Short Stuff: Hangry?

Published Sep 14, 2022, 9:00 AM

When you’re hungry, you’re not yourself. So say the good people at Snickers and it turns out science backs it up. Being hangry is a verifiable thing, we’re just not quite sure yet what’s going on.

Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and this is short Stuff, and we finally tackle one of the most important concepts of our time. Hungry. It's real. It's a thing, Yeah, definitely is. It's not just something people say in their marriage to poke fun at their spouse or their partnership. It is something that is real and it all has to do with physiological things, the the makeup of your human body and the fuel that it runs on, and the fact that when you don't have it, things change. Yeah. They so we're not exactly sure what, like how the mechanism, the physical mechanism of being hungry translates into anger or hostility. There's some really good theories, but there is like a physiological basis for that, and that when you have me of glucose blood sugar um, your your body uses that is energy to power all sorts of stuff. But when that's low, uh, systems start to get kind of shut down. On the periphyry. And sometimes one of those systems, they think is um self control, because self control can often require a tremendous amount of energy, and when you don't have self control sometimes it's difficult to be polite to some people. Absolutely. Uh. The other thing that can happen is the hypothalamus, which is the part of the brain, uh that you know involves hormone production as well as a lot of other stuff. Uh, it gets sort of out of whack and throws hormones out of whack and can suppress serotonin, which is everyone knows is the field good neurotransmitter. And if you're all of a sudden not processing serotonin, then you're probably gonna get the very least moody and maybe even angry. Yes, Supposedly, for your serotonin um like production to really take a hit, your blood sugar has to drop really quickly from like a hundred milligrams a desci leader to fifty five milligrams a desci leader, which that seems like a precipitous drop. Yes, and by the way, quick In show correction, we said grams of caffeine instead of milligrams in which one was that the Energy Drinks Energy Drinks episode, So yeah, we were saying people were drinking a hundred and sixty grams of caffeine. Somebody wrote in and said, I'm just trying to imagine what I would feel like before my heart exploded. Uh So, anyway back to this, Um, Cortisol is another thing that can be a culprit if you have too much cortisol going on, which can happen when you have low blood sugar. That's a stress hormone. So you know, all of a sudden, you've got one thing being depleted, which is serotonin. You've got the other thing in the opposite direction, the cortisol being increased. And it's pretty obvious where that's obvious, where that's gonna lead a big fight. You know where it's gonna lead. Chuck, It's gonna lead us right into a commercial break, all right, change to Chuck, just like the stars the sky so much so, Chuck, we should shout out our former friends and colleagues, well, former colleagues, still friends. I'd like to think how stuff works, UM for helping us out with this episode. There are multiple articles on how stuff works about hanger or being angry, and they basically created a study bonanza that just it's a buffet of studies trying to figure out how to prove that hunger turns into hanger UM, and some of them are pretty lame actually, even though they've been published in some pretty legitimate journals. Agreed, Um, I think what they all do those a show that hanger is real. But yeah, some of them are great, but let's let's talk about them. Yeah, they're just trying to get the design down and no one's really cracked the code yet. Like, for example, there was one from two fourteen that appeared in the p N A. Y S. The journal UM that studied a hundred and seven couples. They measured their gluecoast levels twice a day, okay, and then to measure how aggressive they were, they said, hey, here's a voodoo doll. Do what you will with it, right, Well, a voodoo doll of your partner or spouse. I think they use married couples, but I'm sure it's the same for for non married couples. But uh yeah, they said, here's foodoo dolls, here's a bunch of pins. Um, yeah, do what you want. And what they found was, uh, when the person was super angry, they were jam and pins all over the face and body of their partner's doll. Right. And then they also did a supplementary thing where they put the part there's in separate rooms and gave them each the ability to crank the volume up on some music in the other partners chamber, and um, the ones who are hungry or used more pins in the voodoo doll and turned the decibels up higher than people who weren't hungry. Um. And of course they made it so that the person just thought they were turning the volume up, they weren't actually affecting the volume, which is hilarious but man alive. Yeah, like take this, Emily, right, like jamming pins in a doll, like cranking a bad music. Yeah, here's some nickel Back for you. Are we all still making fun of Nickelback? Yeah? Sure, I think that's okay. Okay. I didn't know if there was like a rehabilitation that I had not not noticed. Oh, I don't know. Now they're still They're still terrible, Okay. I feel bad for those guys at the same time. Yeah, I think they're like multi multi, multi millionaires though, and I get the impression they don't really care. Yeah, because you can't feel sorry for anyone that has a lot of money, right, No. Um. There were some other studies here. One was UM from O how State that basically UM and a lot of this is correlation, of course, and not causation. But