Good Stress, Bad Stress
The difference is gargantuan
ACUTE STRESS IMPROVES YOUR HEALTH
✅ Lifting weights
✅ Sauna
✅ Appropriate sun exposure
✅ Sprinting
✅ Cold plunge
WHILE CHRONIC STRESS RUINS YOUR HEALTH
🚫 High insulin/blood sugar
🚫 High blood pressure
🚫 Carrying excess body fat
🚫 Year-round antinutrients
🚫 Lack of sleep
Your body is made to handle acute stresses, not chronic ones. Here’s why.
Not All Stress is Bad
There is a big misconception that all stress is bad stress. Yes, stress can have detrimental effects on the body when not managed properly, but it can also help you get physically stronger, build a more robust immune system, and a rock-solid mindset, among many other positive things.
Understanding the different types of stress and when/how you apply them in your daily life is a key tool to have in your approach towards thriving in life. Let’s dive in.
First, understand that we are antifragile beings.
Antifragility, a concept popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, explains that things/systems can actually prosper when shocked and stressed. For example, a plant under high winds grows stronger stalks and a more robust root structure, making the organism healthier in the long-term.
We as humans thrive under stress. It’s what makes us so adaptable. Whether it’s physical stress from a sprint workout, mental stress from engaging in a difficult task, or emotional stress from making a tough decision, we “rebound” stronger, stabler and more equipped to handle future stressful situations.
However, we run into issues when that stress moves from short-term to long-term. An easy way to illustrate this is with sun exposure. Going out in the sun for 40 minutes during the peak of the sun’s path midday and exposing your full body is a great way to get crucial Vitamin D and build a healthy base tan. This is very beneficial for your overall and immune health.
But if you went and laid out by a pool for 3 hours in the dead of summer with no base tan, you’d probably get roasted! You’d end up with a sunburn which is very detrimental to your skin and health. If you did this a lot, it could lead to skin cancer. It’s pretty obvious you shouldn’t be out there scorching your skin like that. In fact, there’s a lot of good evidence out there for healthy sun exposure protecting you from skin cancer.
Thi really encapsulates the point! Acute stress is good. Chronic stress is bad.
Things like cold plunges, lifting weights, appropriate sun exposure, and sauna use allow our body to rebound, adapt and thrive.
Whereas a diet in processed foods, excess body fat and inflammation, lack of sleep, high blood pressure, and bad posture, over-time, can destroy our physical, mental and emotional health.
Here’s a more detailed rundown of these examples:
Cold Plunges For the Win
Cold plunges are pretty challenging for many (including myself), but have a lot of benefits. Scientifically known as cold thermogenesis, the basic idea is to use cold water to shock almost all of your body’s regulating systems using a short term temperature stress. After recovering from the exposure, you will notice several benefits such as:
While daunting, the benefits of cold plunges are so numerous and so palpable, that it is one of the most potent ways to improve your health. If you're a beginner, here’s a guide to getting started from Ritual.
Now, just like all forms of stress, they can become detrimental to our well-being if exposed over long periods of time. Imagine, it’s early February in snowy Maine and the power in your office building goes out. Sure, you might be able to make it for a day, but two or three days in and that chronic stress of the cold will take its toll.
It’s not that the cold will kill you, but that over time, the constant stress will lower your ability to fight other stressors, causing you to live at a lower level of health. Your immune, nervous, and hormonal system will all be taxed to deal with the overflow of stress from the cold, unable to readily handle the already large jobs they have.
Let’s Get Sweaty: Saunas
Another great way to improve health and well-being is consistent sauna use. The Scandanavians and other ancestral cultures used it as a tool for pleasure and relaxation, but also surely knew the underlying benefits occurring, which are truly too numerous to list in total, but a few include:
Reduction in all cause mortality from vascular and non-vascular diseases
Enhancing function of the cardiac, pulmonary, immune and hormonal system
Physiological responses similar to moderate to high-intensity exercise
Nothing truly beats a 45 minute sauna session, listening to a great podcast, epic tunes, or lying in meditation to your breath. This acute form of stress, while taxing in the moment, allows your body to rebound almost every system in the body into a stronger, healthier and more robust form of itself, giving you the ability to thrive.
