Dr. Sharon Bergquist
Appearances
Something You Should Know
Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
Thank you so much for having me. I'm honored to be here.
Something You Should Know
Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
Well, stress as a medical concept was introduced around 90 years ago by a Hungarian endocrinologist, Hans Selye. And most of the medical research and what we know about stress since that time has been on how stress harms us. And as a result, most people associate stress as something that we need to avoid and draw boundaries around. However, not all stress harms.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
In fact, there's more recent science called hormesis. It's the science of good stress that is showing us how stress benefits us and enriches and grows us. And this is gonna sound really counterintuitive, but we actually need some of the good stress to build our resilience against the harmful types of stressors that we're trying to avoid.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
So really with stress, what I emphasize for my patients and the people I work with is that our goal isn't to avoid it or to draw boundaries. It's really to optimize stress.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
Yeah, that's really a wonderful question. So what differentiates good stress from bad stress are three Ds, the design, the dose, and the duration. So by design, there are certain stressors to which our biology has adapted throughout most of our human history, and those are the types that enhance us. By dose, hormetic stressors are mild to moderate.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
And duration, they're generally brief and intermittent. So our biology was designed for these types of mild to moderate intermittent stressors followed by a period of recovery. What we are not adapted for are the chronic stressors that are prolonged and continuous. These are things like relationships that are difficult, job situations that create a ton of uncertainty.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
So those are the three key features.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
Yes. How you respond to stress ultimately determines whether that stress is beneficial or harmful. And to take it one extra step, when you are adding these hormetic or these beneficial stressors, they are all deliberate. So you can choose to add good stress and And that can be a way of building your resilience to the types of stress that aren't always controllable or predictable.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
And that's because the predominant type of stress in our life is the type that's harmful. And what I hope that people realize is when we take on these deliberate good stressors, we are actually mitigating some of that harm. And when we avoid the good kind, we are reducing our ability to handle the types of stress that we always talk about as the kind that's weighing us down.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
So one way to really tell the difference is when we go through the harmful types of stress that are so prevalent, we are left exhausted, depleted, we feel more burnt out. Good stress energizes us. It renews us. And literally at the level of ourselves, we now know that we remodel and reconfigure our body in ways where we are prepared to handle future stress better.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
If a person is dealing with a type of stress that's weighing them down, where they're feeling exhausted and burnt out. For example, if they are in a work situation where they are not getting along with their boss or their team, and that's wearing on them. If a person just perseveres in that situation and feels stuck, that is not a healthy way of saying, hey, stress is good for you.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
This is not advocating for being tough in situations where stress is harmful. Instead, if we seek situations of stress that are mission-driven, that align with our beliefs, or that are generative, where we feel we're contributing to a greater good, That type of stress releases a completely different biochemistry, a different set of neurotransmitters and hormones.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
So, for example, when it's something that is purpose driven, we release dopamine, which is our reward hormone. When it benefits other people, we release oxytocin, which is a bonding hormone. When it's something that brings us joy, we release serotonin. These chemicals and hormones are the trifecta for mitigating cortisol.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
So it's a way of buffering ourselves from the harm of the stressors that we can't control.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
if you're stuck you're stuck uh it seems hard to make that into good stress when you feel horrible you can't always avoid some stressors in your life so in an ideal world you would be able to change that situation that's creating the chronic stress but we all know how difficult that is this is really an alternate way of managing stress so one tool is
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
to mitigate that chronic stress or as you've pointed out to change how you perceive it right there are techniques such as meditation and mindfulness so that we don't just ruminate on these stressors and take them home with us however that doesn't work for everybody so good stress is a different set of tools where you are making yourself stronger
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
in your situation where you have to cope with these chronic stressors.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
Exactly, exactly. So you are mitigating some of that harm and biochemically in your body, you're building resilience so that you can handle more stress and handle it better. So yes, it's an alternative approach and it's more than just reframing the stress in your life.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
And simply recognizing that stress can be beneficial and viewing stress as a beneficial rather than harmful event in your life, that alone affects how much cortisol you release in a stress situation, and it reduces the cortisol release.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
There's psychological stress that can be good stress, and then there are physical stressors that can be good stress. So stress in a technical sense is anything that challenges you. So from a psychological perspective,
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
if a stressor aligns with your belief system and if it's mission driven that is good stress and it kind of straddles this realm of pushing you outside your comfort zone but not to the point where it's overwhelming and it's you know the equivalent of if you were going on a roller coaster ride like you know that you're not going to get injured but you also have this brief
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
pleasant stress response so those are the types psychologically but what's really fascinating about good stressors is things like plant chemicals called phytochemicals exercise particularly high intensity exercise limiting eating to 12 hours or less and doing most of your eating earlier in the day
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
Heat and cold, these are all physical ways that have beneficial effects on our bodies and make us more resilient down to the level of our cells. And when we make our cells healthier, we make our entire body healthier. Because the same cells that are healthier are in our heart, they're in our muscle, they're in our brain. And when a neuron is healthier, our ability to handle stress is better.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
Our ability to make decisions is better. Our mood is better. So you're driving at mental resilience through physical stressors and you can do it vice versa. It's a phenomenon we refer to as cross-adaptation.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
