You know that feeling when you're driving to an important meeting but you're running late and
traffic is slow and you hit every red light and you can just feel your blood starting to boil?
Your heart pounds and your fists tighten. This is the stress response. It's the physical response in
your body that happens when you perceive a threat. This threat could be a crocodile, but it could
also be an argument with your girlfriend or being late to pick up your kids from school. The human
brain is so powerful that it can transform imagined threats into a physical response
in a heartbeat. And stress essentially kicks on the fight-or-flight response.
This response is meant to be a short-term reaction to help you fight off an attacker
or run away from danger. The fight-or-flight response speeds up your heart and lungs. It
pumps out adrenaline and cortisol. And it puts a halt on non-essential functions like digestion and
sex. The stress response is great for you in short bursts. With a healthy stress response,
your hypothalamus tells your nervous system to return to calm. But when stress becomes chronic,
it can lead to chronic illness and contribute to irritability, anxiety,
and depression. So let's talk about five ways stress hurts your body and what to do about it.
Hey guys, Black Friday is upon us, and I'm offering all of my courses
for 30% off for the whole weekend. So that means that you can get a lot of the courses for $46.
Happy holidays, everyone. Number one: let's talk about the immune system.
So, first stress initially kicks your immune system into overdrive,
but over time stress hormones weaken your immune system. So people who are chronically stressed are
more likely to get sick frequently and stay sick longer because their immune system gets turned
down. Some people's immune systems get hyperactive under stress, leading to autoimmune disorders,
allergies, and asthma. Okay. Number two is sleep. If you're fighting off an attacker, it's not a
great time to fall asleep. So stress interferes with your ability to fall asleep and stay asleep.
Sleep is essential to mental and physical health. Sleep helps your brain process the day's events.
It helps you heal from injury and illness. And it helps you think more clearly. Okay. Number
three is your gut. Under high stress, your body initially pumps out extra glucose to activate,
but then it turns off digestion. It's like your body is in the Star Trek Enterprise and it puts
all its power to shields or weapons, but it has to turn down the lights on deck to conserve energy.
So when you're stressed, your body is ready to fight off a threat,
not make repairs until the battle is over. So your body devotes less energy to digestion.
This can lead to butterflies in the stomach, loss of appetite, heartburn, weight loss, IBS,
constipation, and diarrhea. Low levels of stress can trigger the opposite result:
constantly stress-eating to soothe the body. And this is usually something that's easy to digest,
like carbohydrates, which can lead to weight gain and obesity. Stress makes your muscles tense to
get ready to fight off that crocodile. It can help you play an intense game of soccer or walk
faster if you're late to an important meeting. But when you're constantly stressed and you're
frozen in a typing position at your desk, your muscles can get all messed up. So stress can
lead to neck and back pain, headaches, and just an overall feeling of discomfort. Okay. Last is your
blood pressure and your cardiovascular health. Stress hormones make your heart beat faster, and
they increase blood pressure. Over time this can damage the arteries and lead to hypertension and
heart disease. It keeps your body in a constant state of pressure, which is tough on the heart.
People with chronic stress are more likely to have heart attacks. Okay. So what do you do? Like what
do you do if your body's seeing some signs of too much stress? Okay. First let's talk boundaries.
Reduce your overall stress levels by setting better boundaries.
You can cut out some activities. You can make time for rest and self-care. You can choose to combat
chronic stress by making a clear separation between work and home life. You can delete
your work email off your phone or, you know, turn off your phone at night. Stress isn't bad;
it's just harmful when it becomes chronic. So take your work email off your phone. Make
rules about when you're allowed to check your email, etc. Next, rest instead of distract.
Take breaks where you actually rest, not distractions where you just put the stress
response in the back of your mind. You can actually learn to notice what state you're in,
whether you're in nervous-system activation or calm. Watching a show or tick tock can keep you
stuck in the fight/flight/response, but because you're distracted, you just don't notice it as
much. Going for a quiet walk, taking a moment for meditation or breathing - those can all actually
help you turn off the stress response instead of just distracting yourself from it. Exercise is
also great for stress. It burns off those stress hormones, gives your body a chance to go through
the cycles of activation and then relaxation. A 30-minute cardio is great for stress, but any
kind of physical activity is helpful. Go for a walk. Build something with your hands. Weed the
garden - whatever it is that you enjoy. Okay. If you haven't tried progressive muscle relaxation,
now's a great time to learn it. So this is an exercise where you consciously tense and then
relax various parts of your body. Usually you start at your toes and you move up towards your
head. I've got a whole video on this, walking you through how to do it. So just search
progressive muscle relaxation and Therapy in a Nutshell and you'll find it.
Okay. Next you can learn to turn on the vagal response. You can learn to switch from the stress
response to the relaxation response with a few vagal nerve exercises. These are simple to learn,
and they only take a moment to use. The easiest one is paced breathing. You just
slow your breathing to approximately five seconds for the in-breath and five seconds to breathe out.
This turns off the stress response, and it turns back on the parasympathetic state. I've got three
or four more videos that go into a lot of detail about how to calm anxiety in your nervous system,
so if you search those you can find those too. Okay. I hope that was helpful.
I hope you feel a little bit more aware now of how stress impacts your body
and some of the things you can do to combat it. Thanks for watching, and take care.