Something You Should Know
What Really Makes Someone Attractive? & When Work Takes Over Your Life
02 Apr 2026
Chapter 1: What does sugar really do to your body?
Today on Something You Should Know, you hear how sugar is bad for you, but just how bad is it? Then human attraction, chemistry, what are the traits that really matter?
Research has shown that someone's voice is involved in attraction, their body language, their facial symmetry, their social network, who they're friends with. We do know that smell is important and all sorts of other things. We know that dance is involved.
Also, when you kiss someone, which way do you turn your head? It depends on who you're kissing and why stress in the workplace is getting worse. And it is getting worse.
And that's actually ironic because the awareness of work-life balance and how damaging stress is and all the efforts that have been made to reduce it have seen the opposite result. It keeps going up.
Chapter 2: How does human attraction work according to science?
There's something about the current workplace which is very, very pressured.
All this today on Something You Should Know.
Hey, it's Hillary Frank from The Longest Shortest Time, an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. We talk about things like sex ed, birth control, pregnancy, bodily autonomy, and of course, kids of all ages. But you don't have to be a parent to listen.
Chapter 3: What factors influence who we feel attracted to?
If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories about human relationships and, you know, periods, The Longest Shortest Time is for you. Find us in any podcast app or at LongestShortestTime.com.
Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
How many times have you heard someone say that sugar is bad for you? But how is it bad for you? What does it do to you? That's a good question, and the one we're going to start with today on this episode. I'm Mike Carruthers. This is Something You Should Know. So yes, sugar is bad for you, but maybe not for the reasons you might think. It's not just empty calories.
The real problem is how added sugar, especially in drinks, affects your body. When you consume a lot of sugar, particularly in liquid form like soda or juice, your body processes it very quickly, leading to spikes in blood sugar and insulin. And over time, that can increase the risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and fatty liver disease. And here's the kicker.
Sugar doesn't fill you up, so you can consume hundreds of sugary calories without feeling satisfied, which makes you likely to overeat. Researchers at Harvard say that a large portion of added sugar in the American diet comes from sugary beverages alone, making them one of the biggest contributors to these health risks.
So sugar itself isn't poison, but the way we consume it today, that's where the real problem begins. And that is something you should know. Human attraction is one of the most powerful forces in our lives. It drives who we notice, who we desire, who we fall in love with, and ultimately who we choose to build a life with.
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Chapter 4: How has the perception of work-life balance changed?
And yet, for something so fundamental, it can feel completely mysterious. Why are you drawn to one person but not another? Why does chemistry spark with some people but not with other people? And is there actually a science behind who we love, or is it all just chance? If there is a pattern, understanding it could change everything.
How you date, how you choose, and even the kind of relationship you end up in. My guest studies exactly that. Dr. Justin Garcia is an evolutionary biologist and a leading researcher on sex and relationships. He's executive director and senior scientist at the Kinsey Institute.
He's chief scientific advisor to MATCH, and he's author of The Intimate Animal, The Science of Sex, Fidelity, and Why We Live and Die for Love.
Chapter 5: What are the main causes of workplace stress today?
Hi Justin, welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi, I'm thrilled to be here. Thanks so much for having me. So as somebody who studies love and sex and relationships, here's something I've always wondered about, and you're the perfect person to ask this. What is it that makes us attracted to one person but not another?
Is there a way to figure that out, or it just is what it is, it's chance, and nobody really knows?
This is such a great question, and it's a pretty complicated one. And I say that because there's a bunch of different things going on. So when we think about the evolution of human courtship or attraction, it wasn't just one thing. So sometimes I want to take us a step back and think about what we see in the animal world.
And when we look at courtship, sometimes we know there's a particular trait, how bright your tail feathers are, how big your plumage is, how strong you are. And there are things like that involved in human attraction, but we know that there's an awful lot.
What happens is the brain then tries to pull and I'll go through some of them and the brain tries to pull that all together and then Kind of does its own algorithm of trying to figure out how you weigh all of those different things So research has shown for instance that someone's voice is involved in attraction their body language their facial symmetry their social network who they're friends with who they socialize with and
We do know that smell is important. It's not entirely clear if it's picking up pheromones, which are a particular kind of hormone, or if it's other indicators of health and hygiene and all sorts of other things. We know that dance is involved and behavioral synchrony. OK, so the list can go on and on.
That is really telling because it tells us that in the human animal, there's a lot of different points of data input. And sometimes one of those can make things go sideways. Sometimes you say, well, this person looks attractive to me, they smell attractive to me, but oh my gosh, on the dance floor, I lost the chemistry.
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Chapter 6: How can we regain control over work-related stress?
The number one thing we found in our studies that singles look for in a potential romantic partner that they're most attracted to is someone they can trust and confide in. So there's personality, there's psychology, there's also all these physical traits. So there's a lot happening.
