Reading time: 10 mins
Perhaps you recognise yourself in this picture…
It’s 9pm. You’ve been “good” with your food all day, but you’re still hungry - or not quite satisfied on some level. It’s also been another stressful day, you’re feeling depleted and craving some “you time”.
You start thinking about the food you’ve got in the cupboards, or about popping out for a little treat. But as you try to ignore these thoughts, the familiar pull grows stronger and stronger. You start feeling as though you’re no longer in control of your body, and at some point, you lose yourself completely in a frenzy.
Within minutes, you’ve eaten everything you promised yourself you wouldn’t. You feel so full your jeans are pressing into you and your stomach hurts. The sinking feeling comes almost immediately. Guilt and shame overwhelm you, and in both frustration and desperation, you tell yourself you’ll make up for the binge tomorrow.
And you ask yourself “How did I end up here again?”
This pattern of evening and night time binges tend to happen for a few reasons. Perhaps reading the above and seeing this situation in its starkness, you can already pick out a couple of them; your body’s need for nourishment and energy not being fully met, and turning to food as a buffer for intense or uncomfortable emotions. Maybe a part of you is also seeking food as a means to experience a glimpse of enjoyment or freedom.
For Highly Sensitive People, this pattern can be even more pronounced. Our cultural messages around worth and weight might land more deeply, perhaps you find the sensations of hunger unescapable, or the intensity of your feelings are just too much.
The good news is, recognising this pattern is the first step - and you’ve already taken it. Seeing it with more clarity and understanding is the next, and that’s what we’re doing here together.
For myself, night time binges are something that I got to know intimately during my 14 years of struggling with
binge eating disorder (BED). But by shining the light on what was happening beneath them, and leaning into my needs as a HSP, I was able to find freedom from these binges. What I’m sharing here is what I’ve learnt on my own journey, and from supporting other highly sensitive women on theirs.
Why you binge eat at night
I want to firstly reassure you that you’re not alone in night time binges. Evenings tend to be the most common time that binges take place. In fact, research using real-time data collection has shown that the risk for binge eating is highest around dinner time, with another elevated risk period observed in the late evening [1]. There are several interconnected reasons why this can happen, which we’ll explore here.
The binge restrict cycle
Binge eating tends to be self perpetuating due to the nature of how we tie up our worth with our weight, and how our bodies can respond to dieting. This is known as the
“binge restrict cycle”, which briefly put, goes like this:
Stage 1: You feel a sense of “I’m not enough” and “I’d be more lovable if I lost weight”
Stage 2. You go on a diet to lose weight, perhaps eating less or cutting out particular foods
Stage 3: Your body sends signals asking for more food which get louder and more urgent when ignored
Stage 4: The urges are so overwhelming you “give in” and binge, feeling out of control
Because following a binge, we often have thoughts like “I’m worthless” and “I need to be extra good tomorrow to make up for it”, we continue the cycle, potentially tightening it further with even stricter food rules.
After restricting food throughout the day, and after dismissing the signals from your body asking for more, you might find that these urges are at their loudest, and hardest to ignore, when it comes to the evening.
Blood sugar balancing
If you’re in this place of restriction, if you haven’t eaten enough throughout the day, particularly not enough carbohydrates, you might find that your blood sugar level is low at the end of the day. If this is the case, you’ll likely notice that you feel a little shaky, perhaps irritable, lightheaded and hungry.
Low blood sugar puts your body into a state of seeking out quick energy, especially craving high-sugar foods. Again, this is your body speaking to you. If its quieter messages aren’t listened to, they’ll get clearer, louder, perhaps amounting to those binge urges. This is your body simply doing what it feels it needs to in order to survive.
Accumulated emotional discomfort
When our days demand so much from us, we suppress or postpone our emotional processing. We find our emotions an uncomfortable inconvenience that we don’t want to deal with, or, we simply don’t know how to be with. Oftentimes both.
However, when the evening rolls around, it all catches up with us. Maybe when you return home from work or you get the children into bed, there’s a moment where the discomfort of what you’ve been holding back peeps through. And perhaps by this time of day your nervous system feels so fried that you can’t hold on any more - you need a release.
This is where binge eating becomes an emotional regulation tool, giving a temporary feeling of numbing or soothing. The foods we tend to binge often have those comforting qualities too. And this makes sense, food is comforting - this relationship between food and comfort is wired into us. But it’s when we don’t have these other tools for processing our emotions and tending to our nervous systems that this relationship can become skewed.
End of day fatigue
You may notice that you’re able to start the day with good intentions around your food, but as your energy wears thin - especially if you add the impacts of food restrictions and emotional toil from the day - resistance to binge urges can be depleted. Giving into the binge urges can simply feel easier than taking a step back and reflecting on what they’re telling you.
Enrichment to your day
Sometimes what we’re really craving is something just for ourselves. A moment of joy or sweetness. And when we don’t experience those little glimmers throughout the day, we seek them out in the evening. Maybe from a favourite TV show, a good scroll on your phone, or perhaps food fills that role - the need for a quick dopamine hit.
