Why Some People Get Hangry Faster Than Others
"Come on, little fella – we should get going now." My son ignored me completely. The playground sand felt perfect under his fingers, and he kept digging with his new toy excavator. As my mind wandered to my to-do list, laughter suddenly turned to sobs. My son wasn't hurt – just terribly upset. When I checked my phone, I realized we had missed his regular mealtime by quite a bit. He was simply very hungry.
We all know that feeling. No matter our age, we tend to grow irritable when our bodies lack fuel. Humans have experienced this phenomenon for millennia, but the word "hangry" only entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2018. The dictionary defines it as "bad-tempered or irritable as a result of hunger."
The Surprising Gap in Research
What's more surprising is how little research exists about how hunger affects everyday moods. Most studies on food and mood focus on patients with metabolic or eating disorders. Many psychologists traditionally viewed hunger as a basic physiological process that didn't need much psychological investigation.
With colleagues from psychology and mental health fields, I decided to investigate how different people respond to hunger. We wanted to understand why some people remain calm when hunger strikes while others become irritable. We hoped our findings might offer lessons for parents dealing with young children too.
Studying Hunger in Humans
In the animal kingdom, scientists frequently study hunger as a key motivator. Hungry rodents will press levers vigorously or climb over large walls to reach food rewards. In the wild, hungry animals often roam further to explore their environment, appearing restless as they seek to overcome low energy threats.
To examine the relationship between energy levels, hunger, and mood in people, we equipped 90 healthy adults with continuous glucose monitors for a month. Glucose serves as the primary energy source for both body and brain. These monitors, typically used in clinical practice to help diabetes patients regulate blood sugar, report values every few minutes.
Participants could actively check their glucose levels using a sensor app, and we could see when they accessed this information. We also asked participants to complete mood check-ins on their smartphones up to twice daily. These included questions about how hungry or full they felt on a scale from 0 to 100, plus ratings of their current mood.
Unexpected Findings
The results surprised us. First, people only experienced worse moods when they acknowledged feeling hungry – not simply when their blood sugar levels dropped. Second, people who more accurately detected their energy levels generally experienced fewer negative mood swings.
This suggests a crucial psychological middle step exists between a person's energy and mood levels. Scientists call this interoception. In the brain, hunger signals come from neurons in the hypothalamus that detect prolonged energy deficits. Conscious hunger feelings then connect to the insula, a part of the cerebral cortex folded deep within the brain that also processes taste and emotions.
In our recent study, people with high interoceptive accuracy experienced fewer mood swings. This doesn't mean they never felt hungry – they simply seemed better at maintaining stable mood levels. This stability matters because sudden mood changes can affect relationships with family, friends, and colleagues. They can lead to poor decision-making and impulsive behavior, including purchasing fast-energy foods that might be less healthy.
Body Awareness Matters
More broadly, paying close attention to our bodies' needs helps keep our minds at ease too, avoiding unnecessary wear and tear on both systems. Deviating too much from the body's ideal state poses long-term risks to our health – both mental and physical.
Young children struggle to interpret signals from their rapidly developing bodies. They also get easily distracted by their surroundings and often fail to notice hunger or thirst without prompting – leading to sudden meltdowns like my son experienced at the playground.
Similarly, many adults in today's fast-paced, digitally distracted world can get caught off-guard by dipping energy levels. One simple life hack involves maintaining regular meal schedules, since hunger often intensifies when we skip meals.
Improving Your Awareness
Everyone's energy levels naturally ebb and flow. However, you can improve your interoceptive accuracy by allowing your internal systems to pay closer attention to energy levels. Exercise and physical activity can sharpen hunger sensing and improve energy metabolism too.
Most of the time, hunger only modestly affects our moods among many other influencing factors. But one lesson from my playground experience has been to address my son's food needs long before they become obvious. Perhaps we all need greater awareness about getting hangry.
