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Eat Your Feelings: How Hunger Becomes ‘Hanger’

WUNC | By Anita Rao,
Jennifer Brookland
Published July 6, 2018 at 12:48 PM EDT
Hunger does not automatically become "hanger," but can be the result of a negative stimulus and lack of emotional awareness.
Petras Gagilas/Flickr Creative Commons
Hunger does not automatically become "hanger," but can be the result of a negative stimulus and lack of emotional awareness.
Hunger does not automatically become "hanger," but can be the result of a negative stimulus and lack of emotional awareness.
Credit Petras Gagilas/Flickr Creative Commons
Hunger does not automatically become "hanger," but can be the result of a negative stimulus and lack of emotional awareness.

Plenty of people blame feeling angry on being hungry and this year the Oxford English Dictionary added the word “hangry” as a colloquial blend of the two. The term reflects a common experience, but one that had not been well understood.Guest host Anita Rao talks with Jennifer MacCormack, a doctoral student in psychology and neuroscience, about her research on hanger.

Jennifer MacCormack is a doctoral student in psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill whose research explores how hunger is conceptualized as emotion. She led studies that found “hanger” is not as simple as a drop in blood sugar, but rather a complicated emotional response that we can control with increased body awareness.

Guest host Anita Rao talks with MacCormack about why we get hangry and how we can prevent it even when there’s no sandwich in sight.   

Copyright 2018 North Carolina Public Radio
Anita Rao
Anita Rao is the host and creator of "Embodied," a live, weekly radio show and seasonal podcast about sex, relationships & health. She's also the managing editor of WUNC's on-demand content. She has traveled the country recording interviews for the Peabody Award-winning StoryCorps production department, founded and launched a podcast about millennial feminism in the South, and served as the managing editor and regular host of "The State of Things," North Carolina Public Radio's flagship daily, live talk show. Anita was born in a small coal-mining town in Northeast England but spent most of her life growing up in Iowa and has a fond affection for the Midwest.
See stories by Anita Rao
Jennifer Brookland
Jennifer Brookland is a temporary producer for The State of Things.
See stories by Jennifer Brookland