Eating out of boredom – Truth or make-believe?

My interest in this topic began with a YouTube video: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvjYcLY_cvY).

To summarize, the YouTuber is a vegan who advocates for her diet of choice and tries to turn others onto her vegan lifestyle. In one of her videos, she discussed the diet of a fellow YouTuber and called her out on her eating style. The fellow YouTuber claimed that she sometimes eats out of boredom, which resulted in her eating unhealthier and how she was trying to change that. The vegan argued that eating out of boredom was not a real phenomenon. She argued that if she was eating, she was obviously hungry and her body was craving food to give energy to the brain. That argument confused me… I scratched my head as I listened to her rant about it. Bored eating isn’t a thing? Well, how come I eat out of boredom all the time, regardless if I’ve just eaten a five course dinner or not? People overeat all of the time.

It didn’t make sense to me, so I decided to look up and see if there were any articles outlining the concept of bored eating. Here’s the link to the article I found: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/shrink/201206/i-am-bored-therefore-i-eat.

While not necessarily “news”, this article written by Dr. Sherry Pagoto outlines the concept of bored eating in detail. She argues that without some sort of change in lifestyle, boredom can begin to take over our lives. This boredom does not have to relate to eating, but this article outlines how eating out of boredom can lead to dire consequences, such as obesity. Dr. Pagoto outlines two different types of boredom: the garden variety of boredom and anhedonia. She describes the first type of boredom rather poetically, referring to them as “blahs”. These are the short states of boredom individuals experience when they feel a lack of pleasure or enjoyment in a small moment, but the length these episodes of boredom last a variable amongst individuals. She describes the garden variety of boredom by illustrating the concept with an example. Say, you were sitting in front of the television, bored out of your mind. You long for something to do but don’t have anything planned. A friend calls you to ask if you would like to have lunch or head over to his or her house for a barbeque. Whether you just ate or not, you are willing to do anything to alleviate your boredom and engage in pleasure-seeking behavior, in this instance, through eating.

There is also a second, more severe type of boredom known as anhedonia. She defines this as “a neurobiologically-based reduced sensitivity to pleasurable experiences”. This essentially means that your ability to experience pleasure is impaired. Individuals who experience this form of boredom will not typically or efficiently be able to relieve their feelings of boredom. The types of pleasure-seeking behaviors that would rid the garden variety of boredom would not rid anhedonia. These individuals instead try to engage in high-risk pleasure-seeking behaviors. Those individuals with anhedonia would include your drug addicts, your sex addicts, your smokers, and even your overeaters. These individuals seek immediate pleasure when they feel bored, thus making drug addicts and overeaters perfect examples of those who fall in this category.

The issue, Dr. Pagoto argues, is that those who experience the garden variety of boredom may move on to developing anhedonia. She discusses the similarities between overeaters and drug users, giving an image with four different brain scans shown. One individual is a “healthy” individual, lean and fit. Another is an obese person. The third is an alcoholic. The fourth is a cocaine user. The lean person’s brain shows high levels of dopamine receptors while the others show fewer dopamine receptors, leading to their inability to experience pleasure in a positive way. When individuals get immediate reward when they are bored, they are more likely to have fewer dopamine receptors, preventing them from seeing or viewing any experiences as pleasurable.

In order to prevent going from a simple bored eater to a person with anhedonia, it is important to take some precautions, which Dr. Pagoto outlines. When you are bored, do not turn to junk food or something incredibly unhealthy. Almost all of us have most likely done this in the past. We’re hungry so we turn to the unhealthiest foods imaginable, foods coated in sugar, fat, and salt. Being healthy when you’re bored will at least ensure you aren’t making a habit of eating junk food whenever and promotes healthier eating habits. She also argues to build an arsenal: allow yourself the opportunity to get multiple, diverse, pleasurable experiences, that way the brain is able to experience more reward and pleasure and isn’t focused on fulfilling just one task. Lastly, following the last bullet point, Dr. Pagoto argues to add variety to our lives, make every day unpredictable and unique, never falling into a pattern. This will lessen the effects of boredom altogether in her opinion.

While Psychology Today certainly isn’t a scholarly source by any means, it does offer some information that is useful for most of the general public. Based on my experiences and knowledge in this course, a lot of the phenomena talked about here do seem to be applicable to how bored eating works, specifically how boredom can affect any of our habits in our lives. Though bored eating wasn’t necessarily a topic we discussed in class, I definitely found it applicable to physiological psychology, specifically how the brain becomes conditioned to these everyday actions and can positively or negatively impact our functioning for life if not conditioned properly. Hopefully, I’ll even be able to incorporate some of the techniques she suggested in order to prevent me from eating out of boredom as well. At least I know that others like Dr. Pagoto do find evidence in support of bored eating being a true phenomenon and not just simply some figment of our imaginations like the YouTuber originally suggested.