There are a number of scenarios in which the body fails to shut off the flow of stress hormones. The most obvious is simply unrelenting stress. If we never get a break, the recovery process never gets started, the amygdala keeps firing, and the production of cortisol spills over healthy levels. Sometimes the fight-or-flight switch gets stuck in the on position. It can be a function of genetics, according to epidemiological surveys: if you put a random group of people in a stressful public speaking situation, those whose parents suffered from hypertension still show elevated levels of cortisol twenty-four hours after the speech.
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Regular aerobic activity calms the body
Regular aerobic activity calms the body, so that it can handle more stress before the serious response involving heart rate and stress hormones kicks in. It raises the trigger point of the physical reaction. In the brain, the mild stress of exercise fortifies the infrastructure of our nerve cells by activating genes to produce certain proteins that protect the cells against damage and disease. So it also raises our neurons’ stress threshold.
less than half the energy expenditure
The kicker is that even if we followed the most demanding governmental recommendations for exercise and logged thirty minutes of physical activity a day, we’d still be at less than half the energy expenditure for which our genes are encoded. Paleolithic man had to walk five to ten miles on an average day, just to be able to eat.