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What do you do when you’re stressed? Some take a relaxing bath, some take a walk. All of us have our methods to try and take the stress off our backs, and it’s the same way with students at NS. But what do nearly half the students do to cope with stress?
They eat.
“I think everyone does it to some degree,” said NS senior Adam Cox. “There are people who are worse than others.”
Not all students eat the same foods, and there is definitely a variety. Some just snack on junk food, some really love to eat salty foods such as chips and crackers, and some just eat anything they can find.
But why do we stress eat at all?
“Stress eating is kind of a way to make us feel better,” said Heather Allred, counselor at NS. “It doesn’t really fix the problem, it just kinda fills you up.”
Using food as a temporary escape from our problems can be good, or bad. A little bit of stress eating can be good, just like a little stress can be good.
“If I’m working on a stressful school project, I’ll be like, shoveling [food] down just to give me something to do while doing it,” Cox said.
But, too much stress can really take a toll on your mental health and your physical health, if you eat too much. This can be a problem for teens that stress eat, because stress often affects teenagers more than other age groups.
“It really depends,” NS sophomore Shirley Sicotencatl. “But if you’re overweight or something like that, and you just keep eating more and more, it could be really bad.”
In a 2018 American Psychological Association survey, it showed that teens tend to be much more stressed than adults.
“Teens reported that their stress levels during the school year far exceeded what they believe to be healthy (5.8 vs. 3.9 on a 10-point scale) and topped adults’ average reported stress levels (5.8 for teens vs. 5.1 for adults),” according to the APA.
Even things that may not seem important to adults can cause stress for teens.
“Things to an adult that might seem trivial to them, seem earth-shattering to a teenager,” Cox said.
Teenagers usually don’t even have more stressful situations than adults either, but teens are often not very well equipped to handle stress.
“Adults have been in this world longer, so they know how to deal with those feelings of stress, whereas teenagers haven’t been here as long,” said Sicotencatl.
Although stress eating is a normal challenge for teenagers, the ongoing pandemic hasn’t helped. In fact, it’s made stress eating much worse in adults and teenagers.
“Generally, the two big things that make children emotionally eat are boredom and stress, and we have a lot of that, the children have a lot of that right now,” said Bärbel Knäuper, a professor of health psychology at McGill University.
Although the pandemic is a problem, some teens are doing better than others, and it’s the same way with or without COVID-19.
“People in families that normally struggle, their struggles have probably increased,” Allred said. “The people that have fairly effective health skills are probably doing better than others.”
Even with healthy teens though, most still have their comfort foods. A way to escape the grip of stress, at least for a while.
