Learn about the pros and cons of exercising on an empty stomach. Plus: why sleeping with your ex doesn’t mean you’re getting back together. You’ll also learn how researchers measure and quantify curiosity, with help from special guests Jon Cohen, Chief Research Officer at SurveyMonkey, and Spencer Harrison, an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD. In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: Should You Exercise on an Empty Stomach? — https://curiosity.im/2DNuGki Sleeping with Your Ex Doesn't Mean You're Getting Back Together — https://curiosity.im/2DOatLo Bosses Don't Encourage Curiosity as Much as They Think They Do — https://curiosity.im/2E41lCu Please tell us about yourself and help us improve the show by taking our listener survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/curiosity-listener-survey If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Learn about the pros and cons of exercising on an empty stomach. Plus: why sleeping with your ex doesn’t mean you’re getting back together. You’ll also learn how researchers measure and quantify curiosity, with help from special guests Jon Cohen, Chief Research Officer at SurveyMonkey, and Spencer Harrison, an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
Please tell us about yourself and help us improve the show by taking our listener survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/curiosity-listener-survey
If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom
Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/exercising-on-an-empty-stomach-how-to-measure-curiosity-w-surveymonkey-and-insead-and-effects-of-relapsing-with-your-ex
CODY GOUGH: Hi. We've got stories and special guests to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. From curiositydotcom, I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today, you'll learn whether you should exercise on an empty stomach, how it affects you when you hook back up with your ex, and how researchers measure curiosity with some help from Jon Cohen from SurveyMonkey and Spencer Harrison from INSEAD.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity.
ASHLEY HAMER: Should you exercise on an empty stomach? There's an idea called fasted cardio, which says working out before breakfast is a magic bullet for burning fat. And today, I'll tell you what science says about it.
CODY GOUGH: Can I tell you straight up how happy I am that you wrote about this? I'm kind of neurotic about my exercise routine. And I feel like I shouldn't be eating around the time I exercise. And that stops me from exercising. But I shouldn't let it stop me because of what you wrote about.
ASHLEY HAMER: Totally. I feel like if there's one lesson about exercise that everyone should know, is just calm down. Just take it easy. Don't worry about the rules. As long as you exercise, you're good. That's good. So here's the basic idea behind fasted cardio. When you sleep, your metabolism keeps on ticking. So when you wake up and exercise before you eat, you've got less glucose in your muscles to use as fuel. That means your body shifts gears to burn the next best thing. Fat.
And multiple studies have concluded this exact thing. Exercise while fasting does burn more fat than exercising after you've eaten. Studies have also found that exercising fasted helps your body rev up its fat-burning abilities on a molecular and genetic level, which could make it easier to burn fat over time.
But that's not the whole story. For one thing, your body will eventually adapt to what you're doing and shift the rate at which it burns fat and glucose or carbs. And according to some experts, there's also a risk that your body will shift its fuel source too far from glucose and start burning protein, which will make exercise recovery harder. All of these studies have some problems though because most of them only looked at short term effects. And they didn't even all control for calorie intake.
Studies looking into the long term effects tell a different story. A couple of studies from 2013 and 2014 each had two groups of women work out on the same fitness plan with one group exercising while fasted, and the other group exercising after they ate. At the end of each study, both groups had lost the same amount of weight, mostly fat.
Overall, aside from what some professional bodybuilders say works for them, there's not much evidence to support the idea that exercising on an empty stomach helps you burn any more fat than exercising after breakfast. The key, like with any exercise regimen, is to do whatever makes you more likely to stay with it. Like what I said before, when it comes to exercise, there are a lot of rules. But there's really only one you need to follow. If it works for you, do it.
CODY GOUGH: This next story is about breakups and how you might interact with your ex. Quick note that this story covers some adult themes. We'll keep it as PG as we can. But now is the time to skip ahead if you're listening with your kids, and you don't think they're ready to learn about this type of relationship science. For everyone else, I think we can all relate to this story.
ASHLEY HAMER: Ashley, have you ever had a friend be like, I'm just going to meet up with my ex tonight, and we're going to hang out, as in hook up, one last time before it's really over.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yes. I have definitely had friends like that. And I've definitely known other people who have definitely done that for sure.
CODY GOUGH: It's such a ubiquitous thing. We've all been there.
ASHLEY HAMER: Not us.
CODY GOUGH: Of course not. Never. No. Not us. But there's a kind of a stigma around it, right? Because what do you say as soon as that friend says they're going to do that? You say nope. Bad idea.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. Like don't do it. You're going to get back together for like a week. And then you're going to hate yourself. And then you're just going to have another breakup all over again and all the same heartbreak.
