Is being 'hangry' a real thing?

You know that feeling when you’re just so hungry that you’re almost … angry? Well, there’s a word for it: hangry.

While it’s not a new term (it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2018), recent research has found that it is, in fact, a very real emotion.

The definition of hangry is simply becoming angry because you are very hungry, and a study from 2022 found that not only is it a very valid emotional state, but that hunger can influence our emotions in other ways.

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Lead author of the study, Viren Swami Ph.D., a professor at Anglia Ruskin University in the UK, said that comments from his wife is what led him to study the emotion.

"My wife is often saying that I’m hangry, but I didn’t think being hangry was real," he told Healthline. "But mainly because I’m interested in the impact of hunger and eating on human emotions and behaviours."

The three-week study of 121 participants found that hunger was significantly associated with greater feelings of anger and irritability and that hunger can negatively affect our emotions in general.

"These results may have important implications for understanding everyday experiences of emotions, and may also assist practitioners to more effectively ensure productive individual behaviours and interpersonal relationships," authors of the study concluded.

What is hanger?

"Hanger is a new emotion. It’s a feeling of frustration and tetchiness, even rage that comes about when we are hungry," leading emotion expert, Professor Richard Firth-Godbehere PhD, says.

While the emotion and feeling itself is not new (Firth-Godbehere says descriptions of the feeling first appeared in a psychoanalytical journal in 1956), the word for it is, which Firth-Godbehere says is a "found emotion".

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"It’s when a language borrows or creates a shorthand for a feeling that people have started to discuss more often," he explains.

"Sometimes we borrow from other languages, like using ‘Schadenfreude’ to describe pleasure at someone else’s misfortune. Other times, we create mixed portmanteau words, like ‘hangry’. This happens a lot more often in the era of social media."

What causes hanger?

The calories that we consume every day are used as fuel for various parts of our body, and our brains take up anywhere between 20% and 30% of this fuel, Firth-Godbehere says.

"The part that controls emotions and conscious thought - the prefrontal cortex - takes much of that fuel," he continues.

"Of all our feelings, the ones our cognitive brain finds hardest to control are anger and fear. It makes evolutionary sense - fear stops us from being eaten by a rampaging bear, and anger helps us protect our children from it if it attacks.

"While fear has its own part of the brain, the amygdala, the anger circuit is partly based in the prefrontal cortex."

This is why it’s so important to eat regularly to give our body and brain enough calories, as Firth-Godbehere says that it’s much harder to control our anger when the front part of the brain (the one that controls anger) doesn’t have enough sugar.

"When the brain is hungry, it also changes our body chemistry, especially those chemicals linked to emotions called neuropeptides. The change makes us more aggressive and ready to react as we hunt for food," he adds. "That makes evolutionary sense, too, because if we are starving, we might have to fight for any scrap of food we can."

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Despite hanger often being associated as a female emotion, Firth-Godbehere says that studies have shown that men are more likely to experience it than women.

"If you want to avoid being hangry, the answer is to make sure you eat enough to keep your brain fully fuelled," he says.

Naturally occurring sugar found in fruit and honey should do the trick, so pick up an apple or have some Greek yoghurt with honey to stave off those hanger emotions until your next meal. Or, be sure to keep a piece of fruit in your bag with you, as you never know when hanger will strike next.

Watch: These are the 8 things people do to never be "hangry"