets fail (interview with Traci Mann, NPR, 2015)
• Evers et al, Feeling bad or feeling good, does emotion affect your consumption of food? (meta-analysis of 56 lab experiments, 3,670 adults, 2018)
• Hill et al, Stress and eating behaviours in healthy adults (systematic review and meta-analysis of 54 studies, 2022)
• Forman et al, Ecological momentary assessment of dietary lapses across behavioral weight loss treatment (study of 189 adults in a 12-month program, 2017)
• Chew, Lau & Lau, Weight-loss interventions for improving emotional eating among adults with high body mass index (systematic review and meta-analysis of 23 randomized trials, 2022)
• Brenton-Peters et al, Self-compassion in weight management (systematic review of 20 studies, 2021)
• Ruffault et al, The effects of mindfulness training on weight-loss and health-related behaviours in adults with overweight and obesity (meta-analysis of 12 randomized trials, 2017)
• Ahmadyar et al, Effects of mindfulness and mindful eating on food intake and appetite (systematic review and meta-analysis of 45 studies, 2026)
• Grider, Douglas & Raynor, The influence of mindful eating and/or intuitive eating approaches on dietary intake (systematic review of 13 studies, abstract only, 2021)