uh, they found that UM self control was linked to glucose levels in the brain, so people who drank a beverage high in glucose was less aggressive than people who didn't. UM. I don't know if that's like any sort of suggestion, like to drink a sugary drink to keep you sort of chilled out. I'm not sure. I'm not sure about this one. I'm with you. There was also one that UM I think linked diabetes to glucose metabolism obviously UM, but that it's they tied it to aggressiveness and decreased self control as well, so that that kind of supports the previous study. But it's kind of surprising, actually, I guess I wonder if people who have type two diabetes are more prone to hungry nous than other people. Yeah. Maybe. Uh. This two thousand eighteen study was published by the American Psychological Association in the journal Emotion. This one I think I understand, but I'm not positive. Uh. Here's what they did, and maybe you can explain the kicker for me. Uh. There were a couple of experiments, and these were online experiments, so it's always a little bit jankie. But they showed four hundred participants in image that was supposed to kind of clearly be either positive, negative or neutral. Uh, and then an ambiguous image in this case they use Chinese pictographs and then said rate that according to like how pleasant it is to you on a scale of one to seven, and then tell us how hungry you are. Uh. And this is where I just don't quite get what it was as far as being primed. It wasn't very well explained. Can you explain it? I can't actually, So so what they did was they found that the hungry year the people were, um, the more likely they were to give that ambiguous image like a terrible rating right like they were. They interpreted it as like negative or something like that rather than neutral or positive. But only they really only saw this effect when the people who were hungry had seen that negative image first. So, so what the what the researchers are saying is that when you're angry, um, you feel like, um, you're you're mean to somebody. But it doesn't just come out of the blue, like if your spouse comes up to you and tells you how much they love you and gives you a hug, you're probably not going to react with hostility. But if you're hungry and your spouse comes up and criticizes you, there's a good chance you're going to overreact and like be a jerk in response, and that is angry. So that was kind of the the upshot of what they were saying. Okay, so there's like a context basically, that's to it. Yeah, exactly that there there needs to be a primer for angry nous to come about. But yes, still, if you're hungry, you're more likely to be hostile if you're primed with something negative. First, all right, well that makes sense. Um. There was one in Europe that is to me, these speak to me a little bit more because they're just very, very rudimentary, and that they asked people to track their emotions very simply track your emotions five times a day for three weeks on this app and let us know, like you're eating habits at the same time. And they basically said that like fifty six of your sort of negative feelings or irritability is due to the fact that you your blood sugar was probably low. Inn't that nuts? Fifty of your jerky nous over that week or month or whatever. Three weeks um can be attributed to just being hungry at the time. Yeah, I find I'm most critical with myself as a father and like when I just don't do the right thing as a dad, as when I'm busy doing something else and I'm like being interrupted. Like if I'm like just trying to get this work email out or something, I can like be a jerk. Um. But I'm curious to see if food is also playing a part there, yeah, because I mean it could be stress or being under a deadline. But yeah, I wonder too. You're gonna have to create your own study with the app and pretend you're from Central Europe too. But it's weird though, because I'm also Emily has more of an app, is more apt to be angry than me. Uh, food is more um, not important, but it has that effect on her more than it does for me, and that for an overweight guy. I can skip meals all day long. I can even do a fast and I don't feel like it really affects my emotions that much. I mean that sounds to me like Emily is just more sensitive to blood sugar. Probably you are, you know, yeah, yeah, or maybe HER's just drops more precipitously than yours does. Who knows. Yeah, there may be like a literal physiological difference. But the upshot of all of these buddies seems to be that, um, we lose self control when we're hungry, and that's that's a big trigger for angry nous. But at the same time, they've kind of shown that you can defuse being angry by just being self aware. Studies have kind of investigated if you show somebody that they're mad and hungry, are they going to like, are they more likely to lash out? And they found no, Like, if you know, I'm being a jerk right now because I'm hungry, then you're probably less prone to actually follow through on your jerky behavior. Yeah, and I think that's probably true for most reasons, Like if Emily was like, hey, you're trying to get something done and you're being very impatient with ruby, has nothing to do with hunger. I think just about self awareness, which is always a good thing to try and model. Definitely, just ask yourself, why do I feel this way? Be curious about yourself. There's all sorts of neat stuff you can learn. Yeah, or stick your head in the sand and never grow. That's right. Uh, Chuck just laughed charmingly, and I've got nothing else, so that means it's the end of short stuff. Stuff you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H

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