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Hi Chris. :)
You’ve traveled to almost 175 countries. You go to places where you don’t know the language over and over again, which tends to make people nervous. You also teach people to quit their job for a living, which almost everyone is anxious about.
Are you nervous about these things? Do you remember a time where you ever were?
Yes and no. In some ways, I’m a nervous wreck with everything I do… I just do it anyway.
In other ways, I’m the world’s most nonchalant and unprepared traveler. It would actually be good if I prepared more than I do, since I’m always forgetting things, booking the wrong tickets, leaving my iPhone in coffee shops, and so on. But again, I just keep pressing forward, for better or worse.
As for teaching people to quit their jobs, that originally began from my own lack of experience at holding down any sort of job. I was a terrible employee and not good at working for anyone other than myself.
I feel like I can relate a lot to that. A lot of other people probably do too, but they’re not in the situation where they just say “screw it” and buy the ticket/get on the plane/quit. What helps you get through that moment?
Well, there are a lot of popular stories of people saying “screw it” and making big changes all at once, and they can be inspiring. But as you mention, not everyone can do that, and some people have legitimate obstacles or concerns that may take a while to resolve.
On my book tour last year I told a lot of different reader stories and tried to pay attention to which ones resonated the best with audiences. Probably the most popular story was about a guy in North Carolina who had a family and a “good” day job. He wanted to make some changes but couldn’t just abandon it all and move to Thailand, you know?
So instead of jumping ship, and instead of just going on with his self-described boring life, he started making a series of small changes. They began with what he called “Life Experiments”—just doing things differently, like going to the art museum during his lunch break, taking up a new hobby of photography, and so on.
Then he started traveling for work, and instead of going to Paris for a three-week commitment on his own, he found a way to take his wife and their three daughters. This way, the whole family had a fun and interesting cross-cultural experience.
Upon returning to the U.S., he eventually started consulting and is now completely self-employed. But the moral of the story, at least how he told it to me, is that the greatest change actually came from the beginning, the life experiments that helped him become more comfortable with doing things differently. With this story in mind, I always encourage people who can’t say “screw it” to start saying “What small things can I change right now?”
There’s a great book about that out there, I think it’s called One Small Step Can Change Your Life. It’s about small changes being more effective because they don’t set off alarms.
When I talk about it in the Flinch, I actually say the opposite. Let your alarms go off and realize that they’re not working well for you at all. They’re ineffective. Your fear is supposed to protect you, but it chokes you instead. For most things, our internal alarm system is defective.
During your book tour, how did you make people feel that they were capable of changing their programming?
Yeah, that’s good—I agree that fear can be a deadly force. When we’re being honest, I think most of us would admit that we’ve let fear make too many decisions for us. That’s certainly been the case for me, at least until I became aware of it.
I don’t think anyone can make people feel they are capable of changing their programming, or at least I don’t think I can. But it does help to provide examples: hey, look at this guy. He used to be just like you, but now he’s a totally different person. What did he do to bring him to this new place?
Especially when you’re a writer or otherwise doing something publicly, the danger is in assuming that everyone wants to be you. Sometimes this is self-inflected, other times some people may actually phrase it that way themselves: “I want to do what you do.” I always try to put the emphasis, and therefore the burden of change, back on that person: “Really? What exactly do you want to do? What’s stopping you?”
Right, what they actually want to be is just an idealized version of themselves, and you try to help them see that.
Just a final question: what is it that’s currently stopping you now? What is that thing that you still have some kind of anxiety about, if anything? How do you fight it?
Good question. I’m coming to the end of my quest to visit every country in the world, and that fact scares me a little. It’s funny because my wife, along with several other smart people, have been asking me for a while now: “What are you going to do when this is over?”
And for a long time, I didn’t understand the question. “What do you mean?” I’d say. “I’ll keep traveling, keep writing, and keep working on my business stuff.”
All of these things are true, but I think the people who asked were right in assuming that there is still a bigger question. In one way or another, I’ve been on the road for much of the time over the past decade. It’s become a big part of my identity. So all of a sudden, I feel a sense of loss and uncertainty, along with the anxiety you mention.
It’s certainly a good problem to have, compared to sucking down candy bars in a cubicle somewhere, but I honestly don’t know what I’ll do to fight it. For now I just keep traveling. ***
—
PS: I get inspired a lot by conversations I have with people. The Flinch was inspired by a moment I had with Jonathan Fields. This conversation actually helped me put together an idea for a book I’d been kicking around. Stay tuned.
Btw, Chris just came out with a guide to publishing (not an affiliate link). Check it out, I found it extremely informative. :)
Filed by Julien at 8:41 am under interviews
8 Comments
For most, the man needs no introduction. But in case you do, here’s one anyway.
