That Hurts So Good

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Emcee Steve Seabury and his cohost from Guinness World records have found eight willing victims. “Are you guys ready to witness some fuckin’ pain?” Seabury shouts to the crowd of a few hundred onlookers. They cheer–and groan–their approval. This is the climax of the New York City hot sauce expo, held in March near Madison Square Garden.

Nearly 50 vendors fill the hall, and names like Defcon Sauces and Hellfire Hot Sauce should serve as beware-of-free-samples warnings. Still, dozens of tasters holding their bellies line a far wall, their bodies crumpled. Some spit into empty beer cups or stare blankly. Wives and girlfriends stand nearby, rolling their eyes.

And that’s just the human fallout from commercial-grade hot-pepper tinctures. Each of the bold men (and one woman) who take their turn up on the stage has signed a waiver to go much hotter. The challenge: to eat three Carolina Reaper peppers. These firebombs average roughly 1.6 million Scoville Heat Units (SHU), about 300 times hotter than a jalapeno.

The Reaper has been newly crowned as the King of Chiles by Guinness, so whoever can beat the heat today will enter the annals. The Guinness guy covers the ground rules: To contend for the speed record, contestants must eat each pepper separately and then wait 60 seconds without drinking water or hurling.

Things go south almost immediately. The first contestant downs the payload in about 19 seconds, and initially he seems fine. But halfway through the waiting period, he starts jumping up and down, hooting and clamping his hands on top of his head like a cartoon character about to blow. Next is Ted Barrus, known as the Fire Breathing Idiot on his YouTube show, who clocks in at 15.68. His face reddens; beads of sweat break out across his brow. The minute expires, but Barrus doesn’t. He dashes offstage and pukes into a trash can. “I’m alive!” he crows. “I’m high as fuck!”

For the moment, he is the king of pain.

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Our response to painful things is largely automatic: Our central nervous system assesses a threat and pumps out feel-good hormones to keep us functional during the assault. The call and response of pain and pleasure–intense sensation followed by euphoria–is so rewarding that it’s no wonder people go to great lengths and travel many miles to seek it out.

You’ve probably experienced it too. For endurance athletes with shaking, fatigued muscles, this biochemical benefit is the much-heralded runner’s high. After about 30 minutes of intense exercise, specialized cells release endorphins and anandamide, two mood-enhancing chemicals, into the bloodstream to relieve those aching legs. You’ve received a hormonal assist.

Chile heads do that without actual exertion. If you create enough of an “ouch” moment, your cells will pump out a cocktail of adrenaline, endorphins, and dopamine to promote calm and help you function until the unpleasantness passes. You know that the fiery nuking of your mouth is only temporary, but your central nervous system doesn’t. It senses the burn and reacts.

The same thing happens with psychologically alarming situations. Your conscious mind doesn’t wait to find out why you’re terrified: You could be about to fall off a tall building to certain death. Or you could just be strapped into a roller coaster designed to crank up the panic by slowly, ominously climbing a steep ascent–click, click, click–toward a scream-inducing plunge.

Which means your reward responses can be hacked.

The upshot is a new wave of cheap, meaningless MTV-type jackassery. There are chile heads, marathon coaster riders, and horror fans hoping to jump ever higher at the next Saw movie.

In this modern age, men seem obsessed with finding extreme yet paradoxically safe ways to induce that hurting-but-high feeling through the controlled administration of various severe-pain stimulations. Basically, we want to feel as if we’re living on the edge; we just don’t want to die there. The term for that is “benign masochism.” It was coined by Paul Rozin, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who last year began teasing out exactly why we find these strange obsessions so attractive.

In a recent paper in the journal Judgment and Decision Making, Rozin surveyed hundreds of people to find out how their favorite affliction-as-enjoyment agitators stacked up. The stuff of Fear Factor ranked high, but the overall winner was more surprising because it requires actual effort: true physical exhaustion. What’s more, benign masochists don’t like to be just a little burned, scared, or wiped out. The majority, mostly men, seek the level just below the threshold at which the pain becomes intolerable.

That leaves modern masochists at a crossroads: You can pinch pimples, eat stinky cheeses, or take ice-cold showers for an easy, ecstatic feedback loop. Or you can work harder, inviting pain through exercise in pursuit of a legitimate reward.

“I don’t like it when my body is physically aroused and my heart is pounding,” says Rozin, 78, as he relaxes in a recliner in his campus office. “There are exceptions,” he deadpans, “like sex.”

But some scientists believe Rozin hasn’t taken his thesis far enough. They argue that the pain of exhaustion, much like the odd zing from listening to gross jokes or enduring a deep-tissue massage, is just another mind-over-body challenge to be conquered. Push yourself further than you ever imagined, the new argument goes, and you could reap even greater rewards than a mere high.

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Embracing pain in pursuit of tangible gain is an age-old practice. Paleo hunters risked being gored, dismembered, and even dying in pursuit of big, dangerous game. But if they succeeded, they scored the most meat. Provider status leads to more sex partners and offspring, which means risk-survival genes are passed down the generations.

We’re not eating mastodons for dinner anymore. But evolutionary theorists tell us that even as societies became more agrarian, another outlet for pain seekers emerged–close-quarters combat. Every society, from the ancient Roman Empire to the modern Western world, has sent men into battle, each with his own fight-or-flight complex. Aside from the physiological payoff, survival was its own reward.

After technological advancements brought soldiers back from the front lines, these theorists say, men began seeking recreational (i.e., benignly masochistic) ways to suffer and survive. Today, there’s Tough Mudder; this largely male event uses endurance obstacles with names like “Electroshock Therapy” to bring on the fear and actual pain of being zapped by live wires, and “Walk the Plank” to tap into the terror of cliff jumping from way too high.

