In this day and age, everyone’s always multitasking. Even the word “multitasking” has becoming commonplace. People often find that they’re doing two or more things at the same time. Come exam week, you’re studying, whilst on Facebook as well.
When you’re at the office, you might be working, meanwhile, also listening to some calming music. Even as this article is being written, there are quite a few tabs open on YouTube and 9GAG. As they say, “time is of the essence.”
However, on multitasking, one of the most common ones that dates back quite a while ago, and is the topic of this article, is how people never usually just eat.
Many times, when you’re eating, you’re either watching the latest episode of your favorite TV series, having a conversation with your significant other, or maybe reading a book at some café. You might just be doing all 3 at once, too!
Although it’s quite difficult to just eat when you are eating, an interesting article on Psychology Today claims that you shouldn’t distract yourself while eating. Just eat, and only eat.
The gist behind these claims are that taste is processed in your brain. Often, when we multitask, we aren’t able to put 100% of our attention in either of the things we’re doing. Often, they’re split into some percentages, where you’re slightly more focused on one thing than the other.
In the same way, when we’re eating whilst also doing something else, only a portion of our brain is actually processing the flavors and we don’t taste as much as we should be.
There’s a whole study on this as well, and not to go into too much detail, but it was found that those who were engaged at other things while eating were not able to taste flavors as intensely as those who were only eating.
Psychologists believe that this might be a cause for eating disorders, as when you aren’t able to fully taste flavors, you’ll seek out more intense ones – often being in the form of sweet and salty foods – those of which can be extremely fattening.
Although not a lot of research has backed this research up, there will be more to follow this up, offering a larger range of participants.
However, when you think about it, it does make sense. You can’t commit your brain to taste amazing flavors if you’re also doing something else.
It’s the same way how you won’t be able to play a game that well when someone is talking to you. So start paying attention to what you eat, and taste amazing food with extremely enjoyable flavors. You might just shed a few pounds.
