Hormesis is the quiet principle behind many effective wellness practices. A small, well-timed stress invites the body to come back stronger.
Dr. Jen Haley places fasting, sauna, cold, intervals, phytonutrients, and microneedling in the same family. Each asks something of the body. Each depends on dose.
Full transcript from the source video, grouped by timestamp for easier reading.
hello and welcome to Radiance revealed the podcast I'm your host Dr Jen Haley I'm a board-certified dermatologist Fitness Enthusiast nutrition expert and Global explorer that over the years has uncovered that your skin is a true representation of your internal health each week we will chat with leading Health wellness and even spiritual experts who will reveal secrets to True health and vitality my goal is to help you change small habits to give you the power to create a more balanced aligned and elevated version of yourself now in hi everyone welcome back to the radiance revealed podcast I'm your host Dr Jen Haley and today I want to talk about a concept called hormesis it's something that I'm obsessed about and I'm constantly thinking about how we're using hormesis or how we can use hormesis in our lives so you may have heard about it if so we're going to dive a little bit deeper into it today in more practical terms and if you haven't heard of it I'm going to explain it to you so have you ever heard the phrase what doesn't kill you makes you stronger and that is basically hormesis so when we think about the human body it's not like a machine the human body is almost opposite a machine
so a machine like a car or any any sort of electronic any any device basically the more you use it the more it wears out and you don't expect it to last forever and it gets weaker and doesn't work as well over time our body is the opposite so the more we stress it the stronger it gets the more we use our brain the better it gets the more we lift weights the more we do resistance training the more we uh do impact training the stronger our bones get the stronger our muscles get so that is basically the concept of hormesis but there's some clever things that we can do uh to enhance that and even in nature there's something called xenohormesis where you know plants that are grown in a controlled situation on a farm with pesticides and herbicides applied so they don't have to work hard to stay Al they don't have the same nutrient density as plants that grow in the Himalayas for instance so Himalayan Tarter buckweat is super high in phytonutrients because in order to survive at elevation in harsh climates plants will produce more nutrients more protective chemicals to protect them and Only the Strong Survive so we want to be the strong that survive right so this
concept the the concept of heresis is basically that short intermittent bursts of certain stressors these hormetic stressors trigger a Cascade of cellular processes that enhance Health slow aging and make you more resilient to Future stresses so remember that it's a short and intermittent burst of certain hermetic stressors so we want to find the sweet spot right because too much stress can weaken your body it can weaken your immune system it can wreak havoc on your physical and your mental health over time and too little stress basically turns you into a couch potato that's disintegrating so there's a sweet spot and I know we often conceptualize as humans that more of something is better but this is not the case this is rarely the case that more is better and we get into trouble when we do too much of anything so remember that especially when when it comes to hormesis we need to find that Goldilocks effect that sweet spot and what we want is we want shortlived acute control controlled stressors that will trigger a healthy adaptive response and that will make you stronger so what does this even look like for your body one of the examples is intermittent fasting so intermittent fasting where you give your body a break from eating so it can clean
up the trash BAS basically will help uh with a it'll produce a Cascade of hormonal cellular responses to clean up your ccent cells so as we're constantly consuming our metabolism is going and we're basically building up a a large amount of metabolic waste products so when we take a break from eating we give our body the chance to kind of clean up so I think of it as Thanksgiving so Ju Just say Thanksgiving you cook a huge dinner and you have tons of dirty plates in the kitchen with food on them all over the counter pots and pans everywhere if you don't take a break from cooking and you just cook your next meal and your next meal you're going to have more and more piling up of trash and piling up of plates and piling up of everything you don't want in the kitchen to the point where you won't be able to cook anymore right so this is what happens when we're feeding our bodies all the time when we feed our bodies all the time Bic what's happening is that we're not giving our body a chance to clean up the and take out the trash so intermittent fasting allows your body to do that so there's a sweet spot for that right because too much intermittent fasting or too much fasting turns into starvation and nobody wants that so that's where we're finding theet The Sweet Spot we're not eating all the time we're giving ourselves a little bit of a break to digest repair renew clean up uh
