Stress Isn’t All Bad? Use Stress to Thrive

Real quick, before we dive into this episode, I have a little sleep secret I want to tell you about. Look, sleep is crucial for your fitness, but it's crucial for just plain old everyday life and function. And I find I sleep great unless I have a migraine. And I've had more than my fair share since perimenopause all the way through postmenopause. My secret weapon was Blue Sky CBD sleep gels. Each gel contains 25mg of CBD and 25mg CBN for deep restorative sleep. Something about it helps to reduce inflammation, which I believe for me was key in helping me get to sleep. But the biggest thing is so many of the over-the-counter solutions, whether for sleep or migraines, can ruin gut health, and liver health. Neither one of those did I want to be problematic for me. So this option is recommended by healthcare providers worldwide and backed by thousands of happy customers, many of whom come from our Flipping 50 community. There is zero THC, so it's non-habit-forming. It's made by a trusted family-owned company that we all can feel good about. Third-party tested for purity and potency. And if you're interested, you too can try a sample for just $6. But even better, you can get 30% off forever with discount code FLIPPING50. That's FLIPPING50. Just go to flipping50.com/blueskycbd. We'll put that link in the show notes and you'll find it everywhere on Flipping 50 at My Favorites. What are you waiting for? Good night. Nope, you heard it here first. Stress isn't all bad. Okay, so you already knew that, but this episode is going to put a whole different spin on stress. I mean, literally, the framework for this is not just que sera sera, Mary Poppins, it's all good, stress is good, you need stress. But there's far more to it. There's a little stress format, and we're going to give it to you. So 5 key stressors that you actually want to apply a little bit every day. And guess what? Yes, you'll hear exercise, but outside of that, what else are you missing?

I'm Debra Atkinson, and you're listening to Flipping 50. I started this podcast over a decade ago to answer questions about fitness in menopause and beyond. Before you know to ask them. The goal: to help accelerate your results with the science and the practical application of proven protocols while living your best life. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than a midlife woman. It's not just you, but it's the 3 generations that you influence. My unique 40-year career, including being a university senior lecturer in kinesiology, an industry subject matter expert and international speaker, to founder of the first and the only exclusively made-for-menopause-and-beyond fitness membership in the world. Every week I interview experts behind the science of optimal hormone-balancing fitness and longevity and share answers to our community's questions so you can have the vitality and the energy you want, need, and deserve.

If you've ever heard of the book by Kelly McGonigal, The Upside of Stress, then you are in for a treat because ideally you've landed here because this topic resonates with you, or maybe you've landed here because you're looking for solutions because this topic doesn't necessarily resonate with you, but you definitely understand it. But if you've never heard of the book by Dr. Kelly McGonigal, The Upside of Stress. You may want to read it after this, but you're gonna probably put another book on your nightstand too. Today's guest, as you might guess, is an author of a fairly newly published book on stress. So this is definitely a paradigm-shifting approach to wellness that reveals how the right levels of stress are actually good for you and and how stress can help you unlock your body's natural ability to stave off aging. Yeah, you heard me right, to prevent disease and improve metabolic health. How can you use stress to thrive and live longer? Stress, yes, generally seen as negative and harmful. In this episode, learn how to create good stress for bursts of happiness and live longer. Our guests will tell us more on the stress paradox, the name of her book and share 5 key good stressors to use stress to thrive. My guest is Dr. Sharon Horish-Burquist. She's an award-winning physician, innovative healthcare leader, and visionary researcher renowned for spearheading a science-based approach to applying lifestyle as medicine. She's helped lead numerous clinical trials, including the Emory Healthy Aging Study and the NIH-funded Emory Healthy Brain Brain Study. Dr. Berkquist 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 TEDx— TED-Ed, excuse me— video on how stress affects the body has been viewed over 6 million times. Do you think we're interested in stress? She received her degrees from Yale College and Harvard Medical School. And by the way, spoiler alert, I'll tell you this, her new book was released March 25th, 2025. You could find that anywhere books are sold. Dr. Sharon Bergquist, thank you so much for joining us.

Well, thank you so much for having me.

