The Stress Paradox

A paradigm-shifting approach to wellness that reveals how the right levels of stress are actually good for you and how stress can help you unlock the body's natural ability to stave off aging, prevent disease, and improve metabolic health. What if we've gotten stress wrong? There's a breakthrough happening in the study of cellular health, wellness, and longevity. We know that excessive stress can be toxic, but emerging new research reveals that too little stress is just as bad for you as too much. Dr. Sharon Bergquist, a pioneering physician and leading stress researcher, is at the forefront of this movement. In The Stress Paradox, she explains that our bodies are designed to heal and repair themselves, but we need the right amount and type of hormetic stress to rejuvenate at a cellular level. Many modern comforts have inadvertently increased our risk of mental and physical illness by causing us to underutilize our inherited response to challenges. Our need for stress is so deeply embedded in our genes that you can't achieve good health without it! Dr. Bergquist reveals how to optimize five key stressors to maximize mental, emotional, and physical resilience and reap a host of health benefits, from staving off dementia to increasing the years of your life. These simple lifestyle medicine changes can keep your mind sharp, improve your mood, increase energy and metabolism, support a healthy gut, maintain a healthy weight, and decrease your risk of serious diseases like cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and Alzheimer's.- Eating more plant "toxins" in foods like vegetables, dark chocolate, and spices- Exercising with intermittent bursts of intense movement- Engaging in heat and cold therapy to awaken your body's ancient healing pathways- Fasting most effectively for your circadian biology- Challenging yourself mentally and emotionally while managing unhealthy stress levels Rooted in cutting-edge science and complete with customizable protocols, workouts, and recipe templates, The Stress Paradox is an accessible life-changing roadmap for using hormesis to dramatically increase health, happiness, and longevity.

Sharon Horesh Bergquist, MD, is an award-winning physician, innovative healthcare leader, and visionary researcher renowned for spearheading a science-based approach to applying lifestyle as medicine. She has helped lead numerous clinical trials, including the Emory Healthy Aging Study and the NIH funded Emory Healthy Brain Study. Dr. Bergquist is widely published in peer-reviewed journals and has contributed to over 200 news segments, including Good Morning America, CNN, ABC News, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR. She hosts The Whole Health Cure podcast and her popular Ted-Ed video on how stress affects the body has been viewed over six million times. She received her degrees from Yale College and Harvard Medical School.