Leo Babauta is the founder of ZenHabits, a massively popular blog that is considered by Time Magazine to be one of the top 25 blogs in the world. This is already enough to make him interesting, but actually, there’s more.
In November of 2011, Leo completed the Goruck challenge, a 15-20 mile behemoth that pushes you to every limit you thought you had.
The connection to The Flinch seemed natural. If you read it, you’ll definitely love this.
They say if you have to ask, it can’t be explained. And so of course I’ll try to explain it: if you hear about the challenge — 12+ hours of grueling physical tasks with a 55-lb. backpack on your back — and you think it sounds like fun, you’re probably right for it.
It’s kind of like getting a taste of what the Special Forces guys do in training, but without the weapons. Weighted pushups, lunges, bear crawls, hiking, running, carrying logs, carrying your teammates … this is the kind of thing I wanted to try. I’m not into the military aspect, but I am into physical challenges, and especially into mental challenges. This was, at its deepest level, a mental challenge: you have to find it in you to not quit when it sucks really bad, to help your teammate when he’s falling down, to motivate your team to meet its missions. I found out a lot about myself.
I know they say “it’s all mental,” and I know from Crossfit, walking the Camino, etc, that it’s true, but there’s also real physical challenge there. How do you know you can do it?
You don’t know, and that’s the scary part. You should be able to run/hike with a weighted backpack (let’s say 30-lbs.) for a couple hours at least. You should be able to do a bunch of pushups, squats, lunges, and bear crawls. You should be able to sprint and run up hills. It requires strength, so practice carrying people on your back and shoulders.
If you can do all that, you should be OK physically. But it will still suck at times, and you’ll want to quit, no matter how physically prepared you are. You have to make it through the suck. You have to embrace the suck.
Now we’re talking. Ok, describe the moment where the suck occurs. How does it feel when it happens? How do you convince yourself to go on?
You’re cold and wet and you’ve been crawling on the sand for hours with your heavy pack biting into your shoulders and your knees are bloody and your shoulders want to collapse, and you don’t know when this will end. Your mind has been complaining constantly, “Why are we doing this? What’s the worst that would happen if we just quit and walked away? What are we trying to prove? Is it worth it? You could go home and sleep. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
And it’s incredibly tempting to give in to your mind, because it is very convincing. We are very very good at rationalizing, especially in the face of pain. It’s painful, and you want the pain to end, and you want to just rest. This is what happens when it starts to suck. And that was just the beginning of the suck — there were many other such moments along the way.
I would convince myself to go on first by being aware of what my mind was doing. I would watch my mind as an outside observer, and laugh at my mind and its rationalizations. Then I would pay attention to the ground in front of my face, the waves on the beach washing up near my body, the incredible view of the Golden Gate Bridge lit up at night, and think, “I am incredibly lucky.” I would feel the pain and the tiredness, and think, “What a wonderful thing it is to feel.” And then I would say, “Just one more step. We can re-evaluate after one more step.” Then I’d repeat that after that one step. It also helped that I had a team relying on me, and that I couldn’t just quit or I’d let them down.
I lived in a Japanese temple for a while where I did that. To delay the decision to stop meditating, I would say, “I will decide in exactly 30 minutes.” And then after that time: “Well, that wasn’t that bad, I could do that again.”
True, it works for anything. It helped me too when I started marathon training — you inevitably want to stop running, but if you just go a few more steps, you’ll be fine.
What I’m trying to figure out is how to make people resistant to the BS of that inner voice. To do it, you need a certain distance from yourself. How did you learn to do it? Were you born that way?
I learned it when I wanted to quit smoking, and the urges would be so strong and the rationalizations would nearly always beat me. I would tell myself, “Just get past this one urge.” I didn’t even need to go the whole day, just that one urge.
Before I learned this, I would give in to any urge. But when you realize the urge is there — you become self-aware — you learn that you can watch it, and listen to your inner voice. The inner voice is extremely intelligent, and the worst part is that we are usually not aware that it’s speaking. We just listen to it without being conscious of it. And it is talking all day long. Most people don’t realize how persistent and powerful it is.
Running really helped me to learn to listen to it, but not heed it. I run without an iPod, which means it’s just me, the outdoors, and my mind. So I pay attention to the nature around me, but also I have nothing to listen to but my mind. So I listen. And it talks, constantly.
Meditation helped strengthen this skill. Meditation is the same as running — you have nothing to pay attention to but your breathing, your body, and your mind. And your mind is very active. So you watch it, and you learn to be this observer, and it’s fascinating if you stick with it.
I’ve started to think that people should be doing difficult things on purpose, if only to train them to be able to push past their usual habits and internal programming. Do you agree? What other internal walls have you been able to push past?
