Boredom increases eating to distract from the experience, with more exciting, healthy foods serving as an alternative to maladaptive consumption.

Eaten up by boredom: consuming food to escape awareness of the bored self

Boredom promotes eating and self-inflicting pain, mainly driven by the drive to escape monotony, rather than an increased desire for rewarding stimulation.

Eating and inflicting pain out of boredom

Eating when bored is a distinct construct from other negative emotions, and should be considered a separate dimension of emotional eating.

Eating when bored: revision of the emotional eating scale with a focus on boredom.

Eating due to boredom during the COVID-19 pandemic led to increased snacking and lower intuitive eating scores, potentially impacting diet quality.

Differing Experiences of Boredom During the Pandemic and Associations With Dietary Behaviors.

Boring TV encourages excessive eating, while Engaging TV reduces intake, suggesting emotional content is more important than the mode of delivery for food intake during TV viewing.

Watching TV and Food Intake: The Role of Content

Boredom is the most common and strongest emotional trigger for eating in people with obesity, regardless of sex or treatment, and understanding this link may help personalize lifestyle interventions.

A Comparison of Emotional Triggers for Eating in Men and Women with Obesity

Boredom during the COVID-19 pandemic led to people choosing food more for convenience and less for health reasons, with no significant impact on overall weight changes.

Consumed by Boredom: Food Choice Motivation and Weight Changes during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Boredom significantly increases food consumption for both obese and non-obese individuals, but the predicted interaction between weight and task was not found.

Boredom and eating in obese and non-obese individuals.

Repeated in-home consumption of chicken soup C, a familiar flavor but new to chicken soup, leads to a smaller decrease in desire and liking over time compared to regular chicken soup A and improved chicken soup B.

Scoring or boring? Predicting boredom through repeated in-home consumption

Promoting young children's engagement in organized extracurricular activities may help reduce boredom and its impact on obesity risk.

Promoting young children's engagement in organized extracurricular activities: ‘Tiger parenting’ or obesity prevention?

Distractions like watching television and driving increase food intake without affecting the desire to eat, supporting an expanded model of mindless eating.

Distraction, the desire to eat and food intake. Towards an expanded model of mindless eating

Boredom proneness and difficulties in emotion regulation predict emotional eating, which contributes to obesity and health problems.

Boredom proneness and emotion regulation predict emotional eating

Emotional eating, or stress eating, is the reason many diets fail, as people use food to satisfy emotional needs and relieve stress, such as sadness, loneliness, or boredom.

Emotional Eating

Leisure boredom negatively impacts uncontrolled eating and life satisfaction in Turkish recreational runners, while uncontrolled eating has no direct or indirect effect on life satisfaction.

Rekreasyonel Koşucularda Serbest Zamanda Sıkılma, Kontrolsüz Yeme ve Yaşam Doyumu İlişkisi

Viewing images of desirable foods on digital interfaces may inadvertently exacerbating our desire for food, causing 'visual hunger' and potentially contributing to the obesity crisis.

Eating with our eyes: From visual hunger to digital satiation

Eating behavior is influenced by social factors, environmental factors, and self-regulation, requiring constant monitoring and self-regulation to maintain health and avoid obesity.

The Psychology of Eating

High-fat diets may drive overeating by overriding energy balance processes and promoting neuroinflammation in the central nervous system, potentially contributing to obesity and related comorbidities.

Eating as a motivated behavior: modulatory effect of high fat diets on energy homeostasis, reward processing and neuroinflammation.

Humans and other animals evolved to eat to their physiological limits when food is readily available, to store excess energy as a buffer against future food shortages.

Hunger, eating, and ill health.

Boredom evolved as an adaptive solution to minimize prediction error by incentivizing learning, and its functions have been conserved across species, including non-human animals.

The Origins of Boredom

Eating is a powerful urge that serves both as a means of achieving energy balance and a form of pleasure and reward in animals and humans.

Are we addicted to food?

These studies suggest that boredom increases eating as a distraction from monotony and is a distinct form of emotional eating, with impacts on diet quality and food choices.