Age Like a Badass Mother

Dr. Sharon Horesh Bergquist: The Stress Paradox: How the Right Stress Can Slow Aging and Boost Resilience

• Lauren Bernick • Season 3 • Episode 10

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Is stress always the enemy? What if some stress could make you healthier and help you live longer?

In this fascinating conversation, Dr. Sharon Horesh Bergquist—a physician, researcher, and longevity expert—unpacks the paradox of stress. You’ll learn how certain types of stress, in just the right amounts, can kickstart cellular regeneration, enhance brain resilience, and improve overall well-being.

We explore:

·      How your body uses cortisol to adapt—and when it backfires

·      Why your mitochondria hold the secret to energy, aging, and healing

·      The powerful effects of phytochemicals in fighting stress at the cellular level

·      Surprising science behind kindness, forgiveness, and their link to reduced chronic stress

·      What it means to “dispose of unhealthy cells” and regenerate healthy ones

If you're ready to rethink stress and unlock a biologically younger, more resilient you—this episode is your roadmap.

Tune in now to discover the healing side of stress—and how to harness it for a badass, vibrant life.

https://drsharonbergquist.com/


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Hi, friend. This week's guest is Doctor Sharon Berquist, a Harvard and Yale trained physician, researcher and longevity expert. She joins me to unpack the fascinating paradox of stress. You'll discover how certain types of stress in just the right amounts can actually kickstart cellular regeneration, boost brain resilience, and enhance overall well-being. If you're new here, I've also shared my personal journey of reversing heart disease with a whole food plant based diet in a previous episode. Be sure to check out my YouTube channel after the show. I've been posting quick, helpful videos to show you exactly what I eat. And while you're there, don't forget to subscribe! Most importantly, I want to hear from you. Your questions and stories shaped this show. You can reach me at Lauren at age like a badass mother.com, or connect with me on Instagram or YouTube. I respond to every message. And again, thank you so much for listening. Hi friends, I'm Lauren Bernick and I'm flipping the script about growing older. My guests have been influencers since before that was even a thing. Welcome to the anti Anti-Aging podcast. Welcome to age like a badass mother. Doctor Sharon Berquist is a practicing board certified physician researcher, an internationally recognized pioneer in lifestyle medicine, she has helped lead clinical trials that have received $61 million in funding for evaluating the benefits of lifestyle interventions and finding early biomarkers for chronic diseases such as Alzheimer's and cancer. She is widely published in peer reviewed journals and has contributed to over 200 news segments, including Good Morning America, CNN, ABC news, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR. Her TEDx video, How Stress Affects Your Body has garnered over 8 million views. She received her Bachelor of Science in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University, and her medical degree from Harvard Medical School. And I bet your parents were happy. Her book, her book, The Stress Paradox Why You Need Stress to Live Longer, healthier, and Happier, reveals the groundbreaking science behind how daily lifestyle habits can activate the body's innate regenerative capacity, reshaping the way we approach aging, disease, and longevity. Oh man. Well, now I feel like a lazy blood clot after that intro. But welcome, Doctor Sharon Bergquist, thank you so much. Happy to be here. I'm happy to have you. I loved your book. So let's just start with like a basic question. What can you explain, like in a couple sentences, what is lifestyle medicine? Yeah, lifestyle medicine is using your lifestyle as medicine. So just as it sounds, some people use food as medicine. Some people use exercise as medicine. This is a more global term where we can also use social connection, stress, sleep, various lifestyle habits as a way to make ourselves healthier. And the truth of the matter is that our lifestyle is actually the most powerful medicine, and that we don't always utilize every component of our lifestyle the way we can. And we resort to pharmaceutical medications. So it's a way of empowering each and every one of us to do the things we can do to live healthy, long lives. Yeah. I mean, I wish that and then that. That's a special board certification right on top of medical school. It is, it's really become a subspecialty that you can get board certified in, because there's science behind everything. I think, you know, as a physician, I hear so many times people saying, oh, diet and exercise and come back and see me in six months. But there's so much science behind. What does that even mean? Like, is the optimal diet. So there's a whole evidence based approach, and you can get board certified as an entire subspecialty because there is so much literature on how to use lifestyle for your specific goals to reach wherever you desire, you know, whether it's disease prevention, whether it's targeted, towards trying to get anywhere you want to go. So yes, it's an entire subspecialty because the science has just grown so much and continues to grow. Yeah, I wish I wish every physician was board certified in this. I think we'd have a lot fewer, chronic diseases, it seems. Yeah. That's the goal. Yeah. Okay. So, you know, can you just give us, like, a, big picture because it seems a little counterintuitive, what your book is saying, that you need stress to activate, you know, these, internal mechanisms to help you be healthier and happier and age better. So can you kind of just give us the big picture of that? Yeah. Yeah, I think most people try to avoid stress, and it may seem very counterintuitive to say, no, add some stress, but our stress response is really designed to help us survive. I mean, that's why we even have a stress response. But a healthy