Stress: The Sneaky Sabotage to Your Health
BEWARE… no matter what diet you follow, how much you exercise or what supplements you take…
There is still one element that can wreck your health and put you at risk for heart disease, diabetes, hypothyroid, autoimmunity and a host of other chronic diseases.
What is it?
STRESS
Tough love here. If you are not doing some form of regular stress management, you may sabotage your best health promotion efforts.
Stress management is absolutely crucial to your health and longevity. If health conscious people spent half the time managing their stress that they spend focusing on nutrition, exercise and supplements, they’d be a lot better off.
What is the definition of stress? A prominent psychologist, Richard Lazarus, defined stress as “any event in which environmental demands, internal demands, or both tax or exceed the adaptive resources of an individual”.
Does that sound like your daily life?
Stress is a disturbance of homeostasis. Homeostasis is the body’s ability to regulate its inner environment. When the body loses this ability, disease occurs.
Your adrenal glands are 2 walnut-shaped glands that sit on top of your kidneys. They secrete hormones such as cortisol, epinephrine, and nor-epinephrine that regulate the stress response.
Adrenal glands determine our tolerance to stress. They are also the system of our body most affected by stress.
Obvious forms of stress that affect the adrenal glands:
- overly full schedules
- driving in traffic
- financial problems
- arguments with a spouse
- losing a job
- other emotional and psychological challenges of modern life
Less obvious forms of stress affect adrenals too:
- blood sugar swings
- gut dysfunction
- food intolerances (especially gluten)
- chronic infections and autoimmune problems
- environmental toxins
- inflammation
- over-training
All of these sound the alarm bells, and cause the adrenals to pump out more stress hormones.
When you are stressed, particularly if you are OFTEN stressed, you may experience symptoms of adrenal overload. Those symptoms are diverse and nonspecific, because the adrenals affect every system in the body. They can include fatigue and headaches, decreased immunity, difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, or waking up, mood disturbance such as anxiety or depression, sugar and caffeine cravings, irritability or lightheadedness between meals, eating to relieve fatigue, dizziness going from sitting or lying to standing, or digestive distress.
Stress harms the body in every way imaginable. Two books on the subject that might be helpful are Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky, and When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection by Gabor Mate.
Long-term stress increases cortisol levels, but more importantly it disrupts your natural daily cortisol rhythm.
Cortisol is normally high in the morning when you wake. This helps you get out of bed and start your day. Then cortisol should taper off throughout the day so you feel tired at bedtime and can fall asleep.
A disrupted cortisol rhythm raises blood sugar, weakens your immune system, contributes to leaky gut, makes you hungry and crave sugar, reduces your ability to burn fat, causes hormonal imbalance, reduces DHEA, testosterone, growth hormone, and TSH. It increases belly fat and causes fatty liver, causes depression, anxiety and mood imbalance and contributes to cardiovascular disease.
- Reduce the amount of stress you experience.
- Mitigate the harmful effects of stress you can’t avoid.
Simple, huh? Maybe not, but still really important.
You can reduce the amount of stress you experience by very purposely avoiding unnecessary stress. Learn to say “no”. Avoid people who stress you out. Limit your exposure to the news. Give up pointless arguments. Beware of your to-do list.
You can also reduce the amount of stress you experience by addressing physical issues like anemia, blood sugar swings, gut inflammation, food intolerances (especially gluten), essential fatty acid deficiencies, and environmental toxin overload.
Work to mitigate the harmful effects of stress you can’t avoid by reframing the situation. Even the worse situation will usually have some positive aspect. It is also ok to simply lower your standards in some cases. Practice acceptance, be grateful, and cultivate empathy. Managing your time differently can be a game changer, as can bringing more pleasure and fun into your life. A little outpouring of endorphins, the feel good hormone, can compensate for a lot of stress.
I have always appreciated the lesson in what I call the “law of attachment”. It derives from Buddhist philosophy though I don’t think they call it that. Basically, it says we create our own suffering by being attached to certain states or outcomes. In other words, expecting impermanent things to be permanent. Birth, life, death are all impermanent states that come and go. According to this “law”, when we are attached to a particular outcome, and are devastated when it doesn’t happen that way, we cause our own suffering.
In other words, trying to control that which we cannot control will bring about suffering, and stress.
Maybe we can strive in some cases to just… LET IT BE.
However, it is true that there is a certain amount of stress in modern life that is simply unavoidable. Therefore, it is crucial to have a regular stress management practice.
Stress management practices can include:
- Meditation/reflection/prayer
- Yoga
- Biofeedback
- Time in nature
Meditation is an awareness practice. Some prefer the term reflection or prayer. This works as long as it isn’t always the asking kind of prayer. The listening or being still kind of prayer might fit.
With meditation, you learn to sit quietly, observe thoughts as them come and go, detaching from them a bit. If a current problem or concern comes to mind, practice just letting it be there, as free of the emotions that go with it as possible. Consider what really matters to you relative to this concern and often a previously elusive “answer” will arise. If you find yourself thinking too much, bring your focus back to your slow, deep in and out breath.
There are many good meditation resources online such as Headspace. Personally, I like to listen to Thich Nhat Hahn videos on YouTube. Just his voice and simple way of speaking is calming and soothing to me. He also has many books, Being Peace, is my all time favorite. Two more books that may be helpful are Opening the Hand of Thought by Kosho Uchiyama and Meditation for Beginners by Jack Kornfield.
Yoga includes physical, mental and spiritual disciplines that originated in ancient India.
It has been shown to reduce stress, improve cardiovascular and respiratory health, and increase flexibility, cognitive performance, and overall well-being. It is particularly effective in insomnia, anxiety, depression, hypertension, and asthma.
There are many yoga videos on YouTube, and lots of local options as well. Doing yoga in a group with others can give the additional benefit of community.
Biofeedback is all about becoming aware of the body’s physiological functions. Sensors follow blood pressure, heart rate, skin temperature, and muscle tension. Participants learn to use this information to modify their physical response to stress.
There are low-cost portable biofeedback devices that work with smart phones and tablets. Emwave2, BioZen, and Quantum Life are a few examples.
Go outside! Recent research from Cornell found that as little as 10 minutes in a natural setting can help one feel happier and lessen the effects of both physical and mental stress. AND time in nature is free and is right outside.
Exercise can be helpful to blow off some steam and even create endorphins for some. I certainly recommend regular exercise and movement, just not as your only stress management technique. Remember gentle movement like yin yoga, slow walking and stretching can be calming and restorative.
- Make stress management part of your life. Schedule it into your calendar.
- Reduce the amount of stress you experience. Say “no”.
- Mitigate the harmful effects of stress you can’t avoid.
- Sometimes, just… Let it be.
- Practice regular stress management techniques like meditation, time in nature, yoga and biofeedback.
If you feel overwhelmed, or like stress is affecting your health and quality of life, there may be more that we can do to give you your life back. Let me help.