So this is very interesting. Behind the scenes in the green room, of course, I'm sharing with you all the details, and then it's always, we've got to let our members in and we've got to just let them hear this unravel. But I commented that, you know, this isn't the typical— you have an MD behind your name, and I'm more used to someone, you know, a health coach or a PhD talking about stress and its less likely, or certainly less uncommon. And you must be the first in 40 years I've talked to who's a physician who's actually talking about this and opening it up. So I'm really curious, I'm sure my listeners are, what landed you here? How did this become what it is you're leading with and talking about?

Yeah, and so it's, it's a great question, and I think it's because I practice medicine in a way where I believe that every thought, every belief, Every action is what creates the internal environment inside our bodies that makes us who we are, that controls our health, that controls what we're capable of doing. And it's been a very long journey getting there. I finished medical school in 1997, finished my residency in 2000. I've been in the same clinical practice now for 25 years, and I'm an internal medicine physician, so I have the privilege of following the same patients over time, and I get to see how choices and symptoms play out over time. And early in my career, what I realized is that even though I was perfectly trained to help my patients control their disease, I mean, their numbers look good, their blood sugar was great, their cholesterol was great, I wasn't slowing the progression. I was seeing further complications and the link between so many diseases. For example, metabolic disease, things like prediabetes, then raise the risk of heart disease, which also raises the risk of dementia, which also raises the risk of cancer. And I was watching people just struggle, suffer, and I thought I needed to do things differently. So my undergraduate background was in molecular biophysics and biochemistry. That's what I majored in at Yale University. I'd gone to Harvard for medical school, did my residency at one of the Harvard hospitals, the Brigham and Women's Hospital, and we were so well trained to treat disease. But that is a very different objective than trying to prevent the disease in the first place. And for me, it became a complete rethinking of what I wanted for my patients, but also what I wanted to feel was meaningful to me in my practice. And so along that journey, the role of lifestyle, um, started to play obviously a huge role, um, diet, exercise, but also stress, also human connection, all these things that I don't think get an equal footing in healthcare because they're not objective. We don't measure them. They're bigger conversations. They're ones that generally don't enter the exam room because the visits are so short, but I truly believe they play a bigger role in our health than a lot of the things that we are measuring.

So I think all listeners will resonate with this because especially for this period of time when women flip into perimenopause, they all know now, or at least my listeners know, that all sources of stress we have to factor in, and it changes the way we need to exercise because of the stress overall that we're getting. And this whole idea of turning stress— that we've always looked at as stress as a negative— turning it into a positive is very appealing. And talk to me about your own stress. I mean, was it something that you needed to look at for yourself too, or was this clearly just patients only?

Oh, 100% applies to my own life. You know, I really am a big believer that we're all capable of becoming more, of being more. And when I was growing up, I was actually born in a different country. I'm the first generation to come here in my family. And, you know, along the way, you just are constantly learning, constantly learning a culture. You have new freedoms, you have new opportunities. And in my own life, I have really asked these questions all along. Why is it that some people become more resilient and others don't? And, and believe me, I would love to have things easier. I mean, doesn't everyone? But I've learned the value of shifting the focus to becoming a stronger person rather than wishing it was easier. Um, so 100% applicable in this whole desire of wanting more, um, is I think a really important piece of hitting 50 and older because I think we understand what we want so much better. We are also going through changes, um, you know, in our bodies and our hormones and that combination of what we need to do to push ourselves for continued growth. Um, I think this is such a peak decade where that kind of comes together.

So well said. Yeah, that we finally know the answer to the question, what do you want? It's so true, right? And, and I think too comes a point where maybe even slightly after that comes what we're not willing to tolerate anymore, which also alleviates a little stress. Your book, your book, The Stress Paradox. I mean, really, you know, when we're looking at reshaping and thinking about how can we use stress to our advantage, you mentioned our bodies are designed to become healthier through alternating stress and recovery. Very similar to exercise. Put the weight down, recover completely, do a high-intensity interval. Recover completely. That kind of a workout has a very positive effect on fitness, especially for women in midlife. Trying to work hard and just having it feel hard at the end of the workout actually doesn't get results. In fact, gets the opposite of desired results. So talk a little bit about, and if you can give some examples maybe of how this has worked and why this is so important for health overall.

