Welcome to the commune podcast. My name is Jeff Krasna. Today I'm featuring an excerpt from the audio

version of my new book, Good Stress, The Health Benefits of Doing Hard Things. This book

distills the hundreds of interviews I've done here on the podcast

and a whole lot of me search into a consolidated guide for well-being. So my simple thesis is this.

Our culture has hijacked our biology and it is making us awfully sick. But there is an antidote.

Good stress.

Yes, in order to realign with our biology and thrive,

we must now self-impose the right dosage of deliberate paleolithic stress.

In my book, I outlined the protocols and benefits of 10 use stress practices from fasting

and cold therapy to how to have stressful conversations. There's also a good amount of philosophy

as I bridge the medical with the mystical. If you like what you're here today and are inclined to

support my work, I'd be very appreciative. The audio version of

Good Stress is available on Audible, and you can listen to it for free as part of your

premium Spotify membership. Pretty good. If you prefer the old school analog option,

you can purchase a good old book at Goodstress.com and get a bunch of additional goodies thrown in,

including $900 worth of courses with some of my biggest influences, including Dr. Mark Hyman,

Dr. Zach Bush, Dr. Gabor Mate, and of course, my better quarters, Skyler.

Okay, today's excerpt from chapter six of good stress focuses on the

third principle of the Tao of health, my philosophy of well-being. It's called the age of agency.

So the last 50 years of the 20th century was dominated by genetic determinism, the belief that genes determine

all traits and behaviors of an organism. However, just like Einstein upended Newtonian physics

at the beginning of the 20th century, the emerging study of epigenetics has toppled the notion

...