I haven’t found this to be necessary myself, though I’m not saying you’re wrong. I do things in baby steps, so that change is easy. I find it much more sustainable than trying to do things that are really difficult.
I also think people are already doing difficult things in their routines — it’s incredibly unpleasant to be in a job you hate, to be overweight and unhealthy, to be deeply in debt. I know because I’ve done those things, but I felt stuck in this difficult life. The baby steps helped me to get out of the routine, to change my internal programming with micro changes.
As for other internal walls … one that I’ve been exploring is giving up goals. I’m very much programmed to be goal-oriented, and I think a lot of us are. When I first considered giving up goals, I thought it was impossible and stupid. But slowly I’ve been learning that it’s a much better way of thinking, at least for me.
Explain “giving up goals.” Did it help you complete the Goruck or was that something separate?
As I looked deeper into what’s necessary and what’s not, I started to question the need for goals — are they really essential? What would happen if you gave them up? Are they really the driving force behind what we accomplish? I’ve found that they are unnecessary — without goals, you’ll still work on things you’re passionate about, and do fun fitness activities and other things that excite you.
Goals take credit for our accomplishments, but our passion and interest is what really make things happen. Goals also add a lot of administration — goal setting, tracking, making sure you’re sticking to the goal, finding next actions, etc. Goals stress us out — if we’re not on track or don’t reach them, are we failures? Goals also fix us on a certain path, when in truth there are many possible paths and staying on one predetermined path with a fixed destination is an artificial limitation that’s completely unnecessary and unnatural.
When you remove this limitation, you are freed to do anything.
When I did the Goruck Challenge, I didn’t have “finish challenge” as a goal. I just wanted to have fun doing a new challenge. It didn’t matter to me if I finished or not. However, when I felt like quitting, I decided to stick it out through the urge to quit, to explore what that’s like. I think it’s a really interesting experiment, pushing past these urges to quit, and so that’s what I did. So yes, it did help me to finish.
“Free to do anything.” That is the perfect final sentence.
Last question: After all this progress you’ve made, is there anything you still feel any anxiety about? What do you still have problems with, if anything?
Sure, I have all the same insecurities as anyone else. I get anxious about unfamiliar social situations, public speaking, will people like my writing, am I good enough to write fiction? I have fears, about financial security and being alone and whether my life is meaningless.
The key I think is whether I let those insecurities and fears stop me from doing the things I love. I’m learning to watch those feelings, like an outside observer, and realize that they are not a part of me, but just something that happens. They are natural phenomena, like the sun rising or leaves changing color, but they are not who I am. So I watch, and let them happen, and don’t let them define me or what I do.
Read The Flinch, for free, here.
Filed by Julien at 12:12 pm under challenge, interviews, risk
17 Comments
Part 2 of an interview with Todd Becker, of Getting Stronger.
Don’t know what this is? Read Part 1 here. (Hint: It’s awesome.)
Julien: Todd, welcome back! Since the last section of the interview we published, I’ve gotten comments from Twitter and on the blog where people have said “I’ve been doing exercises for a week already and my vision is better,” or “I just took a cold shower– wow! I’m not stopping that anytime soon.” Since your methods seem to be simple, interesting, and functional for people, can you give us some practical starting points where people could experience it for themselves?
Todd: I’m encouraged to see all this interest in doing hard things! That must say something about your readers, because there is an understandable human tendency to take the easy path. Most of us will work hard at something only if we can see the benefits, so long as no superhuman effort is required. So start with a goal that motivates you. Do you want to lose weight, get fit, or improve your eyesight? Choose something personally important. Pick a goal that will really please you if you can achieve it. It should be a moderately challenging goal that you know will take effort, but one that is achievable within weeks to months. Make it specific. It could be something physical, like reaching a goal weight, being able to walk or run a certain distance, or being able to drive without glasses. But it could also be something behavioral — gaining control of your temper, or overcoming specific fears, obsessions or frustrations.
Now my next recommendation is to forget about that lofty goal! Because that’s the place where so many people fail. They often flail away at a hard goal, and make some initial progress. But then they hit a plateau, fail to achieve their goal, and get discouraged. One person who recognized this typical pattern of obsessive effort, followed by burnout, was George Leonard. Leonard was an aikido master and a luminary of the human potential movement of the sixties and seventies. He studied what it takes to achieve hard goals and summarized this in a wonderful little book, with the title “Mastery“. He believed in setting tough goals, but he cautioned that being too obsessively focused on goals is counterproductive.