When you tie in all of the above - the effects of food restrictions, of emotional heaviness and tiredness - what might start out as a desire for a little sweet treat, can turn into a full blown binge.
Why this pattern can be even stronger for highly sensitive women
While the factors we just explored can affect anyone, I’ve found that there’s a particular type of woman for whom night time binges can be an especially pronounced pattern: those who are highly sensitive.
A Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) is someone whose nervous system is more sensitive to stimulation - both from what’s happening in the world around them, and what they’re experiencing within themselves.
It was research psychologist
Dr Elaine Aron who first began the study of HSPs and coined the term in the early 1990’s, also often referred to Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS), and found that around 20% of the population [2] are born with this trait.
How high sensitivity can amplify night time binges
Now that we understand what makes someone highly sensitive, let's look at how this trait and its characteristics can intensify the evening binge pattern we explored earlier.
Messages around weight and worth can land deeper
Remember how we talked about the way feelings of “I’m not good enough” and “I’d be more lovable if I lost weight” can trigger the binge restrict cycle? Well for HSPs, cultural messages including those around worth and weight can be processed more deeply and thoroughly.
Perhaps you’ve had the experience of a colleague or family member making a comment about someone else's body, and this comment really staying with you. And after processing it for a while, you’ve made this comment mean something about your own weight and who you are. Because of this, HSPs may be more vulnerable to falling into the binge restrict cycle, leading to night time binges when the body’s signals for more food have been ignored throughout the day.
Heightened body awareness
You might notice sensations within your body more acutely than others, as part of your ability to sense the subtle. Hunger signals or binge urges may become ignorable after “being good” with your food throughout the day, or other physical sensations like those that come with stress can be deeply uncomfortable and disconcerting, pushing you to seek the relief that momentarily comes with a binge.
Emotional intensity compounds
Earlier we discussed how emotional discomfort accumulates throughout the day when we try and push it away. For HSPs, because you experience emotions more intensely, this accumulation happens faster and can feel a lot. By evening, you might be carrying not just your own emotional weight but often others' as well. That empathy that makes you so attuned to others can be emotionally draining when you don’t have the tools to let it go.
By the evening, you may no longer be able to hold back that emotional intensity, and you binge as a way to try and escape those feelings. Interestingly, it's not just difficult emotions that can trigger this - even positive emotions like excitement or joy can feel "too much" for your sensitive system, leading you to seek that familiar numbing or soothing through food.
Overwhelm takes over
Because HSPs are processing more information and at a deeper level, when it comes to the evening you might not only be feeling fatigued, but utterly overwhelmed and fried. So when the binge urges creep in - again as a response to dieting and not meeting your nourishment needs through the day, to emotional weightyness or the compounding effect of overwhelm - it feels as though there’s nothing left within you to keep them at bay. Bingeing can seem the only, and inevitable option in those moments.
Needed alone time becomes a trigger
Here's a particularly sticky aspect for HSPs: you absolutely need time alone to decompress and recharge. It's essential for your wellbeing. But if you find solitude in the evenings, this can unintentionally create perfect conditions for binge eating.
Most binges take place when we’re alone. In fact, binge eating thrives in secrecy. And when you’re alone during the evening with the day’s overstimulation and emotional intensity being held within your body, that’s when this pattern can develop. You begin to associate solitude with safety, bingeing to self-soothe and the momentary relief that comes with it. Before you know it, your essential alone time has become unconsciously wired to binge eating, turning what could be restorative into a trigger.
How highly sensitive women can stop bingeing at night
Now you’ve gained this understanding as to why you might be binge eating at night, you’re likely wondering: “how do I actually stop?”.
Here I want to share something crucial with you - and I hope you find it as exciting as I do!
You are not doomed to binge eat because of your sensitivity. Instead, your sensitivity - when understood and tended to - is your path towards a binge free life, and to your most fulfilling relationships with food, your body and worth.
Binge eating recovery as a HSP invites you to understand and build a relationship with your sensitivity, to create a sense of safety within yourself, and to connect to your innate worthiness. Because at the root of your bingeing patterns you’ll likely find a part of you that just wants to feel safe. That wants to feel as though you’re enough. That wants to feel belonging. And this is what my work with Binge Free & Worthy is here to support you in.
If what you’ve read here resonates and you’d like to start taking those steps to reclaiming your evenings from binges, I’ve created an in-depth guide specifically for you…
The Highly Sensitive Woman’s Guide to a Binge Free Life explores the connection between sensitivity and binge eating further, and gently guides you through the six principles that’ll support lasting recovery. It’ll show you:
- How to feel genuine safety within yourself as a HSP
- Ways to honour your sensitivity while building a peaceful relationship with food
- How to let go of feelings of “not enough” and connect more to your innate-worth
- Practical steps to unravel binge eating cycles that work with your HSP nature
- How to embrace your authentic self rather than trying to "fit in"
"After feeling for years that I was struggling in the dark, trapped in a never-ending cycle,
I was able finally to take a step back and see the link between myself as a sensitive person and my relationship with food. Reading about the need to create a sense of safety, I found I was able to begin to shift my thoughts from self-berating, self-loathing ones, to thoughts of compassion and calm.”
- Rebecca W, Reader