another way that we can use hormesis in our lives is with cold exposure so I'm not great at this I live in Arizona it's about 50 degrees outside right now and I have heat on in the house and I keep telling myself try not to put the heat on above 62 because I know that getting out of the comfort zone getting out of our homeostasis is going to make our body stronger in the long run and that's what we want so one of the ways you can do this besides getting a little bit colder in the winter and not putting your thermostats at 68 in the winter and 68 at the summer or 70 whatever your preferred temperature is is adjusting with the seasons so when it's hotter feel a little hotter more time when it's colder get colder more time more more often and if you're in the biohacker world or if uh you're aware of a lot of the science that's going on right now there's there's a huge Trend towards cold punching and um with cold plunging what's what's currently recommended based on the lit literature that I could review a lot of the research um is done out of the Baltic area and um where I actually attended the most amazing biohacker Retreat last year in Estonia and we did jump into uh two degrees Celsius Lakes which was extremely invigorating and not as hard as I thought it was the thing I was the most scared of doing and the thing I love the most um but the sweet spot for this is 11 minutes per week divided into three
to four sessions so you know maybe two or 3 minutes at a time three four times a week is a nice way to do these these cold plunges and I think earlier in the day is recommended because it um pushes it it increases your dopamine levels remarkably and it it sets you up for a very positive day um but when you think about it too much cold exposure now that's going to give you hypothermia so we're going back to what is The Sweet Spot okay another on the opposite end would be heat exposure so we're looking at sauna Hot Yoga as an option and The Sweet Spot for that is three times a week about 15 minutes per session so when I was at the biohacker retreat I mean these Finnish people they do things so perfectly when it comes to the sauna uh it's a a very ritualistic uh experience which is beautiful because that ritual in itself and that community in itself uh just does so much for your health more than we often uh tout and discuss and we would do cycles of cold hot so we'd go into 180 degree sauna for about 15 minutes and then go into the cold Pune and we do about three or four cycles of that and I thought that was just a beautiful experience but once again when you're doing too much heat now you're getting
hyperthermia so we're finding that sweet spot but the cool thing about heat exposure is that it releases heat shock proteins and heat shock proteins do a lot of things they're chaperon basically but they play they also play important roles in cell signaling and apotosis some people might call that apoptosis but it's apotosis regulation or cell death controlled cell death so when cells no longer have a purpose we want them to die off right we want controlled cell death and he shock proteins play an important role in that so getting a little cold getting a little hot not eating all the time these are some things you can do to get out of your comfort zone uh the fourth thing I wanted to talk about was high-intensity interval training so you can do short bursts of exercise there's many ways to do this you could do it with tatas I like Sprint training I don't do it as often as I should I actually did it the other day um for like the first time in six months to be honest with you and my legs were not moving as fast as my lungs wanted them to move so you got to do the best you can you could do some Plyometrics but we're getting out of our comfort zone we're feeling uncomfortable for short bursts short periods of time doing this too much is going to set your body up for stress so a lot of women in particular you really have to do this according to your cycle so during the menstrual cycle in the ludal phase when estrogen drops it makes us more sensitive to cortisol so that's not a
time you're going to want to be doing the these high-intensity interval training um bouts men you can get away with doing them more frequently but women especially when you're per menopausal your body is not going to tolerate doing high-intensity interval training as much as when you're younger um you could do it on the bike you could do Sprints you could do Plyometrics there's classes you can do but more is not better I want you to remember that more is not better because people get very addicted to this and they get in a cycle where it it really isn't benefiting them um also I look at strength training as a type of hormesis so when you look at weight training you know if you sit there all day and do nothing your muscles get weaker when astronauts go and we don't have gravity anymore when they go into space their bones their muscles everything gets weaker to the point where they can barely even walk when they get back now when we do weight training resistance training any weight in exercise our body responds to that stress by actually forming thicker muscles and strong I'm sorry stronger muscles and thicker bones so we want thicker bones and we want stronger muscles muscles are our metabolic currency muscles are what absorbs the glucose when we take in a meal so that we don't have high glucose levels that can cause a lot of problems with our our skin and our bodies muscle also is our metabolism when we're sitting all day so even yesterday I got
