Sometimes a Bad Mood Is Just Hungry

11:30. The morning went fine. Coffee, the crossword, a call to your sister. You're in a perfectly good mood.

12:15. You meant to make lunch, but there was the laundry, and then the mail.

1:05. The neighbor's dog has started up. It does this. It's a dog. But today it sounds personally aimed.

1:40. The pharmacy puts you on hold, and the hold music is the same eight notes over and over, and the woman who finally answers is, you're fairly sure, being slow on purpose.

2:10. Somebody left the cupboard door open. Again. Is it really so much to ask?

2:25. A cheese sandwich.

3:00. The dog is just a dog.

That afternoon even has a word now, hangry, which started as a joke and ended up in the dictionary. The joke stands on solid ground. When people check in on their phones several times a day about how hungry they are and how they feel, hunger tracks their irritation closely enough to account for roughly a third of the ups and downs.

But the interesting part of the afternoon isn't the hunger. It's that at 1:40, nobody thinks, I'm hungry. Everybody thinks, she's slow on purpose.

Hunger rarely announces itself. It just makes the rest of the world look worse.

There's one small thing that seems to take the sting out. In one experiment, hungry people sat through a computer task that crashed on purpose, and then were blamed for the crash. They came out crankier and harsher in their judgments, all except the ones who had first stopped to notice their own feelings. Same hunger, same crash, same blame. They didn't sour.

Noticing doesn't fill the stomach. It just seems to keep the stomach from writing the review.

So the most useful question of a cranky afternoon may be the plainest one: when did I last eat? Thirsty, cold and tired belong on the list too. The body has a habit of making its complaints in the language of mood.

Not every bad mood is a sandwich away, of course. Some days have earned their grumpiness. A temper that has been short for a long stretch, though, or that doesn't feel like you, is worth mentioning to your doctor.