It seems some people take to the cookie jar to sidetrack unpleasant thoughts of death. I thought when I took to the cookie jar it made for an excuse to defer a mundane task of some sort.

To better understand the link between thoughts of mortality and the urge to consume, Naomi Mandel at Arizona State University, Tempe, and Dirk Smeesters at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, asked 746 students to write essays on one of two topics: their death or a visit to the dentist. Each participant also completed a questionnaire designed to evaluate their level of self-esteem. They found that subjects with low self-esteem who wrote about death ate more cookies, when given the opportunity, and bought more items from a hypothetical shopping list compared to those who wrote about the dentist.

We all know that a little retail therapy can be soothing as well, but once again I didn’t realise its stimulus was so morbid.