How To Stop Struggling With Your Halloween Candy Binge Urges and Start Listening to Them

Have you ever wondered why your friend can seem to eat a piece of chocolate like it's no big deal and move on with their life while you sit in agony over eating one piece, wanting more, and feeling like you're in a battle with yourself about not binging on chocolate?

We receive all these stories about what that means from family, friends, and culture. You may start to create a story that you're weak, lack willpower, or can't control yourself around certain foods.

With Halloween coming up in about two weeks, I wanted to offer a different explanation to why you may find yourself struggling with binging on Halloween candy and a somatic approach you can try when you're feeling that familiar urge to binge on candy.

Let's start with the activation of your sympathetic nervous system.

This can be turned on by living in a trauma response, feeling highly stressed, or because the food itself is perceived as dangerous to interact with activating a fight or flight state. When your SNS is triggered, your HPA axis, which plays a role in your body's stress management, starts pumping out cortisol. An increase in cortisol can increase your cravings for high-sugar, high-fat, and calorie-dense foods. This is biologically genius for the body to do. It is ensuring that if you're in danger, you have enough energy from food to flee or fight or play dead for as long as you need to.

The activation of your SNS releases glucose into the bloodstream so that your muscles get the fuel they need to respond. Once this burst of energy is utilized, you can experience a sudden drop in blood sugar levels. This can feel scary that you'll start searching for food sources that will rapidly raise your blood sugar as quickly as possible guiding you toward carbohydrate-rich foods.

When your SNS is activated your brain's reward system becomes more sensitized and you will actively go toward acts, like eating, that will release dopamine to counteract the emotions and sensations experienced from being in a fight or flight response. Your prefrontal cortex, involved with rational, logical thinking, is inhibited making it more difficult to think through your options and making you more impulsive. You also have an increase in ghrelin levels which stimulates your appetite making you hungrier.

Can you see how binging on candy has nothing to do with a lack of willpower or control?

You didn't choose for this cascade of bodily reactions to happen. This automatically occurs based on the state that was triggered inside of you based on the perception that you are in danger. Your body is doing exactly what it is meant to do to protect you.

I want to offer one other perspective on why you binge on Halloween candy. First, I'm curious if you have labeled Halloween candy in some particular way. Do you call it bad? Do you tell yourself you're not allowed to have it? If so…

Telling yourself that a food is off-limits triggers a few different brain reactions.

First, the restricted or "forbidden" nature of something increases its perceived value, making the brain more engaged in pursuing it. Whenever you anticipate or strive for a reward, your brain releases dopamine. So not only does eating specific foods help you get the dopamine your body and brain want to feel good, but anticipating a rewarding experience like eating Halloween candy that you've labeled as off-limits can intensify the pleasurable experience of finally eating it.

There's also something called the Reactance Theory, which was first introduced by Jack Brehm in 1966. Psychological reactance explains that when you perceive your freedom to choose is being restricted, you experience an emotional reaction and feelings that lead you to try to restore your lost freedom. This can look like an increased interest in a forbidden object or behavior like a certain food or eating a certain food in a specific amount. So when you tell yourself that you can't have any Halloween candy, your brain is going to urge you to go eat as much Halloween candy as you possibly can to restore your sense of freedom.

Additionally, when your body senses scarcity, it is going to guide you to pursue the thing that now has more perceived value to get back into abundance. So even if you intellectually know you don't need candy for your survival, your body doesn't know that. All it understands is that candy is scarce by you restricting it. You're going to feel a strong impulse to find candy to step out of scarcity and when you get it you're going to receive an even greater dopamine hit making you eat a lot more candy than you normally would.

So someone who eats candy in the parasympathetic nervous system of safety and connection, knowing they can have as much as they want, and not making candy off limits, is going to be eating that candy in a different brain and bodily response where they can eat it, stop, and move on. This doesn't have to do with them having more willpower or something magical about them that makes them able to not binge on candy.

Now, here's how you can utilize all of this new awareness this Halloween season or really whenever you feel the urge to binge on candy.

First, you can stimulate your prefrontal cortex to think more rationally by naming the urge to binge and putting words to your emotions and sensations. When you're around a bunch of candy and feel the familiar desire to eat an entire plastic pumpkin's worth of candy, you can say internally or out loud, "I want to eat all of this candy and this makes me feel tight, tense, and constricted with a fast heartbeat and shallow breathing."

Next, look at all the candy around you. Show your body that there isn't a candy famine. Let yourself know that this is not the only day you can have candy and you can have candy tomorrow, the next day, and the day after that too.

So far, this is tapping into more of a mental process that may or may not activate your parasympathetic nervous system to start to feel safer in the presence of candy. If you're still feeling an urge to flee from all of the candy by getting away from it or eating all of it to get rid of it, or fighting yourself for wanting to eat candy, then you'll need to go to non-verbal practices to move through that your body feels threatened.

What I often first recommend is taking yourself to a safe space. If you're at someone's house that might be getting a moment to breathe by going to the bathroom or that might be saying that you forgot something in your car and taking a trip out to your car for a minute. In this space, explore if there are any bodily impulses present. This might be to shake or wiggle your arms and your legs. You can go through your senses to bring your presence into your current space to show your body that you are not in danger. Lastly, you might take a few deep breaths where you breathe in on a count of 4 and breathe out on a count of 6. Longer exhales will activate your relaxation response.

Last, give yourself a choice to foster a sense of your freedom. If you eat a piece of candy knowing that you're in the sympathetic nervous system, you get to own that based on the natural response of your body, you're going to want to eat more. Just because your body tells you to have more candy doesn't mean you have to listen to it. You can assess if you feel like you have the capacity to navigate that response, which can sometimes feel difficult to be with. You can also choose at that moment to say no, letting your body know it is not because it can't have the candy, but because right now you don't want to have to navigate the emotions and sensations that may arise after you have one piece.

If you decide to say no, something you might play with though at another time is eating a piece of candy when you know you're in the parasympathetic nervous system to notice what that candy feels like in your body when you eat it in a safe, connected, rest, and digest state.

Just so you know, this is something we explore at length in the Somatic Eating® Program! You will learn how to track your body, what nervous system state it is in, and what food behaviors will best support you based on your nervous system state. There are 9 more days to sign up. Go to somaticeating.com to learn more or email me at support@stephaniemara.com with any questions you have about this 3 month class that starts on Monday, October 28th.

If you try out this new Halloween somatic practice, reach out to me via email or DM me on social media @_stephaniemara, and let me know how it goes.

Wishing you all safety and satiation this week and chat with you all soon! Bye!