stress response has a beginning and middle and an end. The in our lives today is more chronic and continuous, which is why it is not serving us well. It's really the type of stress. But when you look at what happens to us at the level of ourselves, there's an entire other story that's being told, in our bodies that most of us are unaware about. Most of us think of stress as fight or flight, right? Right. Sabertooth tiger. But in reality, at the level of our cells, the right types of stress, at the right dose, for the right duration, regenerate our cells. Right. This is so incredibly powerful because our bodies have an innate ability to repair, to reshape, heal, to increase our energy through our mitochondria. We literally can use our body's own machinery to regenerate our bodies if we support and nurture our innate ability to do so. Okay, so like you mentioned, the fight or flight and that's, you know, the the bad stress or actually that's that's a good stress it because the situation in the duration okay. So you're just saying it has to be like you know not long term. So can you, can you give us some examples of like what what's good stress versus bad stress to help us understand. Yeah. So stress can be mental. It can be physical. It can be emotional. So most people think of stress as psychological. But you can really extend the definition of stress to be anything that challenges your body. Right. So in a sense, being sedentary is a stress on your body because it is very hard for your body to sustain that for a long duration. Processed foods also stress your body, but not in a beneficial way. So when you think of good stress and bad stress, you know, I would say you can tell the difference by how you feel. And then I'll, I'll speak a little bit more to the psychology, because most people immediately go to the psychological rather than the physical. But as a big overarching umbrella of what is good and what is bad, the stressors that are good can have this regenerative effect on your cells, and they create regenerative energy. When you encounter a stress that is beneficial, you feel energized. You feel creative. You feel motivated. When you encounter stress that's bad, you feel depleted, fatigued in near burnout, in psychological stress, the ones that tend to make us feel fatigued and burnt out are ones that we can't control. There's no sense of mastery. We feel like it's something that is just continuous. Examples would be being in a work situation that we just find so unpleasant, we don't enjoy it. We don't like the people we report to, the type of work that we're doing, but there's no sense that there's a way out, like we have financial obligations, etc. difficult relationships, personal relationships, divorces, a child being sick and you just, you know, don't see an end in sight. And there's so much fear and uncertainty around it. Like, these are harmful, chronic stressors. Stressors that are good, stressors that are beneficial are ones that we can grow and strengthen from the experience. And they typically are ones where we can feel a sense of mastery. We can feel that we, you know, can kind of there's this nervousness of a maybe uncertainty, but that there's this possibility for great reward. So typically either the types of stressors that align with our beliefs, they are meaning to us, they contribute to a greater good. You know, for example, doing this podcast. Right. Like it's a lot of work. It's hard. There's some stress involved with every logistic piece. You know, right before we got on there with all these tech issues, you know, I think I just great schools and I would be able to figure out the tech. But that is challenging. Right. And so these brief stressors that at least are big picture contributing to something that matters to us. The stress response that we release is a different biochemical response than the stress response. That's fear based. The entire neurochemistry is different in that it's not just here's, you know, epinephrine, norepinephrine, cortisol. The stress response is so much more complicated because we release different ratios of growth hormones. Things like neuroscience toys that help us learn from the experience. For example, DHEA, insulin, we release dopamine. As I mentioned, we can release serotonin and we can release nore epinephrine. These other hormones and neurotransmitters actually reduce our cortisol responsiveness, meaning that when we have higher levels of dopamine, serotonin or epinephrine, we don't spike the same cortisol response. In a stressful situation, we moderate and mitigate potentially buffering cortisol. So within a stress response is also the power to actually get good at stress. And those are the types of stressors you want to pursue because you build adaptations every time you encounter stress. And when it's the type of stress that is the kind that is meaningful, and it is the type of stress that's short term, it's brief, it's intermittent. You have just the right exposure where your body builds the pathways to help you handle the stress. You develop adaptations so that you are better able to handle future stress and you're better able to handle the stress that's unavoidable. The unpredictable bad stress that is really a part of all of our lives, right? It's not realistic to have as our solution just to avoid stress. Right? So we have to build the ability, the skills to become more resilient in the face of stress. And these good stressors help us do it in a way that we strengthen and don't get depleted. Yeah, yeah. When you were talking and you use the podcast as an example, as a good stress, I also was thinking about the podcast because, you know, I left my corporate job and I started this podcast and I was so stressed, but I was also so excited. And I just kept thinking to myself, like, okay, just take the next step, get your head shot, find out you know, what platform you're going to use. You find out, I don't know, whatever the next step was. But I was like, just don't think about it. Don't, don't like, think about the big picture. Just keep taking the next little step. And you know, what microphone