deliberately flipping the mental "dismiss alarm" button

This actually sparks another thought: When I was a kid, I got very annoyed with the way my body let me know things. I understood that sometimes it would get hungry, or need to use the bathroom, but sometimes I had to wait before I could viably handle these needs. I thus started viewing these states as "mental alarms", and eventually managed to "install a dismiss alarm button." I now refer to it as my internal messaging system: My body sends me a message, and I get a little "unread message" indicator. I'll suffer until I read the message, but then I have no obligation to actually act on it. If I ignore the message, I usually get another one in an hour or so, since my body still has this need.

At first, a dismissed alarm would last ~5 minutes. Now I can actually dismiss my sense of hunger for a couple days if food just doesn't come up. Dismissing an alarm when I have easy access to take care of something (for instance, trying to ignore hunger when someone offers me a nice meal) is much, much harder.

It does run in to the failure state that I sometimes forget to do much of anything for hours, because I'm focused on my work and just automatically dismiss all of my alarms. This occasionally results in a couple hours of unproductive work until I pause, evaluate the reason I'm having trouble, and realize I haven't had anything to eat all day :)