Why Do I Crave Sweet Food When I Feel Low

Almost everyone knows this moment. You have had a long day, or a piece of bad news, or a quiet evening when nothing feels quite right, and suddenly the only thing you want is something sweet. Not a salad, not a plain sandwich, not a glass of water. You want chocolate, or cake, or biscuits, or a sweet drink, and you want it now. It feels urgent, almost as if your body is asking for it. Afterwards you may feel a little better for a short while, and then the low feeling comes back, sometimes with a touch of guilt on top. If that sounds familiar, you are not weak, and you are not alone. This is one of the most common eating patterns in the world, and it has real reasons behind it. This article explains those reasons in plain words, so you can understand the craving instead of fighting it blindly.

The first thing to understand is that a craving for sweet food when you feel low is not a single thing. It is several small things happening at once. Your body may be low on energy. Your brain may be looking for a quick lift. Your memory may be linking sweet food with comfort from childhood. Your day may have left you tired, hungry, or short of sleep. Any one of these can push you towards sugar. When two or three of them happen on the same day, the craving can feel very strong. That is why the same person can walk past a sweet shop without a second thought on a good day, and then eat half a packet of biscuits on a bad one. The food has not changed. The day has.

What Happens in Your Body When You Feel Low

When you feel low, your body is not just having a thought. It is running a whole set of physical changes. Your shoulders may tighten. Your breathing may become shallow. Your stomach may feel empty even if you ate not long ago. Your energy may drop, and small jobs may feel harder than usual. In that state, your brain starts looking for the fastest way to feel a little better, and sweet food is one of the fastest routes it knows. Sugar is broken down quickly, so it gives you energy within minutes. It also tastes pleasant, and that pleasant taste sends a brief signal of reward to the brain. The relief is real, but it is short. That shortness matters, because it explains why one biscuit so often turns into three or four.

It helps to think of your brain as a manager trying to fix a problem with the tools it has. When you feel low, the manager wants comfort, energy, and a small sense of pleasure, all at once. Sweet food seems to offer all three. It is easy to get, it needs no cooking, it tastes good straight away, and it gives a quick burst of energy. A healthy meal would give you steadier energy, but it takes time to make and time to digest, and when you feel low, waiting feels hard. Your brain is not being stupid. It is choosing the quickest option. The trouble is that the quickest option is also the one that fades fastest, so the manager comes back for more, and the cycle repeats.

There is also a chemical side to this, and it is worth understanding without making it sound like magic. Eating something sweet can briefly raise the level of a brain chemical called serotonin, which is linked with calm and mood. Sweet food can also trigger a small release of dopamine, which is linked with pleasure and reward. These changes are small and short-lived, and they do not fix the reason you felt low in the first place. A bad day at work, a worry about money, a lonely evening, or a poor night of sleep will still be there after the chocolate is gone. But the brief lift is enough to teach your brain a lesson: sweet food helped last time, so try it again next time. Over months and years, that lesson becomes a habit, and the habit becomes automatic. You feel low, you reach for something sweet, and you hardly stop to think about it.

Why Sweet Food Feels Like Comfort

For most people, the link between sweet food and comfort started long before adult life. Think about your own childhood. Sweet food was often part of happy moments: a birthday cake, a sweet given by a grandparent, a treat after a good result at school, a dessert on a festival day. It was also sometimes used as comfort: a sweet to stop tears, a biscuit after a fall, a chocolate bar to cheer you up after a hard day. None of this was wrong. It was kind, and it was normal. But it taught your mind a simple connection that is still running today: sweet food means someone cares, and sweet food means things will feel better.

That connection is why the craving is so specific. When you feel low, you do not usually crave plain rice or raw vegetables. You crave the foods that carry the strongest memory of comfort. For one person it might be chocolate. For another it might be a milky sweet drink, or a slice of cake, or the biscuits their mother kept in a tin at home. The food itself matters less than what it stands for. It stands for warmth, rest, kindness, and a pause from a hard day. When you reach for it, you are not only reaching for sugar. You are reaching for the feeling that came with it years ago.

Culture adds another layer. In many families, sweet food is how love is shown. Guests are offered something sweet. Festivals are marked with sweet dishes. A celebration without something sweet feels incomplete. So when you feel low, sweet food can also feel like company. Eating it can feel like being looked after, even when you are alone. That is a powerful feeling, and it explains why willpower alone rarely works. Telling yourself not to eat the cake is like telling yourself not to want comfort. The want is human. The job is not to remove it, but to find other ways to meet it, and to understand that the cake is only one of many ways.

