Does Instagram lower your testosterone? (Newsletter) (Patreon)

"A dozen millennia ago or so, an adventurous soul managed to lop off a surly bull's testicles and thus invented behavioral endocrinology. ...[the experiment] certainly generated an influential finding--something or other come out of the testes that helps to make males such aggressive pains in the ass."
-Robert Sapolsky's "The Trouble with Testosterone"

Testosterone depends on your social skills?
This interesting paper titled "The role of testosterone in social interaction" suggests that it would be more accurate to say testosterone makes men more aggressive if they feel their status is being challenged. This reminds me of how some men will literally confirm whether the person is challenging their status or not with the good ol' line you think you're better than me?
Perhaps someone who has relatively high testosterone will use the line "you think you're better than me?" when they feel their status is challenged, whereas someone with low testosterone will just sulk. Then again, depending on the social circle you belong to, you might think that interacting with someone so blatantly aggressive would actually lower your status so you either ignore the person or do whatever is necessary to get them to go away. On that note the new hotshot addition to the salesforce might raise their status by cleverly quipping back to the boss, but would probably lower their status if they got into an argument with a 13 year old.

That paper also says that "Maintaining a high status position requires an increased sensitivity for aversive events and impending social threats, particularly those that challenge the high social status of an individual.

As we show below, testosterone appears to be able to influence such processes; in particular, it appears to confer high motivational drive, low fearfulness and high stress resilience, either directly or via interactions with other hormones and neurotransmitter systems."

Sounds like having high testosterone is more fun than having low testosterone...

Perceived social rank affects testosterone
Several studies suggest unsurprisingly that, In a number of primates, dominant males appear to consistently maintain higher testosterone levels than subordinates.[R] And in Rams, position in the herd is essentially determined by testosterone (the higher the testosterone, the closer to the front of the herd they can be, giving better access to food and females)[R, R2]

So, since testosterone has so much to do with social status and your perceived ranking, this makes for some interesting questions: Does your testosterone change based on where you are? For example let's say you're not very well liked and your performance is bad at your job, but you are the top dog at the local badminton club. Is your testosterone lower during a day of work versus during a badminton session?

We humans are really good at determining social rank and in fact one theory is that the reason our brains needed to get so big was to keep up with processing all the fine nuances that contribute to understanding social dynamics. This is called the "social intelligence hypothesis. In that case, do we incorporate "digital" people into our calculations of status hierarchies?
If we're following a bunch of high status good looking muscular dudes hanging out on private planes on instagram, do we begin to incorporate them into our mental status model? That is, would men's testosterone be higher if they had no idea about "superior" lifestyles like Dan Bilzerian's?

"Hey Jeff, you might think you're the top dog in this town, but I went to the town over and they have this thing called the internet and it turns out the actual top is way higher and toppest dog is way more top dog than you."

P.S. Music lowers testosterone? [R]
Maybe the music they used was too chill. Listening to rock or metal gets me more aggressively amped for my workout.

----Re: My Caffeine video----

One side effect of caffeine I didn't talk about in the video was needing to pee a lot. This kind of worried me because I would be waking up in the middle of the night 3 times to pee and was worried I had some kind of prostate issue... However after stopping caffeine, this went away. Actually this was one of the reasons I decided to stop drinking caffeine in the first place - it was so frustrating to keep waking up in the middle of the night so many times that I started looking into it and came across something saying caffeine could be the problem. Too bad I can't find that specific article, but this study jives with what I was experiencing. Essentially it's saying that you develop the urge to pee earlier after drinking caffeine - the threshold for the amount of liquid necessary to give you the urge to pee is lowered. Not only was I waking up a lot at night, I just had to ...pee all the time. This was enough to have me go get checked out at the doctor to see if I had a UTI or some transmitted disease (I didn't.)

I was actually tapering off coffee while editing the coffee video, and now that I'm completely off coffee I've once again confirmed that this excess peeing comes and goes with my coffee habit. I doubt this excess urination happens with many other people, I've been exploring anecdotes of how caffeine makes people feel but don't remember seeing other people talking about it. My guess would be that it has something to do with upregulation of adenosine receptors in the kidney.    

Another interesting thing about the genetic differences with responses to caffeine is that specifically the T allele of the SNP rs5751876 on the Adenosine 2A receptor gene has been associated with panic disorder and has "furthermore been observed to significantly influence anxiety response after caffeine as well as amphetamine."[R] Looking at my 23andMe raw data, my rs5751876 SNP is listed as "CT," yet this study explains that "...caffeine increased anxiety in the TT genotype group but not in the CC or CT genotype groups"[R]. So, at least for this SNP, that increase in anxiety from coffee shouldn't apply to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (This is another reason to not always look at research papers to decide how something makes you feel)  

A couple people commented that coffee / caffeine suppresses their hunger rather than increase it like I was saying in the video. Actually, I agree with this. When I was drinking coffee, I would set my intermittent fasting schedule to where the appetite suppressant "boost" of coffee would make it easier to get through those last 90 minutes of fasting. Yes, caffeine / coffee suppresses appetite at least temporarily.  However, in my experience (as stressed in the video, different people react very differently to caffeine and coffee),  what seemed to be happening was that my normal appetite when coffee wore off was higher than usual. Though I did experience the appetite suppressant effect right after I drank it. At least for me, coffee isn't a free anti-lunch. While I do get a temporary appetite suppressant boost, the downside is that I have to pay for that with interest at a later point with a bigger appetite.