The Glorious Sun!
Another very important, yet highly misunderstood stressor that helps us live a healthy and happy life is sunlight. For many reasons, our ancestors revered and prayed for the sun. We depended on it for the prosperity of our environments, crops and the yearly rhythms of our seasons. However, somewhere in the recent past, “health experts” started recommending that you avoid sunlight at all costs, linking it to skin, breast and other forms of cancer.
And that advice, just like the decades of demonization of animal foods, has had tremendously negative consequences on our overall health and well-being.
How could this be? We evolved for millennia with the sun beating down on our bodies and faces. We did not have sunscreen or sun-hats - so how was this possible? We developed tans to protect us, we covered ourselves with animal skins if necessary, or we assumably sought after some shade for a break. We co-evolved with the sun like ruminants co-evolved with the grasslands.
And just like almost every other species on the planet, we derive immense benefits from it, highlighted here by Mark Sisson.
So yes, sunlight is incredibly beneficial for your health, so why does it get a bad rap? Because we westerners have a very odd way of living when viewed through an ancestral lens. Most of us avoid the sun all day, every day, sitting indoors or being fully clothed when outdoors, not allowing for the UVA and UVB rays to give us our daily dose of stress.
Pair that with our love for heading to a beach for a week where we expose ourselves to 100x the amount of UV radiation that we would get typically, and we can see why diseases such as skin cancer can occur. It’s just like lifting weights - if you went to the gym after not going for a year and tried to squat 400 lbs., what would happen? You’d probably get injured. Would it be smart to blame weight lifting or your lack of thinking? The same applies to sunlight exposure.
And for an in-depth explanation of the importance of sunlight and Vitamin D to your health, checkout this incredible video from Ivor Cummins
To be Swole or Not to Be Swole: The Case for Weights
You know it. I know it. The world knows it. Lifting weights is one of the best ways to live a long, healthy life. The importance of acute physical loading or stress on the body cannot be overstated. It helps you improve bone density, muscle mass, movement independence, walking speed, and cardio-respiratory endurance, all key hallmarks of a fit body.
As we stress our bodies in the gym with movements like push-ups, pull-ups, squats, lunges, carries, and twists, our body starts the processes required to build ourselves up stronger, so that next time we are in a similar stressful situation, it is not as demanding. However, the effects of lifting weights is not just related to physical performance but also metabolic health.
It is a well known fact that resistance training greatly improves several key markers of metabolic health such as blood lipid profiles, insulin sensitivity, mitochondrial density and endothelial function. But, it is not the most important factor in the rising issue of widespread obesity and poor metabolic health in the world. That, I believe, goes to the food we consume.
The Biggest Stress of Them All: Inflammatory Food.
The foods and drinks that we consume are at the very fundamental level, how we create our reality. It is how we take valuable sources of energy and information from the environment (macronutrients, micronutrients, minerals, vitamins, etc.) and create the mind and body we find ourselves in.
It is for this reason, why it is so important to choose foods and drinks wisely, so that they are a source of robust energy and nutrition, not a dangerous and deleterious constant sressor of the body.
Think about it. If you are consistently putting inflammatory foods into your body, eventually, your gut, immune system, and metabolism will eventually overflow with stress, resulting in poor health in the weakest leak of the chain (your body).. A diet high in processed carbs, refined fats and oils, and anti-nutrients only adds fuel to the fire of chronic inflammation.
And those high levels of stress decrease your body’s ability to handle and adequately recover from new stress. Constantly eating ancestrally inappropriate meals/macros is throwing your metabolism on a rollercoaster 4-5 times a day, wreaking havoc on your insulin, liver, heart, and hormonal system. Over time, this causes you to gain weight, have a chronically heightened immune system, and fall down into the rabbit hole that is metabolic disease.
