Raise your hand if you feel weird about snacking.

Maybe you’re one of the 65% of people who eat less-nutritious snacks for a sense of instant gratification – always finding your hand in a packet of chocolate bourbons come 4pm. Or perhaps you’re someone who, convinced by anti-snacking brigade, has decided to let your stomach rumble between meals. Neither snacking attitudes are totally satisfactory: the former often leaves you feeling unsatisfied, even after the sixth biscuit, while the latter can leave you hungry and hangry.

According to Graze’s new The Psychology of Snacking report, 27% of us feel shame and 19% feel guilt after eating snacks that we deem less nutritious. With nearly half of the population experiencing some kind of negative mental reaction to snacking, there’s clearly a lot more to a 3pm tea break than we might think.

For Kimberley Wilson, food psychologist and author of How To Build A Healthy Brain and Unprocessed, it’s no surprise that many of us feel weird about the snacks we consume. “We don’t encounter food in a completely neutral environment.” In fact, she believes there’s no such thing as a neutral environment, when it comes to food. “[Our] environment – which encompasses everything from the foods in your cupboards to TV advertising and electronic billboards at bus stops (and much more) – shapes our food choices,” she says.

“I’m a food psychologist and these are my top 3 tips from breaking out of the snack-guilt cycle”