Anyone else's snack drawer get weird on step two?

The 8 p.m. salt hunt hit me around the same step.

For me it wasn’t true hunger; it was the first quiet minute of the day, and my brain wanted a crunchy reward. I started keeping a small dish of pickles and a few roasted almonds on a real plate, logged it as “evening ritual,” and it took the mystery out.

Weirdly, the string-cheese thing came back after a few weeks. Is your 8 p.m. craving more salty-crunchy, or just something to do with your hands?

There was an old thread about the “second-step snack drawer migration”—lots of us swapped foods rather than dropped them.

Not weird at all—mine flipped from 3 p.m. cheese to 9 p.m. pickles. One thing I’d get specific about: is 8 p.m. actual hunger, or just the day finally going quiet?

I started noting time, hunger 1–10, hours since protein, and whether I’d had enough salt/water. My salty window lined up with days I under-ate at lunch, not with the snack drawer itself. Pre-portioning a salty thing (olives, roasted chickpeas, half a pickle) killed the pantry excavation.

Sharp question: does it happen on days you hit protein/fiber, or every day regardless? If it’s every day, that’s a pattern worth tracking rather than fighting with string cheese.

Night shift here. My snack drawer flipped too. Kids’ 8 p.m. chaos is my 3 a.m. lunch break. What helped: I stopped restocking “nice” snacks. Now it’s frozen edamame I nuke, or cucumber spears with lime salt. Crunch and salt, no prep.

I track it in my notes app as “habit hunger,” not calories. Sharper question: are you chasing salt, crunch, or five minutes of nobody touching you? For me it was the five minutes.

I set a 6-minute timer and just stand there with fizzy water. Drawer stays shut. Might not be your deal, but check that first.

Airport/road version of this: my 8 p.m. pantry poke turned into an 11 p.m. minibar stare.

What helped was a tiny “salt kit” in my laptop bag—single-serve roasted edamame and little seaweed sheets—so I have a crunchy/salty option that isn’t a whole bag of anything. I also started noting time/location in my tracker, not just calories, and most of my salt hunts happen after a weird travel-food day with no afternoon protein.

Not hungry, just bored and tired in a hotel room. Curious whether yours is worse on kid-chaos nights or travel nights?

My fix was boring: I stopped optimizing the drawer and optimized the handoff. I eat an actual plate with the kids at 6:15, then brush teeth immediately.

The late salt gremlin still shows up, but it’s easier to ignore when I’m not also hungry from skipping my own dinner. Tracked it for five days—late salt score went from 4/5 to 1/5. Drawer unchanged.

What time do you eat your dinner vs. theirs?