Maladaptive behaviors like stress-induced overeating may have been adaptive for survival in ancestral environments.

“I think that at the individual person level, you know, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense that when we're really stressed out, some of us want to eat more, right? At the individual person level 'cause it's like, that's not particularly that good for my health in the long term. But if you think about it, like, you know, in some 500 years ago, 1,000 years ago, if I'm highly stressed out, it's most likely that I'm about to not have food at some point and I should eat a bunch of food that is high fat, high sugar, high carb food to put on weight for that next phase where in this stress I may be in battle and I don't have food and I have enough fuel on board, right?”