into a conversation with someone about you know the fact that she had gained some weight after the holidays and she wanted to lose this weight so she's just getting to the gym and she's doing 20 minutes of the treadmill and I told her I said you need to do some weights if you want to lose weight because that's how you're going to lose weight and she's like yeah yeah but let me just lose weight first and then I'll work on the muscle because she's thinking that the muscle's going to make her look more bulky this is the opposite of the truth this is not the truth so when you do cardio which I'm not opposed to doing cardio I think it should be fun I think it should be with other people I think it should be in nature because personally for me cardio is all about uh the mental health benefits of it and helping you know any mood mood helping with mood regulation as well as improving cardiovascular function as well too but I find that a lot of people use cardio as punishment which I person personally had it in my younger years um but going going back to cardio cardio is not the best way to lose weight because you're burning calories while you're doing your walking or your biking or whatever but the rest of the time you're not as opposed to when you're doing resistance training weightlifting and you're building muscle that muscle is burning calories the other 23 hours a day so you may not burn as much when you go to the gym and lift weights for the one hour or
the 40 minutes but you are burning more calories the rest of the time just sitting there just being at rest so huge fan of weight training and um yeah and then going back to the sweet spot with hormesis if you are doing too much high-intensity interval training now you're over stressing your body and you're producing too much cortisol and that's overtraining so sweet spot and then the fifth thing I wanted to talk about was eating phytonutrients so so I'm more of a a meat-based from regenerative Farms kind of person although I'm a huge fan of sprouts especially broccoli sprouts and micro greens and high density uh vegetables so vegetables that have a high density of nutrients in them the purple vegetables purple cauliflower red carrots I I love all those things and eating phytonutrients um that have glucosinolates in them that are found in cruciferous vegetables also will improve your hormesis they they provide a hormesis effect to you and that is something that everyone should add I prefer doing phytonutrients earlier in the day it's because of the sun exposure and the pre-ex exercise and that sort of thing but anytime a day is going to be beneficial so basically the goal with hormesis doing using this hormesis to
benefit is that we want to knock our body out of homeostasis so our body's always trying to get back into homeostasis and we when we knock it out of that comfort zone and get it out of homeostasis it's going to have to work harder and as a result strengthen to get back into homeostasis so these hermetic stressors basically they activate a variety of cellular mechanisms and signaling pathways to promote stress resilience so we want to be resilient to stress and we need to practice in order to be more resilient to stress so overall we get better and better at handling stress in the future when we utilize these short intermittent bursts of hormetic stressors in our lives and the other effect that they have is they repair cellular damage so as long as we're alive as long as we're metabolism we have a metabolism we are um getting some damage to ourselves just from breathing just from existing just replicating and the these repair processes that occur like autophagy for instance during these hermetic stressors can be used to help improve our health so autophagy is the process where our body eats itself so when a cell no longer or a metabolic waste product no longer is useful in the body we want to get rid of it and that's the body does with autophagy basically um other things
that the body um does from hormetic stressors is it repairs DNA who doesn't want that everybody wants that and it combats oxidative stress it reduces inflammation and it eliminates toxins as does the sauna eliminates toxins through our skin because we know that sweat in our body is one of many ways of removing toxins especially heavy metals and it also produces new mitochondria and mitochondria are our powerhouses that's what give us energy every day that's we love our mitochondria and then the other thing I want to mention is about neuroplasticity and the neuroplasticity in the brain is something else we want to utilize hormesis for so I knew nothing about biohacking until the big virus came when when Co came around you know that's when I started my podcast because I was bored and when you have a podcast you could talk to interesting people all around the world and then also I I I'm a knowledge Seeker I'm super curious and I wanted to learn more information and in in my world of being a physician especially in the integrative holistic space I'm already overflooded with tons and tons of information and working on a daily basis but during Co we weren't working as much we had more free time we weren't socially interacting as much so I started learning about the biohacking