am I going to use. Like there's 4 billion questions. But I was really excited by it all. And as I chipped away at it, I, I did feel really good and really excited. And so I get the difference now I, I think I understand the difference that that's a good stress in my life. And the simple reframing of how we view stress in itself affects how stress impacts our health and longevity. And that is just so powerful. Like just a simple recognition that, hey, yes, this is really stressful to do a podcast and leave a corporate job and go out of your comfort zone. But when it's in the service of helping you reach your personal goals, extend your boundaries, increase your possibility, increase your potential as a person to grow and develop in a way that means something to you so that you can contribute in the way that you want to in this world, to your community, to your listeners. The recognition that that type of stress can be good, and having a mindset that this is how I grow and this is a stress is beneficial mindset as opposed to stress, is harmful. Mindset in itself reduces how much cortisol your body releases in a stressful situation. I mean, it's really powerful when you think about it, that simply, you know, if someone's just listening to this conversation and if all that they take away from it is that stress can be good, that is a mindset intervention that will serve them well. And you keep you keep talking about cortisol is so that's that can be really bad in high doses. Or can it be good. Like what can you explain about cortisol a little bit. Oh I love that because cortisol is I think one of the most misunderstood hormones in our body. I think we just associated with belly fat because we see commercials right. If you have too much cortisol, you're going to get belly fat. Every problem is because of cortisol. So I will start off by saying, you know, I our body does not have a moral code. There is no hormone that is good, no hormone that is bad. All in how our choices and activities make us release that hormone. Okay, so in the case of cortisol, chronic exposure to high levels of cortisol can be harmful. But if you release a spike of cortisol that is brief and intermittent, for example, you would if you did a high intensity interval workout or you took a cold shower, you are going to have a spike in cortisol from that stress response. But it's brief and it's intermittent in your basal level. So when you recover from that exposure, you're basal level of cortisol will actually be lower. So after the exercise later in the day, your cortisol level will be lower than before you went into it. And over time you build, you know, a lower cortisol as a basal level. You have a higher parasympathetic nervous system tone, which is the rest, and digest part of your nervous system. So these brief spikes followed by recovery. Actually again this is the paradox. They help us become more stress resilient because they're reducing our baseline level of cortisol and, up regulating that parasympathetic nervous system. So we don't have to fear these spikes of cortisol. They are there to help us build adaptations. The growth comes from that spike in cortisol because in that context of exercise, for example, that cortisol spike is accompanied by a spike in testosterone is spiking growth hormone. These are anabolic steroids. They are growth hormones. And when we release them in that context, we grow. It benefits us when we have the chronic stressors. We were talking about the difficult relationship where your cortisol level is high just cumulatively because you have a higher circulating amount. That is when it can become harmful. So it's you don't have to fear cortisol itself. You really just have to think, how can I reduce my cumulative exposure to cortisol? And cortisol is just a hormone. Is that right. And it is vital. Like we would die if we had no cortisol. Cortisol helps us in the morning when we first get out of bed, we kind of have a rise in our cortisol level. It helps us wake up. Cortisol rises, helps us maintain our blood pressure. Awake us when we are exercising. Cortisol is telling our body we need glucose, we need energy, and it helps us create the fuel in our body to get through that workout. So cortisol has so many essential functions in our body. It's just that the if you need a spike in sugar to get through a high intensity interval workout, that cortisol served you well. If you are sitting at a desk and you are continuously mounting a stress response that higher glucose availability is not serving you well, okay, okay. That's good. Can, while we're on the subject, can you give us like a little reminder about how our cells work? Because I want to get into that a little bit. Yeah. Our cells are incredible. I mean our cells have everything our bodies need to function. So if we took a tour through the cell, our cells have a nucleus. It houses our DNA. So that's one key thing. Our cells have power plants called mitochondria, where we produce energy in our bodies. Our mitochondria convert food energy from, you know, whatever you eat today to cellular energy in the form of ATP, our cells have manufactured a protein manufacturing plant. So we actually make proteins in our cells. Our cells have recycling centers. So we can take old and damaged components. We can take what is still salvageable, kind of like a junkyard and repurpose it. And if it's past the point where it's salvageable, we break it down for energy. That's the process of autophagy that we do in our lysosomes. When any piece of how a cell works doesn't function well, that leads to symptoms. If it goes on for a longer amount of time, then we get some disease. If that goes on even longer, it starts to shorten our lifespan. So at the crux of everything that we feel and disease and longevity is what is happening to your cells. I mean, that is the smallest unit in our body. If our cells are healthy, everything else functions. But if our mitochondria are damaged or underpowered, that creates problems. If we can't repair the DNA that is getting damaged, that creates problems. If we don't have enough autophagy and