By Jamie Barrie I t is a fact that many people feel more irritable, annoyed, or negative when hungry, the experience is called being “hangry.” The idea that hunger affects our feelings and behaviors is widespread, but surprisingly little research has been done on how feeling hungry transforms into feeling hangry. Psychologists have traditionally thought of hunger and emotions as separate, with hunger and other physical states as basic drives with different physiological and neural underpinnings from emotions. However, growing scientific evidence suggests that your physical states can shape your emotions and cognition in surprising ways giving us experi- ence like being “hangry.” Studies have shown that hunger itself can influence mood, likely because it activates many of the same bodily systems, like the autonomic nervous system and hormones that are involved in emotion. When you are hungry, your body releases a host of hormones including cortisol and adrenaline, often asso- ciated with stress. The result is that hunger, especially at greater intensity, can make you feel more tense, unpleasant and primed for action.
People tend to be guided by their feelings when they’re not paying attention to them. This suggests that people may become hangry when they aren’t actively focused on their internal feelings, but instead wrapped up in the world around them. Affect-as-information theory also suggests that people are more likely to use their feelings as information about the world around them when those feelings match the situation they’re in. Hunger likely only becomes relevant in negative situations because hunger itself produces unpleasant feelings, thus making it easier to mistake the cause of those feelings to be the negative things around you, rather than your hunger.
Here are three tips to help keep your hunger from going to the hanger zone:
Pay more attention to your eating habits and when you get hungry. Plan ahead and carry snacks, eat a protein-filled breakfast or lunch to give you lasting energy. Finally, and this might sound ridiculous, but set yourself reminders to eat regularly, it is easy to get busy and skip a meal.
But is feeling hangry just these hunger-induced feelings or is there more to it?
These basic precautions help prevent you from becoming overly hungry in the first place.
An idea in psychology known as affect-as-information theory holds that your mood can temporarily shape how you feel and see the world around you. So, when you are hungry, you may view things in a more negative light than if you were not hungry.
Most importantly, your awareness can make all the differ- ence when hunger sets in, think am I upset because of a pressing deadline or is the growling in my stomach because I skipped lunch to make it.
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OCTOBER 2018 • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
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