13 Ways to Stop Eating When Youre Bored

There are plenty of situations where having a drink is a great way to celebrate an accomplishment. Unfortunately, problems can surface if you use “I deserve it” to justify bored drinking. Boredom is a natural state or emotion that’s part of the spectrum of things we feel as humans, and we all experience boredom in different forms and at different times. What if you’ve tried to do the “normal” stuff people do for fun and don’t like any of it?

Emotional Triggers for Boredom Drinking

If it becomes frequent, try to taper off or contact an alcohol addiction treatment center. Let’s address another reason life without alcohol feels boring. If you’ve created an entire social life around drinking, it is natural to be afraid of life without it.

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It’s kind of hard to spark interest in scrubbing the kitchen sink. These stories remind us that boredom isn’t merely a state of inactivity or idleness — it can also be a time for reflection, creativity, and unexpected discovery. So, when we’re bored and our brain is looking for that dopamine hit, it can often recall that alcohol was a past source of reward.

#5 Stay Physically Active

One of the best ways to deal with bored drinking is to anticipate it — why is not always easy. If “for no reason” pops up frequently in your list, it might help to seek a CBT professional to understand your why in those situations. The American Psychological Association recommends CBT to root out “faulty or unhelpful ways of thinking” that may be driving unhealthy behaviors.

Going out to eat may be nice when you’re alone, but it’s genuinely much more fun and refreshing when you’re doing it with people you enjoy being around. As a kid, whenever I was bored I would read a book, look for friends to play with, go for a walk, or make up my own games such as kicking rocks on the ground to drinking out of boredom see how far they could go. Today as an adult, I still find myself feeling bored sometimes, but I have a different approach to boredom, and a different philosophy on what boredom is. There’s a connection between consuming alcohol and boredom. You may be a single parent, widowed, or unmarried and living alone.

Moderate alcohol consumption has the potential to enliven social situations. But when you add bored drinks to social drinking, alcohol has the opposite effect. If your dose of stimulation is mostly a walk to the fridge, you might be a bored drinker.

Some studies have found that people tend to eat more than they otherwise would when they’re distracted or in front of a screen, such as a TV or computer (35, 36, 37). Researchers know that your emotions and mood often influence when, what, and how much you eat (20, 21). Finding a routine that works for you and sticking with it seems to matter more than exactly how many meals and snacks you have each day. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor.

Pretty soon, the anticipation starts to happen more frequently. This kind of patterned behavior can lead you down a path toward alcohol addiction. “Almost alcoholic” is a term that refers https://ecosoberhouse.com/ to individuals who skirt the boundaries of having a drinking problem. It’s the fine line at which point a person may cross over from casual drinking into having an alcohol use disorder.

• The current pandemic has highlighted how boredom can trigger the misuse of substances, particularly alcohol.
• So much of this list is not just about finding things to do, but treating the underlying causes of extreme boredom in sobriety.
• It may require a bit of soul-searching, especially when your motivation is at historically low levels.

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