recycling, that creates damage. So I think the cells are emerging as really the future of how we can become are healthiest selves at the you know, we're always thinking about what's the root cause, right? What's the trunk of the tree. And if you keep going deeper in the earth and finding the deepest root and the deepest root, it really comes to this tiny microscopic unit in our body, the cells. Yeah. Thank you. That was a good explanation. And I, I wanted to, have you do that because I just want to read a couple of sentences from your book. I wrote it down. Okay. This is a quote from your book. Many chronic diseases and the aging process itself are driven by the same mechanisms that are adaptive. Stress responses counteract inflammation, oxidative damage, DNA damage, mitochondrial dysfunction, protein degradation, and insufficient autophagy. That means that phytochemicals build resilience against the very factors that cause illness and are associated with premature aging. Okay, so that brings up two things that I want to talk about. Well, several. But mitochondrial dysfunction, which is what you just talked about when it doesn't function, you know, well, you really kind of just went into that. But how do we keep our mitochondria healthy? You mentioned in the sense resilience, phytochemicals build resilience. So is that the key phytochemicals and and how do we get those. Yeah. And phytochemicals are one piece of the bigger puzzle of how do we optimize our cells in our mitochondria. You know I mentioned five key ways to do it. Chemicals are phytochemicals being one. The others are exercise with high intensity thermal stress with heat and cold fasting in a way that aligns with your circadian biology and then good emotional and mental challenges. Okay. So let's break those down a little bit. So, let's just start with the phytochemicals. So that's what eating a plant based diet or it is. But it's so much more fascinating than that. And you don't have to even be entirely like plant based or even plant predominant. It's more just adding phytochemicals. So when we are taking on any of these five stressors, we are gently stressing our body. That is the common thread between all of these stressors. And when we do that, we are activating stress responses in our cells. Seven cellular stress Responses That help us Repair DNA through the DNA damage response repair protein through two responses heat shock proteins and the unfolded protein response. We increase our antioxidant capability, we moderate inflammation, and we activate building new mitochondria and improving the health of our mitochondria through this year. Two in response, we can do all of those with plant chemicals or phytochemicals. And this is the part that is so fascinating because every day we are incurring damage. We mentioned the processed food being sedentary, but there are pollutants, microplastics. There are things we don't even know that are harming us. Right. And all of these are creating damage at a cellular level, like on a given day, we have 10,000 injuries to our DNA. I mean, it's profound seven every minute. Right? So our bodies are missing things at repairing the damage. It kind of in the basal background level, like our bodies are. This magically just doing so much work. When we choose these good stressors, we are activating our body's ability to do this work. And this is really what's magical about plant chemicals. When we choose to add some plant chemicals, we are gently stressing our cells and different plant chemicals do this where we activate different stress responses that help us do this regenerative repair work. Depending on the phytochemical that we consume. And the real takeaway from all this is whatever diet you choose to eat or you are currently eating. It could be omnivore, vegan, whatever. Diet. Simply adding phytochemicals supports your body's regenerative ability, right? So the fact that we can do regenerative medicine through our daily habits just changes everything, right? This is not futuristic medicine, sci fi. Like, you know, we're going to recreate our organs through 3D printers. This is something we can all do today in a practical way that is accessible to every one of us. Yeah, it's I found this part fascinating, because because you talked about that there are little toxins or toxic responses in these different plant medicines, plant foods that our ancestors. I think everybody's all obsessed with paleo and ancestors and blah, blah. And, you know, this is kind of one of those things that the people who ate a more and a variety and expose themselves to all these different plants were the ones who survived. Right? That's 100% right. You know, the so I will start off by saying, you know, this is slightly different than paleo but has many of the same. Right? So paleo idea is that, you know, our genes haven't really changed a whole lot better environment has changed dramatically. And now our genes really don't serve us well in our current environment. And there is truth to that. But natural selection selects for survival and reproductive fitness. It does not select for health. So we cannot simply make the argument that all things paleo or healthy, right? Nor all modern things you know, are unhealthy. Right now, what we're doing with these cellular and molecular understanding of these stress responses is understanding anything which, you know, habits, be it dietary or all the others, are impacting our genome in a way that optimize our health. So we are reverse engineering the way we were meant to live. In what's fascinating, as you just said, is that the reason it is so beneficial to eat plants is the long standing relationship that we as humans have evolved over time with plants, right? We coat evolved our ancestors. I mean, the threat of starvation, the ones who consume the greatest variety of plants had the greatest likelihood of getting the calories they needed to survive. Plants also want to survive. And the greatest you know, odds for a plant to survive is to create a deterrent for us as humans or insects to eat the plants. Right? So the plant chemicals, the phytochemicals are