Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
Speaker 1: there's Chuck and this is short Stuff, and we finally
Speaker 1: tackle one of the most important concepts of our time. Hungry.
Speaker 1: It's real. It's a thing, Yeah, definitely is. It's not
Speaker 1: just something people say in their marriage to poke fun
Speaker 1: at their spouse or their partnership. It is something that
Speaker 1: is real and it all has to do with physiological things,
Speaker 1: the the makeup of your human body and the fuel
Speaker 1: that it runs on, and the fact that when you
Speaker 1: don't have it, things change. Yeah. They so we're not
Speaker 1: exactly sure what, like how the mechanism, the physical mechanism
Speaker 1: of being hungry translates into anger or hostility. There's some
Speaker 1: really good theories, but there is like a physiological basis
Speaker 1: for that, and that when you have me of glucose
Speaker 1: blood sugar um, your your body uses that is energy
Speaker 1: to power all sorts of stuff. But when that's low, uh,
Speaker 1: systems start to get kind of shut down. On the periphyry.
Speaker 1: And sometimes one of those systems, they think is um
Speaker 1: self control, because self control can often require a tremendous
Speaker 1: amount of energy, and when you don't have self control
Speaker 1: sometimes it's difficult to be polite to some people. Absolutely. Uh.
Speaker 1: The other thing that can happen is the hypothalamus, which
Speaker 1: is the part of the brain, uh that you know
Speaker 1: involves hormone production as well as a lot of other stuff. Uh,
Speaker 1: it gets sort of out of whack and throws hormones
Speaker 1: out of whack and can suppress serotonin, which is everyone
Speaker 1: knows is the field good neurotransmitter. And if you're all
Speaker 1: of a sudden not processing serotonin, then you're probably gonna
Speaker 1: get the very least moody and maybe even angry. Yes, Supposedly,
Speaker 1: for your serotonin um like production to really take a hit,
Speaker 1: your blood sugar has to drop really quickly from like
Speaker 1: a hundred milligrams a desci leader to fifty five milligrams
Speaker 1: a desci leader, which that seems like a precipitous drop. Yes,
Speaker 1: and by the way, quick In show correction, we said
Speaker 1: grams of caffeine instead of milligrams in which one was
Speaker 1: that the Energy Drinks Energy Drinks episode, So yeah, we
Speaker 1: were saying people were drinking a hundred and sixty grams
Speaker 1: of caffeine. Somebody wrote in and said, I'm just trying
Speaker 1: to imagine what I would feel like before my heart exploded.
Speaker 1: Uh So, anyway back to this, Um, Cortisol is another
Speaker 1: thing that can be a culprit if you have too
Speaker 1: much cortisol going on, which can happen when you have
Speaker 1: low blood sugar. That's a stress hormone. So you know,
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, you've got one thing being depleted,
Speaker 1: which is serotonin. You've got the other thing in the
Speaker 1: opposite direction, the cortisol being increased. And it's pretty obvious
Speaker 1: where that's obvious, where that's gonna lead a big fight.
Speaker 1: You know where it's gonna lead. Chuck, It's gonna lead
Speaker 1: us right into a commercial break, all right, change to Chuck,
Speaker 1: just like the stars the sky so much so, Chuck,
Speaker 1: we should shout out our former friends and colleagues, well,
Speaker 1: former colleagues, still friends. I'd like to think how stuff works,
Speaker 1: UM for helping us out with this episode. There are
Speaker 1: multiple articles on how stuff works about hanger or being angry,
Speaker 1: and they basically created a study bonanza that just it's
Speaker 1: a buffet of studies trying to figure out how to
Speaker 1: prove that hunger turns into hanger UM, and some of
Speaker 1: them are pretty lame actually, even though they've been published
Speaker 1: in some pretty legitimate journals. Agreed, Um, I think what
Speaker 1: they all do those a show that hanger is real.
Speaker 1: But yeah, some of them are great, but let's let's
Speaker 1: talk about them. Yeah, they're just trying to get the
Speaker 1: design down and no one's really cracked the code yet. Like,
Speaker 1: for example, there was one from two fourteen that appeared
Speaker 1: in the p N A. Y S. The journal UM
Speaker 1: that studied a hundred and seven couples. They measured their
Speaker 1: gluecoast levels twice a day, okay, and then to measure
Speaker 1: how aggressive they were, they said, hey, here's a voodoo doll.