So I think we need to do two things to get started. First, I’m a very strong believer in gradualism. Break down your lofty goal into small steps. Pick a very small and concrete first step on the path to your goal, something you haven’t reached, but something you think you could reach within a week. It could be a physical achievement like losing two pounds. But it is probably more instructive to pick something that involves your emotions or sensations. For example, being able to go two afternoons next without any snacks, waiting out the hunger pangs. Or being able to last one full minute in a cold shower. Or resolving to get through one whole day where you decide not to let traffic or quarrelsome people bother you. Whether it involves your body or your emotions, it must be somewhat unpleasant and difficult — or you won’t activate hormesis and the sustained reward you’ll get from opponent processes. Over the next two weeks, pick this one narrow aspect and focus on it like a laser beam. If you can achieve the goal in the first week, aim for an additional increment of improvement in the second week.
The second thing I’d advise is even more important than the first. At then end of the second week, start focusing on the effort as an end in itself. Stick with the plan towards your goal, but forget about making progress for a while. Focus only on the care and thoroughness of the effort itself. Leonard talked about “learning to love the plateau”. He wrote eloquently about how to turn our efforts into habitual “rituals” that we can stick with and learn to savor for the long term. These rituals will grow on you with time, and they are your best defense against burnout. You’ll soon recognize that the most important “product” of your self-improvement efforts is not the specific goal itself! The real “product” is the recognition that the very act of making a sustained effort will permanently change your mental and physical “machinery” in ways that train and prepare you to take on even harder tasks. In that sense, the real “mastery” is not in achieving your specific goal, but rather in becoming master of your own destiny. So while it will help your motivation to start out with a personally meaningful goal, in the long run it not so important what specific goal you choose to work on. Because you are really working on yourself.
J: Funny, that’s just what I started doing recently. Precisely when I’m thinking “why would I want to get into this cold shower again?” — that’s exactly when I jump in, to force the movement at the time of most resistance, for its own sake.
I’m also starting a 24-hour fast in about two hours– any advice on getting through the tough parts?
T: I’m actually in the middle of a 30-hour fast right now, so my mindset is right to answer your question. I’m normally not hungry at dinner time, but I was hungry yesterday afternoon, so that was my cue to start fasting until I eat dinner tonight. Just as you realized with your shower, the best time to plunge into discomfort is precisely when your mind is rebelling. There’s no better way than this to decondition your cravings, and I find it really does rewire my circuits and smooths the path forward. The best way to kill cravings is never to reward them: Eat only when you’re not hungry!
If you’ve done some short intermittent fasts before, Julien, you’ll probably do just fine. But I wouldn’t advise a 24-hour fast for anyone getting started with intermittent fasting. As I’ve said before, gradualism is important. Just as you wouldn’t try to bench-press 300 pounds in your very first attempt at weightlifting, you’ve got to build up a tolerance for this sort of thing. For someone starting out, I’d first look to cut out eating after dinner — allow 2 to 3 hours between the last bite and bedtime. Then cut out all afternoon snacks, at least most days. Then cut out breakfasts and go to 1 or 2 meals a day. This sounds like heresy when we’ve been lectured on the importance of eating a big breakfast to start the day, and eating frequent small meals to keep pumping fresh glucose into our veins. But the science tells us a different story: Learning to adapt to long stretches of time without eating teaches our body to more quickly upregulate the hormones and enzymes that allow rapid burning of our fat and glycogen stores “on demand”. This drives down our basal insulin levels, upregulates neuroprotective brain growth factors like BDNF, and activates the breakdown of oxidized and glycosylated waste products that accumulate in our cells. If we are constantly eating small meals, our insulin levels never get low enough to let this happen.
Another myth that needs to be dispelled is that if you fast for a day you’ll go into “starvation mode” and start to break down your own muscle tissues. That’s just not true. It takes 3-5 days of fasting before any significant catabolism of muscle tissue kicks in. You have plenty of fat and glycogen on your body to get you through a few days of fasting without any problem. There are some excellent resources on this, including the Fast-5 diet (editor’s note: download their free e-book), and Leangains, the website of Martin Berkans. Martin combines intermittent fasting with weight training to get great results with both health and looking great.
Keep a log of your experience during your fast. If you’re like me you’ll experience long stretches of incredible clarity, lightness and energy. You’ll feel like all the cobwebs inside your head have been cleared out. But you’ll also experience discomfort at times. When you first start fasting, it takes time for your metabolism to switch over from burning glucose to burning fat and ketones. Your brain, heart and muscles will do just fine on fat and ketones, but many people experience cravings, light-headedness, headaches or “fogginess” during the transition. And those episodes could last up to a few hours. The more you fast, the more rapidly you switch over to fat burning, so these problems diminish. A very small percentage of people get true hypoglycemia — with shakes and feeling like they will faint or black out. If that happens, eat something with quick glucose like a small piece of fruit or candy bar — but keep it small. Otherwise, drinking non-caloric beverages like water, or unsweetened coffee or herb teas is a great idea.
