#248 Right Amount of Hormesis - Siim Land and Thomas Olivier IG Live

Thomas Olivier (0:01)

Mr. Siim, how are you?

Siim Land (0:03)

Hello, hello. What's up? How's it going?

Thomas Olivier (0:05)

Good. Direct from my car.

Yeah, so I hope you're doing good. It's been a while. Last time we spoke, actually, I was on your show.

So, very grateful about this.

And today, we're here together because, well, you know, we talk a lot about stress, and obviously, it's an everyday, you know, common things for everybody to talk about. And your approach to stress, Stronger by Stress, is very interesting. And it's also eye-opener for most people. And that's why I wanted to talk to you also, because I admire your work. You're one of those people who are very consistent and very prolific and amazing at educating others on, you know, health optimization and biohacking. So I just wanted to give you the hat for that. And yeah, so let's get started. We have people joining. And first, like, how did you get in whole biohacking? And how did you went on talking about, you know, writing your book Stronger by Stress?

Siim Land (1:25)

Yeah, well, I've been doing biohacking, I don't know, for the last, like, seven years or so. And I just got into it through fitness and like body composition, like lifting weights and just trying to build muscle and that sort of thing. But I also quickly realized that there's also like this longevity aspect to it, which is very important to me. And I don't want to take it for granted. And I just always wanted to maintain this balance between performance and longevity and well-being.

And over the course of these years of, you know, slowly built up an audience, mostly talking about the things that I do, the experiments that I do with nutrition and exercise and sleep and other biohacks and supplements and that sort of thing.

And I've written many several books about these topics as well. And the last one or the one of the recent ones last year was We need to keep up with you, that's the thing, because you're like a book every month also. Yeah, yeah. The last one I wrote alone was Stronger by Stress last summer. And yeah, the idea or the reason I wrote it was, you know, because of the pandemic that started. I wasn't planning on writing it in the beginning of 2020

When things started to go haywire in like February or so, I kind of, you know, thought about, OK, maybe, well, I do have like this idea of writing something like that. And it was like a good perfect time or opportunity to also kind of share these concepts with people. Because, like I said, stress is like everyday thing and it especially ramped up over the last year. So, yeah, the main idea of the book is to, you know, teach yourself how to, like, you know, learn to manage stress better, how to be less affected by it. But at the same time, also use it as an opportunity to basically strengthen your body and increase your overall resilience.

Thomas Olivier (3:17)

Yeah, yeah. OK, exactly. And so this is what made you write this book. And it's pretty amazing, you know, pretty amazing content.

From your words, what is your definition of stress? So how do you perceive stress and how, you know, how would you explain stress?

Siim Land (3:36)

Yeah, yeah, well, stress is a very subjective, like every organism experiences stress differently. And it's also like every person experiences it at different thresholds. So let's say what's very stressful for some person may not be stressful at all for someone else, like a Navy SEAL. They can tolerate a ton of stress. They can tolerate an entire sleep, an entire night of sleep deprivation. They can tolerate, you know, military conflict and starvation and that sort of thing, versus like an average person, like a soccer mom or someone. They can't really tolerate those things that well, and they experience the negative symptoms much faster as well. So there is always like a threshold between stressors and the stress itself by definition is like an imbalance in the body's homeostasis or like a deviation from it. So your body is always in this inner balance, maintaining this inner equilibrium. And whenever it goes off that either in some direction, then it's going to experience some stress and the body kind of compensates for it by, you know, raising the metabolic rate, producing stress hormones, down regulating some other sex hormones or something. And it all kind of tries to bring it back into balance.

And, you know, with some conditioning, you can always like increase the capacity at which kind of stressor you tolerate. So you can increase your heat tolerance, you can increase your cold tolerance, your your exercise tolerance and all those things. So, yes, stress itself is very malleable and yet it's not something that is very, you know, specific.