One of the best types of exercise for increasing resilience is high-intensity interval training (HIIT). This has a very strong hormetic effect on your mitochondria, increasing your energy production and slowing aging at a cellular level. Truly, almost any type of movement will do you good. Walking after meals to get fresh air and help balance your blood glucose is also recommended.

Unlike our ancestors, we can pretty much eat whatever and whenever we like. However, from an evolutionary perspective, our ancestors faced starvation fairly frequently. In these situations, our body must run at peak efficiency so many beneficial systems, such as autophagy, ramp up.

This gave our ancestors a much greater chance of finding or catching something to eat. For us, fasting will help you live longer, makes your cells more resilient, protect your brain, improve cognitive function, and burn fat, to name just a few benefits. In our health system Momentum, we practice intermittent fasting, which balances the benefits of autophagy without the downsides. It also avoids pain and mental distraction.

Hot and cold exposure stimulate a whole cascade of positive changes in the body. Wim Hof managed to climb Everest in just shorts after tapping into this power!

The real secret to this is in heat and cold shock proteins. The body produces these in response to sudden changes in temperature to mitigate any damage. But they also protect your cells and kick-start your body’s repair process. For example, taking a cold shower will boost your body’s antioxidant production, and protect your body from inflammation and increase immunity. At the other extreme, heat exposure will strengthen cellular proteins and slow down aging.

When you temporarily reduce oxygen to the brain, it responds by creating brand-new mitochondria. This increases your brain power, resulting in faster thinking. You don’t need high altitude training to achieve this result. In the Momentum Program, we use special breathing techniques to get the same effects and stimulate even more benefits.

Too much direct sunlight is obviously bad for us and carries skin cancer risks. But none at all is also bad for us. An appropriate dose of UV rays from sunlight (or a UVB light) will make your cells stronger and protect you from disease. It also creates vitamin D in your body, which affects over 1,000 reactions across your entire system. These include testosterone production, antioxidant production, and many more.

Not having the ability to run away from predators, plants have different mechanisms to avoid being eaten, including the ability to create substances that are poisonous to insects and animals. Most of these substances should be avoided, but some are found in common foods at a very low dose, having a negligible effect on humans.

One of these substances is called sulforaphane, which is contained in cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli (and it’s even more potent in broccoli sprout juice, which you can get here). Eating this causes a mild hormetic effect on the body, in turn, creating a chain reaction of positive benefits in the body. Sulforaphane activates a special protein inside the cells (known as an NRF-2 pathway) that switches on the body’s production of antioxidants. This floods our system with a miracle molecule called glutathione (along with other antioxidants) and regulates and coordinates a host of protective responses in the cells.