The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind

by John Coates

Sports scientists know, for instance, that to build lean-muscle mass and expand aerobic capacity athletes must endure a training process that shocks their muscles and taxes their cardiovascular systems, to the point of inflicting mild damage to tissues, and then punctuates this process with periods of rest and recovery. Stress, recovery, stress, recovery—when calibrated to exhaust an athlete’s resources, but only just, and then replenish them, the process can expand the productive capacity of a broad range of cells in the athlete’s body. When coaches time this training regime just right they can tune their athletes so that they arrive on the day of competition with the optimal amount of glucose, hemoglobin, adrenaline, cortisol and testosterone coursing through their arteries. What the scientists studying toughening have found is that a somewhat similar process of challenge and psychological loading followed by recovery can tune our brain and nervous system so that we too approach stressors with resilience and an optimal mix of hormones, neuromodulators and nervous-system activation.