Harnessing Hormesis To Heal And Thrive

In today's episode we kick off the new year by reframing your 2026 health goals around using hormesis to build resilience and explain how controlled, short stressors can strengthen immunity, mood, cellular repair, & more! We share practical ways to use cold, heat, fasting, and exercise to build a body and mind that bend without breaking.

• defining resilience as stable function under stress
• links between stress resilience, cancer risk, and longevity
• overview of hormesis and adaptive benefits
• list of benefits including immune, mood, sleep, inflammation
• cold exposure methods and safety basics
• heat exposure, sauna timing, and repair pathways
• fasting windows, autophagy, and seasonal fasts
• exercise choices that drive adaptation
• practical micro-challenges to push comfort zones

Join us inside The Healing Accelerator to build your resilience in 2026 with coaching, seasonal fasts, and structured protocols. Schedule a FREE strategy session to learn more!

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Transcript

New Year, New Focus On Resilience

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome back to the Ground and Root Podcast, where we are exploring the world of holistic and functional strategies to enhance healing and help you stay cancer free. I am your host and holistic cancer dietitian Dion DeTraz. First off, welcome to a brand new year. I hope you had a lovely holiday and were able to bring in the new year with friends and family. This is our first show of 2026, and we are kicking off the month with a theme around building resilience. So in our last episode, I shared some strategies for setting new year intentions a bit differently this year. Specifically, I encourage you to put you and your self-care first to set aside time to dream up what you are actually calling into your life, what matters most to you this year. We often need to then remove items from our to-do list so that you have more time for the things you really want to be doing. So rather than jumping out of the gate, adding more things to your plate, let's release things from the to-do list that don't need to be there. And then ultimately, if we can at all possible make joy be the primary goal. Now, as you continue to think on this and refine and clarify your intentions for this next year, I want you to consider your goals and intentions around your health or your healing from a slightly different lens. Rather than simply, you know, creating a goal around eating healthier or maybe losing weight or exercising more. Consider making resilience the goal. And we're going to spend the whole month talking more about why this could be such an important shift in your health goals this year. But let me explain why resilience, in case this is a brand new concept to you and you haven't even heard that term before. So resilience is really defined as our ability to maintain or restore a relatively stable cycle, both psychological and physical functioning, even when we're confronted with stressful life events. So the more resilient we are, the less of a negative impact stress has on our body. Even though we may be trying to remove stressors and manage our stress better and live a more calm and peaceful life, there are still going to be stressful events that happen, whether that's in our own personal lives, whether it's facing a cancer journey or dealing with someone you love moving through a cancer journey, global affairs, et cetera. We cannot completely avoid stress. So when we have more resilience, the stress is not going to impact us as deeply. And when it comes to cancer, we've actually seen research to show that someone with a lower stress resilience has an increased risk for cancer. So we know there's a connection with just overall health and vitality and how resilient and strong you are. Now, in the world of longevity and anti-aging, many experts also agree that the more we are willing to be in discomfort, the more resilient we become. So the more we push ourselves to move through something, the stronger and more resilient we become. This helps us feel more alive, just in general, but it also brings us more connection to ourselves, to each other, to the planet. It impacts us in many different ways. When it comes to our physical performance, though, it actually helps program healthier genes, healthier cells, and ultimately healthier bodies. This is why I believe it's such an important piece to the healing and health puzzle. When you move through discomfort too, your brain gets rewired. So it's not just what's happening on a physical level, but it's also what's happening psychologically, mentally, emotionally for you as well. Your dopamine or feel-good hormone increases. You feel more empowered, you feel more capable. This is really why scientists have been looking at how discomfort can improve both our physical and our mental health. So I'm gonna invite you to consider building resilience as one of your primary goals for this next year. And in this episode, I'm gonna tell you how to do that. Inside of our coaching program, this is one of the pillars that we help our clients create is building stronger, more resilient body, mind, and spirit. So, first let me explain the process, the physiological process of this, and then I'm gonna teach you how you can do this if you're not already. So there are physiological systems in our body that have evolved over time as we've been exposed to difficult, challenging environments to keep us healthy, to keep us strong, to keep us free of disease. This process is known as hormesis. And it refers to the adaptive response that our body makes when we're presented with a challenge. Hormesis can improve the functionality and the tolerance that we have to more intense challenges. In other words, truly the quote, like what doesn't kill you, does indeed make you stronger and build resilience. So let me first just give you a sampling of some of the ways hormetic stress can benefit