Dr. Berg: Hey, Dr. Berg here.
In this short video, we're going to talk about this subject called cortisol, and how to turn
off cortisol.
The first thing you need to know, is that cortisol is made from the outside of the adrenal
gland.
This is the adrenal gland, you have two of them on top of the kidney, they look like
this.
The outside of this is all gland tissue, and cortisol is made by the outer part of that
glad.
The inside of the gland is all nerve tissue.
It makes neurotransmitters.
They're a hormone like substances that are hormone like, because they travel communication
wise through the nervous system, where hormones travel through the blood.
Those are the differentiation.
Cortisol is made by the outside, and the inside would be all the adrenaline.
Adrenaline is a stress hormone too, right?
Cortisol is a stress hormone.
The thing is like, a lot of people are stressed out, and they seem to not be able to get rid
of stress, they can't seem to turn off cortisol, and that's primarily because the adrenal gland
only has an on switch.
See, cortisol is a hormone that reacts to stress and adapts the body to stressed states.
The same thing with adrenaline.
It reacts to stress, and it adapts the body to stressed states.
If you're being chased by a tiger for example, you're going to have the heart rate go up,
you're going to have the blood flow to your muscles, you're going to have a very awake
brain, excessively aware, and then you're going to have higher blood pressure, you're
going to have more adrenaline, you're going to have all these different things, but you're
not going to have as much digestion or reproduction.
It's going to turn those things off.
What happens over time, and a lot of people don't know this, is that when they experience
stress over their life, they think when they go through it, then the stress just goes away.
No, all stress is accumulative.
I have a machine that measures accumulating stress, and you can see in a body the huge
relationship between the quantity of stress, and then in present time, their body is stuck
on and will not turn off, because adrenal only has an on switch, it doesn't have an
off switch.
All stress accumulates, and it's also interesting to note that, and I'm going to just tell you,
it's probably 100%, might be 99% of the time, but nearly 100% of the time, you take autoimmune
cases like rheumatoid, and MS, and lupus, and all these different autoimmune diseases,
it always happens after a stress event, primarily a loss, or some threat of loss, or a divorce,
or whatever.
Why is that?
Because a loss is a severe stress to the adrenal.
It shocks the body even more than a physical stress.
The person can be stuck in it for years, as far as the physical body gets stuck in it,
and then you're over here, but your body's still reacting down there, and then it turns
on this autoimmune thing.
That's interesting.
We have this thing where we have the adrenals that gets stuck on over time, because of accumulated
stress, it could be measured objectively.
You can feel it subjectively just on how well you tolerate stress, and how you deal with
stress.
If you can't tolerate stress, and things get to you easily, irritate you easily, then we
know the adrenal glands are on edge.
Now, there's a term for this called flight or fight mode.
So when you're flight or fight, you're in this mode where you're constantly either fighting
or running away or something.
It's a stressed state.
The flight or fight can be measured as well, and I can measure that in a test, and you
can see how much flight or fight the person's in, versus if it's normal of they're stuck
in flight or fight, and a lot of people are stuck in this flight or fight from past stresses,
okay?
Stresses could be, you know, change of hormones, menopause, it could be physical stress, mental
stress, could be any type of stress at all.
That's really what's happening, is that we have this hormone that's too high, and this
hormone is too high because of the old stress that you don't see, because it's stuck in
the past.
They do all these tests, and they can't find them, because it's not showing up on a blood
test, it's not showing up on other tests, but it might be in blood pressure, pulse rate,
but you have to use a very sensitive test to pick this up.
I use a test that measures this part of the adrenal.
It's called the autonomic nervous system.
This is all sympathetic nerve fibers, so we can measure that on a test.
It's called heart rate variability.
Don't worry about the name, but just realize there is a test that can measure that, and
when I look at people, I look at two things.
One, is how much stress that they have in their body, and two, how much health or recovery
reserve do they have as well, because it measures both parts.
I find that it's a relationship, and when someone is usually in stress for long periods
of time, they lose their health reserve, their recovery, their reserve to back onto, because
you know, if you lose your recovery, then a little bit of stress really can affect you
badly.
If you have good recovery and your stress doesn't bother you as much because you have
this buffer to fall back on.
The question is, what do we do to turn this off?
Okay, now one of the things that I found, it's very difficult to do this with pills
and things like that.
What I found you have to do is, you have to manually turn the adrenal glands off.
What do you mean manually?
The adrenals are stuck way into the body.
Well, there's techniques that basically work on other parts of this nervous system, okay?
It's called the sympathetic nervous system.
There is other parts of the nervous system that control the off switch, and that's called
the parasympathetics, so that's another word, parasympathetics means the part of the nervous
system that turns things off, because it controls rest and digestion.
Inevitably, someone that's stressed usually has problems with resting and digestion.
If you look at the whole body and find out where these things are located, you can do
techniques, acupressure, without needles, or massage on these locations, of where these
things are located in the body, and create incredible relaxation effect that actually
helps this part of the nervous system.
You're really working, not on the gland per se, but you're working on the nervous system.
You're increasing the flow of this electrical wire that's connected to the brain that won't
turn off.
It's like a switch.
What I did, is I listed a series of videos below, in the link that you can click on to
see some of the techniques.
There's a lot of them, but I'm just going to show you a couple that you can apply on
your nervous system to help turn off this cycle, okay?
I want to just give you a taste of this below, but there's a lot more we're going to talk
about in future videos.
I want to just explain some of the basics on what cortisol is, and how it effects adrenals,
and what's really happening for people that are stuck in stressed states.
I hope this helped, and I will see you in the next video.