When the Healthy Things Aren’t Healthy Right Now

I recently had a conversation with a woman who wanted help to lower her cortisol. She’d been dealing with some anxiety and a dysregulated nervous system for a while and was hoping for some ideas of what else she could do to support her body.

She ran through the things she was already doing for her health, and on paper they were all things most people would agree are very healthy. She was exercising 4-5 days a week, 3 of those days were HIIT exercises and then 1-2 of strength training. She was intermittent fasting most days, eating within an 8 hour window to allow time for her body to reach autophagy -— which is when your body starts focusing on cellular repair. She was doing breathing exercises when she woke up and before bed, and calming exercises whenever she felt like she needed it. But she still just felt on edge all the time and didn’t quite understand why. 

Looking at that list, I could give you dozens of peer reviewed studies for each of those activities showing just how beneficial all of them are. 

But when she told me what she was doing, a bunch of red flags went up in my mind. Not because those things aren’t actually healthy, but because some of them might not be healthy for her, right now. 

This is not another “be scared of this” article

I’m sure you’re as tired as I am of hearing there’s one more thing that’s secretly killing us. That’s not at all what this is. I’m not about to give you a list of things you enjoy that you can never do again, and I’m not going to try to convince you that all the studies on these healthy things are actually wrong. 

What I do want to talk about though is the importance of understanding that not every healthy thing is ideal for every person in every season or state. And this is especially important to understand if you have a nervous system that is still learning how to feel safe. 

Let me give you an example. About 10 years ago we went to a Russian spa where you did a rotation of the hot tub, steam room, hot sauna, cold plunge, and salt water pool. And it was amazing, one of the most relaxing experiences I’ve ever had... at least, it was until I attempted the cold plunge. 

I had never tried a cold plunge before but I knew of all the benefits. I didn’t like cold water, but I figured I could jump right into the hot water afterward and warm back up. So I finally found the courage to do it. I jumped in, lasted about 2 seconds, and immediately got back out.

And then things started going south. I immediately felt really dizzy and lightheaded. I felt like I was going to pass out and had to lie down on the tile. My anxiety went through the roof and I started having one of the worst panic attacks that I’d ever had before. I was on the verge of having them call 911 because I felt like I was dying. Eventually everything subsided and I was able to sit in the lukewarm water and let my body come back to calm. But it was one of the worst experiences I’d ever had.

What I didn’t know at the time was that my nervous system was in a dysregulated state. The healthy stress that a cold plunge creates was way too much for my system, and so it reacted as if it was a serious, life-threatening threat. 

That doesn’t mean that cold plunges are actually bad and you should never do them. After understanding why that happened and learning to regulate my system, I’ve since done cold plunges and found incredible benefits. I no longer have anxiety or panic attacks from them. 

But before I had done that work, it was not something my body could handle. 

So while I don’t want you to think I’m saying these are all things to avoid forever, what I do want to talk about is the relationship between a healthy habit and the system receiving it. 

I see a lot of people doing their best to do all the healthy things, but not realizing that some of those things are creating even more burden for their system to carry. Not because the thing itself is bad, but because right now, their system is already carrying too much. 

Understanding this helps you to navigate everything else in your life, and it will hopefully change what you expect from yourself, no matter what season you’re in. 

So let’s dig in. 

Hormetic Stressors — The healthy kind of hard

We hear the word stress and we immediately think “bad”. But we actually need stress in order to survive. If you think about it, our bones get stronger because of the stress that’s put on them. Our muscles get stronger when we exercise them, which is putting them under stress. So while not all stress is bad, it is about giving your body the right dose while in the right state. 

There’s a term for this in physiology: hormesis. A hormetic stressor is a stressor that makes your system stronger, when applied in the right dose. This is how the body builds resilience and grows capacity. 

If we never put any stress on our body, we never learn how to adapt. So much of the way our body is built has to do with the healthy stress we put it under. 

