Nick Holmes a Court - Why stress is actually good for you? ,

Sunday, June 12, 2011

I've been reading some material tonight that argues that stress is actually good for you from a biological perspective and this is called Hormesis. From reading this, i think we can quickly argue that this applies to psychology and that we can in fact improve our capacity to better manage our lives through actively encouraging and engaging in high stress scenarios.

What is Hormesis?

A universal biological principal whereby a stress that is harmful at high doses promotes defense and repair processes at low doses

Examples of Hormesis in action

Allergen immunotherapy
Cold showers as an anti-depressant
Lifting weights to grow muscles
Exposure therapy for phobias/anxiety
Boot camp for delinquent kids

Why this matters?

Exposing yourself deliberately to high exposure stress scenarios, improves your ability to handle and respond to stress, conflict and personal challenges that happen on a day to day basis.

This is both a chemical, biological and psychological theory that has a reasonable degree of proof and projected applicability across our personal, interpersonal and business interactions.

There is an identified neurotransmitter in the brain BDNF which is understood to foster the brain's ability to adapt and learn. This theory states that exposing the brain to high levels of stress and exposure across many dimensions ultimately improves the brains ability to manage lower levels of stress by re-enforcing and strengthening existing neural pathways.

This seems reasonably obvious upon reflection, but if we can use this theory as a call to action for us to deliberately expose ourselves to big stress and big challenges and then use our emotional intelligence to realise that when we do this we are just bringing up our baseline, we can actually use previously unwanted stress to actually better ourselves.

How to use unwanted stress to actually improve yourself?

Push yourself deliberately into scenarios that you are significantly uncomfortable with (and actively try to engage your emotional intelligence to not worry about it) with the knowledge that this improves your ability to better manage everyday situations and ultimately make yourself better equipped to operate in your world.

You might just find that your unwanted stress, actually ends up making you a more balanced and less stressed person!

Thanks to http://gettingstronger.org/hormesis/ for inspiration and data on this...

Labels: business, hacker, health, ideas, nerds, thoughts