Lets admit it. Sometimes no matter how well we try to be focused on our resilience, the day or our life is just too overwhelming and we need to call in the cavalry. For many of us that may mean a trip to the chocolate store, an ice cream stand, or just making a gooey grilled cheese sandwich along with a bowl of tomato soup.

Finding comfort and solace when things are not going well is a good strategy for our bad mood and research shows that it does help. Its not so much the comfort food itself that helps us feel better but the memory of the hugs and love that usually accompanied the eating of those fun foods. It’s a bit like classical conditioning where as a small child we were comforted by our mother or father who helped us feel better by making sure we had some of our favorite food to make sure “everything felt better.”

Just to be a bit of a spoil sport, however, some of our friends from the University of Minnesota recently published some research showing that we’ll generally bounce back from life’s little challenges with great success regardless whether we’ve had some comfort food, or any other food or even no food.

It’s all about giving ourselves more choices in how we recover from our daily travails. For some it might be a favorite book or magazine, for someone else it might be watching a favorite movie. Whatever it takes for you to get yourself going after a rough one, enjoy it.

© Richard Citrin, All rights reserved, 2015