How Hard Should I Push Myself?

Hey! Dan here. Today, a new book was published by my favorite neurobiologist, Robert Sapolsky. It's called Determined, and it's about why science says we have no free will, and how we might best live once we accept that.

I have a review of it coming for you on Friday, and to whet your appetite, I’m sharing an article I wrote about one of his previous books, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. It’s one of the most popular articles I’ve ever written—I hope you enjoy it.

How hard should I push myself?

It’s a question I ask myself a lot, and I bet you do, too. On the one hand I really want to push myself. I’m ambitious, and I want to leave it all out on the field. Some of my peak work moments have come when I’ve pushed myself to a place where I didn’t think I could go. We all have more ability to adapt to stress and pressure than we think we do.

On the other hand, I want to be kind to myself. I question how much the drive to push myself is to make up for something that I feel is missing or inadequate—and whether pushing myself will fill the hole. I sometimes wonder whether letting myself off the hook is just laziness masquerading as self-care. It’s hard to tell.

But I also wonder whether pushing myself might, in fact, kill me. Constant pressure creates chronic stress, and there are many scientific studies that show that chronic stress is harmful. It makes you more susceptible to heart disease, it makes it harder to recover from illnesses, and it can affect your sleep and even your working memory.

Then there’s a wealth of literature (and conversations on Twitter/X) that says that stress is actually good for you. 

What gives? How much stress is good, and how much is bad? 

In order to understand the question I posed at the top—how much we should be pushing ourselves—we have to better understand stress. We need to understand what the stress of pushing ourselves does to our bodies, how much we can take of it, and how we can, hopefully, learn to cope with it better.

That’s what Robert Sapolsky’s book, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, is about. Sapolsky is a stress researcher, and as far as I can tell, he's one of the good ones. He's the kind of intellectual who's smart, but also smart enough to know what he doesn't know. Though he's written a book, he doesn't come across as trying to sell it to you. He's like your zany, self-aware, smart-as-hell uncle who happens to study the stress responses of baboons for a living.

In the book Sapolsky harnesses his own research, as well as a wide array of animal and human studies, to figure out the answer to a fairly simple question: how does stress work, and why do humans get stress-related diseases? 

It’s an interesting question—you can understand why a human body might react poorly to, say, not being fed enough. But why does psychological stress have dangerous consequences? 

The stress response is designed to get us out of danger. If you're an animal being chased by a lion in the Serengeti, you definitely want to have a stress response. Being stressed means you’re preparing your muscles to move—a lot. Your heart rate rises and pushes blood to your extremities. Glucose is released into your bloodstream to help you pump your muscles as fast as possible. 

While the stress response pushes certain parts of your body into high gear, it also turns certain parts of your body off. For example, when you’re stressed, digestion is inhibited. What’s the point of wasting energy on digesting food for later when you might not even survive for 10 more minutes? Reproduction is also inhibited for the same reason.