Why Trying to Be Too Healthy Makes You Less Healthy

One of the biggest health mistakes you can make is becoming obsessed with health itself. Sometimes the people trying hardest to be healthy are the ones damaging their health the most. There is a point where trying to be healthier actually starts making you less healthy. Here are some great examples of this. Orthosomnia or sleep anxiety. If you're trying really hard to fall asleep, or you're anxious about not being able to fall asleep, you're not gonna fall asleep. Or at least it'll take you many hours to do so. Orthorexia or obsession with clean eating. The placebo and nocebo effect. If you think you're about to get positive or negative effects from consuming or doing something, you're going to manifest those same expectations. Exercise obsession. You can end up doing hours and hours of exercise to either burn off calories, or you think you need to earn your food by simulating hunter-gatherers or something. In all of these examples you're trying to make the healthier decision, but because you're so strict about it you actually end up harming your health. So I wanted to make this video to explain the physiology and psychology behind this phenomenon. Why being too neurotic and too obsessed with your health can actually make you unhealthier. Let's start with stress because a lot of people are afraid of stress. But stress may be harmful for your health only if you believe that it's harmful. A 2012 study looked at you as adults and found that your perception of whether stress is bad for you determines whether it harms your health and increases your mortality risk. People who experienced high stress but also believed that stress affected their health negatively saw a 43% higher risk of premature death. High-stressed out people who didn't think stress was harming their health didn't show a statistically significant increase in their mortality. The other groups weren't statistically significant either. And the way you internalize stress may determine how harmful it becomes. Among older adults, the strongest psychosocial predictor of memory decline over five years was stress internalization, perceiving to be more stressed out, feeling more hopelessness, and being less conscientious. That's quite a profound and important finding. By believing that stress is harmful for you, you create this placebo effect in your head. Your body and physiology expects the stress to be harmful for you and therefore you manifest it in your nervous system. The placebo phenomenon is very well established in scientific research and it applies to many different domains. MRI scans of people getting placebo treatment show that placebo treatment can turn down the brain's pain systems. In other words, believing you're being helped can actually make the pain feel weaker even if there's no active treatment. You're told you're getting something that will reduce your pain even if the treatment is fake. That expectation can lead your brain to turn down pain signaling before or during the painful experience. The same happens when you're expected to be harmed. The expectation that it's harmful will change your nervous system to meet that expectation. It's basically preparing you to be stressed out and becoming harmed. What's the difference between running away from a lion versus having sex with your partner? Both situations will elevate your heart rate, both are categorically physically exertion, both will raise adrenaline, and both will make you sweat. The difference is that you think the lion is going to kill you and you perceive it as dangerous and harmful. Even if it's a pet lion at a zoo or these safaris, the lion who's dosed up on tranquilizers will still elevate your heart rate a little bit and make you stressed out. If you had your own pet lion at home who you took care of since they were a cub, you fed and played with them for years, and the lion shows affection towards you and it doesn't show any aggression towards you, you will treat it like a house cat. You're not going to get the same stress response by standing next to a wild lion or a random lion at the zoo compared to your home pet lion. The difference in these situations is your perception. You perceive the domesticated lion that you've taken care of for many years since it was a cub, you perceive it to be not dangerous because it's your pet lion, right? But the wild lion isn't your friend, in a sense. It's a wild lion and it can be dangerous, which is why you perceive it as a potential threat, even if you're at a safari. So the way you look at things fundamentally changes how your nervous system responds. A much better way to look at stress is to adopt the mental hormesis model. Hormesis is a biological phenomenon seen in humans, animals, and even plants. Basically, a small amount of stress makes the organism stronger and more resilient. Hormesis has been seen to be responsible for the life extension from various treatments in animal research. Some of the longest-living mammals in the world, like Greenland sharks and bowhead whales, who can live over 200 years, they live in very cold waters. And scientists have identified a specific cold-tripe protein that gets activated in the cold to increase their DNA repair and explain why they live so long. We also know that people who don't exercise There's also a ton of data about the benefits of sauna or high-temperature conditioning that strengthens your immune system, reduces the risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, and dementia. Think about it. If you live inside a bubble, you live in constant room temperature, you're isolated from outside threats, outside bacteria, you're basically getting fed and kept in safety in a bubble. Naturally, your physical and mental resilience, as well as your immune system, will get weaker over time because you're not used to doing anything that is even slightly uncomfortable or slightly stressful. Compare that to like a Navy SEAL who can handle 48 hours of sleep deprivation, 48 hours of fasting, and 48 hours of high physical exertion. They can tolerate it quite well. An extreme example of this is the NASA bedrest study where healthy people were told to lay in bed for 70 days. They couldn't sit, walk, or even go to the bathroom. After 70 days, the participants had lost 10% of their aerobic fitness, 23% of their soleus muscle size, and up to 20% of their muscle strength. All because the body didn't have to utilize its muscles and fitness anymore, even if it's just from standing and walking. Those are extreme examples of hormesis. If you eliminate even the hormesis of gravity, your body will deteriorate. People who go to space, they're not exposed to gravity that much, their bones become