CODY GOUGH: Yep. You're going to catch feels.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yep.
CODY GOUGH: But there's some science behind this that shows that it's really not that bad if you and your ex kind of relapse a little bit. The worry that you might kind of catch feelings and want to get back together with your ex is rooted in science because it keeps you in what researchers call the fiery limbo stage of a relationship. That's basically when you've broken up, but you still share feelings for each other. It's like the fifth out of five stages of a relationship cycle.
Well, a new study suggests the overall effect of hooking up won't harm ex-partners too much in the long run, at least according to Stephanie Spielman from Wayne State University. She designed two experiments to measure the effects of sleeping with your ex, focused on participants who had recently been through a breakup.
One study had participants fill out questionnaires designed to measure their emotional well-being, how attached they were to their exes, and whether or not they had tried sleeping with their exes again. And the other study targeted people who had gone through a breakup in the last four months. And it sorted out the participants who had either attempted or who had actually had intimate contact on any level with their exes.
Well, here are the results. Yes. Hooking up with your ex will increase your sense of emotional attachment to them. But that wasn't associated with any negative feelings overall. As in it dispelled the myth that you're automatically wracked with shame or guilt for hooking up with an ex. The most interesting part might be that hooking back up didn't actually seem to affect how easily or quickly the participants processed their feelings and got over the relationship. So if you find yourself feeling embarrassed over a relapse with a former partner, don't stress out about it too much. You're not necessarily sliding back into old habits.
Speaking of sleeping, today's episode is sponsored by Purple Mattress. Better sleep, better you. I get more work done and this podcast sounds a lot better when I am well rested, especially if I got a good night's sleep on a Purple Mattress.
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CODY GOUGH: You and anyone else who sleeps on your mattress are going to love purple. And right now, Curiosity Daily listeners will get a free purple pillow with the purchase of a mattress. That's in addition to the great free gifts they're offering sitewide. Just text curious to 474747.
ASHLEY HAMER: The only way to get this free pillow is to text curious to 474747.
CODY GOUGH: That's c-u-r-i-o-u-s to 474747. Message and data rates may apply.
ASHLEY HAMER: We got a question from Alex in Atlanta who says he's curious about efforts to measure curiosity. How do researchers quantify curiosity? Great question, Alex. And we got a great answer in a recent interview we did about curiosity in the workplace.
CODY GOUGH: Jon Cohen is the chief research officer at SurveyMonkey, and Spencer Harrison is an associate professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD. They collaborated on a recent study to find out what's happened to our curiosity, both at work and at home. I asked them, how can you measure something like curiosity? For their study, John said it all started with asking questions.
JON COHEN: Curiosity and question-asking are not identical, but we explored what are some of the barriers that people feel, particularly at the lower levels, to asking questions in the workplace. There are a couple of barriers that pop out in our survey about question-asking. One is they don't think they get real answers when they ask questions. Or kind of another big one that pops up is a fear of looking stupid. Question-asking is a risk-taking activity. And if there's no reward at the end of the day, why take the risk?
SPENCER HARRISON: Yeah. And to build on Jon's point there, there's a variety of different ways that we can try to quantify curiosity. And people have used a host of different methods, including things like measuring infant's facial expressions, the shape of their eyes, the shape of their mouths, how they respond to surprises. We've also used self-reported personality tests. And I think we're all kind of familiar with those sorts of survey instruments that people might have.
And then more recently, because a lot of what we do is online and is text-based, we can also look at the narrative structure that people use when they're trying to be curious. And I think that that's one of the interesting things as well. I mean, not just things like question marks or like question-asking behavior, but people actually writing the words, I am curious, and then kind of what follows from that.
Because often, because curiosity can feel counter-normative, we have to announce that we're being curious. In a sense, we are actually announcing, I'm right about to break the rules, so give me a little bit of a buffer here, so that I can try something out. And so you see that coming up as a tool that people will use to kind of create space for them to be curious in online forums or via email, these sorts of things. And we're just beginning to kind of have the tools to begin to really look at how people are narrating their way into being curious as well. But generally speaking, the more curious we are the data suggests that it does lead to positive outcomes for individuals.
ASHLEY HAMER: Again, you first heard from Jon Cohen from SurveyMonkey, followed by Spencer Harrison from INSEAD. We posted our full, uncut interview with them for free on our Patreon page at patreon.com/curiositydotcom, all spelled out.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. This is just one of lots of free treats we like to share with you on Patreon when we can't fit them into this podcast. So whether you're contributing or not, you sure to follow us on Patreon at patreon.com/curiositydotcom.
ASHLEY HAMER: Join us again tomorrow with the award-winning Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Ashley Hamer.
CODY GOUGH: And I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: Stay curious.
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