Resiliency Training for Life and Health

colinchamp March 28, 2020 4 Comments

In 1979 the MIT Blackjack Team was started by a group of students that had systematically trained to increase their odds at the blackjack table just enough to turn the odds of winning from the house to their favor. The club met regularly to practice these techniques before setting off to various casinos to cash out. Surviving through the early 2000s, the club at one point was apparently returning gains of 100% to investors.

The key with the MIT Blackjack Team was that, besides the fascinating story that resulted in several books and a terrible movie, the technique required a significant amount of practice and execution, with members spending countless hours engaged in both.

In terms of time and dedication required to turn the odds in their favor, we should not be surprised with the slow and steady investment they made in their pursuit of success. We experience similar demands throughout our life, especially in our adolescence as we train for exams in school, the PreSATs, SATs, SAT IIs, and maybe even AP tests. After high school, if we attend college or graduate school, we can expect an unending series of tests until graduation, and then even more for re-credentialing.

We train for our driver’s license. We train for marathons. We train for the finite games. Yet, somewhere along the line, we stopped training for long-haul, infinite called life. While we would never dare to go into a standardized test unprepared, more and more we seem to be going into life and adulthood with no preparation whatsoever. Financially, this has been shown again and again as a third of the US has no savings whatsoever and an additional third has only a couple hundred dollars stashed away. Sure, these days are financially tough for many, but this lack of savings expands to those who make more than enough to stash some away.

But forget about being financially prepared for retirement, our physical preparation is even worse. Barely over 40% of men aged 18 and above meet CDC physical fitness requirements,¹ and over a third of men aged 20 and above are obese.² (We will focus on men here since it’s easier to pick on my own sex). This is likely not news to many of you, as the decline in our physical health and capabilities is evident throughout society.

Newsflash: if you are 20 years old, obese, and physically incapable of meeting the low bar set by the CDC guidelines, it’s likely going to get worse as you age, if you don’t take drastic measures. You might want to consider some resiliency training.

Resiliency Training:

While many of us have spent considerable time preparing for standardized tests that may do little to prepare us for life, it is time to focus on improving our ability to recover from or adjust easily to adversity or change. In other words, it is time to start resiliency training.

Resiliency is broadly defined as “the capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation caused especially by compressive stress” and “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.”

Roughly speaking, it’s our psychological and emotional ability to deal with distress, annoying people, letdown, and the like. Physically, it is our ability to overcome attack from external (and internal predators) and battle injury and aging.

Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, is credited with the saying “change is the only constant in life.” Indeed, life is a constant barrage of misfortune and change. Resiliency, in other words, is the amount that we have primed our body and minds to combat any harmful misfortune and change. Resiliency is training to live, and now, more than ever, we need to take pause – and more so, action – to consider all aspects of building and strengthening our response to both internal and external factors that test us so we can be better prepared when pushed to our limits. We stress our bones and muscles with heavy weights, they grow back stronger. We stress our metabolism through dietary restriction, it becomes better at adapting when nutrients are low. A topic near and dear to my heart, I have composed several articles related to resiliency and how it impacts our health.

 Old age does not begin until we are 75 according to new reports. If this is true, as a society, we may be in a lot of trouble if people are falling behind in health and physical capability 55 years earlier.

Resiliency, to some degree, is the opposite of convenience (and Conveniencism). Seneca tells us that a gem cannot be polished without friction, and the same goes for us mere mortals. Those inconvenient aspects of our life – those aspects that do not kill us but make us stronger – may be helping us more than we realize, as they train our body and mind to overcome unpleasant physical and mental states, leaving both healthier and more resilient.

Most often the strive for convenience and lack of impulse control play out when it comes to our food and overeating, yet we ignore the fact that this lack of impulse control spills over into many/most of aspects of daily life. Many of us try to combat it via excessive measures, but making poor food choices and then punishing ourselves by attempting severe calorie restriction and wear and tear exercise does not improve our resiliency, but rather harms it. The key is control, and lack of control often comes down to dietary habits. Talking heads will fight about the right diet, but from a resilience point of view, the necessity is a periodic and controlled metabolic stress that elicits a compensatory response. This is resiliency training at its core.

Far too often when we think of resiliency, we automatically think of mental toughness. An internet search for resiliency training brings up an array of courses for managers and business leaders (perhaps giving further insight into our societal views of the importance of corporations in our lives). That is part of the package, but far from the whole equation.

The benefits of eating vegetables is likely from hormetic chemicals – sulfur, for example – that stress our bodies to increase their immune system while upregulating antioxidant defense and detoxification systems, exercise, and specifically, resistance training forces our muscles to grow back larger, stronger, more coordinated, and able to secrete hormones that fight inflammation. Heck, even walking in the forest benefits us from the chemicals secreted by plants in nature that stress our cells leaving them more resilient. Appropriate stress even helps our body to fight cancer.

Resiliency: Training to Be Comfortable with Discomfort

The key with resiliency is that stress on our body is required. In other words, we should get very comfortable with being uncomfortable and it is likely prudent to teach this to our youth. We should promote an Intentional Lifestyle where we think about our actions and purposefully set out to improve our health and resiliency as opposed to reducing it from addiction to convenience and consumption. We should push for increased resiliency that will leave us hungrier for life with more purpose and Ikigai.

The recent outbreak of COVID-19 is revealing the cracks in our physical and mental health foundations, and an entire society that is based on consumerism with little regard for personal health. Regardless of our age, we need resilience training and we need it now. It’s the way to better defend ourselves against the varied hazards we encounter may they be routine or, as is hopefully the case with COVID-19, only once in a lifetime.

The card-counting blackjack group from MIT may have a couple lessons for us. Everything in life is playing odds, and improving our resiliency is an attempt to tip the odds in our favor. We can bet against the house, or we can be the house.

Resiliency References:

1. Early Release of Selected Estimates Based on Data From the 2018 National Health Interview Survey. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhis/releases/released201905.htm#7a. Published 2019. Accessed March 21, 2020.
2. National Center for Health Statistics: FastStats – Mens Health. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/mens-health.htm. Published 2019. Accessed March 21, 2020.
3. Mizushima N, Levine B. Autophagy in mammalian development and differentiation. Nat Cell Biol. 2010;12(9):823-830. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncb0910-823.
4. Mizushima N, Levine B, Cuervo AM, Klionsky DJ. Autophagy fights disease through cellular self-digestion. Nature. 2008;451(7182):1069-1075. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature06639.
5. Hara T, Nakamura K, Matsui M, et al. Suppression of basal autophagy in neural cells causes neurodegenerative disease in mice. Nature. 2006;441(7095):885-889. http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0-33745192802&partnerID=40&md5=854207d4a8ea9d8967d6c028ac36f7b2.
6. Levine B. Cell biology: Autophagy and cancer. Nature. 2007;446(7137):745-747. http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0-34147193472&partnerID=40&md5=71650d43c552aacd55c22ae3c5bd6b16.
7. Chen YC, Chen C, Martínez RM, Etnier JL, Cheng Y. Habitual physical activity mediates the acute exercise-induced modulation of anxiety-related amygdala functional connectivity. Sci Rep. 2019;9(1). doi:10.1038/s41598-019-56226-z

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