Eating out of Boredom: 5 Tips to Help!

Often we do not snack because we are hungry, but because we are bored or stressed. What you can do about it…

Finally, quitting work and getting on the couch! And then a few chips or a (and a second) chocolate bar … that will surely look familiar to some! And not only in the evening, also at work we like to eat a little bit of “nerve food”, that’s not a bad thing, isn’t it? Often enough in these situations we don’t eat because we are hungry, but because of actual or self-made stress or simply because we are bored. The Turkish thing about it: It becomes a habit faster than you like.

Our body naturally needs nutrients and energy, which it gets through our diet. But we like to take them more often than our body needs them! We also like to snack on sugary snacks and thus activate our reward system. But: This effect does not last long and we are already grabbing the next chocolate bar …

Emotional eating

Emotional eaters eat, for example, when they are stressed or feel sad, even though they are not actually hungry. Why is this so? Eating is an attempt to compensate for the actual problem. And often the connection between food and emotions takes place in childhood: A few jelly babies as consolation here, some chocolate for the tidy room there, etc. We link food with something pleasant. Emotional food gives us a positive feeling for a short time – as said before: short.

In the long term, the actual problems (hunger is not) are difficult to compensate for and overweight can be a consequence. The first step is to find out if you are an emotional eater at all: For example, do you always eat when things get stressful at work? When you get bad news, are you bored in the evening after work or do you feel like eating when you are upset or angry?

It is not the one-off or occasional emotional meal that could be problematic. However, if these situations occur again and again, it is time to question one’s own eating behaviour. You want to eat more consciously and not be tempted by boredom or emotions to snack? Here you will find 5 tips to help against eating out of boredom.

Avoid eating out of boredom – but how?

1. Don’t have snacks at hand

Simple, but quite effective: no packed snack drawer in the office, no open pack of wine gum on the coffee table or chocolate bars in the glove compartment. If you have the snacks in the immediate vicinity, you’ll be able to get them faster. Maybe it’s easier at first to just not buy snacks anymore?

2. Eat consciously

Eat consciously, i.e. do not eat anything on the side (e.g. watching TV or working) and ask yourself beforehand whether you are really hungry or whether it is just boring. Take a minute to ask yourself what is behind the desire for something to eat. If you are hungry, chewing gum can help!

3. Keep a food diary

Keeping a food diary helps you to uncover certain patterns in your eating behaviour. You write in it every day:

• All the food you’ve eaten,
• With time
• And reason – so why did you eat? Date with friends, boredom or stress at work?

With a food diary you can find out when you eat and for what reasons. For example, you can see exactly under which circumstances boredom occurs and this gives you the opportunity to face these situations differently or better in the future.

4. Distract

If you want to reach for chocolate again out of boredom, you can avoid it more easily by distracting yourself.

5. Change habits

If eating out of boredom has already become a habit, you can break the habit over time or much more: establish a new one. Because it is harder to break a habit than to start a new one! Over time, the old habit will fade and the new one will become stronger.

If you eat in the evenings out of boredom, you could get a new habit, like a creative hobby or sport. Try it this way:

• In order to establish the whole thing as a habit, you need a trigger. So anything that suggests you do something now If you want to exercise more, you can put your sneakers right by the door.
• The most important point: Reward. At the end of the game, offer a reward (not a candy bar 😉), such as watching an episode of your favorite show. It must be something you are looking forward to.
• Now you have to be consistent and persevere until the new habit has become established as such.

An earlier study showed that it takes an average of 66 days for this to happen. Brain researcher Gerhard Roth, advised Zeit Online to rely on external pressure, for example by making appointments with others to go jogging. In addition, it makes more sense to set small goals, to reward the achievement of these goals and to increase the intervals between the rewards over time (otherwise it will become a habit again …).