actually natural toxins or natural pesticides. And they help the plant become stress resistant. Also against drought in ultraviolet light. When our ancestors would consume these natural pesticides, our bodies then evolved a way to rapidly detoxify these toxins. So they have very little actually remains in our body. We rapidly detoxify. And we also adapted this ability to build our resistance against these plant toxins. So these stress responses activate our genes in a way that makes us more stress resistant. Right? We have higher antioxidant capacity. We start to repair and regenerate our bodies. So we over time co-evolved so that we are strength thinned by these plants. And we have grown to really depend on them to allow our bodies to do these natural healing processes that they are capable of doing. So it's incredibly fascinating. We are so intertwined with the plant world and our environment regarding our health, that you cannot extricate us from this long, you know, now over 2 million year history of our relationship to plants in our environment. I yeah, I really found this, that this part of the book fascinating. I loved it and I didn't really even ever think that plants would be, you know, mildly toxic in some way and be stressful to our body because I've just always believed that they're so good for us, which they are. But it's interesting to know why the science behind it. Okay, so since we're talking about diet, maybe we should talk a little bit about the intermittent fasting portion of this. Can you explain that to us? Why it's good. Absolutely. So, intermittent fasting can mean so many things because you, we we're all fasting. So it's really, like when we fast overnight, we're all fasting, but it's how do we extend that fast? And there are so many ways to do it. There's time restricted eating where you eat in a certain window. There are kind of other fast where it's like alternate day where you severely cut back on calories on certain days of the week. But there just so many ways to do it. The type of fasting I'm referring to is time restricted. Eating to do, doing your eating in a 12 hour window or less ideally like ideally closer to a ten hour window. And the reason being that our bodies are designed to be in this balance where when we are eating, our bodies are in a phase of growth and they're building up energy stores. When we are in the fasted state, our bodies are in a state of breaking down those stores of energy, and they start to do these repair functions, these housekeeping functions, and 12 hours is roughly the time that our bodies need to switch over to these repair and housekeeping functions. So when we eat in a period of greater than 12 hours, we are again not giving our bodies the time to do that work of healing and recovery. So if you, for example, if you were, running a coffee shop in the morning, you want to gear up for your customers and you know, you got the coffee ready and the whatever breakfast treats ready. And at night time you want to mop the floors. You want to, you know, clean, clean the bathroom, stock up so that the next day you're ready for the customers. If you don't give your body enough time to mop the floor, restock, and the next day you're going in with kind of all the things that didn't get cleaned up from the day before. You can see how quickly, over time, you're incurring damage. And it's going to be messy. And you know, you're just not going to be efficient in our body. These are that way. And we are doing this day in, day out. The average person now each over a 15 hour window. We are not you know, this is from the first calorie in the morning. So that coffee or juice down to that midnight snack right before we put our head on a pillow. And so what I, you know, advocate for is really gently stressing ourselves to go past that 12 hours. And when our body sense that there aren't incoming nutrients and we go more than 12 hours, we have this metabolic switch. We switch from burning glucose for energy to burning fat for energy. And we create ketones from the fat. And those ketones are signaling molecules. Signaling molecules send messages throughout our body, and they are sending the message to hunker down to ourselves. And our cells enter the stress resistant mode where they are like, oh, I have to operate more efficiently. I have to uptake glucose so they become more insulin sensitive. They ramp up these processes we're talking about, like making more mitochondria so that then they're better at making energy. The next time energy is available and we start to repair DNA, we enter autophagy to recycle the damage. Can you just stop and talk about autophagy for just like one second? Because I think it's so important. What tell us what autophagy is and what it does. Autophagy literally is a term derived from meaning self eating autophagy. And our bodies have this ability to, take old cells, cells that have damage in them and literally recycle, these cells. So when you are in a deeper state of fasting in your body senses it doesn't have any incoming nutrients. The first thing it wants to do is become more metabolically efficient, so it becomes more insulin sensitive or less insulin resistant, so that it can take up all the glucose and energy in your body more efficiently. If you go a longer period where there's still no incoming food, you enter this self eating process, right? It's it's kind of like cannibalize what is there that your body can use for energy in the first thing your body's going to do is say, hey, it's inefficient to put energy in these old cells that aren't really functioning that great. So it starts to break down those old cells, or it looks around for those damaged ones and it takes it to the lysosome. That's the part we were talking about. That's our recycling center, where the junkyard essentially tries to salvage what it can. And when we break the fast in, we go back to eating mode. We have these healthier cells that are growing and multiplying. So essentially you fast. You do the repair, you start to, you know, essentially select for these healthy cells. Then you eat and you grow these now