TMHS 881: Why You NEED Stress to Live Longer, Healthier, and Happier - with Dr. Sharon Horesh Bergquist
The Model Health Show
Shawn Stevenson
4.8 • 7.2K Ratings
🗓️ 26 March 2025
⏱️ 76 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Most people understand that we have the ability to grow from adversity, yet in our culture we have a largely negative view of stress. In fact, we often do our best to avoid stress at all costs. Today, you’re going to learn about specific stress response systems that are part of our biology, and how to activate them in order to build resilience.
Our guest is award-winning physician, Dr. Sharon Horesh Bergquist. Her new book, The Stress Paradox, explains the critical connection our biology has with stress. Her work explores how we can engage in purposeful healthy stressors to increase resilience and reap multiple health benefits.
You’re going to learn the science behind how and why to activate your innate cellular stress responses. We’re going to talk about how specific strategies, like eating more plant toxins and engaging in high intensity exercise, can help you build a healthier, more robust stress response system. Not only will these protocols help you develop a healthier relationship to stress, but they will also reduce your risk of diseases and increase your longevity. I hope you enjoy this incredible conversation with Dr. Sharon Horesh Bergquest!
In this episode you’ll discover:
- What hormesis is and how it can enrich us.
- Why we don’t need to minimize stress but optimize it.
- How having too little stress can stop us from reaching our potential.
- The three variables of stress.
- What eustress is.
- How to understand the stress set point.
- What the 4 Rs are.
- How the DNA damage response works.
- What sirtuins are and how to activate them.
- How autophagy works.
- What’s missing from the conversation about plant toxins.
- The importance of eating a diverse range of phytochemicals.
- What heat shock proteins are.
- How to improve your body’s ability to regulate inflammation.
- The 5 key hormetic stressors.
- What the most potent way to upregulate your mitochondria is.
- The strongest predictor of mortality and disease.
- Why experiencing good stress actually lowers your baseline level of stress.
Items mentioned in this episode include:
- Organifi.com/Model -- Use the coupon code MODEL for 20% off + free shipping!
- The Stress Paradox by Dr. Sharon Horesh Bergquest -- Get a copy of the book!
- How stress affects your body -- Watch Dr. Bergquist’s TedEd talk!
- Connect with Dr. Sharon Horesh Bergquist Website / Instagram / LinkedIn
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This episode of The Model Health Show is brought to you by Organifi.
Organifi makes nutrition easy and delicious for everyone. Take 20% off your order with the code MODEL at organifi.com/model.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You are now listening to The Model Health Show with Sean Stevenson. |
| 0:04.7 | For more, visit themodelhealthshow.com. |
| 0:11.4 | When most people hear the word stress, we generally associate it with something negative |
| 0:16.4 | and we want to do whatever we can do to get away from that stress. |
| 0:27.3 | But on today's episode, we have the country's foremost expert in the science of stress. |
| 0:35.0 | And her research is indicating that we actually need stress in order to truly thrive, to extend our lifespan, to express healthy metabolic features, including our body |
| 0:41.0 | composition, we need stress in order to be our best selves. And so I'm telling you right now, |
| 0:46.7 | this is one of those things where I had to suspend my disbelief because we have so much |
| 0:51.7 | negative connotation around stress. But of course, there is a formula here. |
| 0:57.0 | And she's going to talk about the different types of stress |
| 0:59.5 | and how all of this stuff works together. |
| 1:01.9 | One of my favorite aspects is how stressing ourselves |
| 1:05.3 | or exposing ourselves to certain types of stress |
| 1:07.3 | actually makes us more resilient to what we deem to be the negative stress that |
| 1:12.5 | we're trying to get away from. And so we're going to paint an incredible picture today and |
| 1:17.6 | learn so much because there is no running from stress. All right, it is a big part of our daily |
| 1:24.2 | lives today in our modern society. So what we want to do is proactively build up that resilience. |
| 1:30.3 | And we're going to learn how to do this through certain foods that, even that, |
| 1:34.3 | when she talked about these key aspects about certain foods, it's one of those things |
| 1:40.3 | that we've got to open our minds up because we've been told one thing |
| 1:44.3 | about certain compounds in foods, |
| 1:47.0 | but it's really turned out to be something completely different, |
... |
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