Anna Lembke

Yeah, I know this sounds really wackadoodle, but there's actually science behind it.

It's the science of hormesis.

And hormesis is Greek for to set in motion.

And what we're talking about is very mild to moderate doses of adaptive or healthy pain as tolerated.

And if you don't like the word pain, maybe use the word discomfort or challenge.

or something along those lines, although often it does involve some physical duress, at the right doses to upregulate our own healing mechanisms, but not so much that it causes irreversible harm.

And what the science of hormesis shows in humans and in animals is that if you expose an organism to mild to moderate doses of painful, toxic, or noxious stimuli, you will actually make that organism healthier, more resilient, more robust.

And we have evidence for that, overwhelming evidence for that through exercise, but also some emerging evidence for ice cold water plunges.

There's also some evidence showing that prayer and meditation, which, you know, are not necessarily painful, but do require effortful engagement and a certain kind of concentration, which is not immediately necessarily pleasurable at

Those behaviors also release dopamine.

Things like exposure therapy, forcing ourselves to do things that make us psychologically uncomfortable.

These are all things that are hard in the initial experience.

but essentially trigger our body to sense injury.

And in sensing injury, our bodies start to upregulate our protective hormones, like again, our endogenous opioids, all ultimately leading to the release of dopamine.

So it's a really great way to overall reset our hedonic or joy threshold to the side of pleasure, which means that we're more resilient in the face of pain and we're generally happier.

That's exactly right.

And there is overwhelming evidence to support this.

So for example, we know that if you track dopamine levels as well as other feel-good neurotransmitters like endogenous serotonin, norepinephrine, endogenous opioids, endogenous cannabinoids,

What you find is that initially when people engage in exercise, those neurotransmitters are low.

But over the latter half of exercise, they slowly start to rise.