rejuvenated, healthier cells. And if you do that on a daily basis, you are making the all your cells enhance every part of your body healthier. Yeah. And and this isn't like crazy. It's just eating from like what, eight in the morning till like six at night. Is that right? Yeah. I'm not great at math. Generally wait an hour or so from the time you wake up to start eating, okay, to have that overnight melatonin level to go down and you want to start to have like that higher level of insulin kick in and then in the evening you want to end 2 to 3 hours before a bedtime, okay. You're aligning your eating with your circadian rhythm and you're honoring this natural rhythm. Your body has to do what it's optimized to do at different times of the day. Yeah okay. That sounds not that difficult. And then you mentioned ketones, but I just want to say you're not advocating for a keto diet. Right. That's yeah. You can get, you know, to using ketones for energy from a ketogenic diet. Because if all you're eating is like fat and hardly any carbs, your body is going to use fat for energy and turn, you know, some of that fat to ketones. The difference here is that when you are doing it through intermittent fasting, you are metabolically switching from using ketones back to using glucose ketones and then back to glucose. That builds your metabolic flexibility, and that honors this natural rhythm and keeps that balance that our bodies really need to be healthy in the state of, in, you know, ketosis and being on a ketogenic diet, you are chronically, using ketones. You get that, you know, there's a lot of, breakdown that happens in that state of ketosis, but you need growth as well as without the other, it compromises your overall health. And the goal, I think is, is more balance. Yeah, that would be more just a constant stress and, a little negative stress. Yeah. Right, right. And two matching in two intensely. Right. And then, let's talk about thermal and, and cold stress because I think you mentioned that. Can you talk about that? So this is, a really fun area because I think it's so underutilized. We don't think of temperature as a lifestyle intervention. Yeah, there's a lot of cold baths going on, though. But I think that you don't have to be that extreme, right? No, no ice baths. Well, that sounds terrible. Yeah. You know, the way the army says or the science of good stress, it is a mild to moderate amount of stress followed by recovery. So it's brief intermittent and mild to moderate. So you do not have to do extreme forms of stress. You want this kind of just right amount where you're pushing yourself past your comfort zone but not to the point of overwhelm. For one person, that might be five seconds of cold at the end of a shower. For a person who's very cold tolerant, it may be an ice plunge for however long they can sustain, but it's very different person to person of what is enough to stimulate your body's regenerative capacity. So I think that is something that's not communicated well when you see the clips, say a cold plunge or a high intensity workout, there is so much individual variability in you have got to know your body, know where you are starting from and just gently push where you are a little uncomfortable, and for a brief amount of time and give your body the time to recover. That's where the growth happens. So think of it like, you know, lifting weights, right? You want to do 5 pounds, build a muscle, then you can do 10 pounds. And it's the same with cold. It's the same with heat. So I think there are a lot of practical kind of DIY ways to do it where you don't have to be in that ice bath. But I body sense temperature as a stress because we are designed to function optimally at this temperature. For most people, around 98.6°F 37°C are enzymes. Which do so much of the biological processes and the proteins work the best in that range. When we are in cold or heat, our core body temperature, either goes down or up respectively, depending on the temperature exposure. When our bodies have this increase, incredible desire to go back to homeostatic balance. So our bodies have this beautiful balance that is, you know, we have so many feedback mechanisms that just swoop in when we're out of that range from we're optimal. So when we have our core body temperature either lowered or raised, these feedback mechanisms kick in that activate these stress responses that we're talking about. So at the level of our cells, all these cellular stress responses that repair and regenerate kick in, at the level of our physiology, we, trigger a lot of beneficial effects. So for example, with cold exposure, we activate our brown fat, which is a type of fat that burns energy very different from white fat, which is what most of us have too much of the type of fat that stores energy. And we also activate thermogenesis that is shivering thermogenesis. So we generate heat, which is what the term thermogenesis means. But we could do that through muscle contractions. Right? That's when we shiver to generate heat. We can do it through turning on brown fat, which, are kind of these internal space heaters that we have. And while this is going on physiologically, there's a whole other level of benefit in our brains, in our minds, that stress exposure is like a jolt of stress that our bodies are sensing in our brain. So our skin is so innervated with these nerve receptors when they sense cold, there's a jolt of norepinephrine going to your brain saying stress response that spikes your epinephrine 530%. And and this is one of the original studies back in 2000 that put people in cold water immersion for an hour, like dopamine, 250%, I mean, huge spikes. But that is why a lot of people find that after that cold shower, they feel motivated, energized. Their mood is better. Their pain is less. So there's this whole component of mental health as well as physical health benefit that's happening from the cold exposure. And there are similarly many benefits that are happening from heat exposure that occur because heat exposure, like sauna, essentially mimics exercise. Your heart rate goes up to about 120 to 150 