What is Hormesis
Who writes about it and what do they say?
Application
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Summary 🎧 (Including Audio)
1. What is Hormesis?
Hormesis is what some might call “optimal stress.”
It’s when something which can be harmful in high doses, creates a benefit in a lower dose.
The scientific definition of hormesis is “a phenomenon in which a harmful substance gives stimulating and beneficial effects to living organisms when the quantity of the harmful substance is small.”
Toxicity is in the dose, as they say.
While today’s post will naturally conclude with recent research and published studies from fields like medicine and molecular biology, we’ll see that the instinct about hormesis has deep origins in philosophy.
Somehow, the brightest among us have always known that balance, practice, and discipline were a key to the good life.
2. Who writes about it, what do they say?
Modern philosopher Kelly Clarkson is best known for keeping this adage alive, with her famous line, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger…”
Lesser known is that she is borrowing a famous line from German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who famously wrote in his 1888 Twilight of the Idols,
“Aus der Kriegsschule des Lebens. — Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker.”
Or, to put it another way,
“Out of life’s school of war—What does not kill me makes me stronger.”
3. Application
We could spend quite some time unpacking the full context of this quote, which has undoubtedly been misused and misappropriated over the years.
Regardless of Neitzsche’s precise meaning in Twilight of the Idols (of which I am not prepared to make my own conclusions), Modern scientists have actually discovered that this idea is reflected in our biology. And that is the point of today’s essay.
In many instance, stress of all kinds exists in a sort of bell curve.
Don’t get enough, your body suffers from atrophy.
Get too much, one experiences trauma.
Hit the Goldilocks zone in the middle of the bell curve, and help your body ward off everything from disease to seasonal depression.
It reminds me of this famous scene from the Princess Bride.
Vizzini challenges the man in black to a battle of wits, only to lose in a battle of hormesis.
The man in black explains, “I’ve spent the last few years developing a tolerance for iocane powder.”
As an aside, in this scene Vizzini levels criticism against Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle
Not unlike Nietzsche from In Twilight of the Idols
“In origin, Socrates belonged to the lowest class: Socrates was plebs. We know, we can still see for ourselves, how ugly he was. But ugliness, in itself an objection, is among the Greeks almost a refutation. Was Socrates a Greek at all? Ugliness is often enough the expression of a development that has been crossed, thwarted by crossing.”
Yes, Nietzsche really wrote this.
I’m not sure if he was serious in the way you and I would think, or if his tone was the point of his essay entirely.
Thankfully for today’s post, this neither here nor there. Simply an interesting side note from a complicated philospher.
4. Click For More
I’d really like to point you to some of the most interesting and up-to-the-minute research on hormesis.
It’s a bit cutting edge if you ask me.
Not necessarily the process, but our understand of the process.
In my humble opinion, the front-leading scholar would have to be Dr. David Sinclair at Harvard University.
He’s spent a few decades at this point understanding aging, and therefore disease, and therefore the benefits of hormesis to ward off both.
His book Lifespan is a simple reflection on the last 20 years of his research, and the ensuing podcast is a simplified 7 part overview including even more recent findings.
The biggest obstacle to studying aging has been maintaining studies over long periods of time.
Thankfully, predictive modeling technologies have greatly reduced this obstacle accelerating the pace of understanding.
If it’s helpful, Dr. Sinclair calls hormesis “adversity mimetics.”
Essentially, it’s the process of tricking your physiology that it’s under stress, without actually experiencing the downside risks of stress.
Here’s Dr. Sinclair giving a short explanation:
I’ll explain more in the summary below, but this TED talk is a great general overview of the research so far.
5. Summary 🎧 (Including Audio)
Disclosure
A quick disclaimer to start: *I am by no means a scientist, researcher, medical professional, or someone that you should take any type of lifestyle advice from*
The point of this essay is to note the ways in which modern research mirrors an ancient philosophical concept.
In doing so, I will communicate my understanding regarding these concepts, but I cannot overstate my posture of epistemic humility in exploring this (i.e. I’m aware that I am communicating ideas, not doing research or speaking from a position of authority.)
So long as we’re all in agreement, let’s dig in.
A. Adversity Mimetics
Whether Nietzsche or Clarkson, we are all aware at some level that challenges which don’t destroy us in some way (physically, psychologically, spiritually) do lead to growth. At minimum, we will know more than we did before experiencing a challenge.
But the physiological research referenced above adds a layer of depth and complexity to the philosophy.
Hormesis, or adversity mimetics, are stresses experienced in optimal doses that direct the body to do all kinds of interesting things.
To put it another way, hormesis is a process of tricking the body into thinking it’s under duress, in order to reap the benefits of the natural defenses that occur.
B. How does it work?
A quick note on how and why scientists like Dr. Sinclair believe this all works.
Essentially, it appears that every cell in our body is “backed” up. If you remember from high school biology, our DNA is constantly undergoing processes like transcription and translation—which is when our cells are given instructions to replicate, repair themselves etc.
When one undergoes the optimal stress in the hormetic zone, it signals to the body that something stressful could be on the horizon—something like a famine, an ice age, a drought.
