Building Resilience in the Age of Ease

Ultimately, the objective of anything we do in the name of better health is to maintain or enhance our resilience. Health can be conceptualized as the range of stressors our body can withstand while still maintaining homeostasis (stable conditions inside the body). The greater that range, the healthier we are.

On one end of the spectrum is robust health, where we can tolerate a wide range of stressors.

On the other end of spectrum is frailty, where any stressor threatens our survival.

And the way we enhance our resilience is to “stress,” or challenge, our body and brain. That challenge triggers adaptations that make us more resilient.

But the challenge we all face if we wish maintain or physical and cognitive capabilities for as long as possible is that our daily lives rarely test our resilience.

The relative ease of daily life creates two problems...

One, it doesn’t provide the stimulation, or challenge, that would trigger the adaptations that would build resilience.

Two, it doesn’t provide us feedback about how resilient we are. Which is why it’s easy, and common, for our health to deteriorate markedly without our knowledge.

Recently, we discussed this dilemma on The Better Brain Fitness podcast in the context of our driving ability. When it comes to the demands of everyday driving around town, you’d be hard pressed to notice any differences between your average “amateur” driver and a NASCAR pro, despite the substantial discrepancy in their capabilities. It’s only at the extremes where those differences would surface. But knowing how you’d perform at the extremes is valuable info, because it’s what determines the likelihood that you’ll crash.

This mirrors the situation with our health.

It is crucial that we understand our level of resilience before it’s too late. We want to build in resilience, or excess capacity, so we have it when we need it. But we can only build that resilience by engaging in activities that test the limits of our capacity.

Here’s the concept illustrated visually. The blue line shows the variations in “stressors” over the course of a typical day, which are beneath the threshold of individuals of high (green dashed line) and low (red dashed line) resilience.

For the less resilient individual, daily life doesn’t provide any indication there’s an issue, nor does it provide the stimulation needed to increase resilience.

So the crux of the issue is this:

In order to build and maintain resilience (or “health”), we must challenge ourselves in ways that exceed our everyday experience. 

For the typical human in today’s world, the most intense physical activity required to meet the demands of daily life is walking (somewhere between 4 to 6,000 steps is the norm).

The occasions where we actually need to jog, much less sprint, are exceedingly rare. It’s been quite some time since I was chased by a bear.

Yet, jogging requires about 3 times the amount of energy as walking, and sprinting requires about 6 to 7 times as much. Viewed through this lens, sprinting is roughly 6 to 7 times more demanding than walking.

We can easily see, then, how heart and lungs that are adapted to regular running or sprinting will be far more resilient than ones adapted only to the demands of daily life. Aerobic exercise is how we build resilience in our cardiovascular system.

And, of course, we use resistance training of various kinds to challenge our muscles and connective tissue in ways that far exceed the demands of daily life, building resilience in that system.

What about building resilience in the brain? Doing so requires challenging cognition in ways that exceed our everyday experience. How might we do that?

Enter music, dance, and sports.

Nothing in daily life compares to the coordination, timing, and perceptual acuity needed to play the piano, dance the tango, or hit a ball hurtling towards us at 80 mph.

The value of these sorts of activities lies in the fact that they can challenge the full spectrum of our cognitive abilities safely, effectively, and in ways that far exceed what’s needed to meet the demands of daily life. And, in doing so, build resilience throughout the brain.

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, I think that the evidence is clear that the lack of cognitive challenge in our daily lives is the driving force behind age-related cognitive decline and dementia. We spend our early life building lots of cognitive resilience thanks to an extraordinarily demanding developmental environment, and then spend the next several decades losing that resilience, until one day the demands of daily life do become a challenge. At which point we crash. Seeking challenges beyond the everyday is how we fortify our resilience before life tests it for us.

This Week On The Better Brain Fitness Podcast: “A surprising link between muscle mass, strength, and cognitive function.”

In this week’s episode, Tommy discusses the highlights of a recent paper he and colleagues published on the connection between physical activity, muscle mass, strength, and cognitive function - including one finding he found quite surprising. Click here to listen to the episode.

Resilience-Building Device: Doorway Pull Up Bar

As discussed in the Better Brain Fitness episode above, pound-for-pound muscle strength (or strength relative to size) was significantly correlated with cognitive function. And body weight exercises are great for both building and evaluating relative strength.

For pull ups (one of the single best resilience-building exercises), these ingeniously designed doorway pull up bars are wonderful. Super easy set up and take down, and I can attest they don’t damage your walls.

And if you want to organically incorporate them into your everyday life, just set a rule that you have to attempt a pull up or three every time you pass through the doorway where the bar is set up (tip: chair-assisted pull ups are great if you’re just getting started doing them - you can use as much or as little assistance from your legs as you need, and can build to the point where you no longer need your legs at all).

The bar I’ve linked here has multiple different grip options, which I find useful (and it can also be used for push up variations).

Thanks for reading The Brainjo Connection. See you next time!

Josh