Is Comfort Killing Us? Becoming Antifragile
The other day I was thinking about some other paradoxes of modern life such as:
We have more prosperity and creature comforts than ever before in human history, yet opiate use and suicide are epidemic.
We have more access to healthy foods than ever before, but diabetes, heart disease, and cancer rates continue to rise.
We have more people with cell phones, email, and social media accounts, but more people than ever feel isolated.
We have unprecedented access to information, yet many people continue to make choices not in their best interest.
We have the most technologically advanced medical system in the world, but the United States ranks 37th in overall efficiency of our healthcare system according to the World Health Organization.
I'm not saying these things are somehow causative, for example that prosperity causes opiate use. I'm just aware of the paradoxes they present. Nassim Taleb in his book "Antifragile: Things that gain from Disorder" offers some valuable insights into these paradoxes. Taleb is fundamentally a systems thinker, and classifies systems as fragile, robust, and antifragile. Fragile systems are easily disrupted by stressors and disorder, while antifragile systems actually benefit from stress and disorder.What he calls robust systems aren't as susceptible to stress and disorder as fragile systems, but also aren't actually improved by stress and disorder, as are antifragile systems.
We could consider a body-builder as robust; he is physically strong, but may not be antifragile. A lot of body-builders die in their 30's and 40's, commonly from kidney failure, heart attacks and liver cancer. We shouldn't confuse physical strength and fitness with health, which is in essence antifragility. It's important to understand that robust is not the opposite of fragile.
Taleb made up the word antifragile because: "The idea of antifragility is not part of our consciousness - but, luckily, it is a part of our ancestral behavior, our biological apparatus, and a ubiquitous property of every system that has survived...Half of life - the interesting half of life - we don't have a name for."
What Taleb calls "naive intervention" tends to make systems more fragile. One example he cites is how prescribing multiple medications actually makes people sicker rather than healthier, in other words, this makes them more fragile. On the other hand he shows how randomness and certain stressors makes the body more antifragile. Things like periodic or intermittent fasting have been shown to have multiple health benefits. Stresses such as lifting heavy objects (Taleb prefers deadlifts) can also make us more antifragile.
Biological systems are often made more fragile with intervention; for example the introduction of the mongoose to Australia to control rabbits, and Hawaii to control rats, both unmitigated disasters. Or the introduction of the starling to North America to control insects, or kudzu to the south as an ornamental plant; both are now out of control and threaten native species.
This summary doesn't even come close to doing his ideas justice, so I recommend reading his Incerto series if this sounds interesting to you. The point I'm trying to make here is that modernity with all its technological advances, comforts, and access to almost anything we want has some negative unintended consequences. We spend more time sitting indoors in our temperature controlled environments glued to a screen of some sort. We drive everywhere, looking for the closest parking spots so we don't have to walk very far. We snack our way through the day, never giving our digestive systems or insulin response a break. Our social interactions are more on our cell phones than face to face. I could go on, but you get the idea.
The antidote to these unintended consequences can be summed up in a word: Hormesis. Hormesis is defined as an adaptive response of cells and organisms to a moderate (usually intermittent) stress. Exercise is the classic example of hormesis, where stressing muscles makes them stronger. Fasting and caloric restriction are another example and have been shown to increase lifespan by as much as 30% while decreasing the incidence of degenerative diseases. Cryotherapy, the intermittent exposure to cold temperatures has shown multiple health benefits. Restricting screen time has been shown to improve sleep, reduce anxiety and to improve cognitive performance. Basically hormesis is the forsaking of comfort at times in favor of doing things that make us more antifragile. Standing under a cold shower isn't comfortable, but I always feel better afterward. It's important to note that hormesis is a dose dependent phenomenon. For instance, while exposure to cold can be beneficial, prolonged exposure could be fatal. Strength training can be good for us, but overtraining with weights (as in body builders mentioned above) can be harmful over time. I've adopted the following hormetic strategies in my life, and I can say without doubt that they have been transformative. Here's a list of the things I do on a regular basis which have made a big difference in my health and well being:
I intermittent fast on most days, meaning that I usually don't eat until after noon. One day a week I do a 24 hour fast (dinner to dinner), and 2-3 times a year I do a 5 day water only fast. I add a feast day once a week where I eat more food, and may even have breakfast.
I end my showers with 2-3 minutes under the coldest water I can.