It’s destroying your ability to bounce back from acute stressors like your dip in a cold lake, a sweaty sauna session, a few hours in the high sun, or a dense workout in the gym.
The Blood Sugar Roller Coaster
One of the most well-known symptoms of a poor diet is constant blood sugar spikes and crashes. Believe it or not, many people start their day off with processed carbs and fat such as trail mix, waffles, or plant-based protein bars. This throws your blood sugar and hormonal system into a roller coaster of ups and down throughout the day, causing drowsiness, lack of focus, low energy and mood, and decreased insulin sensitivity among many other things.
That large spike in blood sugar is a massive stress on your HPA-axis, and when compounded 2-3x a day for several days a week , you eventually fill up your cup and stress will start to overflow into other areas of your body such as your gut and digestion.
Foreign Invaders
Here is a radical idea - the food inside your gut is actually outside of your body. Yes, it truly is. Every day, we ingest kilograms of foreign objects, which have to be assimilated through and by our digestive and immune system. That mass is continually broken down, examined, and processed by the various mechanisms in our stomach and intestines for our body and metabolism to function optimally. However there are various antinutrients such as lectins, phytates, tannins, oxalates etc. that stress the body's ability to optimally process the compounds it needs to survive.
No, a piece of bread or bowl of spinach isn’t going to kill you, but over time, with larger and more toxic amounts, the compounding nature of antinutrients, pesticides, pharmaceuticals and non-native chemicals can wreak havoc on our gut and body overall.
A poor microbiome also factors in. If not kept in check, along with the other “foreign invaders” going through your digestive tract, this could lead to all kinds of problems including SIBO, leaky gut, IBS, Crohn’s, etc. This is harder to measure, but you should definitely be wary of these chronic stressors to your digestive system.
Give Your Gut a Break
Food in general, as you can see above, can also be a stress on the body, especially when it is ingested over 5-7x per day. Whether it is the 6 meal a day gym-bro or the typical 3 meals with 3 snacks meal plan many Westerners fall into, most people are never giving their digestive system the rest it needs to allow other parts of the body to work optimally. For a more in depth study on how meal frequency and timing affects health, checkout this interesting study here.
Our guts are overburdened and overexposed every day. They need a break just like our muscles do in the gym, our skin in the sun, and our brains during a work day. That’s why many people in the health and fitness industry engage in habits such as intermittent fasting, semi-annual longer fasts, or elimination diets to give their immune and digestive systems a break.
Summing it Up
The main point of this post (that somehow turned into a novel), is that there is a HUGE difference between chronic stress and acute stress. Yet somehow this isn’t talked about much.
In my opinion, this is one of the biggest health problems we face as a world. Modern society has gotten people accustomed to putting chronic stress on their bodies nonstop and from all angles. Throughout history we had almost none of these, and if we did, only one or two occurred significantly at a time. Perhaps we went through a whole season or year without enough food, but we had everything else dialed in and our body could cope with this one stress.
Our modern environment and diet are stressing us from all sides, and few realize this or take action.
To truly thrive in life, we need to re-think what, how, and how often we are stressing our body. Regain your natural birthright of an energetic and powerful health. There are many ways to do this, but one of the best places to start is with your diet.
Like always, this free content is made possible by my company Nose to Tail. I have a small team of family ranchers here in Texas that are producing beef, bison, lamb, pork, and chicken the right way! They are using holistic management and regenerative practices to build soil health while producing the best possible quality meat.
We also have beef tallow skin care that I use daily, air-dried beef snacks, and amazing seasonings. Support the families that produce each of these products with me today!
Brian & Matt
Thanks for your passion about learning how to make yourself and the people around you healthier. I have enjoyed being part of this process since your first started to make your movie. You've impacted my life for the better in more ways than you will ever know. I Just wanted to take the time to let you know I appreciate all of what you have been doing!