As January offers us an inflection point to take stock in the previous year, ask yourself this simple question, “Do I want to accelerate or slow the aging process in 2024?” The answer to this question is obvious, we all want to slow the aging process. Solutions such as diets, supplements, surgeries, pills, and injections all offer a promise of improvement in your health and wellness, however there is only one way to pump the brakes on aging and that is through the pursuit of physical discomfort.
By default, our body is hardwired to stay in a homeostatic relationship to the external world. That is to say, even if things are functioning sub-optimally, our body resists change. As a result, the feeling of discomfort is our body’s signal that homeostasis is getting disrupted and we should move away from whatever it is that is bothering us and pursue a more comfortable situation. This feeling was a helpful defense mechanism in the context of humans living a hard, physical lifestyle. If we were cold and hungry we sought warmth and food. However, in the distant past our drive to eat was always strong enough to suppress the feeling of discomfort when pursuing prey for 10 miles or harvesting/gathering food for 10 hours a day. We could inure ourselves to extreme temperatures in any habitat because we didn’t have the luxury of existing in an artificially controlled environment. As a result, that discomfort signal didn’t bubble to the surface of our consciousness until we faced real danger.
Today, those immediate dangers are gone and the smallest annoyance will send alarm bells to our brain, telling us to seek out comfort. We can quit running or turn on the air conditioner at the slightest hint of physical adversity because we don’t have the survival drive to suppress that inner voice that is telling us to grab a latte instead of a workout. Thus, because we live in the cradle of comfort we need analogs of survival that challenge us physically, activities that put our mind and body in a state of temporary discomfort. It is our body’s physiologic response to this discomfort that is the key to slowing the aging process. Running and sauna exposure are two challenging activities that illustrate this point.
Running sucks. I know, I know, if you have been running for a few years it is amazing or at least the feeling you get after running 5 miles is amazing. Putting aside any musculoskeletal limitations, when we first start a running routine our body doesn’t last long before it begins to complain. Initially, our body struggles to generate the energy it needs to run because this activity drives stress through the muscle fibers that are specialized for endurance. But in the new runner, these muscle fibers are not optimized, they don’t have enough mitochondria to fuel the physical demands of running. So the body supplements with glycogen (stored muscle fuel). When you start to run out of glycogen you bonk, and feel horrible.
But discomfort is the point. After a hard run, your body rebuilds such that it can meet the demands of the stress it just experienced. While recovering, those specialized endurance muscle fibers generate more mitochondria. It is the higher density of the mitochondria in our muscle cells that give us more endurance. This process is call mitochondrial biogenesis and discomfort is the only way to stimulate this process.
Conversely, the pursuit of comfort reverses the process rather quickly. After 8 weeks of not challenging our cardiovascular system, we will lose at least 20% of the aerobic capacity that we earned from our running routine. Given that increased mitochondrial density is tightly correlated to decreased mortality and increased strength, that 8 weeks on the couch is quite literally accelerating your on personal aging process.
Another uncomfortable pursuit is sauna exposure. Repeated exposure to sauna appears to induce a physiologic response in our bodies that is similar to moderate-to-vigorous intense cardiovascular exercise. The basket of physiologic reactions to regular sauna exposure seem to be mediated by a cardiovascular, hormonal, and heat shock protein response that is also seen when we workout. As seen with regular exercise, frequent use of sauna appears to be cardio and neuro-protective, induces a decrease in systemic inflammation, improves athletic performance and enhances musculoskeletal rehabilitation.
A large ongoing observational study of 2,300 men in Finland has demonstrated some amazing cardiovascular and cognitive health benefits associated with sauna use. Frequent users show a significant cardiovascular benefit to the practice. Men that engaged in sauna use 2-3 times per week where shown to have a 22% decrease in risk of sudden cardiac death and those that used the sauna 4 or more times per week were shown to be 63% less likely to experience sudden cardiac death. The same study showed that frequent sauna users were 40 percent less likely to die from all causes of premature death with even when the population studied was controlled for age, activity level and other lifestyle factors.
The same study also demonstrated the neuro-protective benefit of frequent sauna use. The study participants using the sauna 4 or more times per week had a 66% lower risk of developing dementia and 65% lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, when compared to the participants only using sauna once per week.
The use of sauna after exercise seems to have a cumulative benefit beyond just the workout. A small study showed that the use of s post-workout sauna for 30 minutes, twice a week for three week improved the participant’s running time to exhaustion by 32%. The specific sauna protocols used in the studies mentioned above vary, but seem to indicate that the benefits are dose specific with the sweet spot being 3 saunas per week, for 20 minutes at about 175 degrees.
This is not a recommendation to start running and jumping in the sauna 4 days a week to slow the aging process, although that is a great start. The point here is twofold; One, make your goals for 2024 physical in nature. Two, seek out physical activities that make you uncomfortable. You will look and feel younger this time next year.
Great blog! I love your quote, “Thus, because we live in the cradle of comfort we need analogs of survival that challenge us physically, activities that put our mind and body in a state of temporary discomfort.” I think this is so true and explains why some people (a special subset of the population, it seems!) are driven to exercise, engage in intermittent fasting, use a sauna, take ice baths, etc. These practices wake up the evolutionarily conserved part of our brains that thrives on challenge on adversity. Pursuing discomfort (without going to extremes) certainly makes me feel and function like my younger self!