I really hate the social convention about comfort eating, and its decidedly guilty cardigan undertones. But until now, I hadn’t entirely connected all the dots. Cue: morning epiphany.* What is comfort eating is actually safety eating?
We tend to talk about comfort eating as if it’s a failure of willpower, which I find increasingly wrong-headed. Actually, a lot of people I speak to have been using enormous amounts of willpower all day. They have been trying not to eat, trying to be ‘good’, trying to ignore hunger, cravings or body signals, trying to manage stress, work, children, sensory overwhelm, hormones, emails, life admin, and the entire deranged circus of being a modern human with a nervous system.
Then at some point, often in the afternoon or evening, the system simply runs out of fight.
That is not a lack of willpower. That is a nervous system that has been white-knuckling it for hours and has finally gone, ‘Right, lovely, I have tried your morality-based food management programme and I regret to inform you that we are eating chocolate NOW.’
So I am more and more convinced that ‘comfort eating’ may be the wrong end of the stick. Not always, because comfort is real and lovely and sometimes a biscuit is just a biscuit, preferably with sweet milky coffee to dunk in. But I wonder whether, for many people, what we call comfort eating might be more accurately described as safety eating.**
This line of thought started for me through HRV readings.*** I noticed that after eating, my readings would often shift towards parasympathetic activity, what we commonly call ‘rest and digest’. Now, parasympathetic activity does not automatically mean safety. This is one of those places where nervous system language can get a bit too neat and self-satisfied, like it has alphabetised its spice rack. Shutdown can also involve parasympathetic dominance. Collapse can feel like relief after frantic activation. Many traumatised or chronically overwhelmed people know the strange relief of moving from wired, watchful, clenched activation into something flatter, slower, less shouty.
Despite all my knowledge and practice, my own nervous system still appears to spend a great deal of time in high sympathetic mode, or rather, in very low parasympathetic mode. I am wary of words like ‘normal’ and ‘should’, but when my app suggests that my parasympathetic activity is often much lower than expected, I do pay attention to the spikes. Not in a panicked ‘let’s optimise the mammal’ way, but with curiosity. What helps? What shifts the state? What gives the body a message of safety, or at least a message of less threat?
So I’m not saying that eating equals safety. I’m saying that eating changes state. And once you start looking at food as something that changes state, rather than simply something that contains calories, the conversation starts to shift.
The vagus nerve is one of the major communication routes between the gut and the brain. It carries signals about digestion, fullness, gut stretch, nutrients and internal bodily state. Gut-brain researchers describe the vagus as a key pathway through which the body tells the brain what is going on internally, including information related to hunger, satiation and satiety. We tend to think of the brain as the floating genius in charge of everything, but it really isn’t. A huge amount of information travels from the body up to the brain, not simply from the brain down to the body. The brain is less solo genius, more committee member receiving constant memos from the intestines.
When we eat, the body receives information: food is available, something is coming in, digestion can begin. We have resources. For a nervous system that has been running on pressure, uncertainty, effort, masking, shame or threat, that may be a powerful and irresistible message.
This is where I think about ADHD, trauma and the way they often intertwine in real life. Not as two tidy boxes, with trauma over here and neurodivergence over there, politely ignoring each other across the buffet table. More as layers of experience that can become difficult to separate, especially for people who have spent years feeling wrong, too much, not enough, misunderstood, corrected, overwhelmed or required to function in ways that fight their body.
Many ADHDers live with a high baseline of effort. It may not look dramatic from the outside. They may be getting through the day, doing the job, parenting the children, answering the messages, showing up, smiling, performing competence with a level of commitment that deserves at least a commemorative mug. But inside, there may be a constant negotiation between stimulation, fatigue, sensory load, shame, time pressure, task initiation, appetite, focus, social uncertainty and the exhausting business of trying to appear like a person whose executive functions arrived fully assembled.
If food reliably helps that system shift, even for a little while, it makes sense that the brain would learn the pattern and keep it on speed dial.
Food can bring sensory predictability: warmth, crunch, sweetness, salt, softness, repetition. Food can bring dopamine. Food gives the body something concrete to do. Food can interrupt the buzzing, searching, restless feeling that many people recognise in themselves long before they have language for it. Food can create a much-needed pause, a rhythm, a small private landing place in the day.
That does not make food a perfect regulation tool. It does make it a very understandable and logical one.
The emotional eating literature already points us in this direction, even if it does not always use the same language. Researchers often describe emotional eating as linked to negative affect, emotional dysregulation, stress and coping. In other words, eating can become a way to manage feeling. For ADHD specifically, there is research linking ADHD symptoms with disordered eating and addictive-like eating patterns, with emotional dysregulation and negative mood appearing as important parts of that relationship.
