Tag Arvhies: cortisol

How Stress Can Get To You

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We keep hearing that stress is damaging to our health. Actually stress has its place as a motivator, a stimulator to action. But too much of this useful stress becomes distress – now that’s how stress can get to you. So how do you know when you have crossed from stress into distress, from useful stress into destructive stress?

Under extreme or sudden stress various glands are triggered into action and release hormones to deal with the threat, the sudden demand or the overload in our personal world. It’s the body’s automatic reaction that bypasses rational thinking. This is your fight or flight, self-preservation, knee jerk reaction that floods your body with adrenaline (called epinephrine in USA) and cortisol secreted by your adrenal glands along with other hormones.

Adrenaline is produced during high stress or exciting situations. This powerful hormone is part of the body’s acute stress response system, known as fight or flight.

Under stress Adrenaline:
– stimulates the heart rate
– contracts blood vessels
– dilates air passages
– increases flood flow to muscles

Cortisol is one of the hormones that rises rapidly under high stress and is produced by your adrenals, situated on the top of your kidneys. Cortisol is not a bad guy in the system. It is part of regulating normal everyday activities, like getting you out of bed in the morning. Cortisol tends to peak in the morning and decrease as the day progresses. This hormone is essential for life and is high only under high stress, and is low when you are going about your normal daily business in a relaxed state. It rises and falls according to need.

Cortisol regulates:
– how we use fuel, our glucose metabolism
– regulates blood pressure
– regulates insulin release for blood sugar maintenance
– regulates rapid fat and carbohydrate metabolism in emergency
– impacts on immune system balance
– involved in inflammatory response.

Cortisol increases levels of blood sugar to help the body to adapt to changing situations or circumstances that provoke stress, to stand and fight or take off and escape. Cortisol is responsible for about 95% of stress adaption in your body.

When you are relaxed cortisol is low but rapidly increases when you are under stress so its key job is to keep blood sugar levels appropriate during stress and relaxation. The problem can be that when the stress has passed the cortisol levels may stay high for some time. If stress occurs on a regular basis, like daily deadlines and strict time frames, then the cortisol does not have a chance to drop down in the brief moments of relaxation. This can lead to adrenal exhaustion and chronic fatigue, with blood sugar irregularities, immune system deficiencies, anxiety, panic attacks, depression and various degenerative diseases.

Continuous high levels of cortisol can interfere with serotonin and dopamine production, two neurotransmitters that affect mood and sense of well-being.

General Adaption Syndrome – GAS

It’s important to recognize how stress can get to you. Under stress your body has to adjust or adapt and functions differently from your healthy norm. It does the best it can to regain balance within the changed circumstances. This is known as General Adaption Syndrome and has three recognizable phases.

Phase One – Alarm: immediately activates the nervous system and adrenal glands to increase energy for defence or offence.
Phase Two – Resistance: activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, the three primary glands that manage our response to stress, often referred to as H-P-A axis. These glands together regulate energy use, immune system activity and digestion. Under stress they instantly increase energy for fight or flight, and reduce energy to immune system and digestion while you are engaged in survival activity in the moment.
Phase Three – Exhaustion or Overload: prolonged stress, or often repeated stress, without opportunity for recovery, leads to breakdown of the weakest body function and dis-ease. The most common diseases in the developed nations of the West are hypertension, strokes, heart attacks, diabetes, stomach ulcers, neck and back pain, to name a few.

Signs of Stress

Know how stress can get to you. The cause of stress can be physical, mental, emotional, or environmental and the adaption to the stress will involve all these aspects. The body will do the best it can to stay productive and effective under the stress load. But the signs will become evident, not always to your self, but often to others with whom you interact.

Physically the tension in our muscles can increase and we become rigid, with neck, jaw and back pain as a result. Tension headaches are common, as are twitches and tremors and poor sleep. Dry mouth and throat can indicate very low levels of digestive juices for effectively gaining nutrition from your food, and obesity can result from comfort eating and storing instead of burning foods consumed. Bowels become over active or under active, or both in turn. Cold sweaty hands and itchy skin are further indicators, as are increased heart rate, pounding heart, high blood pressure, and shallow breathing.

Mental stress shows as forgetfulness, preoccupation, lack of concentration, diminished productivity, past focused or future obsessed, disorganized, negative view of everything, undermining self talk, loss of meaning of work and life in general.

Emotional signs of stress can be irritability, depression, angry outbursts, anxiety, impatience, narrowed focus, low self-esteem, loss of confidence, inability to make decisions, lack of interest, tendency to cry easily, compulsive thoughts, and feeling a victim. We become angry or fearful.

