Anxiety and Appetite

Difficulty enjoying food due to lack of appetite

When people suffer with anxiety and depression, it can be a common occurrence to begin overeating or comfort eat. However, something which may be overlooked is the fact that it can also have the opposite effect and result in reducing your appetite and making it extremely difficult to consume food. As a result of this, it can begin to further impact your mental health as well as physical health.

Why does anxiety ruin your appetite?

Knowing the why can often be the first step to knowing how to overcome a problem. As we understand, when suffering with anxiety, it will have a tendency of triggering your fight or flight response. This fight or flight response will result in hormones being released, such as adrenaline and drive blood to the muscles and away from internal organs to evade danger making digesting food the bodies last priority.

It has been evident that when an excess amount of these hormones are released via a stressful situation, it will impact your digestive system and begin to make you feel nauseous and in extreme cases, cause vomiting and diarrhoea. This is something you may have experienced when having to perform or present something to someone and you feel ‘butterflies’ in your stomach.

When consistently in an anxious state, your body will continue to release these hormones and as a result will consistently make you feel nauseous, making it very difficult to consume food. With this, your stomach also produces acids to help break down food for digestion, however, when you don’t eat for a long duration of time, these acids may build up causing additional feelings of sickness.

When experiencing these symptoms, more often than not they will lead to triggering more stress related symptoms which will impact your mental and physical well-being. It is imperative you adopt methods to not only combat anxiety but also to work around it as there is no quick fix.

Coping Mechanisms

Anxiety can impact a number of different factors of our life and although the best way to combat this, is to combat anxiety itself and get to the route cause, sometimes it can help to adopt coping mechanisms to ease the impacts it may have on our day to day life.

As eating is a essential part of living, when anxiety hinders this on a daily basis, coping mechanisms are certainly something to consider. These are things I have done personally to help with this issue.

Find a distraction – Anxiety will have thoughts racing around your head and you seem to become fixated on those which stress you out the most, as a result this may impact your ability to consume food. Finding a distraction while eating can help keep your mind occupied and focussed elsewhere in an attempt to allow you to eat in piece. An example would be watching something you enjoy while eating.

Smaller Portions – When eating is already difficult, the last thing you want Is to try and tackle a huge portion of food. Factor in smaller meals which you consume on a little and often basis. Also try and consume foods which will be lighter on your stomach and are easier for digestion.

Fresh air – When you feel anxious you can often feel like you’re suffocating and have the onset of panic. Getting ‘fresh air’ can be a great way to combat this and therefore you may find it beneficial to eat outside or near an open window. Although this may sound odd, it is something which helped me greatly.

Acceptance – When you’re already in an anxious state of mind, adding additional pressure on yourself to eat food when you cant will only lead to more stress and you will find yourself stuck in a loop. Sometimes it’s worth taking a step back and accepting that you’re unable to eat anything at that moment and try again when you feel more relaxed.

Supplementing – Not a permanent fix, however the use of supplements can help your body get some form of nutrition without having to consume full meals. Protein shakes, multi vitamins or a meal replacement drink would be some of the most effective options. However, it is important to not become dependent on these over long periods of time.