us. Because I think once you really integrate all these possible benefits, you're gonna be a believer and you're gonna be like, sign me up. How do I start building more resilience in our bodies? So, first and foremost, we get better immune activity. And when we think about the number one goal in cancer protection and prevention is a solid immune response, right? That is our primary defense against cancer, as well as many other diseases as well. So, hormesis, hormetic stress brings us better immune activity. It also helps to lower blood pressure. We get less colds, less upper respiratory infections, quicker recovery from illness or from injury or from surgery, lower inflammation, higher antioxidant levels, less anxiety, less depression, less stress, better mood, better sleep. I mean, who doesn't want all those things? And many of those pieces are very important when it comes to both cancer recovery or cancer prevention. So, how do we do this? Right. I'm sure you're believing you're a believer now. You're like, okay, I want to build resilience in my body, mind, and spirit this year. How do I do it? Well, in a nutshell, really, it's just about moving through something difficult, pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone and experiencing hard things, right? And discomfort or challenge can be experienced as a physical experience, but it can also be an emotional, mental, or spiritual challenge. So anything that's just pushing you outside of comfort. I mean, that could be, you know, there's the scale is huge here. It could be a physical challenge, maybe in the gym that you're pushing yourself, right? To go farther, longer, stronger than you did the day before. It could also be just an experiential challenge of maybe you're gonna learn a new language, or maybe you're gonna travel to a new country where you don't know the language, right? I mean, it could be any experience that puts you outside of your comfort zone. There are four ways, though, that I want to share with you today that we also encourage our clients inside of our coaching program to do and we coach them through it. So, four different ways that you can start to bring hormesis into your day-to-day life. The first is actually the first two have to do with temperature and our exposure to temperatures. So, first cold exposure and then heat exposure. They both have similar benefits in the body. So cold expense, cold exposure. Cold temperatures trigger a fight or flight response. That's a stress response that initially releases stress hormones, but that is quickly followed by endorphins and oxytocin and some of these other hormetic physiological changes that I mentioned before. This provides a boost in both your mood and your energy, as well as feelings of relaxation. Cold temperatures have been shown to activate the immune system, to decrease pain, to increase antioxidants and protect the body from inflammation, right? So, again, all those like little hormetic benefits that we're aiming for can be garnered through cold exposure. How do we do that? It could be as basic as just like going outside when it's cold, taking a walk, or, you know, being in the weather, being in the elements. It could also be taking a cold shower or getting into an ice bath, right? It could be swimming in cold water. We have a very exciting guest coming with us at the end of the month who's gonna share his personal cancer healing journey using cold water exposure. So you'll learn a lot more about that particular hormetic activation when we speak with him later. Now, heat can also provide a similar benefit. So much like cold exposure, heat exposure can also trigger a hormetic response. Heat exposure triggers shock proteins that, even though they initially create a stress response, the end benefit of that is actually reversing damage in our body, it can help protect our cells, can even trigger full body repair mechanisms. It ultimately makes the proteins in your cells more resilient to stress, which can slow down cellular aging. Now, being exposed to heat can also provide other benefits, especially around detoxification. We will cover that more in a future episode. For now, it's really about triggering that hormetic response and heat can do that. So, much like cold, it could be just getting outside when it's hot, right? Exercising in the heat, not shying away from hot temperatures, letting our bodies adjust to both hot and cold, as opposed to always having like a perfect climate inside of our homes or our cars or our offices. It's okay to let our bodies adapt to varying temperature extremes. We can also do more intentional heat exposure with sauna. Using sauna for at least 20 minutes will trigger this heat response, this hormetic response. And an added benefit with this is that cancer cells typically can't survive in temperatures above 40 degrees centigrade. So, again, adding some additional benefit to using sauna, I think we'll keep sauna for a future episode as well, because there's a whole lot more we could talk about with that. But this is also one of the ways we can activate a hormetic response. Two more ways I want to share with you today. The next is fasting. And there is a very good reason why fasting is literally one of my favorite strategies. We're gonna do a whole separate solo episode on fasting in a couple of weeks. So you're gonna learn a lot more about it then. But for now, just know that reducing the amount or the frequency of your meals can also trigger hormetic stress. And this can be accomplished with a variety of different ways of fasting, with intermittent or extended. I'm gonna share more about what all those mean in the upcoming episode, but typically gets triggered at lengths of 16 hours or more. So once you like cross over that 16-hour mark, you're definitely activating the hormetic response. And the thing is, we have evolved surviving periods of famine, right? There were many years in our evolution where we food was not plant readily available, also where we were