By: Michael Beiter

Gym convo topics from today: boredom and tiredness do not equal hunger, sleep and testosterone.

Boredom is an emotion; tiredness is a physiological state. Neither of them is the same as hunger, no matter what you hear or feel.

“I eat when I’m bored and tired, I feel like,” a woman said.

That doesn’t make it right. It means you picked up behavior in response to boredom and fatigue. You can replace those behaviors with better ones. 

For boredom, I point to a branch of positive psychology called Flow theory that says boredom results from a high level of skill and low level of challenge. 

When you’re bored, you have more skills than what you’re doing demands of you. To get rid of boredom, challenge yourself. My favorite ways are exercise, reading, or writing. Each will make you forget about your urge to eat because you will use up the spare bandwidth that convinced you to reach for food. 

For tiredness, I suggest sleeping. The mental gymnastics you will have to perform to finally accept this is to stop self-criticism that says, “I’m lazy, unmotivated, or fucked up because I need more sleep.”

The woman I was talking to is an overnight shift worker. “What do you think about that?” she asked.

“I think it’s something you should try to move away from if possible. The WHO now considers overnight work as risky as if you were a daily cigarette smoker. It’s THAT bad for you.”

There was a man in the circle of conversation as well, and we quoted Matthew Walker’s 2017 book ‘Why We Sleep’ and the evidence he uncovers about just how bad it is to skip sleep. This guy was concerned about testosterone. 

According to Walker, after just one week of sleeping 5 hours per night, " The hormonal blunting effect is so large that it effectively “ages” a man by ten to fifteen years in terms of testosterone virility.”

TLDR: Sleep more, track your food, so emotions don’t inform your decision to eat more or less because they are notoriously inaccurate predictors of what you eat.