In Jilin Province, where it gets very cold in the winter, the older residents engage in winter swimming. It’s good for their health, they say. Everyone knows this, a friend of mine who grew up there told me. On TV, she once saw an old woman say that she was having heart problems, but once she started winter swimming they got better.
When he was a grad student at Harvard, a friend of mine raised rats to be in learning experiments. He found that if he handled the rats — stressing them, essentially — they grew larger and healthier than unstressed rats.
The cosmic ray effect I mentioned earlier — that trees grow more when there is more cosmic radiation — occurred with older trees but not younger trees.
If you’ve ever designed an experiment, you know that both the treatment and the measurement need to be neither too high nor too low. With the treatment, that’s obvious. I suspect all three of these phenomena are examples of positioning the measurement appropriately. They suggest that everyone needs some sort of stress to be in the best health, but only in certain situations is it easy to see this.
I was very shy and meek from kindergarten though high school. As a result, I was bullied a lot (but somehow managed to avoid being beaten up). I think that social stress has been like a social hormesis in making me more robust to social stressors as an adult.
Art deVany, the evolutionary fitness guru, recommends ending a shower by running cold water over the legs to strengthen the body.
An article in the NYTimes today (Oct 26) said that CNN’s last-place finish in the prime-time program ratings demonstrates that viewers prefer opinion-oriented coverage. CNN has moved their opinion shows to their subsidiary, Headline News, which is now beating them in the primetime ratings.
As someone who finds opinion coverage generally shallow and divisive I was disappointed but not surprised to hear this, but it reminded me of this post. People like stimulation, even if it is the “negative” stress of learning about things that make them angry/upset/shocked, etc, which most news coverage does. Most coverage is informative, but boring, and most people seem to prefer being stimulated to being informed.
https://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/cnn-drops-to-last-place-among-cable-news-networks/
The ones that don’t die from it are the healthier ones.
I suppose that could happen at the cellular level too.
@Nathan. It sort of does at the neural cell population level. It’s called synaptic pruning. Synapses are being generated all the time, but only a very few end up surviving after two weeks. Those that survive are selected by the fact that they were stimulated. No stimulation = death for early neurons. Probably happens to stem cells, too, I imagine.
very interesting point MT, that maybe our interest in divisive coverage comes from not getting enough shaking up elsewhere. But I think there is a huge sex difference: Men like Fox News, women don’t. I’d guess the need for stress doesn’t vary much across sexes.
“I think that social stress has been like a social hormesis in making me more robust to social stressors as an adult.”
@Aaron Blaisdell. That is a very interesting point. Perhaps it can be applied to mental health in general, i.e. that there is a kind of mental health immune system that is strengthened through hormesis–exposure to the violence of nature, death of loved ones during childhood, lack of leisure time in childhood, getting beaten up, etc. If it’s true that the last half-century has seen a 10-fold increase in depression in the US, depending on who you ask, perhaps one cause lies, counterintuitively, in the REDUCTION of mental health hormesis events.
@Anonymous. Thanks for the thoughts. And don’t forget the campaings against letting kids watch slap-stick violence on TV. I used to love the Bugs Bunny cartoons, especially the episode where daffy duck kept having his bill blown off by Elmer Fudd’s gun. LOL! But then in the 90s they started editing those scenes out. Now I can’t even find BB on tv anymore. Or Popeye. or Tom and Jerry (talk about the cartoon violence!). There are likely many reasons why these older (and often more violent) cartoons are no longer airing on TV. Some are surely that a) marketers behind the newer TV shows are making a killing (pun intended) off of the toys, games, etc. that stem from newer shows, b) the huge increase in “edutainment” marketed for younger children (e.g., Dora, Diego, Kai lan) which in my mind is just an extension of point (a), and c) these older cartoons were deemed too violent for young children, who would have trouble distinguishing it from real violence. Well, I watched those cartoons since I was a young child, laughed my ass off, and never once considered it to be real in any sense or had any thoughts of engaging in any of those acts with real people. I think sometimes adults don’t give enough credit to the intelligence and resilience of young children.