But here’s the most important part: your body doesn’t sort stressors into a “good” pile and a “bad” pile. It doesn’t know that a cold plunge is a good stressor and a fight with your spouse is a bad stressor. It just totals up the load, all of it together, and asks: Is there enough left in reserve to recover from this?

So it’s not really about the stressor, it’s about whether or not we’re in a state that can benefit from it. 

Let’s dig into some examples of healthy stressors that we want to be aware of, so that we can decide whether right now is the best time for it or not. 

Common Hormetic Stressors

Cold Water Therapy

As you learned with my story, cold water exposure is not always ideal for a system that is unprepared for it. Cold plunges are so amazingly beneficial for so many things (inflammation, immune health, cardiovascular health, brain health, building capacity), but all of those benefits go away if all it does is send you straight into an activated or shut down state. 

One of the tools I’ve been using for a long time to help to retrain the nervous system is cold showers. But the reason it works is because you’re not jumping into ice cold water. You titrate slowly over time, even starting with only slightly lukewarm water, and only staying in it for as long as you can stay calm, even if that’s 2 seconds. You can learn more about how to use this as a tool HERE.

Fasting

Humans have been fasting for millennia, and it’s another tool that is so incredibly beneficial for the body. But it is a stressor. And especially if you have a body that is waiting for the next emergency to happen, the body becomes especially aware of your blood glucose levels. When your blood sugar drops, your nervous system will trigger a dump of stress hormones like cortisol, so that your liver and other organs will release glycogen to bring your blood sugar back up. 

When we are in a chronically activated state, our body wants to run on glucose because it’s an easy energy source. So if you’re fasting in this state, you only end up lowering your glucose levels and the body will react with even more stress. 

HIIT Training

High intensity interval training is another example of something that has a lot of amazing benefits, but can be too much of a stressor when you’re already chronically stressed. Exercise is a stressor on the body, and while some stress is necessary and incredibly beneficial, when you’re already at your max, really intense exercise can push you over the edge of your current capacity. 

This is one of those things that a lot of people have a hard time letting go of. They fear they’ll lose all their progress if they don’t continue to push their body hard. But an important reminder: as long as your body is in a chronically activated state, you will not focus on repair, which means you won’t be making the gains you want. You only get closer and closer to burnout. 

You don’t need to stop exercising altogether. Exercise is a wonderful tool to help regulate the nervous system. But maybe dial it back a bit. Pilates, low impact strength training, walking… there are so many options that end up being more rejuvenating for the body instead of only increasing your stress. 

A good rule of thumb: if you’re exhausted and feel like you need a nap after a workout, then it was likely too much. Exercise should rejuvenate us, so look for those activities. 

Sauna + Heat Exposure

This follows the same logic as with cold exposure. Anything that puts your body under more extreme stress may be too much. And here’s where individuality comes in. I spent that day in the spa going in and out of the sauna and felt fine, I felt great in fact. But I had been using a sauna regularly for years. My body was adapted to it. Whereas I wasn’t adapted to the cold. This is where there’s nuance and why we can’t paint things as good or bad. 

This is not a list of things to avoid, but rather a list of things to be aware of. Some of these things your nervous system may not view as a threat at all, whereas others are just too much for your system at this point in time. 

Other Healthy Stressors

There’s a second category worth looking at too, they’re not quite hormetic stressors but they are often marketed as “good for you” options, but are also things that can drain an already maxed out system. 

Restrictive dieting: Elimination diets, detox protocols, or diets that remove major food groups or macros can be difficult on the body, especially done without any support. These are all things that I use with my clients, but caution is important. Always ask, “Is this something my body can handle right now?”

Meditation/stillness practices: This one surprises a lot of people, but when your body does not feel like a safe place to be, doing an exercise or practice that forces you into your body can trigger that internal alarm. It feels threatening even though it’s meant to be calming. It’s often necessary to first work on learning to feel safe in your body in a slow and gentle way before doing these kinds of exercises. 