Energy, Blood Sugar and the Quick Lift That Fades

Energy is the most practical part of this story, and it is the part people most often miss. When you feel low, you are often also low on energy, even if you cannot tell the two apart. You may have skipped a meal, or eaten very little, or eaten a meal that was mostly white bread or rice with nothing else. Your body may have used up its easy energy, and your blood sugar may have dropped a little. At that point, your brain sends a clear message: get energy, and get it fast. Sweet food answers that message in minutes, because sugar is digested quickly. A piece of fruit with nuts would give you steadier energy, but it takes longer, and your brain is in a hurry.

The problem is what happens next. When you eat something very sweet on its own, your blood sugar rises quickly, and your body releases insulin to bring it back down. Sometimes it brings it down a little too far, and you feel tired and low again within an hour. So you reach for more sweet food, and the same thing happens again. This up-and-down pattern is sometimes called a sugar crash, and it is a real experience, even though the size of it varies from person to person. It does not mean sugar is poison. It means that sugar on its own, on an empty stomach, is a poor tool for steady energy. It gives you a lift, then takes it away.

A simple way to see this is to compare two afternoons. On the first afternoon, you skip lunch, feel low at four o’clock, and eat three biscuits. You feel better for twenty minutes, then tired and flat again. On the second afternoon, you eat a proper lunch with bread, lentils or beans, vegetables, and a little yoghurt, and at four o’clock you eat a banana with a handful of nuts. The second afternoon feels steadier, not because you were stronger, but because your body had steadier fuel. The craving was not only about mood. It was also about fuel. When the fuel is steadier, the craving is often quieter.

Memory, Habit and the Foods You Grew Up With

Habits run on triggers, and low mood is one of the strongest triggers there is. A trigger is simply a moment that tells your brain to run a familiar routine. For many people, the routine is: feel low, walk to the kitchen, open the cupboard, eat something sweet. The routine is so familiar that it can run without any real decision. You may find yourself standing in front of the fridge before you have even thought about what you want. That is not a failure of character. It is how habits work. The brain likes routines because they save effort, and when you are tired or low, your brain wants to save effort more than ever.

Time of day matters too. Many people find the craving is strongest in the late afternoon or the evening. That is when the day has used up most of your energy, when work is done but the evening stretches ahead, and when you are finally alone with your thoughts. The evening is also when many people relax in front of a screen, and screens are full of pictures of sweet food. An advert for chocolate, a cooking video, a photo of a cake on social media: each one can act as a small trigger. You were not thinking about cake, and then suddenly you are. The trigger does not have to be a big emotion. Sometimes it is just a picture, a smell from a bakery, or the sight of a sweet shop on the way home.

Breaking a habit does not mean fighting the trigger. It means changing what happens after it. If you always eat biscuits at four o’clock when you feel low, you can try changing one part of the routine. Keep the pause, keep the cup of tea, but change the food. Or keep the food, but change where you eat it: sit at the table instead of eating while standing in the kitchen. Small changes like this sound too simple to work, but they work because they break the automatic link. The habit loses its grip when it stops running exactly the same way every time. You do not need a perfect plan. You need one small change, repeated until it becomes the new routine.

Tiredness, Sleep and Skipped Meals

Tiredness is one of the biggest drivers of sweet cravings, and it is often confused with sadness. When you have slept badly, your body produces more of the hormone that makes you feel hungry, and less of the hormone that tells you that you are full. You wake up tired, you feel low, and you want something sweet and quick. It is not that you are a different person after a bad night. It is that your body is asking for energy in the fastest way it knows, and your brain is too tired to argue. This is why the same bad news can feel manageable after a good night of sleep and overwhelming after a short one. The news is the same. Your resources are not.

Skipped meals make this worse. If you skip breakfast, you may feel fine for the first hour or two, and then the tiredness and the low mood arrive together in the middle of the morning. If you skip lunch, the same thing happens in the afternoon. Your body has no steady fuel, so it asks for quick fuel, and quick fuel usually means sugar. Many people then blame themselves for having no willpower, when the real problem is that they gave their body nothing to work with. A regular meal, even a simple one, is not a luxury. It is the foundation that keeps cravings quiet. When meals are regular, the body does not need to shout for sugar.