Yeah. And the critical part, like you said, is what's that right amount of stress, um, and the appropriate recovery, because those are the keys. You can take anything that's good, like high-intensity interval training, but if you don't properly recover, obviously it can become a chronic stress or a negative stress on your body. So our bodies are certainly not designed for chronic continuous stress, and that's why we associate stress with being harmful. But what our bodies are designed for are brief intermittent stressors followed by recovery. And this recovery piece is huge because there's a yin and yang. When our body's in stress mode, our body goes through a lot of healing and, and repair. It's making our body operate more efficiently, and it's in the recovery that we're actually remodeling. We are literally reconfiguring our mind and our body. To handle future stress better. So there's definitely a need for a body to go through these brief intermittent stressors because the things that are happening at the level of our cells are things that activate our defenses against disease. So the stress response that I think we are all familiar with is fight or flight, and we typically associate stress with the hormone cortisol. And, and of course there are many others because our stress response is quite complicated. But we think of it as this brief, short stress, and after the stress passes, we are no longer under stress. But what happens after the stress passes is at the level of our cells, we have cellular stress responses. We actually have 7 of them, and the function of them is to what I call the 4 Rs. We resist damage, we recycle damaged components in ourselves, we recharge ourselves, and we actually have repair mechanisms in our cells cells. So we're resisting oxidative and inflammatory damage. We are repairing our protein and DNA. So we have 10,000 damages to our DNA on a given day. Okay, that's 7 per minute. Our body is a machine at constantly repairing, and we're recharging our mitochondria, and we are recycling through this process of autophagy. The components in our cells that are old and damaged so that when we are recovering, we are selecting for these healthier rejuvenated cells. And that's why the path, the process of stress, recover, stress, recover is this blueprint for building health, because the types of damage we're repairing are the very processes that lead to disease and accelerated aging. Right? So the future of medicine is really what is happening at the level of our cells. Our cells are the most fundamental unit in our body. We have over 30 trillion cells. Our cells make up our tissues, which make up our body systems. When our cells are healthier, every part of our body functions better. So our mind, our body, our soul really all converge as what is happening at the level of our cells. And we are literally creating health from the most foundational level and slowing the aging process.

So talk to me about— I mean, there's a lot of stressors here we could choose, and I want to get into the 5 key stressors you talk about in the book and how to apply them in proper recovery. But what about those stressors we can't choose? So a lot of our listeners right now are going through helping a partner or caregiving for an older aging parent or in-law, not choosing that, but they're in a moment and it's not generally acute when they're in that. It's chronic and it's going on for periods of time. So talk about how does this fit in with the optimal stress? Are we looking at the, the short acute stressors and recovery periods as a way to basically buff up So we're getting stronger, more fit to tolerate them. But what if we didn't do that? Then where are we?

Yeah.

Yeah. So as you mentioned, I mean, we all have stressors that we can't control. And, you know, the message here isn't that you have to persevere in situations where you're stuck or they're unhealthy or definitely not health-promoting. The idea is that even though these chronic stressors are so prevalent and we have a lot of techniques towards trying to manage chronic stress, like meditation, mindfulness, they're all incredibly valuable, but they don't work for every person. And we're talking about a different set of tools. So the idea, like you just said, is that if we can use microdoses of stress to build resilience, it actually helps us deal with these stressors that we can't avoid, right? So our goal is not to get rid of stress in our life. Our goal is to optimize stress. So this is like a stress 2.0. It's a different way of thinking about stress management. It's a different set of tools. And the way it works biochemically is we can't control, like you said, relationships if we're caregivers, um, children. I mean, at this age, of course, we have so many demands. But what we can do is if we pursue a stress that is not unpredictable and uncontrollable— I mean, by definition, a lot of the chronic stressors are— but if we pursue good stress, which in this context of psychological stress is a stress that is meaningful to us, that's generative, a part of something that is bigger than us. It's also something that aligns with our beliefs. The biochemistry of that stress response doesn't just release cortisol and epinephrine and, you know, our— the stress hormones we're familiar with. We're also releasing dopamine, which is a motivating hormone. We are releasing serotonin, which some people call the happy hormone, or releasing oxytocin, which is a bonding hormone, if we're doing something generative for others. These hormones actually counter the effect of cortisol. So you can use good stress literally as an antidote to chronic stress.

So good. Okay, so let's say somebody's in the middle of caregiving. What, what would you suggest? She's in the middle of, all right, I'm, I'm out of my regular routine, I'm finding it hard to get maybe the exercise that I was trying to do before. What is, what's the, the dose of acute stress that you would suggest would be an appropriate thing right now?

