Health, Fitness, and Nutrition; Resource for Women

Tag: adaptogens

When is Stress Good for You?

When Is Stress Good For Us
Hormesis; effects on the body

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger? That’s hormesis!

Hormesis is essentially a good type of stress. It’s having a positive response to temporary minor stressors. Having some stress is good, and is necessary to improve the body and mind to become more resilient and stronger, but not all stress is created equal or is beneficial. And obviously, having constant mental stress or physical stress can wreak havoc on our health and have no benefits. So what stress is good and how can we use it to benefit ourselves?

Exercise is a classic form of hormesis. When you’re lifting heavy weights or even light weight to the point of muscle fatigue, you damage your muscle fibers and they built back bigger and stronger. This also applies to endurance exercises as well. 

One of the best types of exercise for boosting your resilience is high-intensity interval training (HIIT). It has a particularly strong hormetic effect on your mitochondria — they become more efficient to deal with the stress, which increases your energy production and slows down aging at the cellular level.

Another great form of hormesis, is Intermittent fasting.

  • It makes your cells more resilient to oxidative damage
  • It protects your brain cells and improves cognitive function
  • It burns fat like crazy
  • It gives the body a rest from digestion so it can effectively cleanse itself
  • It produces more growth hormone
  • It helps you live longer.

The ideal window for fasting is between 16-48 hours. Shorter than that and you don’t see the above benefits as much. Longer, and you start to run into downsides, like dips in energy and muscle loss.

Extreme temperatures are also another type of hormesis. Cold exposure, for example, makes your cells produce antioxidants system-wide, protecting your body from inflammation and damage and increases immunity. Heat exposure makes the proteins in your cells more resilient to stress and slows down cellular aging. 

Hypoxia is another example; when you cut off oxygen to your brain for a short amount of time, it gently stresses your neurons. They respond by creating brand new mitochondria, increasing your brainpower and helping you think faster and work smarter. You’ve probably seen the guys at the gym wearing the Darth Vader looking mask. They are doing hypoxia training. 

Another type of hormesis is exposure to sunlight. We all hear warnings to stay out of the sun or cover up and slather on sunscreen to exposed areas because of the damage the sun can do. But the sun in right doses has many health benefits that we need. Sunlight in the right dose actually makes your cells stronger and helps them protect themselves from cancer. An appropriate dose of sunlight also drives your cells to produce more vitamin D, which affects more than 1,000 reactions across your whole body, including testosterone production, antioxidant production, and more. 

But, to keep the body from being overstressed from our perceived stress/ mental/emotional; bills, relationship issues, traffic etc, physical stress ;overtraining, injuries, surgeries, or even chemical stress; viruses, bacteria, alcohol etc, our bodies can benefit from adaptogenic herbs as well as other techniques to keep the cortisol levels in check and not constantly elevated. Our stress is designed to help us when we need to survive, but if that switch is constantly turned to the “on” position, we never have time to recover from stress mode and go back to homeostasis, which can create a chemical imbalance. That is when stress does not benefit us; distress. There are many ways to combat that as well, but I will leave that for another post.

Natural Treatments for Stress

how adaptogens workAdaptogens – What Are They And What Do They Do?

The term adaptogen is used as a part of natural medicine to allude to herbs that is reported to build the body’s resistance to stress, injury, nervousness, and exhaustion. The idea of adaptogens goes back many years to old India and China, yet cutting edge research did not start until the late 1940’s. In 1947 Nikolai Lazarev characterized an adaptogen as an agent that permits the body to counter unfriendly physical, substance, or natural stressors by raising nonspecific resistance toward such stress, along these lines allowing the organism to ‘adjust” to the unpleasant circumstances.

There are almost one million recorded plants, herbs and botanicals on the planet. Of these exclusive 30 have been recognized as adaptogens-nontoxic with the capacity to help the body oversee stress and come back to a feeling of wellbeing.

Pure herbal adaptogens are actually occurring substances contained in a few plants that can help the body restore itself. They have been utilized as a part of Asian societies for a huge number of years to protect against anxiety, weakness, uneasiness and help resistant working, having already been called “rejuvenants”, “tonics”, “qi herbs”, “restoratives”, and “rasayanas” by natural health professionals around the globe.

Stress is a reality of regular life for those around the globe yet especially so in America. Day by day, we are shelled with stress and pressure from each bearing including work, family and the environment. Utilizing pure natural adaptogens may give some protection, relief and escape from day by day pressure experienced by everybody living in the modern world.

Herbal medication guarantees that adaptogenic herbs are distinct from different substances in their capacity to adjust endocrine hormones and the. They help the body accomplish ideal homeostasis. Adaptogens have a normalizing impact on the body and are able to do either toning down the activity of hyper functioning systems or fortifying the action of under-active systems.  These herbs are different from other substances in their capacity to adjust endocrine hormones and the immune system. They are the only natural substances able to help the body keep up ideal homeostasis.

More recently, adaptogens were used widely as a part of the training regime of the previous Soviet Union’s competitors. By considering the effects of training on the athlete’s body and giving them adaptogens to supplement their ordinary eating regimen the competitors performed better and their bodies recouped all the more quickly. Take a look at the medal counts from the Olympics during the 1970’s and 1980’s. The outcomes speak for themselves!!! Today numerous top competitors keep on using adaptogens to help them acquire peak performance.

From my point of view, the thing I like most about adaptogens is that they optimize physiological functioning.  Along these lines, we can create wellness versus treating disease. That, to me, is a better way to live.

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