You Can Raise Your Testosterone Levels Just By Acting Aggressive

Recently researchers at the University of Michigan had conducted a very interesting experiment. They wanted to see if when a person merely starts acting in an aggressive manner towards another person, to wield power over that person. Could that or would that influence an increase in their testosterone levels. Boy were they shocked with the results! The experiment showed that there was more of an increase in the testosterone levels in women, with up to a 10% increase, and in men it increased 3 to 4%.

 Gizmodo reports: We’ve known for a while that testosterone is associated with aggressive behavior. But a fascinating new experiment reveals that these hormones are a two-way street: Simply acting aggressive can also raise levels of testosterone, in both women and men.

You may know testosterone as the “male hormone,” because it produces facial hair and deeper voices in boys going through puberty. For decades, scientists didn’t question its status as a male hormone because they found higher levels of testosterone in adult men, too. But recent studies reveal that the situation is more complicated. Testosterone is present in adult women, and it seems to be crucial for women’s sense of well-being and sexual health. So if testosterone is important for adult men and women, why do we see more of it in men?

It seems like an obvious question, but nobody had actually thought to ask it until a group of researchers at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor came up with an incredible experiment to find out. Psychologist Sari van Anders, who led the study, has spent a number of years researching how social factors can affect our hormones. She and her colleagues wondered whether social pressure to behave “like a man” or “in a ladylike way” could be affecting hormone levels.

Gizmodo tells how the experiment consisted of a group of actors having to display power over another person, even going as far as reading scripts and measuring testosterone levels from saliva samples after having had to fire someone. 

As mentioned earlier, the difference in the testosterone increase was much more dramatic in women than in men.

NYMAG writes: When women simply act as if they are powerful, this, apparently, is enough to cause a measurable physiological change in their bodies, and a substantial one at that. Acting like a boss (literally — we’ll get to that) increased women’s testosterone levels by 10 percent on average, according to a fascinating new paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

Testosterone is typically associated with men, and for obvious reasons. Men produce 10 to 20 times more of it than women, and in men healthy levels of the hormone is linked to things like a higher sex drive and better sperm production. But it’s also thought to play a role in the way menbehave, in that men with higher testosterone levels tend to act moreaggressively than men with lower levels of the hormone. But this new research poses an interesting question: Do men act powerful because they have more testosterone — or do men have more testosterone preciselybecause men are typically conditioned to act more powerfully?

Van Anders and her colleagues also measured the actors’ testosterone (via their spit) before and after their monologues. Their results showed thatboth scenarios increased testosterone levels in both men and women, but the increase in women was particularly striking. For men, the spike was smallish, around 3 or 4 percent on average. But the women in their study saw their testosterone levels increase 10 percent on average.

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