-This post was brought to you by years of trial and error, along with some Neurovolt
Lets talk STRESS.
Stress is the root cause of almost every illness, disease, lack of gains, and early grave that health experts (including me) have warned people about for decades.
Saying that stress is a killer is nothing new.
BUT, my perspective on fixing it is counter to what I often see recommended...
The current meta is about relaxation, calming the nervous system. And I dont entirely disagree, but this approach is very female coded.
Men are built to endure. Greatness requires stress tolerance.
If we are to be Pragmatic Men, We can do two things with Stress
-Eliminate it entirely. Which itself is often not practical to do (maybe some things can be eliminated, but not all things)
-Become more resilient to it.
Its true that your nervous system can only handle so much. So you either remove the amount, or improve HOW it handles the amount you load it with.
Yet what I often promoted are stress multiplication practices that make the problems worse,
I talk to a lot of founders in hard tech, heavy industry, and high-earning fields, and there’s a pattern where I end up in the exact same conversation happening over and over again.
These guys are redlined, they feel fried, but they are misled into stacking MORE protocols on top of an already fatigued nervous system and mind.
Rather than improve stress tolerance or remove stress, they introduce more chronic stressors disguised as fake solutions.
This is bad, for a multitude of reasons. To understand why
The Dichotomy of Two Stresses
Stress can be divided into two categories. Acute and Chronic.
Acute stress is voluntary.
You go to the gym, you load a barbell, you lift heavy weights, and you put them down. You do it again until your system has had enough for the day.
You rack the bar, and the stressor is over. This is the good kind of stress because IT HAS AN END.
Bruce McEwen at Rockefeller spent his career studying this: The body and mind has a healthy stress response that gets switched on, stays on for a period of time, and then switched OFF.
This is sympathetic nervous system being activated. The part of the nervous system that Fight-Flight-Freeze. This is called the SNS (Sympathetic Nervous System).
Acute Stress engages the SNS, and then the body transitions to the PNS, the Parasympathetic nervous for recovery.
The Stress of Exercise makes you rise to the challenge of Stress, and makes you better at Relaxing after the challenge is done.
You WANT your body to be able to use both systems and transition. This is trainable
Sandra Klaperski, a psychologist out of the University of Freiburg, ran an experiment that demonstrates what happens when you build the body underneath it.
In a randomized trial out of Freiburg, researchers took 149 men and split them into three groups: twelve weeks of exercise, twelve weeks of relaxation training, or doing nothing.
Then they brought everyone into a lab and stressed them out.
The exercise group’s entire stress response—cortisol, heart rate, heart rate variability—came in completely blunted across the board.
In comparison, the other two groups did not perform nearly as well.
When you pit stress management protocols head-to-head against physical training, training wins every single time.
And then we have Chronic Stress
Chronic stress is often not as intense as acute stress.
But its stress that never stops.
Chronic stress simmers in the background. Its often of a more psychological dynamic.
It looks like worrying about your bills, your health, your family, your business. Over the long term, this drains your immune system, and opens the door to almost any disease imaginable.
Now to be Clear, The answer is NOT. “GET RID OF ALL CHRONIC STRESS”.
Again, we must be realistic.
If you are a parent, an entrepreneur, an operator, you chose this chronic stress voluntary. Your goal is not to live a carefree life with zero responsibility.
And your body evolved to handle an enormous physical load, provided the load is manageable.
But modern life blurs all our stressors together. Work stress, money stress, health stress, family stress can all become one.
And some health influencer encouraging you to be orthorexic because of fragrances or dish soap or the sun being too bright is just adding to the insanity
Which reminds me…
The Bryan Johnson Optimization Trap
If you know me, you know that I appreciate Bryan for being willing to document everything and getting tons of data on his health. I think that’s cool and he is being a scientist running his own N=1 experiment.
That said...
Bryan’s approach, I believe, skews toward becoming completely orthorexic in trying to document and questionably optimize every parameter.
He is making himself more inclined to be fragile — said simply.
He recently announced he has an autoimmune condition—autoimmune gastritis—that in his own words, is causing his “stomach to eat itself.”
Stomach and gut issues are always the first warning lights of the wrong kind of stress.
Neither of us has a crystal ball, but I would bet that even if he ate the way I do, trained the way I do, and stopped avoiding the sun, he would have ended up in a similar place.
He was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition at 21. The underlying predisposition was there long before the protocols.
The issue isn’t his disease. It is his POSTURE towards it.
His entire philosophy is “don’t die.” He is using every piece of anti-aging science available, applied with maximum force, to try and control the one thing no man controls.
In an interview with MIT Technology Review, talking about his movement, he said they are “playing with the idea that the body is God.”
When you pile up tools and protocols just to defend a rigid self-image, treating your body like a machine to be optimized instead of a human organism with dynamic needs, your nervous system stays locked in a state of functional freeze.
He is optimizing his way into his own body attacking itself.
The Reaching Spiral
Bryan is just the most prominent example. This is the exact same thing a thousand online coaches and protocol salesmen are pushing onto you.
Every bad feeling must be fixed. Every input must be managed.
And the reaching for tools under stress is what makes the load worse.
Take breathing exercises. Great in concept. They’re designed to induce a parasympathetic response. They help you relax.
