You know that feeling where if you don’t get something in your stomach right this very minute you are going to chuck the entire contents of this dresser against the wall, so help me? Being hungry can make you extra angry, say scientists who are doing us all a huge favor by validating the phrase “hangry,” meaning you should have a snack if you’re in a spat with your significant other to counter that phenomenon.

In a study released yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers propose that low blood sugar can make spouses touchy or, as I often put it when it’s past my usual meal time and I’m stuck on the train, a combination of hungry and angry — hangry, as noted by one Ohio State University psychology researcher.

“We need glucose for self-control,” the lead author of the study tells the Associated Press. “Anger is the emotion that most people have difficulty controlling.”

During the study, researchers monitored 107 married couples for three weeks, measuring their blood sugar glucose levels each night and asking participants to stick pins in a voodoo doll representing their spouse. For those unfamiliar, the more pins there are in the doll, the angrier the person sticking them in there is.

And lo and behold, the lower the blood sugar levels, the pricklier the dolls were — people with the lowest blood sugar scores pushed in twice as many pins as those with the highest levels.

But it’s not like we’re all itching to stick it to our significant others. Around 70% of the time, no one put any pins into the dolls at all, for an average of only a bit more than one pin a night per person in the entire study.

Then there are the very hangry — three people put all 51 pins in at once, with one person doing that twice.

Researchers suggest that gnoshing on a candy bar or some other snack might be a good idea if you’re about to talk about a titchy topic, but fruits and veggies are always best for keeping up blood sugar levels in the long run.

Again, this is one study, so if chocolate doesn’t fix things, there might be other avenues you’ll need to explore.

Study: Snack Might Help Avoid Fight With Spouse [Associated Press]

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