brittle, they lose their muscle mass, and they're unhealthy when they come back. The same applies to some other forms of stress down here on the earth. By adopting the mental model of hormesis, you avoid the harmful effects of stress because you know that it's not harmful for you, you know that it actually makes you healthier. There's also one critical component we need to talk about, and that's the nocebo effect, the opposite of placebo. Basically, you're told that this treatment, this supplement, or this food is going to have negative side effects, and therefore you expect those negative side effects, even if the treatment is fake. This is well documented in scientific research as shown by this review of 73 clinical trials on migraine patients. When patients are told about possible side effects of their medicine, even those in the placebo groups who receive the fake pill with no active ingredient often report symptoms that match the side effects of the drug being tested. They're told that the pill they're getting causes side effects like nausea or cramps, but it's a fake pill, there's no ingredient in it, and the people still experience those same side effects, even if it's a fake pill. In this experiment, healthy volunteers received identical heat pain stimuli. One condition was told that it's going to reduce pain, and the other was told that it's going to increase pain. Even though the objective pain stimulus was the same, it was the same amount of degrees or volts, the nocebo condition experienced subjective increases in pain perception, and that effect lasted for a week. That's why you have to be very careful with what you and who you listen to online. A lot of people might share their own subjective experience by taking some treatments or using some foods or supplements, and other people will start to believe it. They start believing it because it's the nocebo effect. A good example of this is electromagnetic hypersensitivity, which is a condition that some people swear they have. They get headaches or they feel stressed, they can't sleep, and they feel agitated when they're around Wi-Fi and cell towers. Well, a 2010 review of 46 double-blind provocation studies on over 1100 people who self-reported electromagnetic hypersensitivity found that people report symptoms of EMF sensitivity even if they're getting exposed to fake EMF. Basically, the scientists tell these people you're getting exposed to these EMFs, like there's a Wi-Fi router in the room, it's emanating 5G or whatever it is, they start feeling the side effects of EMF sensitivity, such as they feel stressed, they feel agitated, they even might feel pain because they see the Wi-Fi router and they think they're getting exposed to 5G, but in reality, there's no 5G, there's no Wi-Fi. They're in an isolated environment where there is no EMFs, but they still start feeling those same symptoms of EMF sensitivity if the doctors say that there is a Wi-Fi router. Likewise, in these other blinded experiments, when no one knows what's going on, no one knows if there is EMF, the people don't feel those side effects if they don't know whether or not there is EMFs around them. So this is the nocebo effect. You know there are certain side effects from whatever thing it is, let's say vegetables, EMF, air pollution, microplastics, whatever it is, you know some of the potential side effects, but even if there is no active ingredient in those, you start manifesting those same symptoms. Now, I'm not saying there aren't any legitimate cases of EMF sensitivity, I'm sure there are. There are legitimate cases of mold sensitivity, food intolerances, etc. But in a lot of cases, it's a nocebo effect. People are just expecting to get those negative symptoms and they start feeling them because the body wants to meet those expectations. So what's the practical takeaway from this video? It means that if you go really down the rabbit hole of trying to optimize your health and trying to be the healthiest person you can be, you can end up harming your health by creating this nocebo effect, by becoming stressed and anxious about everything and becoming less resilient to things that don't actually harm your health in a significant manner. On social media, there's every different guru with their own boogeyman that the normal person has to be afraid of. There's microplastics, artificial sweeteners, seed oils, sugar, EMF, air pollution, mold, pantoxins, etc. Some of these boogeymen are legitimate health hazards, such as secondhand smoking, which can be equally as bad as real smoking. Microplastics, you know, I would certainly try to minimize my plastic exposure, don't microwave plastic Tupperware, buy glass bottles when possible, but if you're at the airport and you drink a plastic bottle of water, it's not that big of a deal if you do it every once in a while. Just don't actively start to sabotage your own health by believing that it's harming you because that's going to cause more stress and more anxiety and you will start to experience more symptoms of these negative side effects. Now, of course, there are some invisible health hazards that will harm your health, like you live next to a nuclear radiation or you live next to some sort of an industrial factory and it pollutes your drinking water, whatever the case is, those are legitimate health hazards and they can harm your health and shorten your lifespan. But that's not what's happening on social media. On social media, you have relatively harmless boogeymen that in the grand scheme of things don't influence your health and longevity significantly. But because you might start believing that they're very harmful, you live a very diligent and you try to optimize every area of your life, you start causing more harm. So the overall message of this video is, yes, you should try to improve your health and try to optimize it to a reasonable degree, but don't become obsessed with it so much that you become anxious and stressed out by every potential boogeyman around because that's going to cause more harm to your health. And you shouldn't believe other people's nocebo effect. If someone says that they get a stomach ache by eating this food or taking this supplement, then don't automatically believe it because you will adopt their nocebo effect. Because as Morpheus from The Matrix said, you need to free your mind. If you want to learn more about how to improve your biological age and overall healthspan without spending hours at the gym, without spending thousands on supplements and get yourself to top 1% of health without obsessing about it, then check out my online community Youthman Society. It's where you can learn more detailed programs and protocols from me. Link in the description.