exposed to the elements, right? Our shelters were not as tight as they are now. So it helps you understand how our bodies have actually evolved to be in these types of environment and arguably function better when we allow some of these discomforts back into our life. When we fast, we make ourselves more resilient to oxidative damage, we lower inflammation, we boost the immune system, and so much more. Okay, we're gonna cover that more in an upcoming episode. We also fast inside of our group coaching program as a group four times a year. Basically, once a season, we move through an extended fast together so we can take advantage of all of these cancer protection benefits. So, more to come on that. The last way that I'm sharing today to activate hormetic response is with exercise. When you exercise, you push your body beyond its comfort zone, beyond what's easy, what's comfortable for you, muscle fibers get torn, they get inflamed, but then they build back thicker, denser, stronger, preventing future damage, right? We also release lots of anti-inflammatory compounds when we're exercising. And although any type of exercise technically will offer some of this benefit, there are certain forms of exercise that are going to accomplish this quicker. Specifically strength training, high-intensity interval training, rocking, hiking or jogging, especially on uneven terrain, you know, training for more difficult things like a 5K or a half marathon. I mean, technically any workout that is challenging you, that is pushing you, you know, even just doing a few reps more than when you want to stop, that is triggering that hormetic stress response. Next week, I have a very special guest coming where we're gonna dive much deeper into this topic. We're gonna talk a lot more about exercise and specifically strength training and high intensity interval training and how this builds resilience in the body. So stay tuned for that. So, in a nutshell, every time you endure discomfort, challenge, adversity, you build resilience to future discomfort, challenge, adversity, right? And you prove to yourself that you can do it, you can get through it. We can do hard things. And again, I think our modern day lives have conditioned us to be comfortable. Things are much easier than they have been historically for humans. And I unfortunately believe this could be one of the reasons why we are more prone to certain illnesses or diseases than we were previously. Like we don't have this built-in strength and resilience like we used to. The science is there, okay? Hormesis is a very impactful tool that we can use to ultimately optimize our health, our longevity, our cancer prevention. And when you're trying to do everything you can to heal or prevent cancer, which presumably, if you're listening to this podcast, this is one of your goals, one of the things you're working on, then activating this stress response should definitely be part of your plan. So, my question to you today, what I'm gonna leave you with, is how you can add a bit of discomfort into your life. What would that look like for you? And remember, this is like a controlled stress, a controlled moderate stress, right? Because obviously high chronic stress is depleting on our body, is depleting our immune system, creating inflammation, creating problems. So it is a very intentional form of stress with intentional amount of intensity and duration, so that we're building strength, right? That is different than chronic, unrelenting emotional stress. I hope that makes sense to you, right? This is a different type. This is a good controlled type of stress that is gonna make us stronger. So, how can you add a bit more of this type of discomfort into your life? And I mean, just a few examples again. Maybe you can persist a few minutes longer when you want to stop something, you know, particularly when it comes to exercise or strength training. Maybe you're doing a few more reps or you're going a little bit stronger, like you're continually pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone. Maybe you're gonna try ending your normal shower with a burst of cold and then gradually make the cold exposure longer, right? Maybe you're gonna get outside and take a walk no matter the weather, no matter that it's like minus 10 degrees centigrade, like it was for me this morning. I bundled up and went outside to take the dogs for a walk. So, regardless of what the weather is, you're gonna push yourself to go outside and take a walk or a jog or a bike ride or whatever it is, right? Or maybe it's just saying yes to something new, something different, something challenging, something that feels a little bit scary that's pushing you outside of your comfort zone. Don't shy away from that adventure, okay? Whether it's a physical challenge or a mental, emotional, or even spiritual challenge. And if you want more support around helping you build your resilience with coaching, like in a more personalized, controlled way, then join us inside the Healing Accelerator. That is our coaching program. And this is one of the pillars that we are helping all of our clients do. Just like I mentioned with our seasonal group fasts, we have programs in place to help you learn to create, you know, a daily rhythm around hormesis and helping you build more resilience. I hope that was helpful for you. I hope you feel inspired to push yourself a little bit more. I would love to know. Please feel free to reach out and tell me how you're going to build more resilience in your body this year. I'd love to witness that for you. And just remember, if you enjoy the content we're covering here at the Ground and Root Podcast, please help us spread the word by sharing, subscribing, leaving a review. We really appreciate your support and helping this information get into the ears of as many people as possible. I wish you a beautiful day and truly a very happy and healthy 2026. I look forward to connecting with you again on next week's episode. Bye for now.