What if we expanded our definition of a toxic environment?

For years, I not only advocated for, but embodied in my own life, a preventive approach to health built on a few pillars that still seem essential to me.

A healthy diet, organic as much as possible.

Physical movement.

Nourishing relationships.

A measured use of medication.

Today more than ever, I remain convinced that this is the foundation.

But I have also become deeply aware of one thing: this foundation is not enough to guarantee good health, and even less a long life in good health.

We can eat well, move, maintain relationships that do us good, take care of our body…

while living in an environment that continually exposes it to other forms of strain.

The air we breathe.

The water we drink.

The materials of our homes.

The plastics and chemical substances that surround us.

Noise. Light. Our rhythms of life. Our sleep.

And chronic stress.

What the exposome names

I recently discovered a scientific concept that puts a word on something I had sensed for a long time, far beyond what I could control at my own scale: the exposome.

The term was proposed in 2005 by the epidemiologist Christopher Wild, who would later become director of the International Agency for Research on Cancer.

The idea is simple in principle, complex as soon as you try to measure it: to complement what the genome teaches us about our biology with a better understanding of everything we are exposed to over the course of our lives.

We study our genes enormously.

Far less easily the accumulation of everything that interacts with them over 20, 30, 50 or 70 years.

That changes the question.

Instead of isolating food, pollution, housing, sleep or stress as independent variables: what does the accumulation and interaction of all these exposures over a lifetime produce in a living organism?

And what happens when, on top of these exposures, inherited ways of functioning are added — ways that have sometimes become ill-suited to the context in which we live today?

It is this idea of accumulation that interests me in particular — especially when it comes to chronic stress.

I have studied at length the work of Bessel van der Kolk, Gabor Maté, Stephen Porges and Peter Levine on trauma, the nervous system, and the way our experiences inscribe themselves in the body.

But I did not approach them through books alone.

An important part of my understanding was built in interaction with horses, in that sphere where the essential part of communication is non-verbal.

The horse is extremely sensitive to what is actually there — our posture, our breath, our level of agitation — far beyond what we tell ourselves.

It makes very concrete what our culture keeps separating: what happens in our head and what happens in our body.

And I believe a dimension is still missing.

The soul — not necessarily in a religious sense, but that place in us that sometimes knows, well before our head does, when something is deeply right or deeply wrong for us.

Our integrity.

What allows us to feel aligned with who we are, rather than simply adapted to what is expected of us.

Body, psyche, soul.

I am no longer certain we can go on considering them as separate territories.

Exhaustion — from adapting again and again

Stress is not simply an unpleasant thought.

It is also a physiological state.

Our nervous system, our hormonal system, our metabolism, our immunity all take part in our permanent adaptation to what we live through.

Researchers speak of allostatic load: the cumulative biological cost of the organism’s repeated adaptations.

And we are not equal before this load — two people can go through an identical situation and not experience it in the same way physiologically.

Stressors are not only the great identifiable traumas.

A relationship that keeps us on alert.

A job in which we never feel good enough — or, conversely, a job that no longer holds any meaning.

The fear of losing our place.

The feeling of having to constantly prove our worth.

And our relationship to money — the fear of lacking, the need to accumulate in order to feel safe, the difficulty of receiving and of letting things circulate.

Taken in isolation, these stressors seem ordinary.

It is their repetition, their accumulation, that changes everything.

Because adapting takes energy.

Coping. Anticipating. Controlling. Absorbing. Protecting ourselves. Holding on. Complying. Carrying on.

Our organism has extraordinary capacities for adaptation. But they are not infinite.

When we continually call on these mechanisms without leaving room for regeneration, we end up depleting our inner resources — and this exhaustion is not only in the head. It is biological.

Exhaustion can come from too much.

But also from emptiness. From a lack of meaning. From the impossibility of creating.

From a life in which we function correctly on the outside while feeling, on the inside, less and less alive.

And I would go a little further still: we can also exhaust ourselves by living in contradiction with ourselves.

Saying yes when something in us says no.

Staying where we deeply know we no longer want to be.

This is where the word soul takes on its full meaning — because by adapting to everything, we may end up sacrificing something of our own integrity, without even seeing it.

This is also where the question of cancer challenges me.

I want to be precise: this does not mean that everyone subjected to chronic stress will develop cancer. Cancer is multifactorial.

But chronic stress does act on biological systems — hormonal, immune, inflammatory — that are of direct interest to cancer research.

Between the claim that “stress causes cancer” and the opposite claim that there is no link at all, there is therefore an immense territory — one I believe is still largely underestimated.

How do you measure thirty years of adaptation?

Science itself still struggles to answer.

Our invisible pacts

A few years ago, I had a rather extraordinary experience while tracing the thread of my own family history.

At first I thought I was exploring an inheritance in the almost classical sense.

I gradually discovered something far vaster: we do not only inherit possessions, genes or a family history.

We also inherit ways of functioning.

Of keeping quiet. Of sacrificing ourselves. Of being wary. Of our relationship to money.

And, in some families, of violence, abuse, fear or silence.

It is this immaterial inheritance, often passed on without our even knowing we are passing it on, that I ended up calling The Invisible Pact.

I tell its story more fully elsewhere on this blog, and for a few years now I have been dreaming of making it into a film.

Some of the behaviours we pass on probably had a function.

Keeping quiet could protect.

Being wary could save.

Accumulating could secure a family that had known scarcity.

A behaviour may have been a remarkable adaptation strategy in a given context, and become, several generations later, perfectly ill-suited.

The context has disappeared. The behaviour has remained.

That is precisely what makes it invisible.

But we do not only inherit invisible pacts.

We manufacture them ourselves — in a couple, a family, a company, an entire society.

Every time a behaviour is repeated enough to become “normal”, we contribute to making a new one.

“We don’t talk about that here.”

“A good leader is available all the time.”

“You have to be strong.”

“We have no choice.”

These little phrases interest me enormously — because they can conceal rules that no one has truly chosen anymore.

And some of these rules themselves become chronic stressors.

What remains to be chosen

Health probably does not play out on a single plate.

It plays out across a whole ecosystem — outer, inner, relational, inherited.

Perhaps one of the great challenges of our time consists precisely in becoming conscious enough of what we have inherited, of what we are exposed to, and of what we ourselves keep manufacturing —

so that we can finally choose what we still want to pass on.