Stressors

[Amazoniac]

Sometimes I have a feeling that Dr Peat guidelines are a bit extreme regarding stressors.
Don't get me wrong, I admire his work a lot but my concern is: being to afraid of stressors is the first sign of weakness.
Bacterial by-products, vegetable toxins, exercice, fasting (occasional thyroid supression), cold exposure, slight caloric restriction (without being deprived of micronutrients), and so on..
Stress can be hormetic and build resilience. How much avoidance is too much?

 

[pboy]

I guess it all depends the lessons you learn from stresses, and your ability to grow from them. Stress that taxes but has the person not gaining any mental, physical, or spiritual benefit after is not good. Personal reflection, good diet, and rest are all factors in this...and person to person communication in real time. There are some stresses that are just burdens and have no positive benefit other than you realizing not to do that again...which in a way is a honing of character and intelligence, wisdom. Balance is a key with some things...if youre running hot, cold might be good, if youre running cold, hot might be good.

I think on the continuous pursuit for mastery and perfection and ease, you will automatically run into hurdles and as you overcome them, you'll automatically grow in all ways. At some point, you just want a reliable diet that gives you reliable energy and flexibility so you can work on mental and spiritual growth. The thing is also, to grow you have to be in relaxed receptive state. So if you continuously are under stress of any kind, you actually are less likely to grow...its in the quiet time afterwords when you feel good that the reflection happens, the healing happens...then you take it into the world and hone it through experience. The ideal is to eliminate as much stress as you can via your choices, and if anything else happens you will be more nourished and resilient to have a clear mind during the stress and during the reflection after, making the healing and growth potential higher

 

[arien]

We need to be clear about what we mean by stress. As I understand it, stress refers to a change in one's environment that diminishes resilience while stimulation would refer to one which increases it. I see no benefit to the former, while clearly the latter is desirable.

If we accept that, instead our concern then is whether, say, bacterial by-products, exercise, fasting or cold exposure are stimulating or stressful. I see no mechanism by which endotoxin or lactic acid could be beneficial, though I would be most interested in any proposal. Both interfere with oxidative metabolism and both place a burden on the liver. Mutatis mutandis for fasting, caloric restriction or cold exposure. How could these improve the resilience of the organism? The only mechanism I can imagine one could propose is by causing stress-induced inhibition, which may be adaptive in preventing excitatory cell death in the short term, but clearly ex definitione, inhibits functions that cells would otherwise perform. Which functions in particular are inhibited by fasting or cold exposure and why would we want to inhibit them?

On the other hand, some kinds of weight-bearing exercise seem to me to be stimulating. Ray has written about the stimulating nature of concentric muscular contractions and has mentioned in interviews that maintaining fairly large muscles helps to decumulate PUFA, prevent their accumulation and to produce relatively more of the protective hormones. Moreover, as acting beings who interact with the world, strong muscles, bones, coordination and balance clearly help us to do so. In this respect, I very much appreciate the sport of gymnastics. Similarly, drawing, painting and sculpture stimulate our faculties of perception, while reading, writing and speaking develop our capacity to communicate with one another, all of which enrich our lives.

 

[Such_Saturation]

Any signal that a change is needed should allow for that change to be made, otherwise you are talking about a depleting process. The "resilience" you are talking about I think is simply the body sacrificing a part of its functions to recreate the former response in a context of "less life".

 

[tara]

I think it really depends on the state you are in. If you are in robust health, a lot more things will fall into the stimulation category; if you are barely hanging on, even relatively small stresses can be overwhelming, and should be handled with caution. I think you can train particular functions, and that it takes stimulation and also adequate nourishment, light, and rest for this to be helpful.

How much rest is needed for a stimulation to result in a useful adaptation can vary a lot too, depending on our state. Healthy young men may be able to exert muscles strongly every day, and keep growing well. Older people usually require longer between exertions to benefit.

Some people do seem to be able to thrive on one or two meals a day, but this depends on very good glycogen storage capacity. For people how don't currently store glycogen well, intermittent fasting can be more of a harmful stress, until we can build this up.