Water matters here too, in a quiet way. When you are a little short of water, you can feel tired and headachy, and tiredness can feel like hunger. A glass of water will not fix a low mood, but it can take the edge off a craving that is really about tiredness. The same is true of a short walk outside. Fresh air and light movement do not solve problems, but they give your body a little energy and your mind a little space, and sometimes that is enough to make the craving smaller. None of these are cures. They are small supports, and small supports add up over a day.

Stress, Boredom and Loneliness

Low mood is not the only feeling that drives sweet cravings. Stress, boredom, and loneliness all do the same job, and they often arrive together. Stress makes your body release a hormone called cortisol, which can raise your appetite and push you towards foods that are high in sugar and fat. This is not a modern invention. In the past, stress often meant hard physical work, and the body needed quick energy to deal with it. Today stress usually means a long day at a desk, a difficult conversation, or a worry about money, and the body still asks for the same quick energy, even though you are not running or lifting anything. The craving is an old response to a new kind of stress.

Boredom works differently. When you are bored, time moves slowly, and food becomes something to do. A sweet snack breaks up a long afternoon. It gives you a small moment of pleasure in a day that feels flat. The food is not really about hunger. It is about filling a gap. That is why boredom cravings often happen in the evening, when work is done, the house is quiet, and there is nothing to look forward to. The sweet food gives the evening a small event. Understanding this helps, because the answer to boredom is not always a different food. Sometimes it is a different activity: a walk, a phone call, a book, a small job you have been putting off. The craving fades when the day has something else in it.

Loneliness is the quietest driver of all. When you feel alone, sweet food can feel like company, as earlier sections described. It is warm, it is familiar, and it asks nothing of you. But it cannot replace a conversation, and after it is gone, the loneliness is still there. That does not mean you should feel ashamed of eating something sweet when you are lonely. It means that if the craving keeps coming back on lonely evenings, the kindest response may be to reach out to someone, even briefly, rather than only reaching for the cupboard. A short call, a message, a visit: any of these can do what the sweet food was trying to do, and do it for longer.

Breaking the Pattern Without Fighting Yourself

If you want the craving to be smaller, the worst approach is usually a strict rule. Telling yourself that you will never eat sugar again almost always fails, because the rule is too big, and the first time you break it, you feel that you have failed completely. Then the low mood gets worse, and the craving gets stronger. A kinder approach works better. Start by noticing the pattern without judging it. For a few days, simply write down when the craving comes, what time it is, what you were doing, and how you felt. Most people find a clear pattern within a week: always at four o’clock, always after a difficult call, always on evenings when they skipped lunch. Once you can see the pattern, you can change one part of it.

The next step is to make the healthier choice easier than the sweet choice. If the biscuits are on the table and the fruit is in the fridge behind other things, you will eat the biscuits. If the fruit is washed and ready on the table, and the biscuits are in a high cupboard, you are more likely to eat the fruit. This is not about willpower. It is about the shape of your kitchen. The same idea works outside the home. If you walk past a sweet shop every day on the way home, try a different street for a week. If you always buy chocolate at the same shop, buy your lunch somewhere else. Small changes in the path you walk can change what you eat, without any big effort.

Food choices matter too, but they should be gentle ones. A sweet craving is often smaller when your meals have enough protein, fibre, and healthy fat, because those foods keep you full for longer. A meal of bread, vegetables, lentils or beans, and a little yoghurt will keep you steadier than a meal of white bread alone. A snack of fruit with nuts, or yoghurt with a little honey, can give you sweetness with steadier energy. You do not need a special diet. You need regular meals, with a mix of foods, and a snack that is ready when the craving usually arrives. If you eat something sweet as well, eat it slowly, sitting down, and enjoy it. Eating it slowly makes a small amount feel like enough, and it stops the craving from turning into a rush.

What the Setting Has to Do With It

Where you are changes how strong a craving feels. At home, the kitchen is close, and the cupboard is full. At work, the tea break is a social moment, and someone may offer you a biscuit. On a long journey, the only food available may be sweet. On a holiday, sweet food is part of the celebration. None of these settings is good or bad. They simply make sweet food easier to reach, and harder to resist. When you know your setting, you can plan for it. If you know the office always has biscuits at three o’clock, you can bring your own snack. If you know the journey home passes three sweet shops, you can eat before you leave, so you are not hungry when you walk past them.