So you mentioned a whole bunch of things that play into the equation of whether we're attracted to someone. But they can't all have equal weight. And... Well, yeah, let's start with that. They don't all have equal weight and what determines what weight they have? Is it me and what's important to me or is it just objectively looks is more important than smell or how does that work?
We do know that there's a set of things that seem quite important. in attraction and being attracted to a partner, some of them really innate biological like invoking the senses, smell, sight, sound. But how they rate or maybe the hierarchy of how we think of them can depend a lot on where you are. One way to think about that is if you're in a place that's nutrient rich or resource available,
This is true of humans, and it's true of a lot of sexually reproducing organisms. You then don't have the same pressures. You kind of have more luxury to choose, to be choosier. If you're in an environment that you're really concerned about resources, well, then your courtship decisions are much more about survival. You're much more focused on, are we going to get enough food?
Can we build a safe nest? Can you raise offspring immediately?
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Chapter 7: What role does personality play in managing stress?
So we really try to think about how we're balancing costs and benefit, how we're balancing different moments. Now, there's another piece to that. I'm talking about different environments. This is why we see variation around the world. But it can also vary throughout our life course.
So one of the things we found in our research is what you're looking for in a partner, what you're most attracted to when you're 18 versus 35 versus 85 looks different. In our studies, we know that physical attraction is important, but 18-year-olds put a lot more focus on that than people who are over 65.
Whereas when we're older, we tend to focus even more on the issues of trust, of being able to be around someone for a whole host of reasons. We have more experience, we're outside the reproductive window.
So all of that to say, I know this isn't really a helpful answer in some ways because what the literature tells us is that there are all these different factors and they can be prioritized differently depending on where we are in the world, our cultural context, but also where we are in our own individual life course and what's important to us.
That said, there are a handful that we know are pretty important. Yes, physical interaction, but someone you can trust and confide in. Intelligence and humor are also often high up there in the scale. Nice, someone who's nice.
And I think that that's such an important one because all of these big studies that have been done on attraction, looking at different countries, different ages, niceness always pops up at the top. And I think people are sometimes surprised. They say, no, you sure it's not someone's hair or their eyes or their facial symmetry?
And the reason I think niceness is so important, and the reason it's important for both men and women, there's no sex difference in the studies, is that it's such a critical factor to really thinking of, okay, am I just attracted to this person or could I imagine being with this person? Do I want to stick around? Do I want to spend the night? Do I want to see you again later?
So if we're looking at relationships, we're focused a lot on could this person not just be someone who... I have a flame of chemistry for them, but I want to be around them in a week, a month, a year, a decade.
What about the attraction to the bad boy, that whole concept? Because the bad boy, by definition, isn't nice, but he seems attractive, seemingly attractive.
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Chapter 8: How can we effectively recharge after a stressful workday?
And how do we get ourselves out of that mindset? And I think that's a part where When we understand who we are, when we understand our tendencies, then we can start to control them. So you say, oh, I'm looking for someone I could build a life with, I could have kids with, I could have a home with. But you're just focusing on these traits of short-term partners.
Well, they're low in commitment, they're high in risk-taking, but it's not the right thing necessarily to hone in on if we're looking for a long-term bond. But maybe you're not. Maybe you're looking for a short-term bond. So that's part of this whole process of...
courtship and mating of attraction is is one what do we it feels instinctually what are we just attracted to but then at the same time what do we want what do we hope for the outcome of that attraction to be that's where we have to grab by our own biology by the horns well i imagine most people don't stop and think about well
I'm going to go out with this person and let me stop and think about, do I want a long-term relationship or is this just a short term? I mean, I don't think people go through that process.
Yeah, it depends. So in some of our studies, we do a big study every year called Singles in America. We've done it for 15 years now. We survey about 5,000 US singles. It's sponsored by Match, the dating company. And what we tend to find is that people are often aware of what they're looking for. So if they want more of a casual relationship, a serious relationship, but exactly to your point,
then they stumble on someone. There's so many examples of people saying, well, I wasn't looking for love. I wasn't looking for a relationship, and here I am. Or vice versa. People say, well, I'm looking for something serious, and I found myself in this casual situationship that I wasn't expecting. So I think a part of when
we're thinking when we're searching, we're in the search process, there's a difference of what we need, what we want. But then when we're in that search mode, really thinking about what is it, what is it and who is it that we want in this particular moment?
And maybe it's all, maybe we say I'm interested in everything, but I think it would serve all of us to focus more on that question, particularly when dating and mating, because we can look for very different traits and the outcomes of those relationships can be very different.
I want to ask you about this perception that men are more focused on a woman's looks and that for women that that's less important. I'm speaking with Justin Garcia, an evolutionary biologist, executive director, and senior scientist at the Kinsey Institute and author of the book The Intimate Animal, The Science of Sex, Fidelity, and Why We Live and Die for Love.
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