So recently I've had a slight obsession with the powers of hot sauce and hot foods in general. Like many Caucasian young men, I didn't grow up in a household that placed particular value on spicy food. Sure, we had a bottle of Tabasco in the cabinet, maybe some mild salsa in the back of the fridge, and, in more recent years, there was likely the presence of a plastic bottle of Sriracha in the fridge door with the other condiments.

However, I was seldom fed foods that were themselves known for their spicy characteristics. My mother loved the spiciness of certain of Thai foods, but she never made it for the family or forced any of us to eat it. I never knew the splendor of a hot curry or a gumbo as a regular meal. My palate was spared those fiery trials, and I feel that I'm a slightly less-rounded and fulfilled person as a result.

In friend groups, hot sauce has experienced a similar disrespect and failed potential. I recall as a younger teenager that the mega-death-fire-engine sauces that dominated the tops of menus in bold letters at the local wing joints were a coming of age obstacle. It was considered a show of masculinity to be able to intake the hottest of the sauces available while best maintaining one's composure (and you were an adolescent god if you could eat these sauces without the aid of water, milk, or ranch.)

Some people still maintain this feeling about hot sauce well into their adult lives. These same people can usually be identified by their backward, flat-billed hats, their muscle shirts with large bedazzled crucifixes on them, and their insistence that, although it may be the middle of January, their legs don't get cold in basketball shorts.

However, I've experienced a profound reimagining of the potential of these sauces. It began a few months ago when I discovered a web series called "Hot Ones." The concept of the show is simple: famous guests are interviewed by the host, Sean Evans, and together they eat Buffalo wings.

Following their initial introduction, Sean and his guests begin to partake in increasingly hotter wings. The spiciness of the sauces on each wing is measured by a unit called a Scoville. These sauces range from Sriracha (no big deal at a measly 2,200 Scovilles) to the dreaded Blair's Mega Death Sauce with Liquid Rage (this measures in at 550,000 Scovilles; to further put this in perspective, police-grade pepper spray measures in at around 5,300,000 Scovilles).

Now, alluding back to my early teens -- both being egged on to eat spicy foods and egging on my peers to eat spicy foods -- besides the degree of "macho cred" you feel you've acquired by doing this, there's a degree of sadomasochism involved as well.

Some sick part of us enjoys watching our friends cry, sweat, and possibly spew from eating something much hotter than they're used to, especially when they've been talking themselves up; some equally sick part of us enjoys the intensity of the burn ourselves. I believe this is part of the reason that I and thousands of others enjoy "Hot Ones" so much, but this isn't the only attraction for me. I and others have found that the show's interview style commands a sense of immediacy.

When subjected to the effects of capsaicin, the active chemical that your mouth is reacting to when it detects spiciness in food, we feel a sense of urgency. Our mouth processes the heat from spice in a very similar way to how actualfire is processed. You can see this effect progressively becoming acuter on Hot Ones as guests partake in hotter and hotter sauces.

They begin to lose track of their thoughts. The answers they give to Sean's questions tend to not only be more immediate, but they also tend to be more candid, more honest. This particular observation is what got me interested in the effects of these sauces.

My intrigue leads to a personal interest in experimenting with some myself. My band and I have been writing material for a new set of songs that are marked by rage, intensity, discord, and primal instinct. We wanted this to be reflected musically as well as lyrically, so we had been experimenting with unconventional writing methods. One of these was methods was the ingestion of hot sauce while brainstorming and doing quick writes.

My bandmates had zero interest in ingesting super spicy foods, which I respected, so naturally, they became the control in this experiment. I would set the timer for 1 minute to brainstorm, 10 seconds to pick your best ideas, and then five minutes to write. I began as one of the controls myself, writing as I would normally with nothing but the time constraint to affect me. After the 6 minutes was up, we would all read aloud what we had come up with.

Largely, we had achieved the desired effect of immediacy and instinctual writing. The writing came across as pure, base sensation. It was a great place to start developing the kind of lyrics we wanted to write. However, it lacked the frustration and the rage that I really wanted to come across in the lyrical DNA. I turned to the hot sauce.

I experimented by ingesting it through the mouth as well as "bumping" a dot-sized amount of a more mild sauce through my nose (I can already sense the judgment, but just hear me out). The thoughts I found myself writing were everything I had expected and more.

My body was sent into a quasi-survival mode. While my bandmates sat writing, frazzled only by the thought of the clock, I sat there in a frenzy, unable to sit still, untamed by anything around me. I looked like Cosmo Kramer bouncing around in my seat trying to capture all the feelings I was struck with.

I felt a close approximation to pain, anxiety, rage -- all without any of the real world implications that usually follow these sensations. This made for, obviously, a much more interesting and involved writing session and it got me further interested in what other effects and properties might be found in spicy foods.

Reading about it, most of the claims about the benefits of spicy food go back to the presence of that compound I mentioned earlier, capsaicin. It turns out that the same receptors we have in our mouths that react to capsaicin as though it were fire are all over the human body, inside and out.

You've experienced this if you've ever eaten something really spicy and then touched your eyes or some other part of your body to find that that part of you seems to be burning as well. Given that capsaicin is an irritant, this causes various parts of our bodies to experience the jolt from that burn in different ways. Studies find that capsaicin has a quickening effect on our metabolisms (however slight), it can help regulate bowel movements, and has been shown to increase blood flow and lower blood pressure in mammals.

Ever since I've garnered a newfound respect for very spicy food. I always thought it was an overrated sensation and that it was a passing fad, some idiotic way of showing off the hair on your chest. At the very least, I never understood why people liked extremely spicy foods.

My thinking was, "hey, I'm eating for the taste, not the punishment." But the mild pain experienced when consuming Scoville-packed cuisine is rewarded in kind. It's a safe exploration of feelings and sensations we deny ourselves for their scary associations, in spite of the fact that these feelings are completely natural and essential to being human.

And this is what I think has maintained my fascination with "Hot Ones": watching how people we admire deal with these microdoses of pain, anxiety, fear, and immediacy. It's often very telling of the kinds of people that they are. Other times, it just says, "hey, this isn't for this particular person," and that's perfectly fine too.

Still, I maintain that spicy food makes us better people. In its own little way, it's a push out of your comfort zone. It allows us to test our fortitude in a way that's fairly innocuous and it allows us to grow in palate, body, and soul in a way that's small, but not insignificant.

Moreover, it's just a nice bit of flavor once you get used to it.