Yeah, and, and I think in this scenario, I mean, it almost seems like saying, oh, add more stress is so nonsensical, right? When people have so much on their plate. But the key about hormetic stress— and we're talking about this science of hormesis, the science of good stress— is stress that is mild to moderate. Okay, so these are ordinary everyday stressors. And what you want is this Goldilocks zone where you're just a little bit outside your comfort zone, and but you're not overwhelmed, and then you take time to recover. So In the book, I mentioned 5 stressors that work hormonally in this way that activates our body. And you can pick any one of the 5 and kind of apply this whole idea of going a little bit past your comfort zone. Um, plant toxins, exercise, particularly high intensity, using heat and cold, circadian fasting, which is a form of intermittent fasting that aligns with your circadian rhythm. And these really invigorating mental psychological challenges. And with any one of these, it's gonna be different person to person, right? So the person that is already so depleted from caregiving, what is kind of mild to moderate or what feels uncomfortable to that person is gonna be very different from somebody else who's in a different life situation, right? Just like someone who's sedentary and wants to start working out, well, you know, what is high intensity for that person? Maybe just going to the mailbox, right? For someone who's highly trained, it is obviously a much more rigorous, you know, high-intensity workout. But it's different person to person, and it's different for the same person day to day depending on the recovery, right? So part of this is a process, right? You're never gonna get super healthy doing any intervention one time, and that applies to good stress. But over time, you are building adaptations that are making you more resilient. So we know from hormesis that anytime you undergo one of these stressors, you can increase your human potential about 20 to 25% in the process of your body restoring this homeostatic balance that keeps us healthy. When you do these exposures on a repeat level, Okay, stress, recover, stress, recover. Over time, you can increase your human potential 60 to 90%, right? You can literally double what you are capable of over time in this method, right? So like you said, just as you think of this as weights and building muscle, you challenge your brain, you build neural networks, you challenge your heart and cardiovascular system, you increase capacity for blood flow. On and on, right? It's a process of bioplasticity. Use it or lose it. And I think the worst message we get when we're caregivers and we're over 50 is, oh, you should be slowing down. And our body adapts to the conditions we put it to. So the message should be, keep pushing, keep pushing. In fact, you need to push harder because it takes a stronger stimulus to trigger the adaptations.

So I wanted—

I want to break down these 5 key stressors that you talk about in the book, just to summarize them again for listeners. Plant toxins, and that's the one I want to come back to so that we have a better understanding of that. The exercise, thermal exposure, fasting, and psychological challenges. And that one I might want to revisit too, because I'm not sure listeners will adapt or understand as quickly. So what do you mean by plant toxins? As a stressor?

Yeah. So plants make natural chemicals called phytochemicals. And the reason plants make these phytochemicals is it's to make them stress resilient. So when plants are exposed or exposed to drought, to ultraviolet light, to insects or humans wanting to munch on them, what they have to do is they can't flee, they can't run away. All they can do is to make natural pesticides, and that's what phytochemicals are, at least for the plant. When we as humans consume those phytochemicals, they activate our stress responses. They help us become more stress resilient. It's part of this incredibly beautiful kind of co-adaptation that we have developed over 2 million years with our environment. And it's how, uh, kind of we benefit from plants and our biology and our ancestors have learned to depend on these plants to build their resilience.

So a lot of my listeners are going to wonder, is this related to oxalates? Is this something different?

Do you have a question Question for a podcast, a question you'd love to ask, or maybe a story you want to tell. Did you know we have a special group just for podcast question roundups and the answers? My community coaches and I provide answers daily inside of this group, but it's also where I go when I occasionally say, okay, open call for podcast questions, or tell your story, would you like to be a guest? So if you're looking for a community of women who are also interested in optimizing their health strengthening their mindset and looking forward to every new year. Join the Flipping 50 Insiders group. That's Flipping 50 Insiders on Facebook.