The common thread behind all the things that I just mentioned is that your body perceives them as a form of biological stress. These were the stressors that were inherent in our environment for our ancestors. for 2.4 million years. These are the stressors that shaped our genome and our entire physiology. So stress is much more broad than a psychological or emotional response.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
Stress is also anything that challenges our body. And it throws our body out of this natural balance that we call homeostasis. And our body strives really hard to reestablish that balance.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
With all stressors, you either return to a balance that is better than your starting point, so you build resilience, or a balance that is weaker or lower than your starting point, and you've reduced your resilience. But it's basically because how we view stress is more broad than just a psychological phenomenon.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
And we can use our body, so stressing our body physically, as a way to build mental resilience and vice versa. So it's really saying that our heart and our mind, even our spirit, are converging down at the level of our cells and that we have many ways of managing stress that are far beyond our current techniques.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
Yes. There's no question that the bad stress or the chronic harmful stressors chip away at our health. I mean, we've published studies on its effect on heart health. There's a plethora of data on that. And to the extent that we can control these bad stressors or even strategically plan for recovery so that we can lower the effects of the chemicals that are released that cause the harm,
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
there's clear benefit to that. That is stress management really historically, and that is the common approach. What I hope to bring to light is that we have an alternative approach by adding in the good stress and not just feeling that if we can't control the bad stress, that we don't have any alternative choice.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
So to put this in a different way, the first half of my career, I would talk and give lectures to people and students and different keynotes about how stress harms. And the biggest feedback I got from people was that they were getting stressed hearing about the harms of stress.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
And the key behind that is because some of the situations that create the harmful stress are simply ones that we didn't choose. They found us. The good stressors are deliberate. They give us hope. They give us freedom because they are in our control.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
And the amazing part is that they not only build our resilience at a literal biological level, but the same pathways that build resilience actually make us healthier and they make us younger because these mechanisms repair, they do all these housekeeping functions, they regenerate ourselves.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
So it goes even beyond the conceptual framework of resilience to a biological equivalent of becoming healthier and younger in the face of stress. So it's reframing our relationship with stress to think about it more broadly. And of course, there's merit to reducing the chronic stress, but that is just a lot easier said than done.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
Yeah, this is new because the key here is that you want to not just move, but move enough with enough intensity where you are activating a stress response. The stronger the stress, the more your body adapts and becomes resilient. So that is the difference. And it's changing some of the messaging, right?
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
Because, for example, we tell people as they get older, oh, you should slow down, you should do less. And that is the worst advice we can give people because it actually takes a little bit more of a stimulus for our body to adapt as we get older. And we want to continually grow and regenerate and renew our bodies.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
And our bodies work through bioplasticity, which is the biological equivalent of use it or lose it. So if you challenge your brain, you grow brain pathways through neuroplasticity where your brain is sharper. If you challenge your heart through some level of exercise, that really raises your heart rate. You're making your cardiovascular system stronger.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
If you challenge your muscles, I mean, we all know that if you lift heavier weights, you grow stronger muscles. This happens at every level. And the corollary though, is that when we don't, when we do not have enough of this good stress in our life, we become more vulnerable.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
And that is really why the messaging around these health effects, like you said, the ones that are a little more fluffy now, we need to reintroduce that intensity because that is ultimately what we need to thrive.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
How they do it is because we have different stress responses. The one we're familiar with is the fight or flight. Everyone describes stress as running from the saber-toothed tiger. But that is a very small portion of a larger stress response we have. What happens at the level of our cells is that we repair proteins and DNA.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
We actually incur 10,000 injuries in our DNA on a given day, and our bodies are constantly repairing. We have the ability to recycle old and damaged parts. We have the ability to generate energy in our cells and increase our energy making capacity. So when we experience these good stressors, that is the type of repair and regeneration we are doing. So every day we are all incurring harm.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
And our bodies try to recover from that harm, especially at nighttime when we're resting and recovering. Good stress activates these mechanisms. And when we are exposing ourselves to adequate amount, we give our bodies a chance to really make up for a lot of the damage. But the fact that we are removing these good stressors in this greater effort to reduce stress in our lives in general,
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
we are reducing our ability to repair and mitigate the everyday harm that's happening from our environment, from pollutants, from smoke exposure, from pesticides, all the things that we know are probably harming us, and there are many that we don't even know about. So that's what's happening at a cellular level.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
And even at the level of hormones like cortisol, we know that when we expose ourselves to good stress, for example, a high intensity interval workout, You get a spike of cortisol, but what really matters is your baseline or basal level. After the workout, the cortisol level comes below the baseline of where you started.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
is happening is that your basal level, again, this is what matters for health in protecting us from the harm of stress, you want your baseline levels of cortisol to come down. Similar with exposure to cold, you get a spike of cortisol, but afterwards, your levels are lower. And that's ultimately what we want. So that is how the good stress is protecting us.
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Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
Thank you so much. I appreciate it so much.
Something You Should Know
Water vs. Tech: How Moisture Ruins Your Devices & Why We Need Stress
However, not all stress harms. In fact, there's more recent science called hormesis. It's the science of good stress that is showing us how stress benefits us and it enriches and grows us.