By: Alex Gordon, M.A.
Everyone knows that feeling when you have an empty stomach and seemingly trivial matters become profoundly irritating. Even the Merriam-Webster dictionary now contains the word “hangry”, defining it as “irritable or angry because of hunger.” Now, granted, the body’s lack of fuel may contribute to certain physiological changes in these circumstances, but is feeling hangry truly “feeling irritable or angry because of hunger”? Is it logical that skipping breakfast evokes an animal side in people? Probably not.
From an REBT perspective, an event or situation can trigger a negative thought or string of thoughts that emanate from an underlying attitude held by a person, which can then lead to various emotional and/or behavioral consequences. For example, the other day I skipped lunch and while driving home from work, encountered a particularly slow driver in front of me. I found myself tensing up and feeling an urge to yell, acknowledging that I was hangry. Only later did I realize that between the event (car driving slowly) and the emotion (hanger???), I was having thoughts of “This driver should be driving faster” and “I can’t stand when people drive like this.” This encounter contained two irrational beliefs: Demanding a certain behavior from others and the notion that I cannot tolerate the frustration. Although I may typically feel annoyed by events like these, it does not usually escalate to that intensity. The lack of food in my system seemed to have altered my frustration tolerance threshold, which, coupled with the slow driver event and my ensuing thoughts, did not produce a pleasant outcome. Incidentally, Merriam-Webster’s sample sentence reads: To his credit, he knows not to drive while hangry. Guess I didn’t get the memo.
Thinking about all of this revealed to me that feeling hangry is not all that different from feeling angry, with the added biological influence of the body lacking in fuel. As we now find ourselves in the summer months, it is also common to encounter hangry’s sister emotion: hongry (hot + angry). The hot weather seems to elicit irritability in a manner not unlike hunger. The heat can be viewed from a similar perspective; just another variable that makes us more susceptible to the negative thought trap.
Next time I anticipate skipping a meal or hanging out in the heat, I’ll know I have to invest a little more effort to remind myself that, while it is not a pleasant experience, that I can tolerate it. And although I wish others would conform to my manner of living (i.e. driving efficiently), there’s no reason why they absolutely must.
The next time you feel hangry or hongry, I encourage you to consider your associated thoughts and beliefs and to recognize that hunger is not a direct pathway to anger. And someone ought to have a talk with Merriam-Webster about that definition.
