Job stress can cause suppressive hunger due to cortisol release, not to mention that 8% of annual health costs and 120,000 deaths in the US are associated with job hatred, Jeffrey Pfeffer from Harvard found.
But let’s focus here, why does this cortisol make us hungry? And why do we turn to emotional eating under job stress?
The answer in simple English is that our body (exactly our adrenal glands) release cortisol when we feel stressed or scared. This has been happening for thousands of years to homo sapiens when they encountered a fight-or-flight situation; e.g. stumbling upon a lion on their way to lunch. This cortisol is released to balance their blood pressure and they run the heck out.
Now obviously in our modern day and time, there are no lions walking around our concrete roads. Homo sapiens have concord the known world and we are the masters now, or aren’t we?
Now we have different stress and fear sources. They are at our offices everyday. This monster snake called email subject or that god of hatred called Boss-assleous. What do we do now that we have come to this stage and we don’t need to run? We get hungry.