You’ll also find you suddenly have all this extra time freed up by not eating, preparing food, thinking about food, or driving to eat food. I find that these are great times to go for a walk or do something active. The light exercise will actually cause your liver to kick in and supply you with fresh glucose or fatty acids, and that will dampen your appetite and give you a fresh burst of energy.
Good luck with the fast!
J: Thanks, it actually went great. I do it once a week. I was traveling to a Mexico event while it was going on so I fasted around 28 hours total. I find it best when you’re busy, so you don’t even notice you’re not eating– the opposite of being on a plane, actually. But once you’re done you happy you did it. :)
You know, it’s funny, the more I think about advising people to do this stuff, the more I feel like I’m advocating that people participate in weird, cult-like behavior for the purpose of strengthening themselves. For me it’s essential that these behaviours be self-directed, not come from outside. Their purpose is to develop self-sufficiency and health– as Erwan le Corre would say, to be “healthy, happy, and free.”
That said, I think there could be something here, a systematic methodology, which one could use in order to help ourselves take risk, be comfortable with stress and make better, non-fear based decisions. What do you think?
T: You’re right. From the outside, I suppose certain practices like intermittent fasting or cold showers could make Hormetism look like some bizarre ascetic cult. But it is really not a fixed belief system or set of rituals. It’s a versatile approach to self-improvement that is infinitely adaptable to meet individual needs–a “systematic methodology”, as you put it. Everyone’s interests and difficulties are different, and personal change usually happens only when you are motivated and feel in control. I think that preaching and pushing specific directives on other people using backfires. What I’ve tried to do on “Getting Stronger” is to propose a relatively simple formula or set of tools that can be applied to virtually any aspect of self-improvement. On the blog, I’ve described how to apply these tools to a range of very different challenges, such as improving eyesight, avoiding running injuries, extinguishing cravings for sugar or drugs, or mastering negative emotions like worry or anger. While many people who visit the website are searching for answers to just one specific problem, what I’m hoping to get across is that all our personal challenges have something in common. There is set of universal tools that you can apply to any problem, often one that I may not have discussed or even thought about. On my forum, people have written about their own unique issues like nail-biting or addiction to specific foods, and many have come up with their own creative solutions.
What makes Hormetism so different, and perhaps controversial, is that it turns the conventional wisdom about “self-improvement” on its head. The usual approach is to try to relieve or compensate for some particular stress. So you correct poor eyesight by using glasses, tame appetite by eating frequent snacks, treat addiction by abstinence, or control allergies with antihistamines. I suggest you take the exact opposite approach: start by applying a small additional amount of controlled stress. Of course, at first this seems to make things harder! But, just like lifting weights, progressively increase the stress for short periods of time, allowing for rest and recovery, until you’ve adapted and become stronger. This is a gradual process and it takes time — often weeks or months. But at the end of the day, if you persist, your body and soul are stronger. Not only that, you are no longer dependent on a “crutch” like a pair of glasses, a special diet, or some medication. So unlike cultists who give up their freedom to join a movement, you now have toolset you can use to get stronger in a more fundamental and permanent way, freeing yourself from continued dependency on external contrivances.
J: Ok, so let’s move into the discussion of psychological training, to adjust to stress and be able to thrive while under pressure. If I have to make a big decision, or I am avoiding one due to fear or perceived risk, what should I be doing to make sure that fear isn’t the reason I’m avoiding the decision? This goes beyond your usual hormesis stuff (physiological adaptations) but I believe it’s probably within the same realm as the rest, am I right?
T: Most people tend to think that physical and psychological stress are two different things, but they are surprisingly similar in some ways. Too much of either can be harmful. And for that reason, we are usually counseled to keep stress carefully in check. In the case of your example about decision making under pressure, the conventional advice would be “stress management“: take a break from the action, calm down using relaxation techniques, and get some time by yourself to carefully reflect. To the extent that the perception of risk is driven by uncertainties, gather more information. If you’ve got all the information but are still fearful, perhaps you need to probe that fear, by yourself, with close friends, or with a therapist. Sounds sensible, but how realistic is that advice? In the real world, you don’t always have the luxury of time or resources to properly chill out. Time is limited, pressure is unrelenting, and you must decide in the moment.
Other than warning of us of immediate dangers, though, I think fear is usually counterproductive in making good decisions. What you really need is a way to toughen yourself psychologically so that fear is no longer a factor, and clear thinking can emerge. And just as gradual application of physical stresses provide hormetic benefits, there are training techniques that can help you immunize yourself from disabling emotions. Jim Loehr, a sports psychologist who worked with Olympic speed skater Dan Jansen, developed a methodology he called “toughness training“. He used this to help elite athletes like Jansen deal with stress and fear “in the moment”. To build mental toughness, he used intense training exercises to simulate real situations, followed by periods of rest and recovery. Loehr later applied these to help “corporate athletes” make better decisions under stress. I recommend his book, “The Power of Full Engagement“, which I’ve reviewed on my blog.
