Why you need hormetic stress

Hormesis is an adaptive response of cells and organisms to a moderate, and usually intermittent stress. It’s an intentional, mild exposures to a stressor that produces a brief challenge, response, and then recovery in the body.

Examples of hormetic stressors include exercise, dietary energy restriction (fasting) and exposures to low doses of some plant phytochemicals.

Such managed stress helps develop growth, muscle development, brain enhancement, is anti-ageing and more. If you want your health to remain good or to improve it, you have to challenge your body in small ways. Think of weight lifting to break down and rebuild muscle so it’s stronger, or how exposure to dirt, dander and germs in childhood makes our immune system function better.

Importantly, this kind of stress builds resilience. Resilience helps us cope with stress, and be able to return to equilibrium quicker and easier.

One thing some of my unwell clients talk about is their inability to get back to feeling balanced and calm when challenged by stress. Poor stress resilience feeds the cycle of chronic stress and its long-term consequences like inflammation, anxiety and depression, sleep problems, digestive issues, brain fog, compromised immunity, premature ageing, blood sugar disorders, weight problems and more.

Strong stress resilience, on the other hand, can improve physical, mental, emotional health and well-being.

One way of quantifying our stress response is HRV, a measure of the variation of time between each of our heartbeats. Variations are normal and are controlled by your autonomic nervous system, sending signals to the rest of the body. Many personal devices measure this.

We perform best NOT when we’re so calm we’re bored, or so stressed we’re exhausted and DIStressed, but when we’re somewhere in the middle – UESTRESS. This is where we’re energised, focused and doing things effortlessly.

Nutrient therapy is one way of creating hormetic stress. Fasting is another. Also there’s yoga breathing, oxygenation (nitrous oxide) breathing and movement, exercise, hot saunas and cold water therapy (ice baths, winter ocean swimming).

Hormetic dietary stress includes phytochemicals found in vegetables and fruits. They activate adaptive cellular stress response pathways. Phytochemicals have noxious properties that protect plants from insects. In small doses these can create mild cellular stress responses that we benefit from. This is not for everyone, however, and sensitive people with certain genetic predispositions should seek professional advice (bioindividuality!).

Do you need to stress your body in the right way to build resilience?