Commusings: Good Stress by Jeff Krasno

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Dear Commune Community,

Four years ago, I had brain fog and chronic fatigue, insomnia, and a jelly belly. Brown skin tags were budding in my armpits and, as an even greater insult to my vanity, I developed ghastly fleshy protuberances on my chest. And not just A-cups! Clinically this condition is known as gynecomastia. I know it as the ‘boobs of man.’

It wasn’t until I slapped a continuous glucose monitor on my triceps that I got a bucket of cold water over my head – which, at that juncture, was not a deliberate practice of mine. I stared into the app that displayed my blood sugar with disbelief. I had diabetic glucose levels.

The symptoms I mentioned above are so common in modern life that we’ve accepted them as normal. What people don’t know is that, in the long history of humanity, metabolic dysfunction was as atypical as Stoneman Syndrome, the world’s rarest disease. But, now, 88% of Americans have metabolic syndrome, a cluster of conditions that includes high blood pressure, high serum glucose, excess body fat around the middle, and abnormal cholesterol levels. This syndrome is just upstream from modernity’s Four Ubiquitous Contemporary Killers (yes, the FUCKs): heart disease, cancer, dementia, and diabetes.

As I peered despairingly into the mirror, futilely sucking in my substantial gut and flexing my non-extant pectorals, I asked myself: What is the provenance of all this disease? And how do we solve them?

My podcast research and conversations with the likes of Dr. Mark Hyman, Andrew Huberman, Dr. Gabor Maté, Dr. Zach Bush, and many others covered hundreds of health protocols. In response to this deluge of modalities and mushrooms, pills and praxes, I roused myself from the interview chair and became my own n-of-1 experiment. My mind and body and, dare I say, spirit became a laboratory for both the conventional and esoteric protocols of my interviewees.

Could I engage in holotropic breathwork as I froze in a 40-degree ice bath while on a 24-hour pomegranate fast as I gazed at a drishti? Could I do 50 air squats while pouring sweat in a sauna as I chanted Buddhist mantras?

I tried it all.

Sifting through the grifting was certainly part of the process. But, over the course of four years, I auto-didactically learned twice what I did in college. I was also able to reverse my diabetes and insulin resistance while losing 50 pounds. As a chubby kid, I couldn’t do one pull-up. Today, I do twenty at a time.

Not long ago, the notion of reading an entire book, let alone writing one, was inconceivable. But I have reclaimed my capacity to concentrate among the pings and dings of modernity. Once prone to mentally drifting away from a conversation, I now gift people the present of presence. I can already pre-sage the eye-rolls of my daughters as they read this paragraph, and I surely remain a world apart from my best self, but I am healing — moving toward wholeness. And you can, too.

The final result of this inquiry into what begets real well-being: 10 clear, actionable protocols I teach in my new Commune course, Good Stress.

These are available to anybody who wants to recapture agency over their healthspan and live a long and vital life. Not only did they help me reclaim my own health, but I have witnessed their efficacy on the hundreds of brave souls who have attended our retreats at Commune Topanga.

Why Are We Sick?

The chronic diseases that are plaguing society are not “bugs in the system.” They are the natural and expected by-products of our paleolithic genome trying to cope with our modern lifestyle.

Periods of calorie restriction due to food scarcity, exposure to extreme heat and cold, early morning light therapy, manual labor, connection to nature, face-to-face communication, and living in community were simply part of life for tens of thousands of years.

We evolved in relation to these sometimes harsh environmental conditions. Over the past century, however, culture has evolved primarily for ease and convenience, resulting in an over-abundance of highly processed calories, sedentariness, temperature-neutrality, indoor living, near total reliance on digital devices, increased social isolation, and a perpetual drip of cortisol-dysregulating blue light from our omnipresent screens.

This culture of “chronic ease” leads directly to the current scourge of chronic dis-ease. In short, the way we live creates evolutionary mismatches. Humans evolved to thrive in conditions where discomfort and stressors were the norm. Our modern lifestyle is hijacking our biology and rendering our hard-wrought adaptive mechanisms maladaptive.

Acute short-term stress in the human body activates pathways that promote longevity and resilience. This phenomenon is called hormesis. Now, in an era of uber-convenience, we need to purposefully self-impose these conditions as a means to be well. Adopting the protocols of Good Stress is a way to bring our bodies, which have been ravaged by our reliance on the Big MACs, back into balance.

Good Stress mimics the acute stressors my paleolithic ancestor Ffej Onsark (simply my name spelled backwards) might have encountered in his daily quest for survival. Ffej never developed diabetes or heart disease or dementia. Nor did anyone is his tribe. Yet Ffej and I share virtually the exact same genome. Good Stress helps us live a little more like Ffej. Through the adoption of paleolithic stressors, which I sometimes call the protocols of “in-convenience,” we leverage our inherent engineering. We swim with nature’s current instead of against it.

In Good Stress you’ll learn why each of these protocols work — and how you can do them, too:

• Fasting: A spiritual practice that applies not only to food … but to Instagram, shopping, wine and any unconscious habit.
• Exercise & Resistance Training: How the tearing and rebuilding of muscle fibers can reverse diabetes.
• Light Therapy: Sadly, Larry David is an endocrine disruptor … if you watch him at night.
• Deliberate Cold Therapy: As far as dopamine goes, the wicked cold is better than drugs!
• Deliberate Heat Therapy: Getting uncomfortably hot makes your brain work better.
• Training the Mind & Breath: Cultivating the ability to merge thought and action is the key to happiness.
• Stressful Conversations: How (25) Zoom calls with people that hate me built my psychological immune system and changed my life (and brain).
• Social Fitness: Why we need to exercise our social skills like we do cardio.
• Eating Stressed Plants: How humans benefit from the stress of plants.
• Reconnecting with Nature: Walking barefoot makes you more negative … in a positive way.

I also lay out how, over 4 years, I specifically stacked these protocols in my daily life. The result was nothing short of miraculous. And these same impacts are available for you, too.

You can sign up for the first five episodes for free. If you have questions, drop me a line at [email protected] and you can also join the private Good Stress Facebook group here.