Stress preconditioning helps build resilience to stress
Summary
- If you successfully navigate stress, it strengthens your resilience and tolerance to future stress
Details
- Deliberately exposing yourself to stress can improve your tolerance.
- Similar to the principle of progressive overload in building muscles
References
Quotes
If you get through a period of psychological stress and you recover effectively, you can actually adapt and become better and more tolerant to stress. The military have a term for this: ‘stress preconditioning’. For many years, they have conducted ‘stress inoculation training’ on soldiers to help prepare them for the inevitable stresses of the job
What science has now uncovered is that exposing yourself to certain levels of stress of a wide variety of types induces adaptive changes at a cellular level, which can enhance your ability to deal with that stress. Recent research has also revealed a tantalising glimpse of a ‘cross-transfer effect’, which means the improved stress tolerance – to, for example, the physical stress of exercise – can carry over into improved tolerance of other stressors
It’s only by starting an exercise program at the appropriate level for your current self and then continuing it, following the principle of progressive overload (where you increase the volume and/or intensity over time), that you’ll adapt to become fitter, bigger, faster, stronger, leaner or more resilient. It’s the repetitive exposure, staying in that productive zone of disequilibrium, that stimulates adaptation.
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- When you are distressed by an external thing, it’s not the thing itself that troubles you, but only your judgment of it - Marcus Aurelius
- Jehovah is distressed when we suffer even if its due to our own foolishness