Yeah, it's a great question because there's so much out there that plant toxins are anti-nutrients, right? So there's, you know, kind of lecithin, there's the phytates, you know, these are anti-nutrients. And these are phytochemicals that are literally reducing your absorption of minerals. And what I think we need to do is think of this more in a big picture, like what is the net effect of the plant and the phytochemical, right? So the amount that is being kind of absorbed and the reduced absorption that we're getting is really something that matters more when people aren't having variety in their diet and already have some mineral deficiency. When we prepare food in the usual preparation process, you know, like if we soak beans and then we boil them and cook them, we are already getting rid of a lot of these anti-nutrients. So the net effect, um, of, um, them as a negative, uh, component is already so far reduced And these same phytochemicals that we are worried about as being anti-nutrients are also activating our natural antioxidant defenses. They're activating our anti-inflammatory defenses. They have anti-cancer properties because they activate this DNA repair response, which is what's happening from the stress of the exposure to that plant toxin. So overwhelmingly We benefit, right? So we can't ever just look at one pathway or one process. I think when we do, we get led astray. We have to look at the totality of all the good and the bad that can happen from consuming a particular food, and we have to take that net sum. And here that net sum is overwhelmingly beneficial, and there of course, many studies that support that.

So what do you mean by psychological challenges? Are we talking about crossword puzzles? Are we talking about something else?

Yeah, well, psychological or mental. And what we're talking about is essentially doing something that scares you, um, but every day, every day, you know, but in the service of increasing your human potential in the service of becoming a limitless, unstoppable person, right? So that's what we're talking about. So you get to choose the stress when it's a deliberate hormetic stress. They're controllable by the very nature of what, you know, them being mild to moderate and intermittent, right? So for one person, again, you have to find what is right for you and where you're starting. It could be asking for a promotion. It could be hitting send on an email. It could be saying yes to something that you're saying no to, not because you need the recovery, but because you want to stay in that comfort zone, right? It's got to be meaningful to you. So I think that's the kind of pivot point of getting to be the resilient person and And what I think is so key for women who are 50 and older is that we have got to invest in building the, the personal power that we can all own. And that is an energy that we emit when we are in a resonant state, when our body is resilient. Okay, that is the energy that lifts people around us. And the way build that energy is through becoming a very resilient human being. It gives us, you know, in quantum physics, our heart has an electrical electromagnetic field around it, and it's a way that we communicate with those around us without saying a word. And that is the energy that becomes the magnet that attracts. It lifts others around us. And if we want to be, where we want to be in our career, if we want to lift our family, we want to lift the people around us, we have got to invest in building this energy so that we are emitting, um, like kind of inspiring creativity instead of fear, so that we are attracting instead of repelling, right? We want calm instead of chaos. That's the frequency we want to emit. So that is the reason for saying yes to things that scare you.

I love that, and I can't help myself. So all of our Flipping 50 retreat attendees, she's speaking your language. So, you know, we reserve the right at retreats to have surprises, and those are often things that are not necessarily things that our group would have signed up for voluntarily by themselves. And, you know, at the end of a retreat in the last year or so, someone said in tears, you know, the reason I come is because it pushes me to do things that I wouldn't do by myself, you know. And it's funny, until you're on the other side of that, sometimes you don't realize the value of that, you know. But very interesting. What can I ask you? What was one of the most recent things that you have done for psychological challenge?

Oh, well, I will say writing a book.

Okay, I wondered about that. Is it, is it writing the book, or is it doing all the publicity that it has to go in at the back end?

You know, it really started with writing the book because, you know, I think like everyone that's listening here, I mean, we all have busy lives. I have a full-time clinical practice. I do research, I have administrative responsibilities, I'm married, I have 3 children, the list goes on, right? So here's this yet one more thing, and how the heck am I going to find time to do this, right? But as I really asked myself, well, why did I want to do this in the first place? And for me, it is so meaningful to be able to take what I know and use it to help other people. And as I got into that process of of writing and being able to consolidate my thoughts and ideas in a way that's shareable, it changed my energy. Like, I could feel this transformation of what I could potentially do, and it's so energizing, right? So good stress leaves you energized, motivated, happy. The negative stress in our life is what leaves you depleted and leads to the burnout state, right? So that is such a key way to differentiate if the type of stress that is in your life is serving you well or if it's the kind that's not. And to really evaluate, like, how much do you have in each of the buckets, right? How much is in your not good stress bucket or bad stress? I, I hate to use these terms like it's a moral judgment, but, you know, or how much is in this energizing good stress bucket? And to constantly kind of recalibrate, right? Because as we get older, we can choose more of the stressors we want in our life, right? And we can say no and choose to some degree, right? As you said, some are not avoidable. Some stressors are gonna find us, but by and large, we have more control than we think we do.