world and integrating into that space and at the time when I couldn't travel overseas because we weren't traveling I ended up going to uh 40 Years of Zen it's uh Dave asprey's place up in Washington because I was very interested in neuro feedback so I believe that our brain is probably the most important thing in our body because our brain gives us our mood it gives us our Med our our um it gives us our mood it gives us our uh motivation for the day it allows us to interact with people in a healthy way so that we have good interactions with people and we also can learn new knowledge so we can contribute to the world and have a higher purpose right so our brain is in charge of all those things and it motivates us to listen to this podcast and Implement some of these things things as as in regards to heresis so I became interested in neur feedback for two reasons the first one was when my son was six years old he was diagnosed with autism and even though I'm in MD by training I I understand the limitations of traditional Western medicine it's wonderful for treating medical conditions but I I like to think outside of the box and think of more creative ways to solve problems sometimes right that
might not be scientifically proven Often by pharmaceutical supported research so I got interested I did some research and I said okay well maybe there is a part of his brain that is like lazy and we need to stimulate it and help it grow so that it can work better you know because I feel like there's certain parts of our brain that maybe overwork and are over stimulated and other parts of our brain that aren't and that's my Layman understanding of it because I'm not a neuroscientist right and I got him into neuro feedback and I asked the the psychologist who was doing it I said does he have autism or add you know I I was so quick to label him or really I wasn't but you know we and he looked at me he goes it doesn't matter what he has I'm going to read his brain waves and I'm going to treat him and he did you know and there were certain areas of his brain that we're overworking certain that we're underwork as there is with all of us and he underwent about 20 to 40 um sessions of the neuro feedback and he just turned 19 last week and he does not have autism so I'm not saying that this is a way for you to cure your child's autism or anyone's autism this just worked for my
son with his possible misdiagnosis at the time but either way neuro feedback is a powerful tool to use your brain in a different way than you may not have ever realized right and our perception of the world controls everything so that's kind of fascinating the other thing is is my my ex-husband had a lot of traumatic brain injuries and I understood the power of neuro feedback to help with that and also to um I also understood how the brain can be traumatized and it could affect your personality and affect your behavior 20 years after the fact because of the Cascades of inflammation that happen down the road so I personally figured during covid I would go to this 40 Years of Zen and do neuro feedback training to help myself because I hadn't been helping myself I've been helping everybody else around me and it was mindblowing I work with Dr Drew Pearson he's a brilliant brilliant neuroscientist and my life completely changed after doing the neuro feedback and then of course once you're immersed into this biohacking community you connect with all of these other people and you just start thinking differently so that was my experience with neuro feedback and the ability for neuroplasticity because it's just mind-boggling when I was in medical school we were taught that your neurons turn over and your brain is set at a certain age and that's
absolutely not true we have complete power to change everything we have complete power to change the capacity of our brain the capacity of our body we're not limited by our genetics anymore and that's why I'm teaching you these things so that you can take control of your life so um the other things you could do for neuroplasticity is learn new activities when my mom died about 5 years ago I said to myself why do I enroll my my children in New activities every single year and I never learn anything new I've learned to ski I've learned to mountain bike I've learned to play piano I've learned languages not not all successfully I've learned to paint I I try to learn something new every single year so I encourage you to do that do something that's hard just do hard stuff and that's the goal with this entire concept of heresis is getting out of your comfort zone and your body will reward you for it so I want to Pivot using that concept of hor mesis into how we use hormesis in the Skin So as dermatologists one example of what we do in the skin to encourage this hormetic effect is micr needling is an is a great example of this so if you injure your skin a lot you will get a scar your body will heal that wound with scar tissue which is a different type of of collagen
