here are certain things that you need to do to manage your life as an adult. You need to pay your bills and do your taxes. You need to get oil changed in your car. You need to renew your driver’s license and passport. You need to keep toilet paper in the house and take out trash. They require some skill, but, more than that, they require discipline. When these things are not attended to, chaos reigns and you might feel scattered and incompetent. You feel like a fraud and end up hoping that someone will rescue you.

If you can’t manage your day-to-day life, it makes it a whole lot harder to entertain the idea of going after dreams and goals. Cultivating satisfying relationships and pursuing your dreams are critical components to ending your dependence on food as reward. So let’s look at ways that you can manage your life better so that you’d feel more confident and start doing the things that you’d really like to be doing. See if you see yourself in the anecdote below:

You’re late for your meditation class. In your hurry to get there on time, you forget your wallet. Five miles down the highway, you realize that you’re driving without a license, so you flip a U-turn and speed home. The phone rings. “Ns Jones,” the nasal voice at the other end says, “you have a doctor’s appointment to day at two o’clock.” You cant believe that you scheduled a doctor’s appointment for the same time as meditation! Late for both appointments now, you frantically rip through the house searching for the wallet, which you can’t find because you haven’t cleaned in three weeks and everything is a jumble. On the was t the was to the bedroom, you grab a few cookies and shove them in your mouth without thinking. By the time you find the wallet in the pocket of yesterday’s jeans, you’re too late for either appointment, so you console yourself with more cookies and a mug of hot cocoa. Does this sound familiar to you? Does stress make you desperate for a food fix?

Although you’ve probably recognized the connection between stress and the five-cookie syndrome before now m you might not have thought about what role food plays specifically in diminishing your stress. For one thing, food distracts you from the source of your anxiety, at least for am moment or two. That makes you feel better right away, but whatever has been making you anxious remains intact as long as you eat to forget about it, only to arise again as soon as the cookie crumbles in your digestive tract. Also, if you eat enough food, you go sluggish and dull, which might take the edge off the uncomfortable physical symptoms that anxiety causes, but again, the cause of the anxiety is still there.

Few things excite automatic eating the way that stress does. One minute you experience stress, and the next minute you’ve got a fistful of chips headed toward your lips, without stopping to think in between. Having too much stress increases the odds that you’ll eat unhealthy food. Under stress, you tend to opt for food that won’t take any more of your already frayed resources to prepare. You don’t have the time to think about calories or health or even, necessarily, to cook something. Instead you go to some fast food place or to the vending machine, or grab fistful of junk food off of your shelves.

Many of us have a difficult time to tackle everything that needs to get done in day-to-day life. We use stress-reduction strategies that just don’t work. Or they work for diminishing one type of stress, but not others. For instance, if you’re stressed because you aren’t making enough money, going salsa dancing won’t necessary help. On the other hand, if your stress comes from feeling ugly, the dancing might be just a thing. The trick is to isolate your current greatest stressors and find techniques that help you to get a handle on those things.

Roger Gould, M.D