I get outside for a few minutes daily in the mornings to get natural light exposure. This helps reset my circadian rhythm.
I walk at least 10,000 steps a day, and a few times a week lift heavy weights to muscle failure. I do at least 50 squats each day.
I try not to sit for more than an hour at a time without getting up and moving for at least 15 minutes.
I limit time on my cell phone as much as possible, and stop all screens (phones, TV, computer) at least 2 hours before bedtime.
I'm obsessive about getting a minimum of 7-8 hours of sleep nightly
I get regular sessions with the Neurological Integration System as it is not an intervention.
Intervention vs. Hormesis
This is an important distinction, and one that can help you make better choices about your health and well being. While interventions tend to be disruptive and can lead to harm, hormetic choices tend to enhance health. Interventions attempt to change, manipulate, or thwart natural biological processes, while hormetic activities stress biological systems in a way that improves their function. Hormesis tends to be more natural, and not technology based, while interventions tend to use technology and academic knowledge to manipulate biological systems. Consider the example of taking drugs for diabetes as opposed to changing one's diet. In the short term drugs will lower blood glucose, in the long term they actually lead to the need for insulin to control blood glucose, while the correct diet and lifestyle choices can actually reverse Type II diabetes.
The question to ask yourself is whether the upside for any choice we make is significantly greater than the downside. If I shatter my leg, the upside of surgical intervention is much greater than the downside of not being able to have full use of my leg again. In medicine, harm or death resulting from intervention is called iatrogenics. According to a recent study by Johns Hopkins, more than 250,000 people in the United States die every year because of medical mistakes, making it the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer.Some interventions take time to show harmful or unintended consequences. Consider mammograms. For years doctors recommended annual. Recently it has been shown that administering them to women over 40 on an annual basis does not lead to an increase in life expectancy. While female mortality from breast cancer decreases for women subjected to mammograms, death from other causes increases markedly. Doctors seeing some abnormality on a mammogram, cannot avoid doing something, and recommend treatments such and chemotherapy and radiation. Treating a tumor that will not kill you shortens your life. On the other hand acupuncture, with its thousands of years of history, has been shown to have many benefits with little risk. A good question to ask yourself is whether what you are doing has a time tested track record. For example, I'm currently re-evaluating my initial excitement about stem cell therapy based on this understanding. Stem cells may very well turn out to be a true boon for improving and extending life, but if there is a downside it may take some years to become evident. So rather than becoming an early adopter, I'm taking a wait and see approach.
This is precisely the reason I use The Neurological Integration System (NIS) as my primary modality in practice. Dr. Allan Phillips has been developing NIS for over 35 years, and has repeatedly stated that NIS is not an intervention. Because the brain makes the changes that will optimize our physiological and neurological functioning, not the practitioner, NIS is 100% accurate and safe. After treating thousands of patients with NIS since 1997, I have never seen an adverse reaction, but have witnessed positive results with a majority of patients. Ask yourself these questions when making decisions about your health:
Is what I'm doing an intervention, meaning that it is changing some biological process by introducing an external substance, force, or procedure, and if so what is its track record over a significant amount of time? Even nutritional supplements would be considered an intervention, as opposed to a healthy diet, which would be antifragile.
Is what I'm doing in alignment with known principles of biology and physiology? Does it make common sense? Am I willing to invest the time and energy to honestly evaluate my choices?
Does what I'm doing have an ancestral history, and does it align with evolutionary biology? For instance, humans evolved under conditions of feast and famine. The metabolic pathways we developed under this stressor are still a part of our biology, which is why fasting strategies are so powerful.
Is the upside of my choice significantly better than the downside, or are the risks of what I'm doing significantly less than the benefits? For instance, will taking a prescription medication for a condition give me a benefit that is worth risking the possible side effects?
Are there changes I can make in my lifestyle that would make intervention unnecessary, or am I choosing the intervention because it is convenient and easier than changing some aspect of my lifestyle?
How will I know if what I'm doing is working? Are there metrics like bloodwork or other objective feedback I can use? Do I feel better, worse, or no change?
"To sum up, anything in which there is naive interventionism, nay, even just intervention, will have iatrogenics. Since no intervention implies no iatrogenics, the source of harm lies in the denial of antifragility, and to the impression that we humans are so necessary to make things function." -Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