Again, this does not mean every ADHD person who snacks is traumatised, every biscuit is a cry for help, or every craving should be invited to share its childhood memories. Sometimes we eat because food is delicious. Sometimes we eat because we are hungry. Sometimes because the toast is there and toast is, frankly, one of civilisation’s better decisions.
But if food is repeatedly showing up at moments of distress, depletion, restlessness, loneliness, restriction or overwhelm, I think it is worth asking what job it is doing.
Because once we stop treating eating as a moral failure, we can start seeing the intelligence of the adaptation. The brain repeats what works. It is not always elegant. It does not care whether the strategy is Instagrammable or approved by someone called Heather with a meal-prep grid. If something helps us feel calmer, fuller, more grounded, more stimulated, more numb, more in control, more held, less exposed or less jangly, the brain is likely to keep it on the shortlist.
This brings me to the other piece I think we often miss, which is autonomy.
Food is not only regulating. Food is also one of the first places where a child may discover control.
Children have very little genuine power. They do not choose where they live, who looks after them, whether adults are emotionally available, whether the house feels safe, whether school is bearable, whether their sensory needs are understood, whether they are comforted or dismissed, whether anyone notices the difference between ‘being difficult’ and being overwhelmed.
But food enters the body, and that makes it deeply personal.
A child may discover, consciously or unconsciously, that they can eat, refuse to eat, hide food, seek food, ask for more, eat quickly, eat secretly, eat less, keep something back, create a ritual, make one small decision in a world where most decisions belong to other people.
This is one of the reasons autonomy and control are so often discussed in relation to eating disorders and recovery. Of course, eating disorders are complex, serious and never reducible to one explanation. But many trauma-informed clinicians and researchers recognise that food and body behaviours can become entangled with control, powerlessness, emotional regulation, shame and bodily autonomy. More recent work on eating disorder recovery also emphasises how important autonomy can be in treatment itself, because if someone’s relationship with food has already become bound up with control, taking more control away from them may not always create healing. Sometimes it simply deepens the old wound wearing a clinical lanyard.
I wonder whether this principle exists on a broader continuum too. Not only in diagnosable eating disorders, but in the everyday food patterns so many people feel ashamed of. The evening eating. The secret eating. The snack cupboard orbit. The intense pull towards food after a day of holding everything together. The feeling of ‘I cannot keep doing this’ that arrives before the eating happens.
Perhaps food is sometimes not only comfort, but agency.
A way of saying, ‘I can do something. I can influence how I feel. I have a choice here.’
That phrase has been circling in my mind: autonomous safety. Safety I can create myself.
For a child who cannot reliably access co-regulation, food may become one of the earliest forms of self-generated regulation. It may be available when people are not. It may be predictable when relationships are not. It may offer sensation when the body feels numb, fullness when the self feels empty, restriction when the world feels chaotic, sweetness when tenderness is missing, or simply a small private kingdom in a life where everything else is supervised.
I don’t say that to romanticise it. Some of these patterns become painful, rigid, secretive, compulsive, frightening or harmful. They can damage health, narrow life, fuel shame and create exactly the stuckness the original strategy was trying to prevent. Anyone struggling with eating disorder symptoms deserves proper, specialist support, and no blog post should be used as a reason to minimise that.
But if we start with shame, we miss the adaptation.
This is where polyvagal theory gives me a useful language, even though I hold it as a lens rather than a religion. Stephen Porges’ idea of neuroception, the nervous system’s constant scanning for safety, danger and life threat, has been hugely influential in trauma-informed work. Dr Arielle Schwartz, Deb Dana and others have helped translate some of these ideas into more practical, body-based language for trauma recovery. At the same time, polyvagal theory is still debated, and not every claim attached to it should be swallowed whole like a wellness truffle. I find it most useful when it helps us ask better questions about state, safety, threat and connection.
From that perspective, the question becomes less, ‘Why can’t I control myself around food?’ and more, ‘What state is my body trying to reach?’
That feels like a very different starting point.
If someone eats at night after restricting all day, maybe the story is not that their willpower failed. Maybe their willpower worked too hard for too long, against a body that had been asking for food, rest, softness, satisfaction, dopamine or reassurance. Maybe the eating is the nervous system staging a small rebellion after twelve hours of being managed like an unruly intern.
If someone turns to food when overwhelmed, the question may not be simply, ‘How do I stop?’ It may be, ‘What does food give me that I am not getting elsewhere?’ Grounding? Stimulation? Permission? Transition? A break from decision-making? The only moment in the day that feels chosen rather than demanded?
If someone finds restriction calming, the question may be even more delicate. Is restriction giving them clarity? Control? Identity? A sense of competence? A way to shrink needs that once felt unsafe to have? A way to make distress visible, or invisible? Again, this is where specialist support matters, because the fact that something makes sense does not mean it is safe.