More than two thousand years ago, the ancient Stoics developed a psychological technique which is particularly effective in banishing fear. It’s called “negative visualization“. You spend time contemplating the worst that could happen in the decision at hand. You could lose your job, or your investments might crash. You contemplate the illness or death of a loved one. This might sound morose, but it has some interesting effects. First, it increases your appreciation of what you do have. Second, you often realize that even in what you thought was the worst case, you would still be alright and could bounce back without great difficulty. Tim Ferriss, the entrepreneur and “lifestyle design” guru, found this technique liberated him from some fears that were holding him back from making a major decision to leave a job he felt trapped in, embarking on a travel adventure that changed the direction of his life. He and gave a talk about it at Google, captured in a YouTube video that I think addresses your question very well.
J: Wow, GREAT video.
Todd, I was just reading this stuff from what is basically my favourite blog right now. The comments seem to suggest that resistance to disease is a hormetic process. If that’s true, is the human body a hormetic machine? We do see it in other places, like getting stronger bone structure if we lift weights, etc. Or would that be generalizing?
T: Thanks, Julien, I took a look at those comments on Whole Heath Source. I’m familiar with Stephan Guyenet and I share his perspective on a range of topics, including the benefits of low carb or paleo diets, intermittent fasting, high intensity intermittent exercise–all good examples of how hormesis can broadly stimulate good heath. Stephan’s site is not the only one in this category — there are a number of “evolutionary diet and fitness” blogs that share his perspective, including those by Art Devany, Mark Sisson, and Martin Berkhan.
But I’m not sure that hormesis has been adequately explained, even on those sites. Sometimes hormesis is portrayed as a mysterious or surprising biological quirk that only pops up under a narrow set of circumstances. Other times it’s just thought of as a lofty philosophical generality – Nietzsche said “that which does not kill us makes us stronger”. Hormesis has inspired a certain degree of pseudo-science, like homeopathy. And some skeptics argue that hormesis does not even exist — there are huge debates as to whether there really is a low dose benefit to radiation sources like radon or certain chemical “toxins” in foods and the environment. Hormesis is denied or ignored by regulatory agencies such as EPA and FDA. So there is a lot of controversy and lack of consensus about what exactly hormesis is.
My own view is that hormesis can be explained as a set of general and specific adaptive repair and defense mechanisms that exist in all organisms, on the level of both individual cells and organ systems. These are real physiological mechanisms, involving specific proteins, enzymes and hormones that are turned on in response to environmental triggers. It’s not surprising that organisms have evolved ways to repair damage and fortify themselves against environmental stresses. Organisms that can adapt hormetically would obviously out-compete those that couldn’t repair damage or resist increased stress. Some types of hormetic adaptation are highly specific — like the way that animals grow a thicker fur coat to survive the winter, or how guitarists grow calluses on their fingers. One of the more exciting developments I’m researching is allergen immunotherapy, which uses systematic progressive low dose exposure to allergens to strengthen the immune system and totally cure people of specific allergies. But others types of hormesis are more systemic, turning on a whole cascade of metabolic adjustments. I’d put high intensity interval training, insulin-lowering diets and low dose radiation into that category of systemic hormesis.
There are extensive human and animal studies by scientists like Edward Calabrese and Suresh Rattan, that uncover specific hormetic repair mechanisms, and document health and longevity benefits. But I have not seen much investigation into how to apply this knowledge usefully in our own lives. There are many practical questions to answer: What is the optimal level and frequency of any given stress like fasting, cold water immersion, or radiation? If the optimum varies for each individual, which I think is likely, what’s the best way to experimentally figure out the right dose and timing in your individual situation? How much can you continue to increase the stress? How much improvement in life span and health are possible? Are there new types of hormesis that might even be more efficient or effective? Those are some of the questions I’m investigating and writing about on “Getting Stronger,” but this is really an unexplored continent, with a lot to be learned!
End of Part 2!
Filed by Julien at 10:38 am under interviews, training
5 Comments
Anyone that reads this website knows that I don’t do interviews.
I like to keep this blog my own and, for the most part, I’m very selective about who I’ll give a forum to in this place. When I first was introduced to Getting Stronger, a great blog about hormesis, I knew an interview was the right thing to do.
Todd Becker is the author of Getting Stronger, a blog about stress and adaptation for the purpose of thriving in the modern environment. This is Part 1– the rest will follow up later, or you can read more now here.
Julien: What is Hormetism? Why is it important?
