The Truth about Hanger
Your stomach gives a faint growl as your colleague starts asking a string of incredibly detailed questions that can definitely wait until after lunch and you feel a sudden wave of irritation wash over you. ‘Can you just shut up?’ you think, your jaw clenching tightly.
Ten minutes later, you’re sat your desk and tucking into the BLT sandwich you’d made that morning and all seems right again in the world.
For years, the internet has branded being ‘hangry’ as another term thrown around casually in memes and office jokes. But is hanger a real biological phenomenon, or have we just invented another convenient excuse to justify being snappy at work?
Tracking Hanger in Real Time
Professor Viren Swami, social psychologist at Anglia Ruskin University says, “The more interesting question is whether that ‘something’ is a real experience, and our research suggests that it probably is.”
Professor Swami and his colleagues conducted an experience sampling study which allowed them to capture the participants hunger as it happens.
Over a three-week period, participants were tracked via their phones.
Fives times a day, they were then prompted to fill our a survey and rate how hungry, irritable, and angry they were feeling at that moment, alongside their general levels of pleasure.
The experiment concluded while people’s hunger levels naturally fluctuated throughout the day, a definitive pattern emerged. Every time a participant reported a spike in hunger, they also reported a corresponding spike in irritability and anger.
For years, the scientific consensus blamed hunger on a simply drop in blood glucose.
Professor Swami’s research points to a more subtle shift, “What we think is happening is that when you’re feeling hungry, you begin to interpret information from your surrounding environment in a more negative way. So simply if you’re not feeling hungry, a stimulus might be interpreted as neutral or even pleasant.”
Once you understand that hanger is driven by how we interpret discomfort, the boundaries start to expand.
Hunger isn’t the only culprit.
“I’m much more aware, not just about hunger, but any kind of negative stimulus. Heat, for example,” says Professor Swami.
Name it to Tame it
Fortunately, once we have recognised our power we have a powerful tool to be able to fight it, recognition.
“I think the first thing to do if you’re experiencing these negative emotions, is to put a label on them. A lot of the time when we’re feeling angry, we don’t recognise that we’re angry.” says Professor Swami
“Once you’ve put that label on it you know what you can do with it. If I’m feeling hungry and angry, I can go and eat some food. Or if I’m feeling hot and bothered, I can go and find air conditioning.”
Once you label it you can rationally solve it. You can step away and find a snack.
The next time you find yourself clenching your jaw in a meeting, ready to shout at a colleague for breathing too loudly, take a breath. It’s probably not them; it’s your hungry brain playing tricks on you.
Label that feeling, go grab a sandwich or step into an air conditioned room and give your brain the reset it needs.
After all, you aren’t actually furious at the world, you’re just due lunch.
