You think you’re ok, but are you really stressed? You think you’re really stressed but are you just emotionally distressed? Do you understand the difference and the impact both can have on your happiness, health and wellbeing?
“Stress has been associated with significant long-term changes to health such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, obesity, headaches, migraine, memory loss, sleep disturbance and even premature death!”
For most, stress is a time when they fail to cope with their everyday life, when the pressures get too great for them to cope with. They feel overwhelmed, perhaps anxious, fatigued, frustrated and perhaps even depressed.
Stress is quite a different thing. When the body struggles to recover from one day to the next the result is an activation of your flight or fight centres combined with a hormonal shift. Long term this leads to many physiological and neurological changes.
This could occur if you’re doing too much training, getting poor quality sleep, if you’re overstimulated or even if you’re lacking routine.
Chronic emotional distress can lead to stress in many people and result in broad changes to brain and physical health. Two key areas that really suffer are your brain and your blood sugar regulation.
Cortisol, our main stress hormone, has profound affect on our hippocampus, a key area of the brain responsible for regulating your memory, spatial awareness and navigation and plays a critical part in sleep regulation (day-night rhythms) and anxiety.
In addition, cortisol can create insulin resistance in an attempt to increase energy availability to allow you to survive the current threat to your life.
Stress isn’t all bad! Small amounts of stress actually stimulates your brain, in fact without it you would most likely end up bored 24/7 and never achieve anything. This lack of achievement can have an opposite effect, reducing dopamine levels in your brain and potentially even lead to an unmotivated depression!
Identifying the physiological reasons your body is not recovering from day to day is paramount to reversing stress and emotional distress. An in depth look through your neurology, physiology and lifestyle by a practitioner specifically trained stress related disorders can identify the triggers and imbalances preventing you from recovering and help you to retake control of your life.
If like many, you’re probably thinking ‘I’ll just take a holiday, do some meditation and get a little more sleep and I’ll be right’, but for some simple changes such as these may just be too late!
You see, when your brain starts suffering as a result of chronic stress, areas such as your hippocampus actually begin to shrink! Yes, they physically shrink!! From my experience, when this occurs, the natural ability for the brain to turn off the stress mechanism is reduced. The result is you can go sipping pina colladas in the bahaamas for 12 months and you may still find very little improvement.
So I’m guessing if you’ve read this far down you’re probably going to want me to give you some tips on how you can prevent and, in some cases, even reverse the damaging effect of stress…right?
Ok, so here are the top 5 lifestyle things I’ve seen help those with chronic stress issues:
1 – You are what you eat AND what they eat – You’ve heard the saying before, but maybe not this detailed. Not only are you what you eat, but also what they eat. Feed plants poisons and toxic substances and these substances will get into you and often destroy your gut health. Likewise, the meat you consume also contains the grains, hormones and anti biotics that they were given.
Be mindful of the source of your food. Whilst food is really a specific issue that requires specific assessment of your physiology, most with stress disorders do better by reducing their carbohydrate intake, increase their good oils, reducing gluten and lectins and relying less on carbohydrate first thing in the morning.
2 – Routine is king – Yes, habits should be broken for good brain health, but daily routine is paramount. The body adapts to daily routine, so keep your wake time, your sleep time and you exercise times as consistent as possible to start with.
3 – Sleep deprivation removes all – Irrelevant of what you change in your life, if you’re sleep deprived your brain won’t function well. A few key rules I discuss with my stressed patients are to ensure they’re early to bed and early to rise AND if they’re waking up because of an alarm they’re sleep deprived!
4 – Stimulation that kills – tech use is horrendous for so many areas of neurology. In fact blue light is how the brain works out seasons and even the time of day. The flickering blue light of technology (eg. Mobile phones) stimulates specific areas of the brain associated with your flight or fight responses. So keep it’s use under 1 hour a day!
5 – Exercise is everything – There has been so much written on exercise it should be a no brainer. Most importantly, aerobic exercise has been shown to elevate a brain hormone known as brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) which is found in high concentrations in the hippocampus. BDNF is known to stimulate neuronal growth, reversing the effects of stress!
Stress and emotional distress is a massive topic and a huge, growing problem that very few truly understand. Simple lifestyle changes can have profound affects, however, there does seem to be a point of no return.
But if you’re in need of a little help, just click the message button and tell us what you need help with. Otherwise, book an appointment and one of our specific trained practitioners will get to the root of your issues quickly.
Trevor Chetcuti
CEO
Spinewise
