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Is stress bad for you? Yes, but so is too little stress. Sharon Bergquist, MD, author of The Stress Paradox: Why You Need Stress to Live Longer, Healthier, and Happier, shares her research on how good stress, in the right amount and at the right time, can enhance your well-being and longevity.
Dr. Sharon Bergquist joins us from Atlanta.
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Bio
Sharon Horesh Bergquist, MD, is the author of The Stress Paradox: Why You Need Stress to Live Longer, Healthier, and Happier. She is an award-winning physician, innovative healthcare leader, and visionary researcher renowned for spearheading a science-based approach to applying lifestyle as medicine. She has helped lead numerous clinical trials, including the Emory Healthy Aging Study and the NIH-funded Emory Healthy Brain Study. Dr. Bergquist is widely published in peer-reviewed journals and has contributed to over 200 news segments, including Good Morning America, CNN, ABC News, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR. She hosts The Whole Health Cure podcast and her popular Ted-Ed video on how stress affects the body has been viewed over six million times. She received her degrees from Yale College and Harvard Medical School.
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For More on Sharon Bergquist, MD
The Stress Paradox: Why You Need Stress to Live Longer, Healthier, and Happier
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About The Retirement Wisdom Podcast
There are many podcasts on retirement, often hosted by financial advisors with their own financial motives, that cover the money side of the street. This podcast is different. You’ll get smarter about the investment decisions you’ll make about the most important asset you’ll have in retirement: your time.
About Retirement Wisdom
I help people who are retiring, but aren’t quite done yet, discover what’s next and build their custom version of their next life. A meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident.
Schedule a call today to discuss how The Designing Your Life process created by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans can help you make your life in retirement a great one – on your own terms.
About Your Podcast Host
Joe Casey is an executive coach who also helps people design their next life after their primary career and create their version of The Multipurpose Retirement.™ He created his own next chapter after a twenty-six-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking. Today, in addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, which thanks to his guests and loyal listeners, ranks in the top 1 % globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 1.6 million downloads. Business Insider has recognized Joe as one of 23 innovative coaches who are making a difference. He’s the author of Win the Retirement Game: How to Outsmart the 9 Forces Trying to Steal Your Joy.
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On Good Stress and Bad Stress
“You can tell a lot about the difference between good stress and bad stress by looking at studies on retirement because there’s such a discrepancy between the studies, some showing that some people live longer and live better when they retire and some people actually do better if they work past retirement age. And when you look at the difference, it really comes down to the nature of their job. If people are working in jobs that are joyful, purposeful, very reward driven, they tend to do better working past retirement age. And people who feel chronically stressed, overwhelmed by their work, there’s no joy, low reward, they tend to do better to retire. And that begins to tell you a lot about good stress and bad stress.”
On Stress
“So essentially, good stressors are stressors that are mild to moderate. In terms of intensity, they are generally brief or intermittent, where you are exposed to the stress and then there’s a period of recovery. And their nature is that they’re aligned with your belief system, they’re meaningful, they contribute to a greater good. And the bad stressors that are harmful, in nature, they’re more intense. They can be very overwhelming. Their duration is usually chronic, it goes on continuously. And generally, they’re the ones that drain you, there’s not as much of a sense of purpose or reward. And they leave you feeling exhausted and burnt out.”
On the Benefits of Good Stress
“We have this natural ability to heal our bodies, to regenerate. And good stress is the mechanism that signals our body to activate these healing systems. The benefits of good stress I think are really having come to light in mainstream because we focus a lot on how we need to reduce our exposure to things that are harming our health. So in our Western environment we know that processed foods, sedentary, loneliness, chronic stress are all factors that are chipping away at our health and there’s tremendous focus on reducing these exposures. What we don’t talk enough about is that we have the ability build health to counter the effects of these harmful stressors in our lives. And that’s what good stressors are trying to do. So I think of it as building a bank account. So these harmful stressors are withdrawing money out of your bank account. And the good stressors are making deposits because they’re repairing the damage. They’re helping you build reserve and resilience.And that in turn helps reduce your risk of disease. It also slows your aging process. So those are the fundamental benefits. And so much of disease and the aging process is rooted in decline in our repair and regenerative systems. And that results in cellular damage. So we have this ability to kind of slow that process with aging to slow what happens to these repair mechanisms from the exposure that are occurring from our daily life and live such a happier and longer life.”
The Five Good Stressors
“The five key stressors that we know that can activate our repair and regenerative systems and help us live longer and disease-free are plant chemicals that mildly stress our cells, exposure to brief intervals of high intensity activity, thermal stress from heat and cold, fasting stress, reducing incoming nutrients in a pattern that aligns with our circadian biology and good mental and emotional challenges that help us thrive.”