in your Skin's naturally made of if you do micr trauma to the skin through Micron needling for instance your body will respond with a hormetic effect of thickening the collagen so as we get older as we discussed about in skin skin 101 the physiology of skin on the previous podcast your body your dermis your collagen your elastic tissue your hyaluronic acid they all decrease over time and that's what makes our skin more saggy over time and lose its uh plumpness and its rebound elastic effect and we could use micro needling for instance to cause micr trauma micro stress micro damage in the collagen and as a response the collagen gets organized again and it thickens and it renews itself so that's beautiful right we have control over helping with acne scars mild wrinkles mild fine lines I like this done in a dermatologist office so I do not like the dermar rollers for number of reasons the dermar rollers that you can buy on the internet number one they are often reused and infection is a problem because we've learned previously skin physi physiology 101 that your skin is
your protective sheep to protect you from the outside world so we want that Skin Barrier to be maintained properly so that it doesn't allow infection into your body when you're taking a dirty der dermar roller that is not medical grade and you're rolling it on your skin you have potential to uh introduce infections into the skin so that's the first problem the second problem is that the way we do Micron needling in the office is usually a like a checkerboard punch pattern it's it's like a stamping punch pattern and when we do that we have proper spacing in between where we are uh caught we have proper spacing in between where we're causing that controlled trauma in the skin so that your body can respond by thickening and reorganizing the collagen when you're using a dermar roller what's happening is is you're rolling those needles through and it's shearing the skin it's tearing the skin in an uncontrolled way so I do not recommend dermar rollers if you're going to get Derma needling do it in the office okay so micro needling should be done in the office the other treatment with Micron needling is you can get radio frequency Micron needling there's a number of devices out there and that's Micron needling with heat at the bottom so it the heat also stimulates collagen and it it stimulates a reparative effect and that can only be done in the office under somebody who's trained to do that
so that is hormesis for today and the next episode I will be talking about the four RS of facial Rejuvenation and how a board-certified dermatologist evaluates you during your aesthetic consultation and how fillers work how Botox and other neurom modulators work and how to even out and smooth out the tone and texture of your skin so thank you for joining me if you would like to connect with me offline please check out my Instagram Dr Jen haly and my YouTube channel is now up and running so connect with me there I'm very responsive to DMS I'm going to be doing a monthly AMA and please share and subscribe and rate the podcast thanks so much I'm here for you if you're enjoying the radiance revealed podcast please don't forget to subscribe so you'll always know when there's a new episode and while you're at it please give us a review as that helps others to find this podcast and if you want to connect with me please visit my website Dr Jen halal. com or you can find me on Instagram at Dr Jen Haley hello everyone just a friendly reminder that this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only the statements and Views Express on this podcast are not medical advice
opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility made for statements made by guests neither this podcast nor any of the information contained within it are a substitute for Care by a qualified medical professionals this podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or professional advice or Services if you are looking for help in your journey please seek out a qualified medical
Transcript auto-generated by YouTube. Verbatim — duplicates intentionally preserved.
6 hormetic tools discussed Dose the difference between adaptation and depletion Skin a visible signal of internal health
Hormetic stress works because the challenge is temporary and contained. Heat, cold, fasting, and intense movement create a signal, then recovery completes the adaptation.
Too little stimulus changes very little. Too much becomes depletion. The practice is learning the middle ground.
Haley speaks as a dermatologist, but her frame is whole-body. Skin is not separate from sleep, nutrition, inflammation, circulation, or stress chemistry.
That makes skin a useful feedback surface. When the internal environment becomes more resilient, the external expression often becomes calmer too.
The adaptation does not happen during the hardest moment. It happens afterward, when the body repairs, regulates, and integrates the signal.
This is why hormesis belongs inside a complete ritual: stress, pause, nourishment, sleep. The pause is part of the performance.
"The strongest protocol is the one your body can absorb and repeat."
Use one primary hormetic practice at a time when you are building consistency.
Keep intensity below the point where sleep, mood, or recovery begin to suffer.
Support the signal with protein, minerals, hydration, and rest.
Hormesis means a small stress that stimulates a stronger response. Fasting, sauna, cold exposure, HIIT, phytonutrients, and microneedling all depend on appropriate dose.