The people around you matter too. If your family eats something sweet every evening, it is hard to be the only person who does not. If your friends always meet for cake, saying no every time can feel rude. In these cases, the kindest approach is not to refuse completely, but to take a smaller portion, eat it slowly, and enjoy the company more than the food. You do not need to explain yourself. Most people will not notice, and those who do will understand. The goal is not to be perfect in every setting. The goal is to make the craving a little smaller, a little less automatic, and a little easier to live with.

It is also worth noticing how the weather and the seasons affect you. In winter, when days are short and cold, many people crave sweet, warm food more often. In summer, the craving may be for cold sweet drinks instead. These changes are normal. Your body is responding to light, temperature, and the amount of time you spend indoors. A craving that is stronger in winter does not mean something is wrong with you. It means your body is asking for warmth and energy in the darkest part of the year. A warm drink, a hot meal, and a little daylight can all help, and they are kinder responses than blaming yourself for wanting something sweet.

My Take:

If you ask me what I think about craving sweet food when you feel low, my answer is simple: it is one of the most human habits there is, and it deserves understanding, not shame. I do not think people who reach for chocolate on a bad day are weak. I think they are tired, or hungry, or lonely, or carrying a worry they have not had time to name, and their brain has found the fastest comfort it knows. That comfort is real, even if it is short. The chocolate does make you feel a little better for a few minutes. The problem is not that the feeling is fake. The problem is that it fades, and when it fades, the reason you felt low is still sitting there, waiting for you. So you reach for more, and the cycle goes round again. Understanding that cycle is the first step, because once you can see it, you can step out of it without blaming yourself.

I think the most important thing I have learned from thinking about this topic is that the craving is rarely about the food itself. It is about what the food stands for. For most of us, sweet food means childhood, celebration, kindness, and rest. It means a grandmother who gave you a sweet when you were upset. It means a birthday when everyone was happy. It means a quiet evening when someone made you a cup of tea and put a biscuit beside it. When you are low, you are not really asking for sugar. You are asking for that feeling: someone cares, you can rest now, things will be all right. The sugar is just the easiest way to get a small piece of that feeling. Once you see it that way, the craving stops being a mystery, and it stops being a moral failure. It becomes a message. Your mind is telling you that you need comfort, and you need it now.

That is why I do not believe in strict rules about sugar. I have seen how they work, and they usually work like this: a person decides they will never eat anything sweet again, they manage it for three days, and then on the fourth day, after a hard day at work, they eat a whole bar of chocolate, and then they feel worse than before, because now they feel low and guilty. The rule did not help. It made the low feeling bigger. A kinder rule works better, and it sounds like this: you may eat something sweet, but eat it slowly, sitting down, and enjoy it. That small change matters more than it sounds. When you eat slowly, you notice the taste, you notice when you have had enough, and you stop before the packet is empty. When you eat standing in the kitchen, in a rush, you barely taste it, and you need more to feel the same comfort. The difference is not willpower. It is attention.

I also think we should be honest about energy, because energy is the part of this story that people most often ignore. When you skip meals, when you sleep badly, when you work long hours without a break, your body runs low on fuel, and a body that is low on fuel will ask for sugar. That is not a character flaw. It is biology. A car with an empty tank will not run, and a body with no food will not feel steady. So before you blame yourself for craving something sweet at four in the afternoon, ask a simple question: did I eat a proper lunch? Did I sleep well last night? Did I drink enough water? If the answer to any of those is no, then the craving is not a surprise. It is your body asking for what it was not given. Fix the meal, fix the sleep, and the craving often becomes much quieter, without any big fight.

Sleep deserves a special mention here, because I think it is the hidden driver behind more cravings than people realise. After a short night, everything feels harder. Small problems feel bigger. Patience runs out faster. Food tastes better, and the desire for something sweet is stronger. I have noticed this in my own life, and I have heard it from many other people too. A bad night does not just make you tired. It makes you hungrier, it makes you want quick energy, and it makes it harder to say no to the biscuit tin. So if your cravings are strongest on days after a short night, that is not a coincidence. It is a pattern, and patterns can be changed. A regular bedtime, even half an hour earlier, can do more for a sweet craving than a week of strict dieting. That sounds too simple, but simple is often what works, because simple is what you can actually keep doing.