So good. I, you know, in, in the book The Stress Paradox, you describe how these hormetic stressors can lower a person's biological age. I think we're all paying more attention when we can do that, you know, and it's not that we regret, you know, the birthday and the experience that we've had so much as, you know, we want to be healthier. I think we're really looking at longevity as not necessarily the long game, but the healthspan game. And how do we play that really well? So how, again, you know, describe this, maybe coming full circle here. How does good stress play a role in this reversing or lowering our biological age?

Yeah, so we had done a clinical study, a clinical trial on looking at stress, resilience, and biological age, which is, you said, can be very different from chronological age. When we're looking at biological age, it's looking at how your body at an epigenetic level, at a level of how you're expressing yourselves, is reflecting how you are aging. Aging. And we went into this study— so we did the study in executives. I work with a lot of CEOs and executives. And the question, of course, is, you know, what is stress doing to our bodies? And we went into this with this hypothesis that people who have high levels of stress are going to be aging at an accelerated rate and vice versa. And the part that was mind-blowing is, and people who low resilience, people who had low stress or almost no stress were aging faster, had a higher biological age than the people who had kind of the average level of stress in this country, kind of like a mild to moderate amount, right? Just speaks so much to how our biology has adapted to doing things that are hard, right? Our entire genome was not made for comfort. It was made for challenge.

And so the statement is really not, you can do hard things, it's you really want to do hard things.

Yeah, you need to do hard things if you want to be your healthiest self. Now, we've always at some intuitive level known that, oh, we grow from adversity, right? But the difference of where we are now with this understanding is we know what's happening at a biochemical level. And we also know that this isn't just a psychological phenomenon of growth. This is a physical phenomenon of the connectivity inside our bodies, right? The entire environment of the hormones, of the neurotransmitters, are actually changing. And it's taking us in a direction where the epigenetics, the way that we are creating changes on top of our genome that ultimately affect, like, our— the rate of aging, and they affect, you know, disease, etc., are changing. So at a cellular level, we know that there are 9 hallmarks of aging, and these are changes that are happening inside our cells that are reflecting the changes we see outside, right? The gray hair, the wrinkles, etc. At a cellular level, what's happening is we're having epigenetic changes. Our telomeres are getting shorter. Our genome is less stable. Our proteins are out of their balance. There are changes in nutrient sensitivity in our pathways. What is amazing about these hormetic good stressors is that they counter the very processes that are a part of these 9 hallmarks of aging. Like, there is this incredibly deep connection between our aging biology and our stress biology, and it speaks volumes to how our body has adapted to needing some level of challenge for us to thrive and survive.

Mm-hmm.

Right?

Yeah. So it makes me think about the phenomenon when some people retire you know, they actually end up slowing down and it's seemingly going downhill. And, you know, I, I always wonder about that. I know, so as an entrepreneur, you know, choosing my own hard work, like I'm choosing my schedule, and, and I know people ask because I've walked the halls of a regular paycheck and stability and all of that, and and did not like the fact that, you know, it was not just the students, but often the professors that couldn't wait till spring break. And I thought, do I really want to spend my next 40 years here in this environment wishing I was done and it was over? So when people ask, well, when are you going to retire or will you be able to retire? It's like, I'm not sure I ever completely want to, you know. And, and I think that's in such a good spot. But coming back to your CEO study, I mean, is that— I'm interpreting this in a very low level— but do you believe that that's also a part of like feeling a sense of purpose? Like having— like, I get up in the morning and I am excited about— it's a problem, but I get to solve it, kind of?

100%. Yeah, you know, And this retirement question is really— it comes down to, well, do you enjoy what you are doing, right? If you are in a situation where you are working financially, you have to later in life, but you work under conditions you don't enjoy, you work with people you don't want to be working with, you are work— putting your effort and energy into something that you don't even believe in, Well, that is going to lead to this depleted burnout state. But if you are in your later years and you are doing what you were meant to be doing, right, you are doing what you're on this planet for, and that type of energizing stress— I mean, why, why would you ever— like, what does retirement even mean if you're trying to get rid of that, right? Like, that's our highest calling. We are serving in the highest way, and we are reaching our highest potential for health as well as what we're capable of doing for the people we're doing it for.

