Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Wed, 12 Mar 2025
This episode is brought to you by LMNT, Maui Nui, and Birch Living. When we think of stress, we often associate it with something negative—something to avoid. Our modern culture has fostered an environment of persistent chronic stress, yet at the same time, we've also eliminated beneficial stress by designing a life of chronic ease. Today's guest joins us to explain why stress isn't just unavoidable—it’s essential for growth. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Jeff Krasno, CEO and co-founder of Commune, to explore the benefits of positive stress in our modern world. Jeff explains why chronic stress harms our health and longevity, while adaptive stress—like fasting and hot/cold exposure—has been key to human evolution and survival. He also shares how to evaluate your protocols, behaviors, and routines to ensure they keep you in balance. Jeff is the co-founder and CEO of Commune, a masterclass platform focused on personal and societal well-being, and the co-creator of Wanderlust, a global series of wellness events. He also hosts the Commune podcast. His latest venture, Good Stress: The Benefits of Doing Hard Things, expands on his personal story and wellness protocols. Drawing from over 400 podcast conversations and his own experiences, the book explores deliberate, self-imposed behaviors that enhance social, psychological, and physical well-being. In this episode, Dhru and Jeff dive into: How chronic ease is leading to disease (00:37) How to befriend stress (5:44) Jeff’s personal journey and the health challenges that shaped him (09:50) Fasting, hunger, and stress—how they can benefit you (23:34) Fasting recommendations for women and the importance of an individualized approach (26:50) Jeff’s Substack insights on weight loss (32:42) Research on cold plunges, blood glucose, cancer, glutamate, immunotherapy, and more (36:50) The future of health, chronic disease, systemic issues, and the decline of public trust in health and food institutions (43:19) The impact of health podcasts, their practices, and how people are paying attention to new information (56:24) How to lean into stressful conversations—plus tips for tackling them (59:18) Evaluating our protocols, behaviors, and routines—do they help us find balance and return to center (1:19:50) Final thoughts (1:24:45) Also mentioned in this episode: Jeff’s new book - Good Stress: The Health Benefits of Doing Hard Things Commune Podcast Gabor Mate - Kiyumi retreat Thomas Seyfried's glutamate research KetoPet Sanctuary For more on Jeff, follow him on Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and his Website. This episode is brought to you by LMNT, Maui Nui, and Birch Living. Right now, LMNT is offering my listeners a free sample pack with any purchase. Head over to drinkLMNT.com/dhru today. Right now Maui Nui Venison is offering my listeners a limited collection of my favorite cuts and products. Just go to mauinuivenison.com/dhru to secure your access now —but hurry, supply is limited! To get 20% off your Birch Living mattress plus two free eco-rest pillows, head over to birchliving.com/dhru today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: How is chronic ease leading to disease?
Jeff, welcome to the podcast, brother. It's an honor to have you here. And I'm excited about everything that you're working on. In particular, you got a new book coming up. And inside of that book, Good Stress, a big thing that you talk about is that there are positive bits of stress that can radically make our life better.
You know, for thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, we as humans have been focused on getting as much stress out You're here to convince us that maybe the extreme version of that, taking all stress out of our life, is actually a detriment to our health. Let's talk about that.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, Drew, thanks for having me. You are just such a great friend and you platform so many amazing people. And I'm very grateful to be here. So, yeah, listen, for hundreds of thousands of years, Homo sapiens, and even beyond that for millions of years, hominids have evolved in relationship to their environment. You know, to be alive is to be in relationship.
And so we've evolved these adaptive mechanisms in relation to what I sometimes call paleolithic stress. But since the Industrial Revolution, in the West primarily, but really accelerating in the last 70 years, at every turn, we've engineered our society for comfort, for convenience, for ease. And it's my thesis that chronic ease is actually leading to chronic dis-ease.
We are essentially using our culture to hijack our biology, and that is leading to all sorts of detrimental downstream impacts. And I can unpack just some of those mechanisms.
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Chapter 2: What does it mean to befriend stress?
Yeah, well, let's start off with the first one, which is from a lot of people's observation, they're looking around, they're driving to work in the morning, and actually a lot of people around them look pretty stressed. So what's going on there?
In modern times, we have a negative association with stress and totally justifiably, right? Because in the modern age, stress is chronic. And chronic stress, as you well know, leads to imbalances in the human organism and by extension, disease. But stress at its core is actually an adaptive response to our environment. So I live up in the hills of Los Angeles.
