Stress Your Cells

_{photo: Sisu Lifestyle}

Foundational Health Principle 13: Expose your cells to targeted stress (heat and cold exposure)

Fact 1: 10-15 Minutes of Cold Exposure Increases Dopamine 250% Above Baseline. (Dr. Andrew Huberman)

There’s been a lot of talk on health podcasts about cold plunges and saunas. These tools are becoming all the rage – and there’s no shortage of resources on them (some are linked below). But I wanted to share the concept that helped me understand why these tools might be important:

Chronic stress (what happens when we constantly eat inflammatory foods and scroll social media all day) isn’t good, but increasing research targets acute stress on our cells. Throughout human history, we have been exposed to acute stressors (bursts of exercise, temperature shifts as we lived outside), but modern life has largely taken these away. 

A growing body of research shows that subjecting our cells to stress is essential to building up antioxidant defenses (which fight oxidative stress), increasing mitochondrial numbers, improving endurance capacity, and stabilizing energy management in the body. This research has helped me see cold/heat exposure less as a fad and more as an important tool to expose our cells to stress they are evolutionarily accustomed.

Here are the two definitive podcasts on the subjects if you want to dig more into the subject:

Heat Benefits

Cold Benefits

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