The Art of the Middle Ground
Balance is hard. When you swing the pendulum either way – avoiding anything remotely “bad” (see: healthism), or avoiding anything remotely good (see: gluttony) – life’s capacity shrinks.
Joyless devotion to the treadmill doesn’t make for a good hang. A bottle of wine every weeknight doesn’t make for a long life.
The extremes feel easier to navigate but, perhaps surprisingly, both end up draining your lifeforce in different ways. Finding the middle ground between hedonism and healthism is the real art of life.
The Problem with Extremes
We often assume that if a little is good, a lot must be marvellous. However, the biological reality is closer to the concept of hormesis. This is the biological phenomenon where a low dose of a stressor (like exercise or cold) triggers a beneficial adaptation, while a high dose becomes toxic.
Consider the heart. A study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology tracked 55,000 adults over 15 years. The findings were startling: those who ran modest amounts, less than 32 kilometres a week at a gentle pace, saw a 19% reduction in all-cause mortality.
Yet, those who pushed beyond this with higher mileage, faster pace and more frequent runs had diminishing returns, with extremes increasing the risk of dying from cardiovascular issues.
Whether you are over-exercising or over-indulging, you are placing a heavy load on your system. Both states require the body to divert massive amounts of resources away from its baseline.
The Great Energy Gobble
Stress is a greedy guts. Mounting a stress response requires a staggering investment of the body’s internal resources. Research indicates that a short bout of psychological stress can temporarily increase energy expenditure by up to 67% above the resting metabolic rate.
About a third of this energy fuels the racing heart. The rest is consumed by the production of stress hormones and the subsequent inflammatory response. When cells are chronically bathed in these hormones, they burn through energy 60% faster. They age quickly and expire early.
While the stress response is active, the body doesn’t focus on digestion, hormonal reproduction or repair.
Prediction Through Allostasis
It’s been a minute since we spoke about allostasis, the idea of stability through change. That’s how our nervous system forecasts what we need to get through the day.
As neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett explains, your brain reacts and predicts, regulating your body and sending back sensory signals about the consequences of that regulation.
When the demand is constant, whether that’s incessant training or relentless work, the nervous system loses its ability to return to baseline. The body’s burning through far more energy than it needs to, and the gap between your capacity and the demand in front of you closes.
Supporting the System
We can’t avoid stress (it’s not all bad, see: eustress) and, quite frankly, we wouldn’t want to. That’d make for a very dull life. The goal, then, is to support the nervous system to manage what you throw at it.
ZAAG is designed exactly for this. Our daily shots support nervous system regulation, ensuring your internals can handle the heft of life without burning out.
By prioritising the system underneath everything, we can move away from chasing temporary states towards building a body that can handle the glorious, unpredictable variety of life.
Start your two-week starter pack today.
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