I'm apt to go for a hike generally before I have a podcast, for example, to clear my head. And every once in a while on that little serpentine path, I'll run into like a rattlesnake or a coyote, right? And I have a very, very natural adaptive response to stress. I see the rattlesnake on the path. What happens, right? I have a bottom-up response. My heart rate and my respiratory rate increase.
My liver secretes just the right amount of glucose to center my extremities to fight or flee. My pupils dilate. The aperture of my attention becomes super, super tight. I become... self-obsessed and distrust the world. And that's all for good reason, because that serves my biological imperative to survive. And of course, we inherited this mechanism from our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
The problem in modern society is the rattlesnake never leaves the path for so many people. So we're in this chronic state of agitation.
now on the path in laurel canyon above my house what happens after the rattlesnake looks at me and says i don't think jeff will be on the specials menu today right and he slithers back off into the tall grasses well i return to homeostasis right my heart rate and my respiratory rate decrease the aperture my attention opens back up i become more creative and i trust the world again
And that is a total natural response, right? I return to the middle. I return to homeostasis. The signature of modernity is that we never find the middle again. We never return to homeostasis. So when you're driving here and you're in traffic and you're looking around and you're seeing people are stressed out, that's because they're in a state of chronic stress.
And we know just like hormonally, for example, that chronic stress is going to lead to all sorts of different kinds of disease. So chronic stress, again, adaptively activates the liver, for example, to secrete glucose into the bloodstream. That is totally adaptive, but you don't want high levels of glucose in your bloodstream all of the time, right?
Because that leads to prediabetes and diabetes and insulin resistance. You don't want high levels of cortisol also because it degrades immune function. It actually lowers the production of certain kinds of innate immune cells like neutrophils and macrophages, et cetera. It also degrades gut function over time.
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Chapter 3: How can fasting and hunger benefit you?
So this is what fasting was for me. For me, I adopted a very simple 16-8 protocol because I found that there was the most data around that. And that's simply just consolidating my consumption of food in an eight-hour window. For me, that was more or less between 10.30 and 6.30.
I've subsequently played with that window a little bit, but I saw very, very significant results pretty quickly from that protocol. Time-restricted eating doesn't mean you're necessarily calorie-restricting because you could eat 10 pints of Chubby Hubby in an eight-hour window, right?
But generally, when you're becoming a disciple to a practice like that, you're making more conscious decisions about what you put in your mouth. And I was, of course, pairing that with data that I was getting directly from my CGM, and I was seeing vast improvements there. So fasting was a huge one.
Chapter 4: What fasting recommendations are important for women?
Now, of course, there's all of these other benefits to fasting outside of just potentially losing weight. You know, there is obviously the activation of certain pathways like AMPK, which I'm sure a lot of experts have talked about on your show, which is associated with autophagy, cellular cleanup. There's mitobiogenesis, the creation of new mitochondria.
There's the production of BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor that seems to even grow new neurons, but certainly manage the functionality of pre-existing neural health. So there's all of these kind of like under the hood benefits, but the benefits that I was seeing was a tremendous amount. of weight loss in combination with a couple of other stress protocols.
Give us an idea. What was your life like before that? What got you into the mess in the first place? Because I've known you for a long time. I generally have thought of you as being somebody fairly healthy. When we look at the larger population, you're in California. I think even one point in time, you had a very healthy restaurant and cafe, right?
I did.
And the reason I ask is because I think a lot of people can relate. They generally feel that they are doing a lot of healthy things, but maybe a few things have been off and that's enough compounded over years to kind of create a little bit of a problem. This episode is sponsored by Element. One of the most valuable, affordable, and overlooked brain boosting biohacks out there is proper hydration.
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Chapter 5: What insights does Jeff offer on weight loss?
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Chapter 6: How does cold exposure impact health?
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Yeah, well, I feel bad, Drew, because I'm not an extraordinary guest. I'm actually incredibly ordinary in terms of the presentations that were in my life. So I was chronically fatigued. I was brain fogged. I was pretty irritable, very hard time concentrating, couldn't read a book, needed to grab my phone quite often. And then of course, as I described, I was heavier. So I was about 210 pounds.
But with that kind of deposition of, adiposity sort of dad bod. So a lot of fat right around the middle, you know, and as my children love to tease me, I like to use the clinical name gynecomastia. My kids were like, dad, you have the boobs of man and would sometimes leave one of their bras on my bed just to rub it in a little bit. So I had, you know, that whole sort of panoply of symptoms.
