Why some stress is good for you…
We know that chronic stress is detrimental to our health, but what about some stress?
A concept called hormesis states that little bit of stress or toxicity in the body is actually beneficial. Let me break this down. When we speak of stress, what we are actually referring to is the production of reactive oxygen species, ROS or free radicals, when these build up it’s known as oxidative stress which damages our cells.
So why is this good? Well, when our body detects that ROS and free radicals are produced it responds by creating antioxidants (remember these are the good stuff you get from fruit and veg - well we can also produce them in our bodies too). These antioxidants neutralise the ROS and free radicals produced. However, the result is not net:net, actually we produce more antioxidants than signalled for, and overall we end up in a better place than where we started.
Mild stressors also promote something called autophagy - translated as ‘self eating’ the process by which our cells pick out their damaged or worn our components and digest them - overall increasing the efficiency of the whole cell. This process defends against all aspects of ageing.
Mitochondria are the part of our cells that create energy. If they dysfunction you feel tired. They need to undergo autophagy often (every 9-25 days) to make sure they are as efficient as possible. If this process is defective in the brain, you get things like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Multiple Sclerosis amongst other degenerative diseases, which is what causes the low brain energy and low mood.
So what kind of stress is good:
Being bored kills: when we are cognitively stimulated, our brains produce a small amount of something called glutamate. Glutamate in this amount is mildly toxic to our brains. Via hormesis, the body responds by strengthening its neural connections + manages its energy resources better than before.
Doing exercise + calorie restriction creates ROS, but the body adapts in response to them and thrives in the long term. Exercise actives proteins that are anti-ageing, and that initate autophagy. Exercise increases brain and heart function, improves metabolic function and body composition and increases insulin sensitivity. Exercise increases the amount of mitochondria you have (with more mitochondria, you can make more energy and the cycle continues in the right direction!) Essentially, exercise is anti-ageing. Being obese or insulin resistant on the other hand, literally accelerates ageing. You have mitochondrial dysfunction, meaning you feel tired all the time, meaning you crave simple sugars/carbs for energy, when you eat them, you cause further mitochondrial dysfunction and the cycle continues in the wrong direction!
Eating fruit and veg is also actually mildly stressful for the body. Again, ROS are produced in response to the compounds plants have in them to protect themselves. The result is more antioxidant production than we started with.
Intermittent cold and heat. Things like cold water swimming put stress on the body and as a result increase your brown adipose (fat) tissue. It is brown because it contains more mitochondria. This means that the fat tissue is better at creating energy, and so is less inflammatory (than the alternative, white adipose tissue). Heat exposure on the other hand causes us to make something called heat shock proteins which stop our proteins from being damaged. An egg turns white when cooked, because the heat of cooking denatures it’s proteins - we don’t want that to happen to our proteins and the body protects itself against that
