Why a brain like ours forgets to eat

Here is a scene you might know. It is eight at night, you have barely eaten since morning, and suddenly you are standing in the light of the open fridge, ravenous, a little ashamed, and quietly wondering what is wrong with you. I want to gently take the shame out of that picture, because what is happening is not a character flaw, it is the body doing exactly what a brain like ours sets it up to do.

Interoception is the perception of signals from inside the body, including hunger, fullness, thirst and arousal. Emerging research suggests it may work differently for some people with ADHD, but it is not a settled or universal explanation. Medication effects, task absorption, time awareness, sensory needs, access and planning can also contribute when eating is missed during the day. None of those possibilities is a moral failure.

This is worth saying plainly, and also honestly. The link between ADHD and less reliable interoception is still an emerging area of research rather than a closed case, so I would never dress it up as proven fact. What we can say is that it fits a growing body of work and, more importantly, it fits what so many people describe to me in the room, week after week. And there are two things layered on top that are on much firmer ground. Emotional dysregulation sits close to the centre of ADHD, so food can become a way to reach for calm or a hit of interest when a day feels flat or overwhelming. And if you take stimulant medication, appetite suppression during the day is well established, which quietly pushes hunger to the edges of the evening. Put those together and the fridge at eight at night starts to look less like a mystery and much more like a pattern with reasons.

So what actually helps, gently. The single kindest thing is to stop asking a faulty hunger signal to run the whole show. Instead of waiting to feel hungry, which may not arrive until it is urgent, you can lean on a light, regular rhythm, something to eat every few hours whether or not the signal has turned up yet. This is not a diet and it is not about control, it is the opposite. It is giving your body a steadiness it cannot always ask for on its own. Clinicians call the underlying idea regular eating, and it is one of the most established, gentle tools we have. I built the Anchor app around exactly this, a quiet nudge rather than a rule, with no numbers and nothing to earn.

If any of this is tangled up with a history of disordered eating, please be extra tender with yourself and do not do it alone, because a brain like ours deserves support that is safe around food from the very first step. But if you take one thing from this letter, let it be this. You were never failing at something everyone else finds easy. You were reading a quieter signal, and quieter signals just ask for a little more structure and a lot less shame.