#324 Stronger by Stress Full Speech (Siim Land Biohacker Summit 2020)

Siim Land (0:00)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast. And today I'm playing you the recording of my speech at the Biohacker Summit 2020 in Helsinki called Stronger by Stress. It's based on my book called Stronger by Stress. And it also gives a little insight into the movie that we made called Stronger by Stress. You can check out the movie on all the major streaming platforms like iTunes, Amazon Prime, etc. And you can get the book from Amazon. This episode is brought to you by Self Decode. Self Decode is a genetics decoding company. You can get personalized health recommendations based on your DNA and the latest scientific research. They have numerous different DNA reports for different areas of focus like weight loss, longevity, gastrointestinal health, cognition and even mood. Recently Self Decode came out with their 2 software that incorporates artificial intelligence in generating DNA reports. It's the most advanced and comprehensive consumer DNA service in the world. You can get a 10% discount with the code SIIM at selfdecode.com. Head over to selfdecode.com and use the code SIIM for a 10% discount on your personalized DNA reports.

I'm glad to be here. I only come from Estonia but during these times it's hard to get anywhere even outside of your own house.

I would imagine that 2020 has been pretty stressful and pretty chaotic but at the same time we can't really forget that this sort of chaos and stressful events are just part of life and they're not inherently harmful. So in the past people would always like experience famine, starvation, war and even pandemics, they come and go all the time. So us as people we just have to kind of take that information into account and if we know what to do then we can actually kind of leverage these stressors as a way to get stronger and better. So that's going to be the purpose and topic of my speech. How can we get stronger by these stressors?

And I would imagine that the first thing that comes to mind when we talk about stress is that it's harmful, it's negative, it's bad and it makes us feel awful. And it is true that research shows if you are chronically stressed out then you're more more susceptible to many chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, interresistance, obesity and even like depression and neurodegeneration. So yes, stress can be quite harmful if it's in excess. But if you look at the definition of stress then it's not necessarily negative. By definition, stress is just like an imbalance in the body's homeostasis. So homeostasis is balance and stress is just an imbalance from that homeostasis. The body has deviated away from this balance and in order to maybe get healthier and get back into balance, then we just need to kind of reduce the stress or learn how to manage it better.

The founding father of stress science is Hans Salje. He is a Hungarian-Canadian endocrinologist and he did a lot of experiments after World War II on different mice and species. And he has said that it is not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it that does. So even he kind of realized that there are many stressors in our life and what necessarily causes this damage and causes these negative side effects is our own response to the stressors.

And Saliha also came up with his module called the General Adaptation Syndrome and it essentially describes the stress response as a physiological phenomenon and it consists of three stages. The first stage is the alarm stage where the body has experienced this stress and it has encountered this resistance and in this stage your body hasn't been accustomed to the stress yet and therefore it experiences this drop in the immune system, drop in just functionality and decline in these restorative processes and regenerative processes inside the body. The second stage that you can see in the orange is a resistance and in this stage the actual body hyper responds to the stressor. It tries to fight it, it tries to resist it and it does so by mobilizing all the resources it has. It releases stress hormones, it releases blood sugar and just tries to survive and resist the stress as much as possible. But eventually every type of energy is going to eventually be depleted including the resistance to stress and if that happens then you can end up with two solutions. That's the third stage, the last stage, it can be either recovery or exhaustion. So recovery would happen if your body has managed to deal with the stress, it managed to overcome it and is now returning back to homeostasis, back to baseline where it's healthy. But if the resources have been depleted or the stressor is too large, too excessive, then exhaustion is going to ensue and that can lead to all the diseases, burnout, depression, anxiety and eventually even death.