OH! Magazine - Australian Version September 2015 | Page 12

HORMESIS AND
OPTIMUM HEALTH

PAUL
TAYLOR

Paul Taylor shares these tips to boosting your brain health.
n the late 1800s, the German
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
said ‘That which does not kill us, makes
us stronger.’ It is a phrase often used to
explain the resilience of people who
have endured hardships. It turns out
that it certainly contains more than a
grain of truth.

I

My interest in this subject arose from
undergoing a course called Air 427 in
1998, whilst serving as an officer in the

British Armed Forces. The course was
ten days of rigorous combat survival and
resistance to interrogation training,
which involved walking hundreds of
kilometres over ten days, with very little
sleep due to sleeping rough in freezing
conditions, and the only food over the
entire ten days was a chicken between
four people – and it was alive when we
got it. To ramp up the pressure, the final
five days was an ‘escape and evasion’
phase, where we were to evade a Hunter
Force
that
was
equipped
with
helicopters, vehicles and dog teams.
At the end of the ten days we underwent
interrogation training, which consisted
of
alternating
bouts
of
highly
uncomfortable
stress
positions
(blindfolded while exposed to very loud
‘white noise’), with interrogations of
increasing intensity. Once the course
was over, the first thing that struck me
was that I had a new-found appreciation
for things that I took for granted – as
well as the obvious such as food, shelter
and warmth, there were lots of little
things that I appreciated much more,
such as a toothbrush, clean underwear
and toilet paper!
It wasn’t until a few weeks and months
later that I noticed something more long
lasting – my view of what was stressful
had completely changed and my
resilience was greatly enhanced. I
realised that this phenomenon was very
well explained by knowledge from my
first Masters Degree in Sports Science –
that of training adaptation. Exposing the
body to training stresses, such as
sprinting or lifting heavy weights,
induces changes in gene expression
which result in a an adaptive response

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SEPTEMBER 2015 ( OH! MAGAZINE )

– and the body ultimately becoming
bigger, faster, stronger. This knowledge
led to me reframing potential stress in
my life as something that would make
me stronger.
When I left the Armed Forces and
became more of an academic I looked
deeper into the research in this area,
and that is when I uncovered a topic
that has real relevance to many areas of
our life – that of hormesis.
Hormesis is a biological phenomenon
whereby a beneficial effect results from
low