What Hot Peppers Say About People’s Personalities

The workings of our physical attributes give insights into how our other attributes work. This includes our mental and emotional ones. This includes our personalities. What hot peppers do to our mouths has something to say about how our personalities deal with each other and our world.

It is common for people to comment on the “toughness” of those who can eat very spicy foods. Eating hot peppers is the ultimate challenge of this form of toughness. How much pain can one stand? The truth is quite different though.

What hot peppers do to our mouths says something about our personalities.

The Burning Truth about What Hot Peppers Do

The chemical in hot peppers that mainly causes our mouths to burn is Capsaicin. This chemical triggers pain receptors in our mouths that register heat. They do not raise the temperature though. They just inflict pain.

How much pain they inflict on a person depends on how many such receptors he has. The number varies widely in each of us.

The truth is that we do not need to be tough to eat hot peppers. We just need to have fewer receptors. It is easy to endure pain if we do not feel it. It is not about toughness. It is about insensitivity.

What Hot Peppers Say about Personalities

What hot peppers say about personalities is that we are born with widely different sensitivities, physical, emotional and mental. Some of us are more sensitive than others are.

The problem though is that we often tell sensitive folks that they just have to learn to not let things bother them. That is like forcing someone to eat hot peppers and telling him not to feel the pain. “Tough it out. Learn to not let it you.”

We also cannot expect others to find a hot pepper too hot just because we do. They are not being insensitive to us on purpose. They are not slighting us. That is their personality. They are being they.

Yes, people can learn to eat hotter peppers. There are limits though. What hot peppers say is that the attributes of their personalities vary widely. We are not nearly as alike as we think we are. God and evolution would not have produced such diversity if it were not valuable.