beats per minute, similar to moderate intensity exercise. And so many of the benefits and our vascular system are similar to the benefits from exercise. And to be clear, I'm not recommending that you just do sauna instead of exercise right? You know, there are so many unique benefits to exercise, but when you are looking at a way to build a healthy lifestyle that regenerates your body, you have so many tools at your disposal. And temperature is one of the more underappreciated and underestimated tools. And so obviously colds would be, like you said, cold shower or cold baths and, jumping in the pool when it's, you know, chilly or and then he would be sauna or hot bath or hot yoga or a walk on a hot day. Is that right? It could just be that. That's right. Okay. Use ambient temperature. You know, the thermostat, the I mean, there's one study where they, for ten days had people turn down the thermostat to 60 degrees, where shorts and a t shirt and do that for six hours a day. Brown fat volume increase 37%. Wow. That's crazy. Okay. And then so, let's just talk briefly about exercise because you that's also one of the, the ways to do this. So tell us obviously I think we all know the benefits of exercise. But yeah, there are so many from the lens of Hawn. Mrs.. Which is really how I, I'm seeing the regenerative effect. Exercise is really the most potent way to improve the health of our mitochondria. So, you know, you asked the question earlier, what damages our mitochondria? Why do we have mitochondrial dysfunction? Well, age alone is creating some mitochondrial dysfunction, and that's one of the processes that's leading to aging right now that we understand at a cellular level why we age. So if we can just improve the health of our mitochondria, we each better end our Western lifestyle, like the processed food, the sedentary, the chronic loneliness that damages mitochondria and exercise, particularly with bursts of high intensity, enable us to make more mitochondria and they help us do a selective form of autophagy called my TOF AG, where we can take damaged mitochondria and actually kind of restore them to take away these, you know, mitochondria that aren't functioning well. When mitochondria don't function well, they create more oxidative damage. They release free radicals in the process of making ATP. And if they are damaged, you're releasing so many free radicals in that process of metabolism. But so what exercise, the high intensity workout high or what is it called hit? Yes, hit. So, you know, ideally you want some level of moderate, continuous paced exercise, like about 180 minutes a week, say a walk or cycling at low intensity and 1 or 2 workouts of the hit or the high intensity like a high intensity interval. So it's bursts of high intensity, right? It is. And again, it's what's intense to you. So, I don't want that term to sound intimidating. There, was a Japanese study where they looked at middle and older age adults who were walking every day for their exercise, and they had one group, instead of walking 30 minutes continuous pace to do the walk in three minute intervals, three minutes a fast walk, then three minutes. Slow down, catch your breath. Okay, walk super fast. It can, you know, then slow down, catch your breath. Over five months when people did that, you know, about four times a week, the group that walked in intervals had a 15% increase in their VO2 max in their cardiorespiratory fitness and a 20% decrease in their cardio metabolic risk factors. So you can take whatever exercise you like. If you're a walker, do that in intervals. If you like the elliptical, do that in intervals. If you like cycling to, you know, hard and fast for four minutes or so, slow down, catch your breath for three four minutes. But there's such a unique benefit of getting to that vigorous and high and higher intensity because your body releases, lactate in an amount that's greater than what your mitochondria can clear. And lactate is one of those signaling molecules, just like ketones, that signal a stress response, where the lactate tells your cells through this master regulator called PGC one alpha, to turn on making new mitochondria. And that ultimately is such a key part of health, because if your cells cannot make adequate energy, your mitochondria, if they are impaired, all of these critical functions that our cells do, whether it's a muscle cell, it doesn't have the endurance. If it's a hard sell, it can't squeeze your heart as well. If it's a neuron, you can't think critically. None of these functions can happen if your cells are underpowered. So exercise in particular these bursts of high intensity are really an absolute non-negotiable for long term health. Okay, that's bad news for some people that don't like to exercise, but I, you know, but I think, like you said, it's it's what's high intensity for you. So like you said, it could be the walking fast for a few minutes and then slowing down. So that's that's doable. You know, I will also add that it sounds like, oh, go hard, do hard. The message here isn't too hard. Just so you can say you have grit or perseverance. The message here is this is a message of love. This is what defines wellness. This is what being good to yourself. Yes. If you want to exercise your body's ability to keep you healthy, to do the magical work that it can do to fight disease and help you live this long, healthy, beautiful life and expand your, you know, human potential increases realm of possibility for you. You are enduring that hard in the service of becoming this person that is stronger and healthier. Yes, this is really a message of love, not a message of yeah, yeah, go be tough. Right, I know I, I appreciate you saying that. I think that's really important to because being kind and loving to yourself is huge, especially as we age. Did we cover all. What did you say? There was five ways to repair your mitochondrial plants. Exercise. Hot and cold stress, intermittent fasting. What else? Okay, that's, what was the other one? The mental. Oh, mental. Mental and emotional. Okay. That was right. Okay. And so, what, you know, we you