But you cannot always be relaxed. You need to be able to toggle back and forth. Get too far into the relaxation rabbit hole, and mildly stressful situations become major problems.
Sometimes your cortisol will spike. Thats okay. Getting caught in the mental loop of “am I handling this right” creates a double bind of worrying about worrying. Your anxious because your getting anxious.
This is the biggest problem with wearables and health data
You get info, stress about the numbers, and the numbers get worse. Are the numbers even accurate? DO they matter or at all? Are they “real” in any objective sense.
Maybe, maybe not, but they start directing peoples decision making and guiding their nervous system.
How To Actually Use Tools
I have a simple Binary.
A tool exists to solve a problem. Clearly.
Not to create problems. Which gets messy.
As basic as that sounds, a lot of the “stress management” is performance. It’s “tool shaped” but doesn’t deliver on the outcome.
The intention behind the actions you take makes all the difference.
If a tool creates more work and needs it own KPIs without clear ROI, it’s NOT A tool. Don’t bother with it.
To assess a tool, ask what the objective outcome should be from it. If there isnt one, if its a vague promise, or if it creates more work…its NOT something you need to bother with.
There are simple things that I use and they have clear outcomes
-Phone call with my team. yeah we have slack and do zooms, but I call people on the phone. We figure things out faster. We reply to texts quickly. A culture of quick communication is how you get shit done. Dont wait for meetings and BS email chains to get to the point.
-Black out curtains. They make the room dark, and I sleep better. FIN
-Incandescent and circadian friendly lightbulbs. The lights in my house arent white light blue light blasting us all day. We wake up at dawn, fall asleep a few hours after sunset. The whole family. The peace of mind this gives is immeasurable.
-A home gym. I can train without leaving my house. Exercise makes me stronger, and I handle stress better and Im healthier. FIN.
-Magnesium, collagen, nattokinase. Somewhere around half the population doesnt get enough and its depleted from soil. Collagen is good for connective tissue. Ive promoted it for years. Not everyone drinks bone broth, I put it in coffee. Nattokinase is good for cardviovascular health.
Neurovolt, as a pick-me-up in the morning before I start my workday.
I built Neurovolt specifically because I wanted a cognitive and energetic edge without the sympathetic-nervous-system-on-fire feeling. That redlined feeling can be like rocket fuel in the moment, but it taxes your stress budget for the rest of the day. And long term you burnout.
As a father, I don’t always get a perfect sleep score. Nor do I obsesses about the score in the first place. I don’t need a ring to tell me I did t sleep optimal. Some nights I get 5 hours. It’s not ideal, but worrying about lost sleep causes more stress than the lost sleep itself.
On those short nights, I find it significantly easier to get all my work done and be present with my kids when I have a nootropic that improves my focus and stress resilience That’s what I made it for.
This simple framework applies to all forms of chronic stress
1. Build the physical organism Get into the gym and lift heavy weights 3 to 4 days a week. Physical strength expands your nervous system’s capacity for friction. Stop looking for relaxation hacks until your baseline is built. “A stronger human is harder to kill, more resilient to stress and more useful in general”
2. Organize the Stress so its easier to process. If it cannot be organized at all or you are not the person to do it, delegate. If you dont have a choice, learn the skill. If its messy and can be made neat, organize. If you are avoiding it, stop and confront it. Its its truly toxic, then get serious about cutting it out.
3. Stop treating information as the destination Stop obsessing over your Oura ring scores, lab tests, and micro-protocols. Reaching for endless fixes keeps your mind convinced that you are constantly in danger.
4. Always do your best: being an entrepreneur is a roller coaster ride, you are constantly learning and failing, and trying to create solutions. You are leading a team, creating your own path, and figuring all of this out yourself. If you push yourself to the best of your abilities…even if you fail, you will still be ahead of where you started. Acting with this kind of integrity in your actions will give you peace of mind.
I did all I could, and it WORKED. (And transformed you into a more capable and wiser person)
Holding back and knowing you could have done more is what creates stress and regret later.
That being said…
5. Accept what you cannot control The bills, the business problems, the thing keeping you up at 3 AM, some of it cannot be solved tonight. Pretending otherwise just keeps your stress switch buzzing needlessly.
Act daily, move the proverbial needle forward. Dont stop moving.
And finally
6. Dont Try to Do it ALL Yourself. As a new company founder and Father, I haven’t given myself a Plan B. All I have is Plan A, and a backup plan to make Plan A work.
My calendar is on lockdown for the first time since I was a personal trainer, budgeted by the hour.
I did something very counter intuitive to protect the most important habit I have:
I hired a Fitness coach.
More specifically, a bodybuilding coach.
I won’t say who. I handed my programming over them, and I follow it. I don’t ask a thousand questions; I don’t tweak it,
I just run the program, get my training in, and leave.
En Summa
Become Resilient as Possible. Recognize what is important. Ignore what is Not. And protect your foundations.
and Keep your mind sharp with NeuroVolt.
References
McEwen BS. Protective and damaging effects of stress mediators. New England Journal of Medicine. 1998;338(3):171-179.
Klaperski S, von Dawans B, Heinrichs M, Fuchs R. Effects of a 12-week endurance training program on the physiological response to psychosocial stress in men: a randomized controlled trial. Journal of Behavioral Medicine. 2014;37(6):1118-1133.