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

by John Coates

Thermal stress is a natural part of our life, so if it is eliminated a fundamental part of our physiology may atrophy. The great physiologist Walter Cannon hinted at something like this back in the 1920s. Displaying an extraordinary prescience, he worried about the advent of central heating, air conditioning and hot running water, because these conveniences threatened to deprive us of the opportunity of exercising our systems of thermoregulation. “It is not impossible,” Cannon warned, “that we lose important protective advantages by failing to exercise these physiological mechanisms, which were developed through myriads of generations of our less favored ancestors. The man who daily takes a cold bath and works until he sweats may be keeping ‘fit,’ because he is not permitting a very valuable part of his bodily organization to become weakened and inefficient by disuse.” Today we may be paying a high price for our modern comforts. In fact, Cannon’s fears of a decline in fitness may have been justified: recent evidence suggests that the widespread adoption of climate control in home, car and office may be one cause of the current obesity epidemic. The disappearance of thermal stress from our lives may have another unintended consequence: it may have largely eliminated a valuable toughening process. It is too early in this research to recommend any particular toughening regime as a way for risk takers in the financial world and elsewhere to build up a resilience to the stress ...