Your brain has lumped together all of the times that you relaxed and ate chips while watching TV and combined them into a single reward value of chips + TV = relaxation. Your zombie-like behavior of mindless eating gets triggered the moment you walk in the door. That de-stress reward value doesn’t get updated until you start paying attention right in that moment. So of course you keep repeating this behavior over and over, wondering why you can’t just tell yourself to stop.
