What really is "food rage"? "Hangriness" explained

Have you ever found yourself mindlessly munching on a bag of crisps while watching TV, or making a beeline for the fridge after an argument with a friend or a tough day in the office? Emotional eating is nothing new. In fact, it is quite common and normal. It occurs when we use food to regulate strong emotions like anger, stress, and sadness. And while it’s acceptable to indulge occasionally – after all, food is also a way for humans to connect, and the sharing of meals has long been a part of our history as a means of celebration, courtship, and more – emotional eating becomes a problem when it is the only or first coping mechanism we resort to in order to deal with our feelings. 

Have you ever heard the term “gut instinct”, or the phrase “trust your gut”? Some people call it a sixth sense, and others call it a hunch. Whatever your chosen phrase for it, it’s that feeling you get when you just know something. When some type of impulse deep in your gut tells you that you don’t need to think about something more, or mull over your opinion一you can almost feel it tugging there, like some sort of unseen force guiding your intuition.

Imagine that you're driving a car. Suddenly, something's wrong: a dog has walked out onto the road in front of you. At that moment, every other thought clears from your mind, and an intense feeling rushes through you: the impulse to swerve instantly. 

Anger can bring out the worst in us. It can cause relationship rifts to grow greater, find fits of furiousness fueling violence, and unnecessarily escalate a situation from minimal annoyance to intense rage. But anger is still a normal (and mostly healthy) emotion, and learning to control it can help us to limit loathsome damage. 

Emotions are an important part of life. Sometimes they can be difficult to experience, let alone understand, but the capacity to feel the full spectrum of emotions – from anger to joy and everything in between – is a huge part of what makes us human. It’s also an important instinct for our survival: when we’re babies, expressing emotion is our only method of communication when something isn’t right. As infants, we scream with rage or cry with grief when our needs aren’t being met. As adults, the same notion is true一except the conditioning that comes with language and cognition can leave us quite disconnected from our feelings, and unable to recognize what our emotional responses are trying to tell us. Thankfully, there are some methods we can use to try and figure it all out, such as Plutchik’s Emotion Wheel. Named after Robert Plutchik, the psychologist who came up with the concept, it’s a tool for improving emotional literacy, so that we can learn to become more in tune with our feelings.

Imagine you're bankrupt all of a sudden due to an unexpected emergency that you can't possibly control. Perhaps it could be that one of your family members is suffering from chronic health issues and requires your help with additional medical expenses, or it could be that there's catastrophic damage to your house that needs you to instantly make a huge financial sacrifice to renovate the property. If in just a few days, you could lose most of the money and assets to which you have dedicated most of your life and time, how would you feel? You would probably experience various negative emotions from depression and rage to grief and despair. Maybe you’d also blame the world for the misfortune, finding pain in how helpless you feel, since what’s happening appears to be something that you have no power to control, no matter how desperately you wish that things could have turned out differently.