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Chapter 7: What are the future implications of health podcasts?
The thing about everything I just named, chronic fatigue, insomnia, brain fog, they are so common now. that we essentially have accepted them as normal, but they're so, so, so abnormal. And so I was walking around in this incredibly compromised state. Now, subsequently, I started to do some testing and I realized that I was pre-diabetic, borderline diabetic.
And then I did some microbiome testing and my gut was as like leaky as a rusty old pipe, basically. So I was dealing with all of those things, but that just basically makes me average.
And what about your diet at the time? Your diet, your life, some of the things that kind of contributed to, again, a lot of the things that a lot of people are dealing with. Like what was going on?
Yeah, so I'm a serial entrepreneur, not in the serial sense in that I can't stop making businesses. And so prior to Commune, which is my main gig these days, I was running a festival called Wanderlust. Some of your guests might be familiar with it. It started with just like one little festival in Lake Tahoe, California. geared around wellness, ironically.
I was pretty focused on growing that for a number of years. And I think by 2016, that concern had grown to about 68 festivals annually in 20 countries. So you can imagine what my life looked like. First of all, I have three daughters, so we were traveling like a band of gypsies, basically. But I was on a plane nonstop. I was in every time zone you can imagine.
I couldn't even cover the amount of events that we had, candidly.
so i was sleeping very very poorly um you know i was constantly stressed i very very naively raised a lot of private equity money um which i thought was a great idea in the moment and then of course you know i was under the thumb of you know some cigar smoking plutograts in midtown you know looking down at me scrutinizing all my moves
And that was a lot of stress, bad stress, chronic stress, endless emails, endless pressure. And yeah, my diet was basically carbicide, you know, because I was eating in airports and even when I wasn't eating in airports, I was having that bagel for breakfast or that muffin for breakfast. Obviously, over time, doing that for many, many years, I just wore down.
The issue here with a lot of these chronic diseases, as you well know, is that they are progressive. You know, they don't just come on like the Texas chainsaw murder or whatever. They're slow. low and, you know, they unwind like a little film noir, you know, so this is what was happening in my body.
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Chapter 8: How do we handle stressful conversations?
You know, my whole story was like, I just have the thrifty gene, right? You know, great in a famine, but like really bad for Instagram, you know? And I had to relearn a new story about myself. And that was really key. And then that propelled me into, you know, adopting headfirst, jumping headfirst into these protocols like fasting and cold water therapy and some of the other ones I began to stack.
What was part of that? I'm sure you're into so many different things. You learn from so many different teachers. You have your own podcast. You get to have a lot of people. Do you want to just mention your podcast so that people can check you out?
Yeah, sure. It's the Commune Podcast. And you're absolutely right. I mean, I feel like I am a product of everybody else's wisdom. I don't have any letters.
at the end of my name you know i'm not a doctor um sometimes i wish i went to medical school but i guess someone told me when you're not an expert in anything that makes you a thought leader so was there anything that you felt was super helpful in unwinding that story because i think a lot of people listening feel like i am at least somewhat aware of that story but it has such a grip over me and my life that i sometimes forget that it's a story and it just becomes
my reality, like how can I step out of it? Are there methodologies, systems, workshops, books that have been helpful that you might recommend that were helpful for you?
So I spent a lot of time with this guy, Gabor Mate. This is the wonderful thing about having this retreat center in Topanga is that I get to host a lot of these brilliant people and then distill their wisdom to the best of my ability. And Gabor really opened me to that notion that people, but particularly children, will really sacrifice their authenticity for belonging.
It is reconnecting with your authentic self. So he was really instrumental in helping me sort of tell a new story about myself. And also for me to recognize that in some ways, what was my biggest shortcoming as a child turned into my biggest superpower. And it's crazy. Sometimes the most obvious truths about yourself are just hidden in plain sight. It's like that optic blind spot.
It's like, he was like, well, Jeff, tell me a little bit about what you've done in your life. And I was like, oh yeah, well, I used to put on big concerts in the music industry and help to tour bands. And he's like, oh, okay. So you brought people together? I was like, oh yeah. And then what did you do? Oh, I started Wanderlust. He's like, oh, what's that? Oh, that's a big festival.
oh, so you brought people together? I was like, oh yeah, I guess I did. He's like, well, what's your business now? And we were laughing. It's like, it's called commune. It's like, I bring people together. He's like, that is the thread of your life. Because you value belonging so deeply because of your experiences as a child, you turned your biggest shortcoming into your biggest superpower.
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