Strict routines/schedules: When we create ambitious morning routines or fill our schedules so that every minute is maxed out.. Even if we’ve pencilled in moments of breathing .. that pace can just keep us in that “I have to keep running from the danger” mindset without realizing it. I’m a schedules person so this is something I know very well. And it’s tough because it often feels so productive and healthy, but it can also be a big contributor to why your system feels so activated all the time. 

Constant health monitoring: There are so many wearable tools now that tell you exactly how you slept, what your HRV is, how much you’re moving, and so many other metrics to monitor your health. I personally use one and I think they can be so incredibly valuable. But if we’re using them to obsess over our current state, it can easily be one more thing adding stress into our life. Wanting to always monitor often comes along with chronically stressed and chronically ill individuals because you often feel so out of control with your symptoms. Monitoring feels like a way to gain back some of your agency to ensure a better day. But it too easily creates a state where every bad metric spikes your cortisol because of what it might mean, keeping you in that heightened activated state longer. 

Both things can be true

Again, this is not a list of things to avoid. And it’s definitely not a list of things that are secretly hurting you. There may be things on this list that you do regularly and you’re only enjoying the positive benefits from. 

That being said, this is a list of things that might not be helpful for your system in the state it’s currently in. That doesn’t mean these are things you should eliminate forever, but maybe for right now. 

There also may be things on this list that have been beneficial for your body for years, but then something changed. Maybe you started a really stressful season. Maybe your life circumstances changed. If that’s the case, trying to maintain what you did before could be contributing to your overall load. That’s when a good stress can turn into one that’s only depleting you. 

Learn what you need right now

The woman I mentioned at the outset was doing all the “right” things. She specifically chose these healthy activities to help her body. But because she was in a state where she needed more nourishment, some of those things were only adding to the load she’s currently carrying. 

My recommendation to her was not to skip exercise, but to adjust it. Avoid the high intensity workouts for a couple weeks and do things that have lower impact. Still make healthy food choices, but instead of fasting, focus on keeping blood sugar balanced throughout the day. 

And these weren’t recommendations for her to follow forever. Just for this season until she could get her system into a more regulated state. In order for her cortisol levels to go down, she needed to focus on supporting her system more than stressing it. 

And that part is key. You don’t want to just cut out all the stressors and stop there. As I mentioned at the outset, stress is necessary for a healthy body and mind. But it’s all about the dose. 

Find your Window of Tolerance

There’s a concept often referred to in the realm of trauma therapy called your window of tolerance. The idea is that each person has a range of activation or stress that we can experience without having any negative effects. In this window we can experience stress, but we’re able to remain functional and we’re able to effectively recover. 

Even though this concept is traditionally applied to emotional regulation and trauma, I think it gives us a helpful way to think about physical stressors too. We all have a certain amount of challenge we can adapt to at any given time—and that amount changes depending on what else our system is carrying.

Hormetic stressors work exactly the way they’re meant to when they’re applied inside that window. It’s enough to be a stimulus and even a positive stress, but not so much that you blow past what you can actually recover from. When we’re outside that window, the exact same stressor doesn’t have any benefit, it only adds to what’s already too much. 

But here’s an important key: you cannot widen the window from outside it. You can’t force your way into a bigger capacity by pushing harder when you’re already dysregulated. In fact, trying to do that usually only confirms to your system that it was right to be on guard in the first place. Widening the window happens after your system has had enough repeated experiences of safety while inside the window you currently have. 

Small, survivable, safe… over and over until your body starts to trust that safety. It’s only from there that the window is able to expand. 

Questions to ask

Now that you understand this concept, here are some questions to ask yourself when you’re about to choose something that pushes your system a bit:

• Is this input helping me build resilience, or am I already too depleted to actually benefit from it?

• If it’s too much, could I strip this down to a smaller dose instead of eliminating it entirely?

• Am I trying to force capacity that I don’t currently have? Or am I building from a place of safety?

• What would “enough for right now” actually look like?

When we acknowledge where we are right now, we create so much self-trust. And it’s from that place of self-trust that the body is finally able to learn that it is safe, and that is what allows us to grow.