This is the tightrope I think we need to walk. We can understand a behaviour without endorsing every consequence of it. We can respect the intelligence of a survival strategy while also recognising when it has become too costly. We can say, ‘Of course this helped,’ and also, ‘You deserve more than this one way of coping.’
For coaching, this opens up a much richer conversation than the usual food morality circus.
Instead of asking whether someone has been ‘good’ or ‘bad’ with food, words I would happily compost, we might ask what kind of need is showing up. Physical hunger, yes, but also sensory hunger, dopamine hunger, rest hunger, autonomy hunger, safety hunger, protest hunger, comfort hunger, transition hunger, connection hunger. The language may be imperfect, but the curiosity is the point.
If food has been doing the work of regulation, autonomy or safety, we need to build more than food restriction around it. We may need other forms of regulation that actually work for this person’s body, not imaginary wellness-person body who loves breathwork on command and never gets annoyed by a meditation app voice. We may need more genuine choice around pace, work, sensory environment, boundaries, clothing, rest, movement, social contact and food itself. We may need predictable meals, enough food, less punishment, less mental pressure, less all-day restriction followed by evening collapse, more warmth, rhythm, support, softness, connection, and fewer impossible expectations dressed up as discipline.
And if food is doing the job of childhood survival, we need tenderness. Because that younger part of us did not choose a ‘bad habit’. It found a door.
It may not be the door we want to keep using forever. It may be creaky, narrow and occasionally lead straight into a cupboard full of crisps. But it was a door.
This is why ‘safety eating’ feels like an interesting phrase to me. Not as a replacement for every other explanation, and definitely not as a shiny new label to slap on every snack. More as a question.
What if some eating is the body trying to create safety?
What if some overeating happens after a whole day of fighting the body, not because of too little willpower but because of too much?
What if food has been carrying regulation, agency, comfort, stimulation and self-soothing all by itself, like an overworked pack pony with a flapjack in its saddlebag?
Maybe the aim is not to shame food out of that role, but to stop making food do all of the work alone.
Because perhaps meaningful change does not begin with ‘stop needing this’. Perhaps it begins with, ‘Let’s understand why this made sense.’
And then, very gradually, ‘Let’s give your nervous system more than one way home.’
*You’ll often hear me say that ideas don’t happen when we try to have them. They often appear when we’re having a shower, waking up, dreaming, walking the dog, or staring into the middle distance while technically meant to be doing something else. It’s the brain having a chance to process things in its own time. Very valuable fallow time.
**I’m not trying to present this as a grand truth. I am not climbing onto a hill with a flag and declaring a new clinical model of the digestive biscuit. I’m exploring an idea, partly from my own body, partly from coaching conversations, partly from nervous system theory, partly from the literature around emotional eating, trauma, ADHD and autonomy. So please read this as a thinking-aloud piece, not a diagnostic tool, and certainly not as advice to ignore eating disorders, medical needs, hunger cues, medication, nutrition, or any professional support you may need. Food and bodies are not simple. Anyone pretending otherwise is probably trying to sell you a powder.
***I use Welltory for HRV readings. Smartwatches can also give HRV data, and I can see the appeal of having more regular information, but I don’t especially like wearing something around my wrist from a sensory perspective. I also have a slightly odd but very real objection to carrying ‘time’ on me all the time. Welltory lets me take a reading through the smartphone camera and flash, using the light through the fingertip to track changes in blood flow. I am not enamoured with the name, but I do quite like being able to gather data without wearing a tiny wrist-clock goblin.
Want to rabbit-hole into the science?
This piece is an exploration, not a formal literature review, but these five links are good starting points if you want to dig further into the science and theory behind it.
- Gut-brain signalling, eating and the vagus nerve
de Lartigue, G., Brierley, D. I. & Choi, H. J. The critical role of gut-brain signalling in eating behaviour and obesity.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41575-026-01203-x - Emotional eating as regulation, not simply ‘lack of control’
van Strien, T. Causes of Emotional Eating and Matched Treatment of Obesity.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5918520/ - ADHD and disordered eating
Kaisari, P., Dourish, C. T. & Higgs, S. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and disordered eating behaviour: A systematic review and a framework for future research.
https://research.birmingham.ac.uk/en/publications/attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder-adhd-and-disordered-eati/ - Autonomy, control and eating disorder recovery
‘I’ll do it on my own, but I’m never alone’: lived experience and practitioner perspectives of autonomy in longstanding and severe eating disorder treatment and recovery.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40337-024-01164-z - Polyvagal theory, safety and nervous-system states
Porges, S. W. Polyvagal Theory: A Science of Safety.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/integrative-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnint.2022.871227/full
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