Being hungry doesn’t just impact your grocery decisions...
Bottom Line: We all know it’s a bad idea to go grocery shopping on an empty stomach. But we probably all do it at least on occasion. Inevitably there’s an impulsive decision or four that finds its way into our cart that upon further review and a full stomach later on we realize we shouldn’t have made but, oh well. It’s done now and we wouldn’t want stuff to go to waste...Well, it turns out that our hungry decision making isn’t only compromised when it comes to food. We become worse at all decision making according to a new study from Scottish scientists in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.
When we’re hungry researchers found we’re far more likely to focus on instant gratification rather than longer term goals. The impulsive tendency is so strong that decisions as important as buying a home could be impacted by one’s level of hunger. In fact, it appears that all facets of financial decision making in particular are impacted based on our bellies. Bottom line – it's one thing to gamble on a treat at the grocery store. It’s a whole other to literally gamble because you’re hungry. The long story short is this. You don’t want to make any meaningful decisions, especially financial, when you’ve got food on the brain. But don’t be surprised to see marketing tactics that attempt to use this info against the more disciplined version of yourself.