“I used to say, ‘There’s nothing to do. I’m bored, I don’t have the energy to go for a walk, read a book, start a new hobby. I feel depressed about that, so I go digging for food and I sit on the couch, zone out, and eat mindlessly from a bag of chips. I feel better, even if only momentarily.’ This cycle would have continued forever if I hadn’t reprogrammed my subconscious mind. I’m so grateful I did. I not only no longer eat when I’m bored, I rarely ever feel bored in the first place.” —Marc L., London, England
After emotional eating, eating when bored is the second biggest impediment to weight loss. When you’re bored, you are not feeling exhilaration, happiness, or excitement. In fact, extended boredom can feel like depression. In the same way that we eat to change our emotional state, we eat to snap out of boredom, a state devoid of emotions altogether.
There’s nothing like dopamine to perk you up, even if a quick hit crashes you lower than where you started. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter in the brain that plays a major role in reward-motivated behavior. To put it simply, dopamine is the brain’s “desire” chemical associated with the feeling you get when achieving a goal.
As mentioned in chapter one, specific foods contribute to an increase in dopamine levels. These foods are generally categorized as “junk food”—those high in sugar, fat, and sodium content. Foods like these cause the body to release endorphins, aka feel-good hormones. It’s safe to assume that when you’re bored, you aren’t reaching for that plate of brussels sprouts. A series of studies by researchers at the University of Limerick, Ireland, indicate that “boredom increases eating, specifically unhealthy and exciting foods which can serve as means to escape the bored self.”50
The real challenge here is that eating does make us feel better when we’re bored. That’s not made up—it’s real. According to an article in Psychology Today,
It’s possible that when we’re in a malaise, so are our dopamine neurons. When we boredom-eat what we’re really doing is trying to wake them up so we can feel excited again . . . After all, our dopamine system evolved with the very purpose of making adaptive things like eating feel rewarding, so that we wouldn’t forget to do them and die. And one survey study recently found that the happiest moments of a typical participant’s day were the ones where he or she was eating something.51
While eating triggering food may make us feel better in the short term, over time those same foods can wreak havoc on our health. The solution is to retrain the subconscious to choose what is uncomfortable in the short term (now) but wonderful in the long term. In all areas of life, and especially when it comes to weight loss, we benefit from programming our minds to choose long-term growth over short-term pleasure.
Evaluating the deeper reasoning behind the boredom and developing proactive ways to break out of it will help, as will learning to wake up from this trance of boredom eating. As you might be starting to recognize, with hypnotherapy you’re actually de-hypnotizing yourself. There are three main antidotes to eating when bored:
1.Become consciously aware of the fact that you’re eating (since most boredom eating is unconscious).
2.Learn new ways of dealing with boredom.
3.Over time, train yourself to take different actions altogether when boredom sets in.
You’re going to train yourself to do these three things in this week’s hypnosis recording. You’ll become hyperaware of any time that you’re putting food into your mouth (“Cancel, cancel!” mindless eating and replace it with mindful eating!) and you’ll use tactics similar to what we used during our motivational prep-week recording to snap you out of boredom without using food. Here are some other areas you’ll cover with this week’s hypnosis recording:
•What is boredom covering up for you? In other words, what emotions or thoughts are buried beneath the boredom?
•What are the ways your mind pretends that boredom is keeping you safe? How long has it been doing this?
•What massive breakthroughs could you experience by facing what’s buried beneath boredom and working on the root issue?
There are some interesting answers beneath those layers of protective self-sabotage, which, in this instance, are dressed up as boredom. I’ll be interested to find out what you uncover!
Homework
A.Practice self-hypnosis three times a day, every day this week (right before breakfast, lunch, and dinner). Turn to page 20 for a reminder of how to do self-hypnosis or head to www.CloseYourEyesLoseWeight.com to follow along with a tutorial video.
Week 6 Hypno-affirmations—Eating When Bored
•Every day in every way I am more and more aware of everything I eat.
•I choose to eat mindfully with awareness.
•When I eat, I eat. That’s it.
•When I eat, I focus on the taste of the food as I chew until only liquid remains. That is all.
•I am awake and alert when I eat.
•For a boost of energy, I jump up and down and change my state.
B.Listen to the “Week 6—Eating When Bored” hypnosis recording every day for the next week here: www.CloseYourEyesLoseWeight.com.
C.Use your journal pages daily to stay motivated, log your progress, and determine which pick-me-up hypno-affirmations you’ll benefit from most.
Boredom has been broken! You’re free to live an exciting, energizing life. As for what you’ll learn in chapter ten, it’s simple. No more rewarding yourself with “poison”—it’s time to reward yourself with health and vitality. Turn the page, and let’s get to it!
50 Andrew B. Moynihan et al., “Eaten Up by Boredom: Consuming Food to Escape Awareness of the Bored Self,” Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2015), http://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4381486/.
51 Susan Carnell, “Do You Eat out of Boredom?,” Psychology Today, December 4, 2011, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/bad-appetite/201112/do-you-eat-out-boredom.