Speaker 1: Do what you will with it, right, Well, a voodoo
Speaker 1: doll of your partner or spouse. I think they use
Speaker 1: married couples, but I'm sure it's the same for for
Speaker 1: non married couples. But uh yeah, they said, here's foodoo dolls,
Speaker 1: here's a bunch of pins. Um, yeah, do what you want.
Speaker 1: And what they found was, uh, when the person was
Speaker 1: super angry, they were jam and pins all over the
Speaker 1: face and body of their partner's doll. Right. And then
Speaker 1: they also did a supplementary thing where they put the
Speaker 1: part there's in separate rooms and gave them each the
Speaker 1: ability to crank the volume up on some music in
Speaker 1: the other partners chamber, and um, the ones who are
Speaker 1: hungry or used more pins in the voodoo doll and
Speaker 1: turned the decibels up higher than people who weren't hungry. Um.
Speaker 1: And of course they made it so that the person
Speaker 1: just thought they were turning the volume up, they weren't
Speaker 1: actually affecting the volume, which is hilarious but man alive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like take this, Emily, right, like jamming pins in a doll,
Speaker 1: like cranking a bad music. Yeah, here's some nickel Back
Speaker 1: for you. Are we all still making fun of Nickelback? Yeah? Sure,
Speaker 1: I think that's okay. Okay. I didn't know if there
Speaker 1: was like a rehabilitation that I had not not noticed. Oh,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Now they're still They're still terrible, Okay.
Speaker 1: I feel bad for those guys at the same time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think they're like multi multi, multi millionaires though, and
Speaker 1: I get the impression they don't really care. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: you can't feel sorry for anyone that has a lot
Speaker 1: of money, right, No. Um. There were some other studies here.
Speaker 1: One was UM from O how State that basically UM
Speaker 1: and a lot of this is correlation, of course, and
Speaker 1: not causation. But uh, they found that UM self control
Speaker 1: was linked to glucose levels in the brain, so people
Speaker 1: who drank a beverage high in glucose was less aggressive
Speaker 1: than people who didn't. UM. I don't know if that's
Speaker 1: like any sort of suggestion, like to drink a sugary
Speaker 1: drink to keep you sort of chilled out. I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure about this one. I'm with you. There
Speaker 1: was also one that UM I think linked diabetes to
Speaker 1: glucose metabolism obviously UM, but that it's they tied it
Speaker 1: to aggressiveness and decreased self control as well, so that
Speaker 1: that kind of supports the previous study. But it's kind
Speaker 1: of surprising, actually, I guess I wonder if people who
Speaker 1: have type two diabetes are more prone to hungry nous
Speaker 1: than other people. Yeah. Maybe. Uh. This two thousand eighteen
Speaker 1: study was published by the American Psychological Association in the
Speaker 1: journal Emotion. This one I think I understand, but I'm
Speaker 1: not positive. Uh. Here's what they did, and maybe you
Speaker 1: can explain the kicker for me. Uh. There were a
Speaker 1: couple of experiments, and these were online experiments, so it's
Speaker 1: always a little bit jankie. But they showed four hundred
Speaker 1: participants in image that was supposed to kind of clearly
Speaker 1: be either positive, negative or neutral. Uh, and then an
Speaker 1: ambiguous image in this case they use Chinese pictographs and
Speaker 1: then said rate that according to like how pleasant it
Speaker 1: is to you on a scale of one to seven,
Speaker 1: and then tell us how hungry you are. Uh. And
Speaker 1: this is where I just don't quite get what it
Speaker 1: was as far as being primed. It wasn't very well explained.
Speaker 1: Can you explain it? I can't actually, So so what
Speaker 1: they did was they found that the hungry year the
Speaker 1: people were, um, the more likely they were to give
Speaker 1: that ambiguous image like a terrible rating right like they were.