Behavioural changes include increased alcohol consumption, under or over eating, smoking, withdrawal, carelessness and being accident prone.

To Reduce Stress

Make sure you recognize how stress can get to you so you can stop it and reverse it. Stress diverts energy away from your immune system leaving you vulnerable to health breakdown. Medically prescribed adapaogens have been in common use for stress over the last 50 years but the results are less than favourable with many side effects and long-term problems.

Traditionally herbs from the East and the West have been reliably used in many parts of the world to reduce stress, along with acupuncture, tai chi and various martial arts, meditation and other practices. Psychologists have applied various systems and processes with varying success.

Since the 60s and 70s Kinesiology has provided effective options that allow the body and its nervous system to identify the best way to reduce stress, lift energy, and bring meaning and value back into the events of our days as we each walk our life path.

Also see: 3D “Switch On” for Your Brain http://annamcrobertblog.com/?p=289
and Stress Release Process http://annamcrobertblog.com/?p=118

Stress Less to Lose Weight

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Linda Drummond wrote in the Sunday Mail on 6th June, “ If your excess weight won’t budge, getting your anxiety levels under control could help.” It makes sense to me.

We were never meant to be in constant stress.  In the animal kingdom there is threat to life and limb when animals are stalked or do the stalking, or fight for mating rights.  But these threats come and go fairly quickly.  Once an animal escapes, or the threat passes, or the challenge is won or lost, there is a return to the non-stressed state.

Human beings are very clever.  It seem we have worked out how to remain in a stressed state non-stop, day in day out, for days, weeks, months or even years.  It’s either the job we don’t like or the in-laws we can’t get on with, or the promotion we missed, or the mortgage payments, or noisy neighbours, or a partner who doesn’t understand us, or teenage kids that rule the roost, or something.

We could fight the physical attackers but our stresses like worry or fear are emotional so we can’t resolve them physically.  Many of us try to keep busy or to run away from the problems, but that doesn’t resolve things either.  And some of us are just frozen, unable to fight or run, just get stuck.

Our body was not designed to withstand continuous stress.  “One of the things that stress does is release stress hormones cortisol and neuropeptide Y,” says Dr Sainsbury-Salis.  “Cortisol acts directly on your fat deposits, causing you to gain fat around the belly.” Cortisol receptors in your abdomen are ready and waiting to store fat in case of famine or another life-threatening situation.

And further, “Cortisol gives you a higher preference for addictive behaviours and makes high-fat and high-sugar foods much more attractive.” Dr Sainsbury-Salis says.  And further still, for many, stress hormones trigger the hypothalamus in the brain to increase hunger so they want to eat more.

New research at Garvan Institute found neuropeptide Y “causes the birth of new fat cells (that’s a new admission!), increases new blood vessels to the cells, and generally helps promote their growth and development,” says Dr Sainsbury-Salis.  But this happened only when animals in experiments ate high-fat, high-sugar diets.

Seems there is no way to win in the weight struggle.  Prolonged stress increases appetite for the wrong reason, for the wrong foods, expands the belly readily, and makes more fat cells, escalating threats to health even more – which adds further stress.  It’s now a cycle that loops round and round.

What’s the solution?  Is there one?

The problem started with prolonged stress so that’s where you look to find the solution.   Stress is now a habitual pattern.  Part of the problem is that we actually become addicted to stress hormones and being in a constant state of panic.   And if things get quiet we panic that it can’t last and set off stress anyway.  All that stress slows down your metabolism.

So reducing stress and increasing metabolism can reverse the problem.  How do you do that?  What are your options?  Well, inaction is also part of the problem.  Stress hormones are designed to give extra energy for life saving action.  If you don’t take action and use up the hormones you can’t relax.  Don’t sit on it.  Start moving your body.  Get walking.  Go to the gym.  Take up sport.  Do something physical, regularly, daily.   This will reverse the stress signals and produce feel good hormones instead.

Straight after physical activity it becomes much easier to relax, so consciously add deep breathing while you stretch and elongate muscles to further reverse stress signals.  Your brain is wired to recognize the cluster of stress hormones, plus tension in specific muscles, plus shallow breathing, as one unit.  Move to get energy flowing, use up the hormones with exercise, now breathe deeper and stretch muscles.  Your brain takes each as a signal to reverse the panic, to allow the body to relax more and more.

And use Emotional Stress Release, a Kinesiology technique, to reverse blood flow in the brain.  When distressed blood is redirected to survival programs and withdrawn from executive brain so you can’t think through or create a solution to your problem.  More on that to follow.

Cheers
Anna McRobert
anna@annamcrobert.com.au