Did you give the biggest kick? on her best friend, ignored her boyfriend on WhatsApp, chafed at her mother, and then had to apologize to everyone because she found out that her disease was hungry?
Well, discounting our moods around those around us is not a desirable behavior, but in this case, hunger can really explain much of the problem.
You may have already made the association between lack of food and irritation, but what you may not know is that a study at Florida State University found evidence to support this relationship.
Glucose and voodoo dolls
Assuming that we are most demonstrating our irritation to those closest to us, the researchers recruited 107 couples who lived together to investigate the influence of their blood glucose levels and the degree of aggression of each individual.
For this, participants had to measure their blood glucose before breakfast and before bed for 21 days. The researchers' interest in this data was that in healthy people, glucose levels increase when we eat and decrease when we spend a lot of time without eating? that is, blood glucose drops when we are hungry.
Also read: Why am I always angry? 7 reasons that may explain your lack of patience
In addition, to be able to measure the impulses of aggression, participants had to perform one more task: each night, according to the level of irritation they felt toward their spouse, they should stick a voodoo doll that represented the partner or partner with 0 to 51 pins.
This task should be done in isolation and each person should write down the number of pins used. And as you can imagine, the result was that lower blood glucose levels at night were associated with a higher number of pins stuck in the voodoo doll, meaning there was a greater tendency to show aggressive impulses towards a person. next.
Aggressive impulses vs. aggressive behavior
Having an aggressive impulse does not necessarily mean that we will actually behave aggressively because we have self-control mechanisms. However, the scientists wanted to investigate whether this aspect would also be influenced by glucose levels.
For this, at the end of the 21 days of the study, couples went to the laboratory to participate in a test. Scientists told participants that partners would fight each other in a simple computer game, and the loser would suffer the? Punishment? hearing annoying noises (nails scratching a blackboard, dentist's engine, ambulance siren, etc.) in a headset.
The intensity and duration of these noises would be set by the winner, who could choose between noises of 60 to 105 decibels (equivalent to a fire alarm) and times between 0.5 to 5 seconds. There was also an option where no noise would be emitted from the losing spouse's headphones.
Also read: 9 tips that will make you feel less hungry throughout the day
What the participants did not know was that computer game matches had predetermined results, so that each individual would lose 13 of the 25 disputes, and that the noises they were hearing on the headphones had not been chosen by the spouses? indeed, sounds had already been defined by scientists, and even though they varied, they were always within safe limits for hearing.
So what really mattered was that the participants believed they had a? Weapon? that could cause different levels of distress (or no distress) to their partners, a methodology previously used to measure aggressive behavior in the laboratory.
As the scientists predicted, participants who had lower daily glucose levels (measured over the 21 days of the study) were more likely to choose longer, more intense noises, which can be understood as a greater tendency to have an aggressive behavior.
Why does lack of glucose increase aggressiveness?
You may have been in a situation where you got very nervous, but you had to swallow your anger to not do anything stupid, right? Is this possible because of our self-control, which allows us to stop harmful impulses? and it is essential to maintain a good relationship with anyone.
But self-control is not an inexhaustible resource: so when we need to trigger it, we have a little less of that ability for the next challenges, making us more likely to succumb to our momentum.
Read also: Juice that takes hunger: learn recipes that will take away your desire to eat
Another important factor is that self-control requires a lot of energy, which is largely obtained by the transformation of glucose from the food we eat. Thus, when blood glucose drops, we have less energy to trigger self-control, leading to acts of aggression, fury and negativity.
As one of the main causes of the drop in blood glucose is the fact that you spend a lot of time without eating, you may have already concluded: yes, does hunger make us in a bad mood? Not that we needed scientific research to know that!
However, it's never too much to remember: the irritation caused by falling glucose levels is quite different from physical aggression and other attitudes that put you at risk. So while hunger may explain moodiness, isn't it an excuse for abusive, combined behavior?
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