Hacker News Reader

Humans have a massive capacity to vary energy use. Highly trained endurance athletes like professional road cyclists and triathletes can average 3x or more the typical daily energy expenditure of a non-athlete on a long term basis. The idea that psychological stress can overwhelm the body's ability to produce energy does not seem credible to me.

View on HN

Those people have trained very deliberately over years to reach that level of performance, on top of an innate genetic disposition.

Undoubtedly, in absolute terms they have a higher capacity to withstand the negative physical effects of psychosocial stress as described in the paper, precisely because of these physiological adaptations.

If regular people trained themselves to deal with stress then they would have a higher capacity too.

The paper is referring to the maximum capacity of a particular organism at a particular moment in time. It doesn't assert that the capacity is uniform across a species or doesn't change over time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com