So very interesting. If there was a question as we wrap up, I think, you know, there's so many places we could go here, but if there was a question, knowing we're talking to primarily women 45 to 70. There's some outliers— we're not ignoring you, by the way, if you're listening and you're outside of that— but who really care. And we operate by the premise there's no more powerful health influencer in the world than a midlife woman. 3 generations staring at her, looking at her decisions, her choices, and asking for advice. What question should I have asked you? That I haven't?

Um, you know, I, I think again back to this whole idea that we can take ownership, that we have agency. I think it's so important because so much of health information is centered around what we should not be doing, right? Like, do not eat ultra-processed food, do not stay sedentary, and do not go through chronic stress. This is all about what you you should be doing, right? It is a different mindset that creates abundance instead of restriction, and it takes you to really the same endpoint, which is trying to get healthier, right? You can either remove things that are harmful or you can add things that are beneficial. So I want people to play the health game more on the offensive than the defensive.

So powerful, so powerful. Okay, the book is called The Stress Paradox. Where can people find that, and where can they find and follow you?

So, um, you can find the book and me on my website, drsharonburquist.com. The book is coming out with HarperCollins. Um, March 25th is the date it is available in all bookstores. And you can also find me on Instagram at The Good Stress Doctor and LinkedIn as Dr. Karen Hares Burke List.

Oh, that's an easy one to remember. The Good Stress Doctor.

What a great title.

I, I would own that loud and proud. Congratulations on the book. Um, so having finished and birthed this first book baby, will there be a second?

You know, I, I think that there's a high likelihood there will be a second. Um, I think that once you get a book out into the world and you see how the message affects people's lives, it's really hard to not want to continue to do that work.

As a last question, a little bit more on the personal side. So as a working mom, 3 kids, and I— we haven't asked, you know, how old they are, but how have you juggled it all? And how do you see stress landing in young adult kids?

Yeah, huge question, you know. So the first part, you know, landing it all— it's all about small stress, right? So ordinary everyday stress. Hormesis is not, you know, people say, oh, well, it doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. That's what hormesis is. And that is a real misunderstanding. It shouldn't kill you. It's mild to moderate everyday ordinary stress. So for me, it is running up a flight of stairs to get some vigorous intensity exercise. It could be lifting weights while I'm waiting for the coffee machine. It could be adding plant food, you know, to my meals, to my smoothies. I look for these small opportunities every part of the day. Like, even before we hopped on, I was doing squats, you know, like, it's like, hey, I've been sitting. So for me, it's not discounting what a difference that these small stressors can make. And I think we can all do that no matter how busy we are. And our role being where we are in life and how we influence, I think this is really critical. So as a parent, how I apply to my children, I think of this concept of stress inoculation, which is actually very well studied, and it's how you can use stress, like, you know, stress with a small s. We're not talking adversity with a capital S, but helping kids deal with small stress so that they can gain immunity. Immunity to stress when they're older, right? So stress inoculation is like a vaccine. They're building their immunity, and their little brains in the first kind of 16 to 20 years of life are at their peak of how they can build neural pathways to learn to handle stress. So I fight my maternal instinct to jump in there and make it easy for them. I let them sweat, figure things out. I don't jump in when they have deadlines the next day. Because if they can learn to handle this, I am doing them a service. When they are older, they become more creative, more resilient. And, and they've been a lot of studies, you know, mostly animal studies, because this is unethical to do in humans, but of how even baby squirrel monkeys, like, separated from their moms early on, grow up to be more creative. They explore more with toys. The parts of their brain that help with decision-making and kind of their amygdala, which creates their stress response or is responsible for how they respond, those pathways actually become more resilient when they're older and it carries over later in life. So I, again, I'm, I'm not advocating in any way for children to go through a hardship. You know, we all know that childhood adversity can leave long-lasting imprints later in life, but we're talking about everyday stressors. And this is the type of stress that our ancestors, again, for 2 million years had as part of their day, whether they were children or later in life. And our lifestyle has changed so radically that we have removed these good stressors with the advent of ease and comfort into our lives. And it is taking away from our health. Part of the widespread disease is we are becoming more vulnerable to mental and physical illness because we aren't needing to challenge ourselves in a way that our human history has required us to until very recently.

Wow, what a note to end on. Thank you so much for wrapping up so Powerfully. And thank you so much for being here. Congratulations on the book.

Well, thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure, and, and thanks for allowing me to share this information.

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