I want to say something about loneliness too, because I think it is the part of this topic that is hardest to talk about. When you feel alone, sweet food can feel like company. It is warm, it is familiar, and it never judges you. But it cannot talk to you, and it cannot stay with you after it is gone. If you find that your strongest cravings come on lonely evenings, I would gently suggest that the kindest response is not another biscuit, but a short connection with another person. A phone call to a friend, a message to a family member, a short visit to a neighbour: any of these can do what the sweet food was trying to do, and they last longer. I am not saying this is easy. Reaching out when you feel low is hard, and sometimes the other person does not answer. But even trying is a step, and it is a step that treats the real feeling, not only the craving that covers it.

There is another point I want to make, and it is about habit. Habits are powerful, and they run without thinking. If you always eat something sweet at the same time, in the same place, after the same kind of day, your brain will run that routine automatically. The way to change a habit is not to fight it head on. It is to change one small part of it. Keep the cup of tea, but change the snack. Keep the evening pause, but take it in a different room. Keep the sweet food, but eat it after a proper meal instead of on an empty stomach. One small change, repeated for a week or two, can loosen a habit that has run for years. I like this approach because it respects how the brain works, instead of pretending that willpower alone can beat a habit that was built over a lifetime.

I also think we need to be honest about what sweet food cannot do. It cannot fix a bad day at work. It cannot sort out a worry about money. It cannot make a lonely evening feel less lonely for long. It can give you a few minutes of pleasure and a quick lift, and there is nothing wrong with a few minutes of pleasure. The trouble starts when you ask those few minutes to do a bigger job than they can do. When you expect a chocolate bar to fix a problem, you will be disappointed, and the disappointment will make you feel lower, and the lower feeling will make you want more chocolate. The way out of that loop is to ask the food for what it can give, and to ask something else for the rest. Food can give you energy and pleasure. A conversation can give you comfort. A walk can give you space. A good night of sleep can give you strength for tomorrow. Each tool has its own job, and life is easier when you use the right one.

If a friend asked me for one practical piece of advice about this, I would say this: watch the pattern for a week before you try to change anything. Write down when the craving comes, what time it is, what you were doing, and how you felt. Do not judge what you write. Just watch. Most people find a clear pattern within a few days, and that pattern is more useful than any diet plan, because it is their pattern, not someone else’s. Once you can see it, choose one small change, and only one. Eat a proper lunch. Or go to bed half an hour earlier. Or keep fruit ready on the table. Or take a short walk before the evening craving usually arrives. One change, kept for two weeks, will teach you more than five changes kept for two days.

I would also tell that friend not to eat sweet food in secret, because secrecy makes the craving stronger. When you eat in secret, you eat quickly, you feel ashamed, and you eat more than you meant to. When you eat openly, sitting down, enjoying it, the food becomes an ordinary part of the day, and ordinary things are easier to keep in proportion. If you want a piece of cake, have a piece of cake. Sit down, eat it slowly, enjoy it, and then move on with your day. That is not a failure. That is a normal, human pleasure, and normal pleasures do not need to be hidden.

One last thought, and it is the one I care about most. Be kind to yourself on the days when the craving wins. There will be days when you eat more sweet food than you meant to, and those days do not undo the good days. They are part of being human. The goal is not to be perfect. The goal is to understand yourself a little better, to eat a little more regularly, to sleep a little better, and to find comfort in more than one place. If you can do that, the craving will not disappear, but it will become smaller, quieter, and easier to live with. And that, in my view, is a much better goal than never eating sugar again. A life with no sweet food at all would be a poorer life. A life where sweet food is a pleasure, not a rescue, is a richer one, and it is within reach for most of us.

So here is my final view, in plain words. Craving sweet food when you feel low is normal, common, and understandable. It comes from low energy, from habit, from memory, from tiredness, and from a real need for comfort. It is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is a sign that your body and your mind are asking for care. Give them that care in the ways that last: regular meals, enough sleep, a little movement, a conversation, a pause. Keep the sweet food too, but keep it as a pleasure, eaten slowly and enjoyed, not as a rescue that has to fix everything. If you do that, you will find that the craving loses some of its power, not because you fought it, but because you understood it. And understanding, in my experience, is always stronger than fighting.

