This idea describes a process and proposes the establishment of habits that induce hormesis throughout the day. The hypothesis here is that hormesis is beneficial for health preservation.
We currently don't have many tools to stave off the effects of aging. This may be one of them and it's free.
In biology, hormesis is defined as an adaptive response of cells and organisms to moderate, short-lasting stress. Mild stress-induced activation of one or more intracellular pathways of the stress response. In other words, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
A few examples of stressors that induce hormetic responses:
physical exercise
dietary energy restriction
exposures to low doses of certain phytochemicals
ischemic preconditioning
cold water immersion / cold showers
How I imagine this works (hypothesis)
I haven't done enough research, so this comes purely from my imagination. I will update the section when I'm able to find good data. Here goes:
Entropy is a difficult concept to explain. I will let Richard Feynman do the talking. Basically, it makes sure that everything in the universe is always progressing towards decay. Everything we know, down to a single atom, is constantly and irreversably moving towards disorder. Cells are self-repairing chemical "machines". They have to be in exact order to function. To survive, they use the energy from their surroundings to counter the effects of entropy. Put simply, one of the universal forces is slowly tearing you apart and blending you with the surrounding while your cells are working hard to prevent that from happening.
Entropy is slow but persistent. Your cells are doing a good job defending you but they are not perfectly designed for the task. The cellular mechanisms might not be sensitive enough to detect all the atomic/molecular damages inflicted by entropy. Slowly, but surely the damages accumulate and mess with the cellular processes. We call this aging.
Hormesis to the rescue. When our cells detect that something is off, in addition to fixing it, they might also run some chemical processes that reset some crucial parts. Thereby unintentionally fixing additional damage that would otherwise go undetected.
An analogy for this would be - hearing an enemy aircraft in the night sky, not being able to pinpoint it but starting indiscriminate anti-aircraft fire in hopes of hitting the plane before it drops the bombs. Or a more suitable one: You own a small grocery store. You know that occasionally people steal something (entropy) but you don't have time to re-count all the inventory every day. Someday your shop gets vandalized (hormetic stressor). Afterwards you take the time to clean, re-count the inventory, put everything back in place, stock up and get your shop back to its optiomal condition.
In the conributions below I will make a list of all hormesis inducing stressors I can think of. I will then make it a habit to get myself into these hormesis inducing situations often and daily. I will use different stressors, throughout the day.
Taken a step further, someone could create an app that schedules these events througout the day. Every now and then you would get a notification telling you that the time has come to get uncomfortable and choose one of the few suggested stressors to apply.
Darko Savic Aug 11, 2021