[Disclaimer: I’m not a doctor and by far I’m not an specialist on health]
First of all, I don’t think the use of “acute” is correct here. Unless I’m misreading the meaning of “acute” in medical jargon [edit: yes, it seems I did. I use acute to mean sever in this comment], acute stress in all these cases is bad for your health and going too far can even cause death. I think it is a (mild to) moderate stress that is good.
It seems to me that the model for “good stresses” are (evolutionarily-) common moderate stresses that produce some minor damage which the body takes advantage of to improve something. The lack of these stresses implies lack of (or lower?) improvement. The same type of stress but of a high enough magnitude starts being detrimental. I think this is what inspired Taleb for the concept of antifragility, where a stress within some limits is advantageous for a system instead of a harmful.
I also think stubbing a toe is not a good counter example (in a relatively short time, it would produce callus that would ultimately protect from the hits). The breaking a bone example seems better. I think the main difference is that breaking a bone actually is an acute stress rather than a moderate one. That’s an stress that is beyond the threshold the body can stand.
This way to model it is not very helpful here, cause we don’t seem to know yet whether short-time lack of sleep brings us any kind of improvement. But it makes 2 things obvious: (1) it seems very plausible that short-time lack of sleep is at least not too bad, as humans may have had occasional all-nighters during our evolution (e.g. to escape predators or other humans); (2) short-time lack of sleep is not an acute stress, so it could fall into the category of good stresses.
Besides acute stresses (obviously bad) and good stresses, there is at least one other relevant category of stresses: mild to moderate stresses the effects of which are cumulative (enough accumulation in a long enough life has bad consequences). I am not sure if this category can be further broken into 2 categories as well, because at least in some instances these stresses make the body somehow resilient to higher doses of the stressor (e.g. heavy drinkers develop a tolerance to the effects of alcohol). Probably there are more categories of stress but I am not aware of them.
Now the issue is still open to which category of stress do short-time and chronic lack of sleep lay in. I’m very interested to know it! My guess is that short-term lack of sleep can very well be beneficial in some way and that the accumulation of lack of sleep is probably bad in the long term.
[Disclaimer: I’m not a doctor and by far I’m not an specialist on health]
First of all, I don’t think the use of “acute” is correct here. Unless I’m misreading the meaning of “acute” in medical jargon [edit: yes, it seems I did. I use acute to mean sever in this comment], acute stress in all these cases is bad for your health and going too far can even cause death. I think it is a (mild to) moderate stress that is good.
It seems to me that the model for “good stresses” are (evolutionarily-) common moderate stresses that produce some minor damage which the body takes advantage of to improve something. The lack of these stresses implies lack of (or lower?) improvement. The same type of stress but of a high enough magnitude starts being detrimental. I think this is what inspired Taleb for the concept of antifragility, where a stress within some limits is advantageous for a system instead of a harmful.
I also think stubbing a toe is not a good counter example (in a relatively short time, it would produce callus that would ultimately protect from the hits). The breaking a bone example seems better. I think the main difference is that breaking a bone actually is an acute stress rather than a moderate one. That’s an stress that is beyond the threshold the body can stand.
This way to model it is not very helpful here, cause we don’t seem to know yet whether short-time lack of sleep brings us any kind of improvement. But it makes 2 things obvious: (1) it seems very plausible that short-time lack of sleep is at least not too bad, as humans may have had occasional all-nighters during our evolution (e.g. to escape predators or other humans); (2) short-time lack of sleep is not an acute stress, so it could fall into the category of good stresses.
Besides acute stresses (obviously bad) and good stresses, there is at least one other relevant category of stresses: mild to moderate stresses the effects of which are cumulative (enough accumulation in a long enough life has bad consequences). I am not sure if this category can be further broken into 2 categories as well, because at least in some instances these stresses make the body somehow resilient to higher doses of the stressor (e.g. heavy drinkers develop a tolerance to the effects of alcohol). Probably there are more categories of stress but I am not aware of them.
Now the issue is still open to which category of stress do short-time and chronic lack of sleep lay in. I’m very interested to know it! My guess is that short-term lack of sleep can very well be beneficial in some way and that the accumulation of lack of sleep is probably bad in the long term.
I’m using acute to mean “of short duration”, independent of severity, which I think is not how you are using it.
Ah, ok sorry. Yes, I thought it means sever.