Psychology of distracted eating: The person who eats dinner in front of Netflix isn't just relaxing; a 2013 review of research found that distracted eaters take in more food and then eat more again later

Picture your average Tuesday night. You’re eating dinner on the couch, plate balanced on your knees, three episodes deep into whatever show Netflix has decided you love this month. You don’t remember eating your food. You just look down, and there’s nothing on your plate anymore.

That "where did it go" feeling isn't just you being a mindless eater. A 2013 review, ‘Eating attentively: a systematic review and meta-analysis of the effect of food intake memory and awareness on eating,’ published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition by researchers at the University of Liverpool and the University of Birmingham, found that distracted eating is associated with increased food intake, both during the meal and later. The team reached that conclusion by combining the results of 24 controlled laboratory experiments, and the pattern was consistent across different types of distraction, from TV to radio.

What the numbers actually showed
The same review also found that eating distracted led to a moderate increase in the amount of food people consumed during that same meal. But the more interesting part came next: when researchers observed intake later in the day, the distracted group ate even more than they did at the initial meal, an effect about twice the size of the immediate one. In other words, the show cost you more than a few extra bites of dinner. It made you want a snack that evening as well.

The review also found that hiding how much someone has already eaten, for example, filling up a bowl of soup without them noticing, increased how much they ate in that sitting, and this effect was even larger than a plain background distraction like TV or radio.

Why does your brain forget what you just ate
The researchers have an explanation for this that involves less willpower and more memory. This review proposes that eating choices are not just made by your stomach. Your brain appears to lean on the memory of your last meal, how much you ate and how good it felt, to help decide when and how much to eat next. If you’re focused on a screen instead of your food, the memory isn’t encoded as well, and your appetite doesn’t signal the way it’s supposed to. The same review found that if people were prompted to remember what they had eaten earlier in the day, before their next meal, they ate a little less.

Other lab studies beyond this specific review corroborate this memory link. People who played a computer card game while eating lunch remembered the meal less clearly and ate more during a taste test 30 minutes later than people who had the same lunch with no distraction, according to a 2010 study from the University of Bristol.

It's not just TV anymore
The studies included in this review mainly used television and radio, the usual lab distractions, through the 2000s and into 2012, when the searches for it were performed. For many Americans in their 20s and 30s today, the more recognizable culprit is a phone resting against a water bottle. According to a 2020 overview of later research on phone use during meals, published in Frontiers in Psychology, scrolling on a smartphone while eating has been linked to higher calorie intake in young adults, echoing the same pattern seen with television years earlier.

Where the evidence runs out
Not all distraction manipulations were successful. Likewise, the 2013 review found that asking people to pay extra attention to their food while eating did not clearly change how much they ate during that meal. The researchers note this was based on only two small studies, so it’s far from a settled question.

So, should you ban Netflix at dinner?
Not necessarily, and the researchers themselves are careful not to overstate their findings. The review found that most of the underlying studies were conducted in a lab, on relatively small groups of mostly young, healthy-weight women, over the course of a single meal. That’s a good starting point for thinking about the effects of attention on appetite, but it’s not evidence that watching TV at dinner will cause anyone to gain weight over time, and it’s not a diagnosis of anyone’s individual eating habits. Real life is messier than a lab, with stress, schedules, and social eating all affecting how people eat.

The takeaway
You don't have to sit through every meal in total silence, staring at your plate. But if you’ve ever wondered why a food-show binge always seems to end with an unplanned trip to the fridge, science suggests your attention, or lack thereof, may be part of the answer. Something as simple as turning the phone face down or watching one episode instead of four might be a small, low-effort way to eat a bit more in tune with your actual hunger.