What Humans Can Learn from Drug-Addled Rats

Let me introduce you to a splendid land of rats and drugs…

In a series of now-famous experiments studying the nature of addiction, psychologist Bruce K. Alexander and his team raised their lab rats in two groups: those in small, solitary cages, and others in Rat Park, a huge colony with food, toys to play with, wheels to exercise on, and more than a dozen rats of both sexes (wink wink).

The rats in both environments were provided with two water dispensers. One contained plain tap water and the other contained a sweetened morphine solution. Alexander’s experiment was to test whether the rats would self-administer morphine.

Can you guess what happened?

The caged rats began to drink the morphine-laced water, in some cases drinking nearly 20 times more morphine than the Rat Park animals. The rats in Rat Park would taste the sweet morphine water, but showed a strong preference for the plain water.

Soooooo...What do a bunch of lab rats have to do with your relationships with your food, body, or self?

The Rat Park experiment highlights how your behavior can be influenced by your environment—the rats who lived in a fulfilling environment, one where they were a part of a community and had the ability to nourish themselves with play, exercise, companionship and sex, didn’t feel inclined to zone out with morphine.

Makes sense, right?

Food, like drugs, can become a form of escape—where food is used as a self-soothing mechanism for uncomfortable emotions, like boredom or loneliness (the kinds of feelings you might have if your "park" was devoid of fulfilling elements).

In other words, if a human’s environment is more like a solitary cage than a Rat Park, they’ll be more likely to manipulate their feelings with drugs, alcohol, food, shopping, social media, or anything else that we classify as addictions or addiction-like.

In short, they will be more likely to engage in escapism.

Here’s an example of how similar research in humans played out:

During the Vietnam war, research showed that 35% of service members abroad had tried heroin and up to 20% were addicted. However, it was found that when they returned home to the U.S., only 5% of the heroin users (not the total service members) became re-addicted within a year.

When they were removed from the environment and the stressors, their addictions spontaneously disappeared.

Now, I’m not trying to equate food with hard drugs or suggest that if you upend your life, your problems with food will disappear.

I also don’t want to suggest that healing your relationship with food will be as simple as replicating Rat Park—getting more exercise and a romantic partner.

However, I do want to suggest that if your relationship with food feels out of control, or if you’re chronically overeating, that it’s time to examine what exactly in your life is driving you to choose food to self-medicate.

Maybe you feel lonely because you’re a stay-at-home mom of young kids who feels like she’s lost her identity and misses adult relationships.

Maybe you’ve spent so long trying to prove yourself at work that you’re burnt out, utterly exhausted, and still don’t feel appreciated or noticed.

Maybe you suffered abuse and internalized it as a lack of worthiness and belonging, and struggle to feel lovable or even likeable.

Upon reading this, you might already know what void you’re filling with food.

But for many of us, finding out why we emotionally eat, binge eat, sneak food, obsess over our food intake, skip meals, overexercise, villainize foods, or diet hop…is going to take some deep introspection.

This process of self-inquiry is the focus of the first few weeks of Food Body Self coaching...but developing greater mindfulness is something you can begin today, right now, on your own.

The next time you catch a disordered urge—to binge, emotionally eat, skip a meal, etc—pause for just a second and note how you’re feeling.

What emotion(s) can you detect? What thoughts are you thinking? What immediately preceded the urge?

Tracking your thoughts and feelings surrounding your eating behaviors is FAR more important than tracking your calories, as it will give you the insight you need to address your emotions and mindset—and your environment.

If you’re tired of strong-arming yourself around food and then beating yourself up for not having enough willpower, it’s time for a change;

It’s time to embrace the Food Body Self principles of mindfulness and mindset to create your very own Human Park.