mentioned kindness in your book. How does that tie into this and why is being kind good for you? Yeah. And this is the most beautiful way that I think we as humans are connected. You know, I mentioned we're connected to our environment. Part of our environment is each other. We are a program that when we do good for others, when we do something altruistic that turns around and becomes one of the strongest and best ways that we make our bodies more like healthier and stress resistant. I think our tendency when we are in a stressful situation is to look inward, right? Like, what do I need to do? You hunker down and you kind of zero in on what your needs are. And if you can think of things as how can I, in the midst of my stress, you know, do something voluntary that helps somebody else, right? How can I lend a hand to somebody and, you know, do a good deed? There is this phenomenon called helpers. Hi. I'm not sure if, people are familiar with it, but it's this kind of surge of these feel good hormones that get released. A lot of the ones we mentioned before, like, norepinephrine, serotonin, but also endorphins, endocannabinoids, these create that soup in your body that helps you reduce the amount of cortisol. So you're essentially helping others. And in that process reducing your own stress. And this is yet another counterintuitive way, right, of it may seem really stressful that while you're stressed, you're taking the time to do something for somebody else, which sounds like it would be more stressful. But the paradox here, just as with the others, is that leads you to a different starting point, like it's resetting, your resilience, so that your body is better able to handle the stress in your life. And I love that because you can create this beautiful, like, positive, virtuous cycle where you can, you know, make yourself more stress resilient and in that process lift others up with you. And I think it's so powerful, that we are essentially programed in a way where our bodies reward us for kindness. Our bodies also reward us for doing things that are meaningful. There's also a lot of social genomic research. Similarly showing that when we are doing activities that are meaningful, that even if we're not happy when we're doing them, like there's kind of this unpleasantness sometimes to kind of get through that activity, it takes us in a direction where we express, like this. We actually turned down this, conserved sequence in our genes, the KT gene, which is the conserved, transcriptional response to adversity, where we down regulate in, inflammation in our body. We are just so programed to be there to contribute to a greater good. Because again, if you look at our human history, we need to work with people in a tribe to survive and in order to be a member of a tribe, because our hunter gatherer ancestors traveled in bands of around 50 people who would contribute to that tribe, people who, you know, made tools were the ones who would push themselves to go beyond the horizon and figure out the bigger world that was out there. They added the most value to the tribe, and they would, you know, hence be ones that you'd want to keep in the tribe. People who maybe were more self-focused and weren't, contributors. Well, they really didn't need to be in that tribe. But if they were excluded from the tribe, they were going to die. I mean, you can't really survive on your own, but it's just so phenomenal that, you know, I think in the modern world, we've kind of removed ourselves from realizing these ways that our bodies reward us, for, for doing good, being good, acts of kindness, doing things that are meaningful. And it's just incredibly powerful. that makes a lot of sense. I mean, we, like you said, we're born to be an a tribe to, you know, like a, you know, we lived in these communal settings and I, I, I, we've all experienced that you do something kind for somebody and then you feel good, you know, you know we've all experienced that. And then you're like, well dang, did I do that for myself or did I do that for the others? And we did it for both. And everybody benefits. So there's no downside to being kind. Can you just overall give me what do you think the, the one best piece of advice for aging well is, you know, I think it's forgiveness and acceptance. I think so much of the chronic stress is really the internal stress that we create for ourselves. You know, we picture stress as being this external thing, like we talked about the financial hardship, etc., but our own minds create so much stress for ourselves when we hang on to anger, when our actions don't align with our beliefs. These are all ways that we are stressing our bodies. We are increasing inflammation and we discount those because it can. It's so easy to externalize and pinpoint factors in our life that aren't going well, but we've got to do that internal work of thinking how we are creating chronic stress from our own expectations, from our lack of being able to accept, let go, forgive. And I think that's such a powerful force. Well that's good. Do you have good advice for how to forgive? You know, I always look at a person's intentions. And oftentimes, even if they did something that was not ideal. But at the end of the day, they have a good heart or they mean well, and they did something that they wish they could take back, but it was not necessarily intended to be malicious. It was a certain point in time. It's just to exercise grace and understanding behind that person's general motivation and not hang on to that one act. We all do stupid things. Yes, I agree, I just have that grace and understanding. Well, thank you so much for your time today. You've been a wonderful guest and it's just been a pleasure. Well thank you. I love this conversation. I love that you help empower your listeners with all the information you, you know, present and all the guests that you have. And thank you for the work that you do, because it really is meaningful and it really is good stress. Well thank you. Take care. Bye bye. Bye bye. Thanks for listening, friend. From my heart to yours. Be well. Until we meet again.