I also want to say something about the people who cook for others, because they are often the last to eat properly themselves. A mother who serves everyone else first, a worker who eats last after a long shift, a carer who puts another person’s meal before their own: these people often feel low and crave something sweet in the evening, and then blame themselves for it. But the craving is not a failure. It is a sign that they gave their energy away all day and kept none for themselves. If that sounds like you, the kindest change is not a diet. It is a plate of food at a regular time, eaten sitting down, before the evening arrives. You cannot pour comfort into other people from an empty cup, and a regular meal is one of the simplest ways to keep your own cup from running dry.

There is one more honest point, and it is about money. Sweet food is often cheap, quick, and easy to buy, while a balanced meal can feel like it takes time and money you do not have. I understand that, and I would not pretend otherwise. But a steady meal does not have to be expensive. Lentils, beans, rice, bread, eggs, seasonal fruit, and vegetables are among the cheapest foods in most shops, and they give you far steadier energy than a packet of biscuits. A banana with a handful of nuts costs little and keeps you going for hours. The point is not to spend more. It is to spend the same money on food that lasts longer in your body, so that the low feeling and the craving do not come back an hour later. That is not a lecture about money. It is a practical observation, and it is one that many families already know from experience.

When I look back over everything I have written here, the thread I trust most is a simple one: understand the craving, and it loses its power. It does not disappear, and it does not need to. A piece of chocolate on a hard day is a small, human pleasure, and there is nothing wrong with it. What matters is that it is a choice, not a rescue, and that it sits alongside regular meals, enough sleep, and a little kindness towards yourself. If you can keep those things in place, most days, the craving will be a quiet visitor, not a master. And that, in my view, is enough to aim for.

Frequently Asked Questions

When should I speak with a healthcare professional about I crave sweet food when I feel low?

Speak with a healthcare professional if the craving feels out of control, if you often eat large amounts of sweet food and feel distressed afterwards, if low mood lasts for weeks and affects your sleep, work or relationships, or if you notice other changes such as losing interest in things you used to enjoy. A professional can look at your whole situation, including mood, sleep, appetite and daily life, and help you decide what support would suit you. General information in an article is a starting point, not a substitute for that personal conversation.

Is I crave sweet food when I feel low something I should worry about?

For most people, no. Craving something sweet when you feel low is very common, and on its own it is not a sign of a serious problem. It becomes worth paying closer attention to if it happens very often, if it leaves you feeling distressed or out of control, if it is linked with low mood that does not lift, or if it is affecting your health, weight, sleep or daily life. In those cases, the worry is not the craving itself, but what it may be telling you about your mood, energy or routine, and that is worth talking about with a health professional.

Can small daily habits really help with I crave sweet food when I feel low?

Yes, small habits often help more than big plans. Eating regular meals with a mix of foods, keeping a piece of fruit and some nuts ready for the afternoon, drinking enough water, going to bed at a regular time, and taking a short walk can all make the craving quieter. The habits work because they deal with the causes behind the craving, such as low energy, tiredness and habit, rather than only fighting the craving itself. Try one habit at a time for a week or two, and notice what changes, instead of trying to change everything at once.

Why does I crave sweet food when I feel low happen to me?

It usually happens for a mix of reasons rather than one single cause. Your body may be low on energy, your brain may be looking for a quick lift, your memory may link sweet food with comfort from childhood, and you may be tired, stressed, bored or lonely. When several of these come together on the same day, the craving can feel strong. Keeping a short note for a few days about when the craving arrives and how you felt can often show your own pattern more clearly than any general explanation.

How long does I crave sweet food when I feel low usually last?

The craving itself often passes within minutes if you wait, distract yourself, or eat something steady, but the lift from sweet food usually fades within an hour, which is why the craving can come back. The pattern as a whole can last for weeks or months if the causes behind it, such as poor sleep, skipped meals, stress or loneliness, stay the same. When those causes are eased, even a little, the cravings usually become less frequent and less urgent over time.

Does I crave sweet food when I feel low happen to many people?

Yes, it happens to very many people, across all ages and all walks of life. Sweet food is one of the most common comfort foods in the world, and low mood is one of the most common triggers for it. Knowing that it is common can help in two ways: it takes away some of the shame, and it means there is plenty of general information and support available. You do not have to work it out alone, and talking about it with a friend or a health professional is often the first step that makes it smaller.