Have you ever felt the little music of irritability rising within you when you were hungry?
A kind of bad mood, a tension which emanates from a belly which cries famine and which makes understand to your interlocutor that it is better not to seek you.
You can be painful for those around you, but know that this is completely normal.
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A survival instinct
The story is explained by the fact that the feeling of hunger is linked to anxiety.
You should first know that the part of the brain that regulates feelings of hunger and satiety - the hypothalamus - is also the part that regulates feelings of stress, anxiety and regulates mood.
"Thus, when the hypothalamus is activated for one reason (hunger), it is also triggered for the other sensations associated with it (irritability, for example)", comments Gilles Mithieux, director of the Inserm nutrition laboratory "Diabetes and brain”.
Variations in our blood sugar levels, the level of sugar in the blood that allows cells to function, also play a role.
“After eating, at the end of digestion, blood sugar begins to drop.
This creates the feeling of hunger and biologically and mechanically activates the HPA hormone, linked in particular to stress,” explains Gilles Mithieux.
In hunter-gatherer times, when people were hungry, it meant there was danger of death.
It was then necessary to feed quickly, and all this was a source of stress
Gilles Mithieux, research director at Inserm
Why would stress come into play at this precise moment?
Because our brain has remembered a survival reflex dating back to the hunter-gatherer era.
“When men were hungry, it meant that their blood sugar was low and that there was therefore a danger of dying, informs Gilles Mithieux.
So you had to eat quickly, and all of that was a source of stress.”
That's enough to raise your "science" sign to justify that unhappy look thrown at your colleague or your partner, ten minutes before the lunch break.