TJ Power

Originally, the main things that stressed us out were starving to death or chased by an animal.

And those would have equally been extremely stressful.

But in those scenarios, your body is doing one thing.

It's moving hard and fast.

It's going to be moving a lot in order to tolerate the experiences coming its way, to find the food, to survive the threat.

And endorphins basically evolved as this chemical that in intense stress,

They would come in when our body was physically taking action to take the stress back out of our mind so that we could survive.

So you didn't run away going, oh my God, I'm going to die.

Your brain just got locked in.

Similarly, when you are hungry, you weren't like, oh, I'm so hungry.

I'm so hungry.

I'm going to die.

You just got locked in to try and find the food.

Nowadays, with all those micro stresses that I mentioned before, what typically happens is things stress us out and our body remains dead still.

And it just swallows more and more and more stress.

And you'll notice when you exercise, you get this stress relief experience or when you go for a walk or when you hike.

And our body really wants us to physically release the stress from our body through movement by activating endorphins.

Yeah, definitely.

Like after work, you never want to go straight to the sofa.

You always want to move your body first, get a bit of an endorphin release.