#439 How Stress Resilience Makes You Live Longer - Dr Olli Sovijärvi

Siim Land (0:00)

You know, your body will always adapt to what you give it. And if you're always, you know, pampering and cozy, then your body will be non-resilient and very weak, and not able to tolerate any kind of a stress.

Olli Sovijärvi (0:11)

There seems to be this curve where there's a sweet spot, and the sweet spot seems to be...

Siim Land (0:19)

Olli, welcome back to the show.

Olli Sovijärvi (0:22)

Hey, thanks, Siim. I don't even remember how many years.

It's maybe four, five years since the last time.

Siim Land (0:30)

Ah, well, yeah, I mean, we've had a lot of these live streams on your channel, on the Biohike presented channel, or the Hololive channel. And yeah, but glad to have you back on my show. And you've also recently published a new book called The Resilient Being about resilience. And I'm also one of the co-authors on that contributor. So yeah, I'm excited to talk with you about all things related to physical resilience and health, et cetera. And I recently actually had a tweet as well on X where I said that, you know, health is not like just being free from sickness and free from disease. It's also the aspect of being resilient because, you know, you could live in a bubble, literally speaking, all your life, but you get exposed to some sort of a minor pathogen, and then are you really healthy? Whereas being healthy is actually also being able to be exposed to certain toxins and certain pathogens without getting sick. And if you do get sick, you're recovering from them a lot faster than the average person would. So I think, yeah, like resilience is a central component of being healthy and it's also very involved in like all the longevity mechanisms and longevity pathways. Like they actually overlap a lot, like a lot of the resilience genes and stress-resistance genes, they overlap with a lot of the longevity pathways. So it's, yeah, kind of very relevant to all things are ready to help.

Olli Sovijärvi (2:04)

Yeah, you kind of put it very well together. So I think like what we experienced as a humanity, like the COVID era and post-COVID, that was a kind of like a... It was a turbulence, for sure, and it tested our resilience as a humanity, as like a global conscious being, but also in a single, like individual level. And many of us got very sick, and hopefully most people have recovered. Of course, it always takes a toll on certain people. But I think that this was a very good test to humanity as a total, and it also bursted. I think this book also got a little bit inspired about the factors that are affecting resilience. And there's a lot into it. So yeah, this book, Resilient Being, you are also co-authoring it. And this is a statement of all the aspects that, how you can develop your own resilience, how you can actually live in the world. You don't have to be in a cave. You don't have to be in isolation on an island. Of course, that would test resilience on a different way. But I see also many people kind of retracting themselves of the society, and just like maybe moving countryside, and just living the natural life. Of course, that's also the possibility, but then it's kind of missing the point of interaction, and contracting different kind of maybe threats. I don't know if threat is a strong word, but different kind of things that challenge our physiology, our mental capacity, our being in total.

So, if you think about the Buddha who went to the mountains in isolation, trying to find enlightenment, and eventually came up back to the people and realized that you're not going to do it alone. So, we also need each other in this life. So.

Siim Land (4:31)

Yeah, and you know, you can't avoid it completely. There's always going to be, the entire human history and life on this planet has been a different kind of catastrophe, one after another, so you never will be able to avoid them all together. You need to be prepared for them in advance, both physically, of having your physical health in check, and mentally as well, of being mentally prepared for all the uncertainty and dangers that come around at some point.

Olli Sovijärvi (5:02)

You know, nothing is as certain as uncertain. So that's a good phrase. Also, these kind of things force to live in the moment, and you don't know what's going to happen next. Of course, you can do some predictions, and what's the likelihood of an asteroid hitting the planet, or beginning of World War II, III, or what not. So, but if you go too much into like the possibilities or the threats, then you're actually losing a lot of energy. So it's wise to recognize, okay, hey, now it's like winter season. There's a lot of viruses like hovering around what I need to do to manage and go through that. How can I prepare myself? How can I prepare my body, the mind, and what do I need? And in this sense also for me, like the seasonality and like realizing all the cycles, macro and micro cycles that we go through the life. It's when you learn to like just go with this the cyclic nature of the life, then you're more able also to fine tune yourself and tune in to the flow, this stream, the flow of life. So that's how I see it. And if there are like disruptions, like major disruptions. So I can give an example. So for example, the past year, I haven't gotten sick, no flu, nothing. And multiple past years, like before that, we always in the winter time went to the Canary Islands or something tropical, and just disrupted the body homeostasis. So our bodies were already in winter mode, and it's a different state physiologically. We go more inwards like the core, core temperature maybe gets a little bit lower, and our immune system is in a different state. So when you disrupt the homeostasis, you go into full summer, like full sunshine blasting your system. And many times I got sick after being three, four days, like just taking too much in the sunshine.