Speaker 1: They interpreted it as like negative or something like that
Speaker 1: rather than neutral or positive. But only they really only
Speaker 1: saw this effect when the people who were hungry had
Speaker 1: seen that negative image first. So, so what the what
Speaker 1: the researchers are saying is that when you're angry, um,
Speaker 1: you feel like, um, you're you're mean to somebody. But
Speaker 1: it doesn't just come out of the blue, like if
Speaker 1: your spouse comes up to you and tells you how
Speaker 1: much they love you and gives you a hug, you're
Speaker 1: probably not going to react with hostility. But if you're
Speaker 1: hungry and your spouse comes up and criticizes you, there's
Speaker 1: a good chance you're going to overreact and like be
Speaker 1: a jerk in response, and that is angry. So that
Speaker 1: was kind of the the upshot of what they were saying. Okay,
Speaker 1: so there's like a context basically, that's to it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly that there there needs to be a primer for
Speaker 1: angry nous to come about. But yes, still, if you're hungry,
Speaker 1: you're more likely to be hostile if you're primed with
Speaker 1: something negative. First, all right, well that makes sense. Um.
Speaker 1: There was one in Europe that is to me, these
Speaker 1: speak to me a little bit more because they're just very,
Speaker 1: very rudimentary, and that they asked people to track their
Speaker 1: emotions very simply track your emotions five times a day
Speaker 1: for three weeks on this app and let us know,
Speaker 1: like you're eating habits at the same time. And they
Speaker 1: basically said that like fifty six of your sort of
Speaker 1: negative feelings or irritability is due to the fact that
Speaker 1: you your blood sugar was probably low. Inn't that nuts?
Speaker 1: Fifty of your jerky nous over that week or month
Speaker 1: or whatever. Three weeks um can be attributed to just
Speaker 1: being hungry at the time. Yeah, I find I'm most
Speaker 1: critical with myself as a father and like when I
Speaker 1: just don't do the right thing as a dad, as
Speaker 1: when I'm busy doing something else and I'm like being interrupted.
Speaker 1: Like if I'm like just trying to get this work
Speaker 1: email out or something, I can like be a jerk. Um.
Speaker 1: But I'm curious to see if food is also playing
Speaker 1: a part there, yeah, because I mean it could be
Speaker 1: stress or being under a deadline. But yeah, I wonder too.
Speaker 1: You're gonna have to create your own study with the
Speaker 1: app and pretend you're from Central Europe too. But it's
Speaker 1: weird though, because I'm also Emily has more of an app,
Speaker 1: is more apt to be angry than me. Uh, food
Speaker 1: is more um, not important, but it has that effect
Speaker 1: on her more than it does for me, and that
Speaker 1: for an overweight guy. I can skip meals all day long.
Speaker 1: I can even do a fast and I don't feel
Speaker 1: like it really affects my emotions that much. I mean
Speaker 1: that sounds to me like Emily is just more sensitive
Speaker 1: to blood sugar. Probably you are, you know, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: or maybe HER's just drops more precipitously than yours does.
Speaker 1: Who knows. Yeah, there may be like a literal physiological difference.
Speaker 1: But the upshot of all of these buddies seems to
Speaker 1: be that, um, we lose self control when we're hungry,
Speaker 1: and that's that's a big trigger for angry nous. But
Speaker 1: at the same time, they've kind of shown that you
Speaker 1: can defuse being angry by just being self aware. Studies
Speaker 1: have kind of investigated if you show somebody that they're
Speaker 1: mad and hungry, are they going to like, are they
Speaker 1: more likely to lash out? And they found no, Like,
Speaker 1: if you know, I'm being a jerk right now because
Speaker 1: I'm hungry, then you're probably less prone to actually follow
Speaker 1: through on your jerky behavior. Yeah, and I think that's
Speaker 1: probably true for most reasons, Like if Emily was like, hey,
Speaker 1: you're trying to get something done and you're being very
Speaker 1: impatient with ruby, has nothing to do with hunger. I
Speaker 1: think just about self awareness, which is always a good
Speaker 1: thing to try and model. Definitely, just ask yourself, why
Speaker 1: do I feel this way? Be curious about yourself. There's
Speaker 1: all sorts of neat stuff you can learn. Yeah, or
Speaker 1: stick your head in the sand and never grow. That's right. Uh,
Speaker 1: Chuck just laughed charmingly, and I've got nothing else, so
Speaker 1: that means it's the end of short stuff. Stuff you
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