When our bodies are uncertain of the future, they will generally decide to send the instructions to cells to repair and replicate—to back up, if you will—in order to prepare for the potential adversity ahead.
Evolution has left us with this feature as a means to stave off impeding periods of unpredictable suffering (like running out of food or warmth.)
Dr. Sinclair is currently investigating the phenomenon that even eating stressed food can help kick off these beneficial processes.
It appears that our bodies are capable of recognizing food sources that have undergone stress and decide to prepare for a famine just in case.
This is the thread he is pulling on regarding red wine. Communities with regular, moderate consumption of red wine have been correlated (without causation) to longer life- and health-spans.
A known chemical that results from the process of cultivating red wine, resveratrol, occurs when the grape vine is stressed in preparation for harvesting.
Resveratorol is a compound which must be stored in the body over time (i.e. you can’t take a pill [yet] and get the stores you need, it takes time to absorb in your body.)
So when Europeans, for example, drink moderate amounts of red wine over a lifetime, the theory is that these stores of resveratorol act as a first line of defense against aging by consistently telling the body, “these plants are stressed, let’s prepare for an impending famine, just in case.”
It also appears that resveratrol counteracts moderate amounts of alcohol in the body (especially as it relates to effects on the liver) leaving many with a net gain so long as the consumption is moderate.
Again, currently only a theory, and I’m not a doctor.
Another simple example of hormesis is sunbathing.
While the common story is that we get vitamin D from the sun, it’s not quite that straightforward.
Rather, when we expose our skin to moderate amounts of UV radiation from sunlight, we kick off a natural defense of the body which results in the self-production of vitamin D.
The vitamin D doesn’t come from the sun, the hormetic stress of UV radiation instructs our bodies to make vitamin D.
What’s really interesting is that this process in specific is believed by evolutionary scientists to have existed in the earliest life forms on earth.
C. Top 3 Stressors that lead to hormesis
With that base understanding of how stress effects the body, let’s look at the top 3 stimuli currently under investigation:
Fasting
Exercise
Temperature
Starting with fasting, the obvious biological story is that your body will want to repair itself as soon as it predicts the chances of future food is scarce.
The most straightforward way to fast for longevity is to not eat for 3 days.
Not only is this uncomfortable, due to the wide array of medical histories and genetics, it’s not the most efficient or scaleable protocol.
Dr. Sinclair has discovered that intermittent fasting is a bit of a biohack.
When done regularly, the body responds to the protocol as if one had not eaten for 3 days. Yet, one consumes roughly the same caloric intake, only with a delay.
The best windows of time he has discovered are 16:8 (16 hours of fasting, 8 hours of eating. I.e. eating lunch and dinner and then not eating breakfast) and 20:4 (only eating dinner).
Dr. Sinclair follows this pattern himself, but notes it was a decision he made after years of studying his own body under supervision of his physician.
Here he is talking about it on CBS Sunday Morning
Similar to protocols for fasting, exercise also puts the body into a state of perceived adversity to which it responds by lighting up the longevity pathways described above.
Unfortunately, the peer-reviewed research on what type of exercise and how much isn’t as prevalent as the studies in the other two areas. But, there is a general agreement that about 60-90 minutes a day, 4-5 times a week, and some combination of weight lifting/resistance training and cardiovascular exercise will produce the desired results.
Finally, heat and cold exposure is not only the most interesting but also the most studied and most understood of the memetic stressors.
Metabolic scientist
has pioneered this research. Coincidentally, she has a great substack that I highly recommend!A native Scandanavian, she was inspired by cultural rituals such as winter ice baths and the common practice of leaving newborns outside in the winter in order to cold adapt (they are bundled, and there is now quite a bit of research proving both the merits and safety of this deeply ingrained cultural phenomenon.)
I think you should learn more about her work directly, but of the 3 known hormetic stimuli, cold (and heat) exposure is the most precisely understood. Thanks to Dr. Søberg we have the exact protocol down to the minute regarding healthy stress for heat and cold exposure.
It’s a combination of weekly ice bathing and sauna use—interestingly a protocol that has existed socially and culturally in Scandinavia for generations.
So while Dr. Søberg didn’t invent this protocol, she clearly defined its healthy limits, proved the concept definitively, and helped Scandinavians explain why their rituals lend themselves to such healthy and long lives.
D. Conclusion
So there we have it, that which doesn’t kill us indeed makes us stronger.
But maybe now we’ll add a few caveats, like sticking to documented and researched stress, for the right amounts of time, in the right conditions.
I also can’t seem to find examples where overwhelming oneself with psychological stress leads to long term benefits. Rather, it appears that the development of psychological skill is the antidote to handling mental stress.
All of that said, mood and happiness are both positively correlated to physiological hormesis—cold exposure especially is proven to release mitochondrial rich brown fat and hormones which directly boost mood.
And if we look back, the Stoics are well known to encourage the rehearsal of stressful events—whether that be psychological rehearsal for negative events, or the disciplining of one’s body and environment to better handle obstacles.
Perhaps they too intuited something about hormesis.
I hope you enjoyed today’s deep dive, share your feedback below!
Until next time,
Matt