Stressful Modern Life Is Giving Us All Hunger Rage

You know "hanger", that raging storm cloud of grumpiness that rolls over you when you haven’t eaten in ages? The word – a very clever portmanteau of hunger and anger – is now defined in the Collins Dictionary as an adjective, meaning “irritable as a result of feeling hungry”.

Being hangry is like stepping into an awful second-skin version of ourselves. It makes us look and act like dicks, and it’s shitty for everyone involved. But how aware are we of it before it’s too late? Before we end up disgracing ourselves because we don't have immediate access to a biscuit or a sausage?

Picture the last few days of your life in breakfasts, lunches and dinners. How many of those meals were eaten when your stomach had already started purring? And how many times did you have to rush to eat because you were so hungry that you were no longer capable of holding a rational conversation? We’re all busy, and because of that our appetites get sidelined – just one more phone call, one more email, one quick meeting, then we can eat. According to Susie Orbach, an author and psychologist who's been writing about the human appetite for 40 years, being out of sync with hunger like this is "a very modern phenomenon".

Maybe this is why we’re not fully aware of just how connected our guts and brains are. How can hunger so radically alter our mood? Paul Currie, a professor of psychology at Reed College in Portland, says it’s largely down to one hormone: ghrelin. “When we’re hungry, there’s an increased release of ghrelin from the stomach, which increases our motivation to consume food,” he explains. “Elevated levels of ghrelin might also activate the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, otherwise known as the stress axis.”

Ghrelin receptors are also present elsewhere in the body, namely in the spaghetti junction of our metabolism, the hypothalamus. The more this hormone circulates, the more churned up the brain gets. “Animal studies show that direct ghrelin injections into the hypothalamus increase anxiety-like behaviour, suggesting there’s overlapping brain circuits mediating food intake and emotional behaviour,” says Currie. The gut and brain, then, essentially have a hormonal M1 running between them.

Our senses go into overdrive when we’re hungry: noises seem louder, lights brighter, smells smellier. It could be why someone in the flat below you blasting nosebleed gabber all day might be more annoying when you’re hungry than when you’re not. But while being hungry may not stand up in court as justification for you smashing a hole through their ceiling with a broom, it might ease your conscience knowing that somewhere, somehow, it’s chemical – that it kind of isn’t your fault.

Courthouses are a good example of hanger's power. In 2011, a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was released, examining 1,000 judicial rulings by Israeli judges conducting parole hearings. Over ten months, more lenient verdicts were given in the mornings and immediately after scheduled breaks, i.e. lunch. The authors found that favourable rulings peaked in the morning, declining over the day from a likelihood of around 65 percent for a positive outcome to nearly zero. After a meal break probability rose again to around 65 percent. Hunger was proved with empirical regularity to have had an effect on judgement. So the old adage that justice is what the judge had for breakfast is clearly more than just an adage.

Hunger is, along with the need to shit and sleep, a base impulse. It’s one of the first experiences of fear and satisfaction we ever encounter as a human being. But while a baby can scream its tiny pink lungs out until a nipple or bottle is put in its mouth, grown-ups don’t really have the same luxury. We rely on physical prompts; the sad, squelchy sounds of our empty gut wrestling with itself. So when hunger tips over into mental discomfort, is our body trying to get our attention a different way?

“This is exactly what we think might be going on,” says Currie. “The increases in arousal [anxiety, for example] elicit the appropriate behavioural response – to satisfy our need for food or energy. The brain circuits mediating intake, motivation, arousal and emotion are overlapping.”

Would these overlapping circuits explain why eating can provide such an immediate calming effect after feeling hangry? Why even a few mouthfuls of a sandwich can settle our mood? “Yes,” says Currie. “Once you actually start to eat, ghrelin levels in the brain decline rapidly, reducing the arousal and continued signalling associated with seeking out food.”

This information makes the surge in popularity of certain diets worrying. Juice fasting – or, as its advocates would have it, "cleansing" – is one. Because eating disturbances like this, where hanger and some degree of mental upset are pretty much guaranteed, “compromise our physical, emotional and cognitive function”, Currie says. Fasting is as old as time and still practiced, carefully, in certain religions, but the juice boom in the Western world has something sad and complex at its heart. Any doctor will tell you that a) any weight lost will return with normal eating, and b) the “cleansing” part of it is bollocks.

However, smart, high-functioning people still keep falling for the Gwyneth Paltrow approach to sustenance. Why? “We’re in placebo territory,” says nutritionist Claudia Louch, who runs The Harley Street Nutrition Clinic. “The human body is the perfect machine. Our liver, kidneys, digestive system and skin remove toxins very effectively. Anyone with a sound understanding of the body will know that it isn’t the healthy option people are duped into believing it is.”

Does the popularity of this kind of dieting suggest not only that certain people have an otherworldly resistance to hunger, but that some of us actually thrive off hanger? It's significant that juice cleanses are more popular with women, which Orbach suggests could be because of “our constant bombardment with weight-consciousness” and the fact that “we are addicted to the idea of a quick fix”.

Nearly 40 years after breaking ground with her book Fat Is A Feminist Issue, which urged women to return to eating within the rhythm of their appetites, she believes that “appetite, and therefore satisfaction, is tainted with fear”. So it seems that feeling hangry, for some people, means feeling in control – of desire, impulses and, most of all, weight. That’s what it always comes back to: staying thin.

If we’re constantly stuck in a spin cycle of dieting, it's a given that we’ll be hungry more. Lisa Sasson, a professor in NYU’s department of food studies and public health, told the New York Times that weight-consciousness may explain why women might report “hunger-related moodiness” more. “Women sometimes feel that, if they are satiated – if their bellies bulge the tiniest bit beyond flatness – then they may have overeaten.”

This makes me want to drown my sorrow in a pint of chip fat, but there must be an alternative answer. Obviously it’s impossible to shut out all the noise surrounding weight loss and food, but Orbach says we should “really dare to learn to eat with our hunger”. It takes practice, she says, “but being aware of our different levels of fullness is a start”, i.e. on one day we might be hungrier than the next, and that’s fine. “Follow the hunger urge like you would the urge to pee.”

Sometimes hanger is unavoidable – we can’t always eat exactly when we need to. But pre-empting where and when we might get hungry is probably a good thing, because unlike hunger – which is a good thing – hanger is horrible.

Follow Eleanor (@eleanormorgan) and Luke (@LukeARoutledge) on Twitter