Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
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How is chronic ease leading to disease?
Jeff, welcome to the podcast, brother. It's an honor to have you here. And I'm excited about everything that you're working on. In particular, you got a new book coming up. And inside of that book, Good Stress, a big thing that you talk about is that there are positive bits of stress that can radically make our life better. You know, for thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, we as humans have been focused on getting as much stress out You're here to convince us that maybe the extreme version of that, taking all stress out of our life, is actually a detriment to our health. Let's talk about that.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, Drew, thanks for having me. You are just such a great friend and you platform so many amazing people. And I'm very grateful to be here. So, yeah, listen, for hundreds of thousands of years, Homo sapiens, and even beyond that for millions of years, hominids have evolved in relationship to their environment. You know, to be alive is to be in relationship. And so we've evolved these adaptive mechanisms in relation to what I sometimes call paleolithic stress. But since the Industrial Revolution, in the West primarily, but really accelerating in the last 70 years, at every turn, we've engineered our society for comfort, for convenience, for ease. And it's my thesis that chronic ease is actually leading to chronic dis-ease.
We are essentially using our culture to hijack our biology, and that is leading to all sorts of detrimental downstream impacts. And I can unpack just some of those mechanisms.
What does it mean to befriend stress?
Yeah, well, let's start off with the first one, which is from a lot of people's observation, they're looking around, they're driving to work in the morning, and actually a lot of people around them look pretty stressed. So what's going on there?
In modern times, we have a negative association with stress and totally justifiably, right? Because in the modern age, stress is chronic. And chronic stress, as you well know, leads to imbalances in the human organism and by extension, disease. But stress at its core is actually an adaptive response to our environment. So I live up in the hills of Los Angeles. I'm apt to go for a hike generally before I have a podcast, for example, to clear my head. And every once in a while on that little serpentine path, I'll run into like a rattlesnake or a coyote, right? And I have a very, very natural adaptive response to stress. I see the rattlesnake on the path. What happens, right? I have a bottom-up response. My heart rate and my respiratory rate increase.
My liver secretes just the right amount of glucose to center my extremities to fight or flee. My pupils dilate. The aperture of my attention becomes super, super tight. I become... self-obsessed and distrust the world. And that's all for good reason, because that serves my biological imperative to survive. And of course, we inherited this mechanism from our hunter-gatherer ancestors. The problem in modern society is the rattlesnake never leaves the path for so many people. So we're in this chronic state of agitation. now on the path in laurel canyon above my house what happens after the rattlesnake looks at me and says i don't think jeff will be on the specials menu today right and he slithers back off into the tall grasses well i return to homeostasis right my heart rate and my respiratory rate decrease the aperture my attention opens back up i become more creative and i trust the world again
And that is a total natural response, right? I return to the middle. I return to homeostasis. The signature of modernity is that we never find the middle again. We never return to homeostasis. So when you're driving here and you're in traffic and you're looking around and you're seeing people are stressed out, that's because they're in a state of chronic stress. And we know just like hormonally, for example, that chronic stress is going to lead to all sorts of different kinds of disease. So chronic stress, again, adaptively activates the liver, for example, to secrete glucose into the bloodstream. That is totally adaptive, but you don't want high levels of glucose in your bloodstream all of the time, right?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How is chronic ease leading to disease?
0:00–1:44
2
What does it mean to befriend stress?
1:44–7:43
3
How can fasting and hunger benefit you?
7:43–8:37
4
What fasting recommendations are important for women?
8:37–10:21
5
What insights does Jeff offer on weight loss?
10:21–11:40
6
How does cold exposure impact health?
11:40–14:37
7
What are the future implications of health podcasts?
14:37–20:02
8
How do we handle stressful conversations?
20:02–1:27:05
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Dhru Purohit Show
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