"I'm just bored"

Half past nine, the sofa, nothing on, and the crisps. There's no email here and no phone call. You'd struggle to name a feeling at all. You're just bored, and bored people eat. Everyone knows that.

Everyone is right, as it happens. Andrew Moynihan and colleagues found in a week-long diary study that people ate more on days when they felt more bored, and in experiments that a boring task increased the wish to snack. Remco Havermans and colleagues did something odder. They had people watch an hour of a documentary, and on another day an hour of the same short clip from it repeated over and over. When bored, people ate more chocolate. In a parallel experiment, when bored, people were also more willing to give themselves mild electric shocks. The authors' conclusion is that eating when bored isn't about wanting pleasure. It's about wanting anything at all. Bored people will take a shock to break the monotony. Crisps are just the nearest thing that isn't a shock.

I find that clarifying. Boredom is the mind reporting that it has nothing to do and would like something, anything, to attend to. It's an ordinary state and there's nothing wrong with you for having it. The trouble is only that the fridge is what you've trained it to reach for. The crisps are attended to for six minutes, and then you're bored again, with the packet empty and the after starting.

Moynihan's third study points at the answer. Bored people ate more of the less healthy food, as you'd expect. But they also ate more of a healthy food that had been made interesting, and no more of a healthy food that was dull. The boredom wasn't looking for fat or salt. It was looking for something to happen. That's good news, because things can be made to happen without a kitchen.

So the ask, on the sofa, produces a plain answer. What's actually going on is that nothing's going on, and you'd like something to be. That's a real need. Chapter 16 will ask you to keep a short list of things that answer it, and the list needs to be more interesting than crisps, which sets the bar low. A hand of cards, a phone call, the guitar, the crossword, a bath, going to bed early. What tends not to work is the phone, because the phone is the crisps of attention, and you'll be bored again in six minutes with the after on top.

One more thing about the evening. Some evening eating has no feeling in it at all, not even boredom. It's the sofa and the time and the packet, and it happens because it happened yesterday. That's a matter of setting, and chapter 13 is about it.