Let's make kicking stress top of our New Year's resolutions for 2024!
Let’s talk about stress, particularly the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol is a tiny hormone that plays a big role in your body. It influences everything from our energy levels to our immune system.
Cortisol is produced by our adrenal glands, and it exists to help us deal with the stresses of life. Before we evolved into what we are today, the stresses of life came more in the way of predators and other very real threats to our lives and survival. While those stresses aren’t as common today, the less life-threatening stresses that we encounter daily still illicit the same stress response. When we are faced with a threat in life, whether real or perceived, a tiny region at the brain's base, called the hypothalamus, sets off an alarm system in the body. Through nerve and hormonal signals, this system prompts the adrenal glands, found atop the kidneys, to release a surge of hormones, such as adrenaline and cortisol; this is the start of our fight/flight response to stress.
Adrenaline makes the heart beat faster, causes blood pressure to go up, and gives you more energy to fight or flee. Cortisol, the primary stress hormone, increases sugar, also called glucose, in the bloodstream, enhances the brain's use of glucose as well as increases the availability of substances in the body that repair tissues that may get damaged in our response to stress if we are indeed required fight or flee. Cortisol also slows functions that would be nonessential or harmful in a fight-or-flight situation, in other words, it causes the nervous system to pay less attention to systems that aren’t critical to our survival in the situation at hand. Cortisol changes immune system responses and suppresses the digestive system, the reproductive system, and growth processes. This complex natural alarm system also communicates with the brain regions that control mood, motivation, and fear.
We are designed to “shake off” these stressful events as they pass, this allows our nervous system to ramp down its response to stress and return to a baseline where ease and safety dominate. Once back to this state of ease, our nervous system can resume coordinating and controlling all of the systems of our body allowing those systems to go function as they should. The trouble comes when the stress of life becomes chronic. This can cause that fight-or-flight reaction to become the new normal in your body. Over time this can have a major impact on your physical and mental health.
The long-term activation of the stress response system and too much exposure to cortisol and other stress hormones can disrupt almost all the body's processes. This puts you at higher risk of many health problems which include but aren’t limited to things like anxiety, depression, digestive problems, headaches, muscle tension and pain, heart disease including heart attacks and strokes, sleep problems, weight gain, and problems with memory and focus. That's why it's so important to learn healthy ways to cope with your life stressors. You may be wondering why you react to life stressors the way you do, this is where things get interesting. Your reaction to a potentially stressful event is different from everyone else's. How you react to your life stressors is partly the result of your experiences in life but to a greater degree, how you have been conditioned to deal with those experiences.
Allow me to share a silly story with you. A young girl is watching her mom cook a ham and she noticed that her mom cuts the ends off the ham before putting it in the oven. The little girl asks her mom why she did that and her mom responds, “That is how your grandmother always did it, ask her”. So, the little girl called her grandmother only to get the same answer so at her grandmother’s suggestion she calls her great-grandmother to get to the bottom of this mystery. When she asked her great-grandmother about the odd way of cooking ham her great-grandmother laughed and shared “Our first oven was too small for a whole ham so I had to cut the ends off to get it to fit all those years ago”
The moral of this story is we often do things or in the case of cortisol, respond to the stresses in life, in ways that served us or our family in the past. The way that we dealt with past stresses or the way we have been conditioned to deal with stresses may have served a purpose at one time and may have been a very effective way to deal with things however that same response may not serve us today and in some cases can cause us more harm than good.
So, you may be wondering what you can do about elevated cortisol. The good news is there are some really easy ways to reduce cortisol and improve your health naturally.
The biggest thing you can do is learn to react to stress in a healthy way. This can be done by journaling, self-reflection, or working with a counselor or therapist. Other ways that you can combat the effects of increased cortisol in your body include getting plenty of sleep. Studies have shown that it takes on average 8 hours for the glymphatic system to properly clean your brain of waste products (stay tuned…we will cover this in-depth in an upcoming blog post). Many neuroscientists also share that it is important to have a consistent sleep and wake cycle meaning that you should go to bed around the same time every night and wake up around the same time every morning.
Eating a healthy, mostly plant-based diet has also been shown to be beneficial to not only your brain health but your overall health as well. Included in that is being sure to drink plenty of water. Other things you can do is practice relaxation exercises such as yoga, deep breathing, meditation or polyvagal exercises. You can find an entire video of examples of polyvagal exercises on our website at drnicciedearing.com
Of course, getting adjusted regularly also has an impact on how your body and nervous system respond to the stresses of life. Regular chiropractic care has been shown to help the nervous system become more resilient to the stresses of life by widening what is referred to as our window of tolerance.
So in conclusion, if you are looking to improve your health naturally, managing your stress is a great place to start!