Todd Becker: Hormetism is both a philosophy of life and a set of specific self-improvement techniques, based upon the practical application of hormesis. Hormesis is a biological principle which is surprising or counterintuitive to most people when they first encounter it: a small dose of something harmful or stressful is frequently good for you. There is a lot of research showing that health and lifespan can be improved by exposure to a wide variety of stressors, including toxic chemicals and radiation, exercise and calorie restriction. Of course, there is always a balance, and too much stress or toxicity can harm you. However, I think most people unnecessarily fear and avoid stress, and as a result they miss out on the benefits. It is very important to understand how to gradually adjust the dose and frequency of the stress to get the maximum benefits.
Hormetism goes beyond the science and asks how we can incorporate hormesis into our lives in a practical way, to increase our resilience and well-being. It is more than a set of techniques; it’s a practical philosophy. I’ve read the works of the Greek and Roman Stoics, philosophers like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, and was surprised to see that they recognized not only the physical benefits of hardship and self-denial, but the psychological benefits as well. The Stoics were not a sour and humorless bunch, as you might think, but they were joyful and light-hearted because they learned to appreciate the good in life while building up a tolerance for what most people consider as misfortune, adversity or even pain. The Stoics feared very little in life.
A few years ago, I began to see how the principle of applied stress and hardship generates positive returns in so many different areas. There is a lot of good scientific research on hormesis, but it is typically very narrow and esoteric, and I was surprised that nobody was connecting the dots to develop general principles for self-improvement. My interest is in elaborating the findings of hormesis into more general guidelines, which we can apply to improve our health and our outlook in life in any field of interest. The more I read and think about it, the more connections and applications I see to every aspect of life and society. I think this is such an important finding, because all of can benefit by getting stronger physically, psychologically, and even spiritually.
So I started writing my blog, “Getting Stronger” back in March. And I’m getting a very good response, my readership is growing every day. I’ve even started a forum where discussions take place on various topics. I think I’ve tapped into an important niche that nobody else seems to be addressing. This is exciting to me and I want to see how far the idea of Hormetism can go.
J: I bet the main question you get from people is “Why would anyone do this to themselves?” So, why would they?
TB: You’re right, there’s often a certain puzzlement as to why anyone would subject themselves to cold showers, skipping meals, running barefoot, or lifting heavy weights slowly. All of these things are uncomfortable, at least at first. One of my readers tried taking a cold shower and commented that it was ‘the most intensely uncomfortable non-dangerous thing’ he’d ever tried. So I can understand the reluctance. But I’m not recommending masochism or self-harm. The practices I’m advocating trade short term pain for long term gain. Everything I write about is something I’ve tried myself, after I’ve researched it to understand the scientific basis and evidence for the benefits. In each case, there are long term objective benefits, which become increasingly apparent with time. And what is remarkable is that the initial short term discomforts generally also diminish in short order.
Two good examples of that are cold showers and barefoot running. When you take your first cold shower, you’ll probably experience “cold shock” — involuntary gasping, a pounding heart rate, and very cold extremities. But after several cold showers, this reaction gets much shorter and milder, and you’ll soon feel a kind of radiance and vitality that lasts all morning. Cold showers are a great anti-depressant! Barefoot running can also be a bit awkward and uncomfortable at first. You get calluses and sore muscles you didn’t known you had. But after a few sessions, you realize how fun it is, and people find themselves stronger and less prone to injury.
I’ve also written about the psychological benefits of refraining from pleasurable things and learning to tolerate uncomfortable things. The Stoics were the first to recognize these benefits. And recent psychologists, like Richard Solomon, noticed that strenuous or unpleasant activities often bring with them a pleasurable aftermath which grows stronger, and lasts longer, the more it is repeated. He first found this when studying the euphoria that skydivers experience after their first terrifying jump. Each time they jump, it becomes less and less terrifying–whereas the positive feelings upon landing get stronger. It’s almost the inverse of addictive pleasures, where the pleasure decreases and lasts less time with each “hit”, leading to tolerance effects and very unpleasant withdrawal symptoms.
The good news is that most of the long term benefits I write about don’t take all that long to show up. So you don’t have to be some type of super-disciplined person to follow this program, you just have to have enough motivation to get started, and take it one step at a time.
J: I found out about intermittent fasting around 2007-2008 and started practicing it, with interesting results. I also recently started taking cold showers, which are known to have physiological benefits. How could someone start this process of intentional stress if they were interested?
It’s interesting that you have tried cold showers. When I first wrote about cold showers, my wife said, “Why don’t you stick to diets, there’s a big audience for that — nobody wants to take cold showers!” But of all my posts, the one on cold showers has had the most hits, even more than the diet-related posts, and its popularity has grown steadily over the 6 months since I posted it. I’m not sure why that is, but perhaps its because I focus on the subjective experience of taking cold showers and the benefits of making it a daily habit — whereas most other web articles talk only about the health benefits, or recommend a cold shower as a one-time freakish experiment.
