Emotional Exploration: Hangry

Once again, we are at that time of the month when we explore our emotional vocabulary. Sometimes, it is funny, and other times, it is more serious. Either way, exploration and understanding are to be had. The purpose of this series is to expand our emotional vocabulary to enable us to express better how we are feeling, and also to better understand those around us. Language is power, and so is self-understanding.

So this month I thought we would have a quick look at feeling hangry, this is not influenced by my current feeling at all, I swear. Hangry is an amalgamation of Hungry and Angry, therefore it is not too surprising when I tell you that hangry means to become angry when hungry. Some of you may recall my post on Anger, so you may understand my love for the word hangry. Anger is a complex emotion and often the word angry does not convey exactly what is going on, see my earlier post for more details, but with hangry we know exactly what is going on. 

Hangry is also interesting as it highlights the close link between our body and our mind, in this instance our stomach and our emotions. Many different bodily responses can explain feeling hangry, one of these is blood sugar levels, as low levels can drastically impact our mood. Typically, when our body is seeking something like food, it takes over a lot of our capacity to manage other needs like mood regulation, which can result in us feeling angry because we cannot satisfy our need for food. I think an excellent example of this is immediately obvious to anybody who has worked in retail when they recall their ability to interact with customers the closer it got to a break time. It is also the underlying unnamed emotion in the Snickers adverts with the tag line “You're Not You When You're Hungry”, so hangry is an emotion we should be familiar with even if we couldn't name it.

And for those of you who are not a fan of new fandangle words, hangry’s first known use was in a letter written in 1918, so is not a word being used by “today's youth”. Perhaps time to add hangry to your everyday vocabulary. 

So maybe you are somebody who finds yourself regularly getting angry, have you stopped to check if there is a pattern to these moments and if so do they revolve around meal times? Could you be feeling hangry?