The Psychology of Why We’re Drawn to Spicy Food and Other Dalliances With Pain

It’s 100° outside. The sun is baking the back of your neck ... it’s going to hurt later. You’re standing in line with your friends, you’re sweating, you’re hungry, you’ve finished your drink. Finally, it’s your turn. The person across the table hands you a tortilla chip or a plastic spoon laden with a chunky or smooth or silky or oily concoction. Maybe it’s bright red or nuclear green or yellow or concerningly black. You take a bite and boom! Your palate explodes with pain.

Ooooh yeah, baby. That’s the good stuff. The eye-watering, esophagus-scorching, burns-while-entering-and-exiting good stuff. Now your heart is racing and your tongue is on fire as the capsaicin works its magic. What are we doing here, babe? Why are we doing this to ourselves?

Well, even though there’s no literal fire, the capsaicin from the peppers in the hot sauce binds to pain receptors in the mouth. They send signals to the brain that say “Ack! Fire!” The brain responds to this perceived threat by releasing endorphins, the hormones responsible for producing feelings of pleasure and euphoria, like a runner’s high. In other words, for some folks, the pain is offset by a subsequent feeling of pleasure. And that racing pulse, pouring sweat, and fight-or-flight sensation? Some people are really into that.

“Endorphin is a portmanteau of endogenous morphine, so it’s like your own home-brew feel-good system,” says Leigh Cowart, author of Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose. “The fact that your body has a reward system ready to go once you’re suffering can lead to humans making some pretty interesting decisions about what is fun for them.”

Psychologist Paul Rozin suggests that humans like to engage in “benign masochism,” the enjoyment of negative sensations that are harmless, like watching sad movies. When people eat spicy food, they know that the discomfort is short-lived and isn’t an actual threat. This knowledge allows them to experience the sensation as a thrill rather than something to be avoided.

“There’s a full range of human experience and a full range of emotions that we get to experience in life,” says Dr. Art Markman, a cognitive scientist who is also vice provost for academic affairs at UT-Austin, and one of the hosts of KUT podcast Two Guys on Your Head. “Most of life we live in a fairly narrow range of those experiences. If you think about your daily work life, your daily home life, generally speaking, you might be happy, but you’re not elated. You might be disappointed about something, but you’re not incredibly sad. You might be frustrated by something, but you’re not going to get really, really angry, right? We construct situations that allow us to [experience those extremes], whether it’s following a sports team and then going to a sporting event, or watching a scary movie in order to experience a frightening situation.”

Going ham on some hot sauce, then, is a way to safely push boundaries and challenge ourselves, engendering a sense of accomplishment, as well as earning bragging rights and high fives for our ability to handle the heat. And the communal aspect of enduring a palate-searing salsa can bring people closer together.

“There was a study out of Oxford in 2010 that found that moving the body in sync with other people can increase your pain threshold,” says Cowart. “It’s very hard to describe to someone exactly what you’re feeling when you’re in pain. But if you’re eating a really hot pepper and someone else is eating a really hot pepper or hot sauce, then there’s this bond that happens, just in that moment where you’re both suffering in the same way.”

Markman concurs: “There’s a lot of things like that that are more fun in groups, right? Going to see a horror movie alone is a qualitatively different experience than doing it with a bunch of friends in a crowded theatre. And these kinds of things can create a bit of a bonding experience. 'Hey, remember that time that it was 170 degrees and we went out and we had that [sauce that] was unmeasurable on the Scoville scale?’”

And, thanks to those aforementioned endorphins, long after the pain subsides, what remains is a fond memory of a good time spent with your pals, which is far more valuable than any trinket or bauble. It’s how we spend our time on Earth with our homies, not the stuff we collect. “If you think about the research on the ways of spending money that make you happy, turns out, buying stuff doesn’t generally make you happy,” says Markman. “In the long run, it is your memory that really ultimately counts, not your experience in the moment.”

So, why do we torment ourselves with spicy foods? Because, deep down, we’re thrill-seekers. Life is more fun when we tiptoe out to the edge every once in a while. And nothing brings people together like a shared “I can’t feel my tongue” moment as tears stream down our faces. Hurts so good, indeed.