More than 1.3 million people have paid to endure Tough Mudder since the series launched in 2010. The goal, says CEO and cofounder Will Dean, was to meet men’s more “primitive” urges: “I think it’s fascinating that modern life, for all its comforts and perks, creates an itch we need to scratch.”

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At some point we all hit the wall, the supposed limit to what we can physically achieve. We are out of breath. Our muscles burn. We need to stop–now. But what if we didn’t stop? What if these painful symptoms were actually signs that we’re finally making progress toward our goals? Wouldn’t we seek more of that sort of pain? Shouldn’t we?

Researchers have a problem studying peak exhaustion: Asking athletes to go to potentially harmful extremes for the sake of science isn’t ethical. The closest approximation happens in the lab of Timothy Noakes, M.D., D.Sc., Ph.D., a professor of exercise and sports science at University of Cape Town, South Africa. His work space features a sealable chamber outfitted with exercise bikes, treadmills, and climate controllers that can mimic any heat and humidity combination imaginable.

Over the past decade, Dr. Noakes has asked hundreds of runners and cyclists to hop on treadmills or stationary bikes inside his climatic test tube. He outfits his human lab rats with heart rate monitors, electromyography cuffs that can track the power output and electrical activity of core muscle groups, and rectal thermometers to measure core body temperature. As if the anal probe weren’t enough, Dr. Noakes jacks up the environmental harshness and plays psychological tricks.

When your surroundings are hot or the air is hard to breathe, your central nervous system cues its own anticipatory response. Athletes involuntarily slow down, claiming to be in distress despite normal vital signs. Dr. Noakes challenges them in other ways too. In some cases he’d tell runners to run 5 kilometers and then, as they near the finish line, ask them to keep going. Many weren’t prepared for that mentally, so they would claim to be exhausted. When they continued on, however, they experienced no precipitous drop in performance.

Evidently, perceived effort depends on a subjective appraisal of pacing; but most of us can still be tricked into giving more despite the pain. Since 1996, Dr. Noakes has combined this data to refine the controversial Central Governor Theory. Essentially, the theory states that we all have a subconscious pain threshold that is more emotional than physical. Pepper eaters can withstand the Scoville assault because they know the pain will pass, leaving no permanent damage. The same may be true of physical exhaustion: You can endure way more than you think, for an even longer time, and live to brag about it later.

Eduardo Fontes, Ph.D., an exercise professor at Catholic University of Brasilia, has worked with Dr. Noakes to develop an ergometer, a stationary bicycle wired to a load generator and an fMRI machine. As physical effort ramps up, Fontes notes, activity decreases in a person’s frontal lobe–the brain’s command and control section. At the same time, it increases in the central limbic region–emotion central. So when we’re physically stressed, we are less rational and more emotional. If an athlete allows his emotions to overwhelm him during a long run, he’ll fail. If he can remain rational and work through the exertion, he’s more likely to keep going.

For at least one athlete, embracing the Central Governor Theory has paid off. In 2008, Ryan Sandes, a surveyor from Cape Town, entered the Gobi Desert run, a seven-day, 155-mile race through one of the hottest regions on earth. Sandes had no specialized training. In fact, he’d run only one marathon, which he barely trained for. But he knew Dr. Noakes’s work and believed in himself. So he hit the trail. Sandes won his debut event in the Gobi and went on to claim top finishing spots in the other 4 Deserts Race Series events, which includes crossings in the Sahara, the Antarctic, and Chile’s Atacama desert. Now a pro, Sandes invents his own ridiculously uncomfortable challenges to test himself.

“I know I’m going to feel like death sometimes and not want to keep going, but you can ride those moments out,” Sandes says. “If you can hold it together mentally, then physically you’ll be okay. You realize you can deal with this. Your body will be fine. Just keep running.”

That makes sense to Dr. Noakes. “Discomfort is in your mind. It has nothing to do with reality,” he says.

In the U.S. Army, being all you can be requires maintaining this kind of mental control in the face of pain. According to a Green Beret who helps run the selection processes for the Special Forces and wishes to remain anonymous, that initial job screening includes surviving a 21-day orienteering expedition. Throughout the ordeal, candidates must stay sharp despite sleep deprivation, doing things like solving algebra problems on the fly and alphabetizing every country they can remember. The point is to make sure that these men can endure a pain trifecta–sleeplessness, hunger, and physical exhaustion–by recognizing that all three are merely uncomfortable, not life threatening. That mental discipline allows them to, say, tiptoe up to a terrorist’s compound without blasting every cat that yelps from a garbage heap.

The trainer notes that those who do the best generally exhibit what graduating commandos refer to as the “uncle effect.” In short, they are willing to sacrifice themselves to save a very extended family: all of us. That means pushing on despite all the pain because they are serving a higher purpose. Their country, yes, but also something more personal. Green Berets don’t quit, because that would mean ultimately failing a mission. And the most important mission of all is being bigger than the pain and never failing your expectations for yourself.

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Back at the hot pepper contest, the fifth contestant, Russ Todd, a lanky 42-year-old engineer who drove in from Allentown, Pennsylvania, steps up to the hotplate. Unlike some of the competitors before him, Todd isn’t sponsored by a hot-pepper company. At least not yet.

The judge gives the nod and Todd polishes off the peppers in 12.23 seconds, staring ahead with zenlike composure. Crowd favorite Barrus looks shocked.

Afterward, Todd says: “I expected to finish, but I didn’t expect to win it.” His strategy? “It’s like meditation. You lose yourself in the challenge ahead.” Turns out, he’s also a long-distance runner.

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That Hurts So Good