Every practice I recommend is intended to become a permanent habit, something that you stick with for the long term. The benefits continue to grow, like compound interest. Even my recommendations regarding eating are not meant as “crash” diets, but long term changes to eating habits.
I also find that these are not separate, individual practices, but they tend to work together to improve physical and psychological resistance. For that reason, you can start almost anywhere. I’d recommend choosing a single area of your life where you’d most like to see improvement. Don’t try to change everything about yourself at once– pick one area that is important but manageable. If you are overweight or out of shape, it could be weight loss or fitness. Perhaps you want to improve your vision, overcome an addiction, or learn to manage emotions like anger or fear. I’ve written posts on each of these. In all cases, the technique involves exposing yourself to the uncomfortable aspect of change, but doing so gradually and in a systematic way. So for example, with intermittent fasting, I recommend that you take it one step at a time. Don’t start out fasting 24 hours. First try eliminating afternoon snacks. Then, when you can handle that, cut out breakfast. And so on. You have to be motivated and patient, but it helps to know that the science is on your side — that your body and mind are plastic and adaptable, and that with the right approach you can change.
When you’ve had success improving yourself in one area, the second and third areas come more easily. In the process, you are actively strengthening not just your physical being, but your patience and tolerance to undergo further challenging changes.
J: That fits right into the stuff I wanted to bring up next. It was actually on your blog that I first read about the “opponent-process theory of emotion,” which I’ve found to be an interesting way to build willpower. Can you explain how that works?
That’s a really interesting question, Julien. In the 1950s, two neurologists, Leo Hurvich and Dorothea Jameson, tried to understand why we see after-images. When we stare for a while at bright colors and then look at a white wall or paper, we’ll often see a ghostly image with the opposite, complementary color. Hurvich and Jameson traced these after-images to processes within our nervous system, in the retina and ganglion cells, that act in opposition to the initial stimulus, so when you remove the stimulus, this weaker but persistent “opponent process” is still running. And as I already mentioned, psychologists like Richard Solomon and J.D. Corbit found this to also be a good explanation for why intense thrills like skydiving give way to pleasurable relief, while intense pleasures from drugs or whatever can lead to addiction, because they leave one feeling down or depressed between highs. Solomon’s biggest insight, I think, was not just in coming up with many examples of these kinds of psychological reactions and describing them, but in actually trying to locate their underlying causes within our nervous systems.
The basic idea is that our nervous systems try to resist large changes through a mechanism called homeostasis. Whether we see a change as “good” or “bad” doesn’t matter; homeostasis acts to compensate for big changes. This applies to any physiological system in our body, not just our nervous systems. If we get hot, our circulatory system acts to cool us down. If we eat a big meal, our digestive hormones act to control blood sugar. If we get highly excited or stimulated, our neurochemistry acts to depress the stimulation. For any big change, there is a simultaneous, lower level process acting to at least partially blunt the impact of that change. Solomon found several interesting things. First, the low level opponent process continues on even after the original stimulus stops. So if we experience a stressful thrill like skydiving, the calming reaction leads to a sense of relief that can last much longer than the original thrill. For example, if we take a cold shower, the thermogenic opponent-process outlasts this and we feel a lasting pleasant warmth after stepping out of the shower. More interestingly, the opponent process gets stronger and lasts longer with each repetition; the body is adapting and realizes it must try harder to maintain homeostasis. That means that the original “shock” is muted faster and more strongly, even from the beginning. It also means that with repetition the opponent process continues to get stronger and last longer after the stimulus stops. So the more you take cold showers, the shorter the initial unpleasantness, and the longer and stronger the “afterglow”.
I think this also explains why exposing yourself to challenging or unpleasant situations is a great way to build up your tolerance, or “willpower” if you want to call it that. Some people think of willpower as a mysterious ability you are either born with or lack. But the opponent-process theory shows that anyone can strengthen their willpower by continuing to test their will. The will is like a muscle — you have to build it up by confronting progressively more difficult challenges. Cognitive behavioral therapists have found that exposure therapy — progressive exposure to fears – is very useful in overcoming phobias or anxieties. Similarly, we can gain willpower by first setting small challenges for ourselves, and increasing the challenge. We can expect a reward each time in the form of a feeling of satisfaction that comes after meeting each challenge. And the opponent process theory teaches us that we can expect this “relief” or satisfaction to continue increasing the more we test ourselves. Willpower gets easier the more you practice it. It’s just how our nervous systems work. I’m currently researching the underlying physiological mechanisms for this for an upcoming post on my blog. Its absolutely fascinating how this works.
End of Part 1! Read Part 2 here.
Filed by Julien at 1:29 pm under interviews, training
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