A reason people often give for going off their diet is that they are bored.

When you are at home and bored, do you drop by the refrigerator to check if there is anything good to eat?

I know I do. Intuitively, most of us would say boredom is a big part of why we eat, but there have been surprisingly few studies showing a relationship between boredom and weight. Perhaps researchers think it is just obvious.

One study did find that when people were bored they ate more. And another study found the reason most people gave for going off their diet was boredom.

What could boredom have to with eating? In one bizarre study, researchers found overweight people may have a different sense of time when bored. They found that, when bored, overweight people experience a slower passage of time, which leads them to eat sooner because they think it’s time to eat again.

What else about boredom could lead you to eat? I think it’s because of what we talked about in The Power of Food Threat: food has power. Food in your house is like a giant neon sign saying “come eat me,” especially when you don’t have other thoughts to crowd out the thoughts of eating.

Your brain isn’t stupid. Your brain knows where the food is and is drawn to it because it wants a reward. Your brain wants to feel satisfied and food makes people feel satisfied, especially those people with fewer dopamine receptors and a biology that makes food more pleasurable.

If you are one of us, then food isn’t just a small little neon sign, it’s more like the spotlight at a red carpet premiere of a Hollywood block buster movie. When you are bored, the spotlight zooms in on the refrigerator and you walk the red carpet, open the door to the fridge, and you do what comes naturally...eat.

You are drawn to the fridge because food activates a common mechanism in your brain for getting your brain what it wants. What your brain wants isn’t exactly sugar or fat or salt or sex, what it really wants is another shot of dopamine. Dopamine is how your brain knows what is important and how it knows what it should learn to help you survive.

Food is just one of the ways your brain can get dopamine, it has other ways. You can get dopamine from interaction with friends, art, music, shopping, and of course, drugs.

But have you noticed how the feeling of satisfaction you get from food and other activities doesn’t last? You get a quick hit of a sense of well-being and then it goes away. If the pleasure didn’t fade quickly, you would probably die because you wouldn’t want to do anything other than what brought you the amazing sense of well-being.

From a survival perspective, you can’t stay too interested in any one pursuit for too long. You have to keep chasing satisfaction. Satisfaction doesn’t stick around and you can’t save it in a bank for later.

What happens when the sources of satisfaction in your life become fewer and fewer? You lock on tighter to the sources of satisfaction you have left. This is why you can become addicted to anything supplying a hit of dopamine. Drugs like cocaine work through dopamine, but dopamine is released by a lot of things, not just drugs.

If you had a lot going on in your life that interested you, the spotlight couldn’t shine on just one source of satisfaction. It would have to flit from one source of satisfaction to another. But if your only satisfaction is food, then the spotlight will shine so bright and hot on food you won’t be able to ignore it.

Food can become your whole world without anything being broken in your body at all. All you need is a small enough world where food is your best source of satisfaction.