The Impact of Hunger on Decision-Making: A New Study

You know how bad your brain can get when you're hangry. Even if you don't, Snickers has long made a series of video ads demonstrating just how not ourselves we can be when we need to eat. Hunger doesn't simply make us irritable or weak, though: According to new research, it can send our lives into a tailspin.

Psychologists at Scotland's University of Dundee have just released a study looking into how being hungry or full can affect the quality of our decision-making. It turns out the results are pretty significant: Not only does hungry make a person more impatient, but it tends to make us settle for less just so we can get what we want sooner.

If this sounds like the famous marshmallow experiment to you, in which children who can resist eating one marshmallow now are given two marshmallows after a set amount of time, you're not wrong. What's new is that the Dundee psychologists have discovered that we make similarly non-rational decisions while hungry even when our choices aren't related to food. In that case, it may pay to eat well before, say, signing a lease or picking a new pair of shoes. Being satiated could mean the difference between blisters or untenable rent and a much more comfortable future.

That might mean ducking into a restaurant, if a snack won't keep your hanger at bay. Luckily, you won't have to guess on wait times — the internet, as always, has you more or less covered.