Morbid thoughts make you reach for the cookies

NEW YORK (Reuters
Life!) - Thinking about
your own death can
make you reach for
the cookie jar, with
an international study
finding that morbid
thoughts tend to whet
the appetite.

Researchers Naomi
Mandel from Arizona
State University and
Dirk Smeesters from
Erasmus University
Rotterdam in the
Netherlands
conducted several
experiments in Europe
and the United States
where participants
wrote essays on their
feelings about their
own deaths.

They then checked off
items on a grocery
list or ate cookies.
Consumers who wrote
about their own
deaths wanted to buy
more and ate more
than those who wrote
about a painful
medical procedure.

"People want to
consume more of all
kinds of foods, both
healthy and unhealthy,
when thinking about
the idea that they will
die some day," said
the researchers in a
report published in
the Journal of
Consumer Research.

They found people
with low self-esteem,
in particular, tend to
over-consume after
death-related
thoughts.

Mandel and Smeesters
explained this by
using a theory called
"escape from self-
awareness."

"When people are
reminded of their
inevitable mortality,
they may start to feel
uncomfortable about
what they have done
with their lives and
whether they have
made a significant
mark on the universe.
This is a state called
"heightened self-
awareness,"" they
said.

"One way to deal with
such an
uncomfortable state
is to escape from it,
by either overeating
or overspending."

The study also
revealed that placing
a mirror in front of
the participants
reduced the desire to
over-consume.

"Consumers,
especially those with
a lower self-esteem,
might be more
susceptible to over-
consumption when
faced with images of
death during the news
or their favorite
crime-scene
investigation shows,"
they said.

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