Stress
/By Dr. Kelli
Stress can make us sick and unhappy. Today we are plagued with diseases that accumulate damage slowly-heart disease, cancer, cerebrovascular disorders, diabetes. These diseases can be caused or made worse by stress, so there is significant value in understanding stress and how to mitigate it.
How Stress Works
To understand the stress-response and how to manage it we need to understand a bit of the neurology first. The autonomic nervous system is the involuntary, automatic part of our nervous system and it consists of the sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system. You might remember those words from high-school biology or maybe you slept through that class, so let’s refresh. The sympathetic nervous system is known as the “fight or flight” and it is activated during flight, fright, fight and sex. Working in opposition to the sympathetic system is the parasympathetic nervous system (“rest and digest”), which promotes growth and energy storage.
During the stress-response the sympathetics are turned on and the parasympathetics are turned off.
We are not designed to maintain constant high stress levels. Built into our physiology is a reservoir of cortisol intended to be used for short periods of time when in stressful situations. Imagine you are camping at Yellowstone National Park and while on a hike you cross paths with a bear. That is a stressful situation that will spark cortisol production so that you have the energy to RUN! So, you run and make it back to your car safely. Shortly after, your brain would realize that the danger is eliminated and the stress response should turn off. However, you open your phone to 23 unread emails, your husband just got laid-off, and your Facebook news feed is nothing but negativity. Your brain senses this and the stress response stays on sometimes for months or even years.
A sustained, active sympathetic nervous system can trigger symptoms including:
Headaches
Frequent colds/infections
Weakened gut health
Low energy
Loss of sex drive
Chronic pain
Muscle tension
Unnatural posture
Nerve dysfunction
Mental strain/irritability
Increased pain perception
Decreased sleep quality
3 Types of Stress
Homeostasis- another buzz word from biology 101- is the state of steady internal, physical, and chemical conditions maintained by living systems. A stressor is anything in the outside world that knocks you out of homeostatic balance or the anticipation of it. The stress response is what your body does to reestablish homeostasis.
1) Physical stress includes contact sports, prolonged postures/physical inactivity, sitting at a computer, rapid growth changes, and accidental traumas.
2) Chemical stress can be found in both the internal (physiological) and external environments. Stressors includes dietary habits, how foods are grown, stored and prepared, medications, nutritional supplements, home and work place environment, air quality, cleaning products, sanitizers, pesticides, artificial fragrances and many more.
3) Emotional/Mental stress includes depression, anger, hostility, anxiety, heartbreak, loss, jealousy, pessimism, and change.
How We Deal With Stress
At some point in our lives we found a way to deal with stress whether the outcome was helpful or harmful long-term. Unfortunately, most of the time it is the latter. These coping mechanisms feel good and are easy in the moment but they manifest themselves in a vicious cycle of self-sabotage. If you read this previous post about habits, you will learn that the habits we form in response to stress are deep-rooted into our neurology.
I am no different than many of you in the forms of coping I default to when I am feeling stressed out. Drinking, eating, binging TV and scrolling social media are a few that come to mind. These *almost* never make me feel better or address the root cause of the issue at hand. If anything, I feel more drained and uninspired than before and the effects pile up on top of one another until I’m debilitated and completely depleted.
We often fail to consider the harmful effects of chemical and physical stress because they are usually quietly lurking in the background activating your stress response without you even realizing it. For example, let’s consider posture. We sit slouched over our desk every day for 10 years until one afternoon when you start to notice some pain in the neck and tightness between the shoulder blades. At first glance, you might think that the pain is “all of a sudden” and “it came out of nowhere.” But it didn’t that physical stress has been wreaking havoc on your system for years until finally something had to give. The same goes for living in a house with hidden mold. It’s so common for symptoms like headache, fatigue and congestion to be written off as ‘normal’ or blamed on allergies but the reality is, our bodies are being subjected to TONS of stressors daily and they are keeping us in a dominate sympathetic state.
Mitigating & Managing Stress
It’s important to emphasize that we can change the way we cope, both physiologically and psychologically. Sheer repetition of certain activities can change the connection between your behavior and activator of your stress-response. For example, the first time I adjusted someone I had the heart rate of a hummingbird, my hands were visibly shaking, a wave of heat rolled across my body and I was already stressing about the next time I had to adjust again. Now, after a few thousand repetitions, I am calm, cool and collected when I adjust. I repeated the experience so many times that I stopped being scared and anxious which changed my hormone secretion patterns. The entire psychological component of my stress-response was habituated away.
Here are some ways you can start easing the stressors in your life in order to move your system toward a healing parasympathetic state:
Chiropractic adjustments ➔ chiropractic adjustments positively impact the nervous system and its ability to communicate in the body- adjusting the spine affects the nerves that stimulate parasympathetic activation, thus restoring some homeostasis to your system (this is the reason why fussy, sympathetic dominant babies usually fall right to sleep after an adjustment)
Check out this blog post for more about Chiropractic and the Nervous System
Remove toxins ➔ start slow and one at a time begin to replace toxic household/cosmetic items with natural, more clean options (good idea to toss all of those glade plug-in air “fresheners”)
Exercise ➔ makes you feel good by secretion of beta-endorphin, sense of self-efficacy and achievement; stress reducing so long as it is something you actually want to do; consistency- minimum of 20-30 minutes at a time, a few times a week to get the health benefits; don’t overdo it- too much can be at least as bad as too little
Meditation ➔ regular, sustained basis- daily for 15-30 minutes at a time
Social Support ➔ getting social support from the right person, the right network of friends, the right community is wonderful but the strongest stress-reducing qualities of social support is the act of giving social support- to be needed; charitable acts also serve as an amazing source of control because we all have the ability to make the world a better place with our actions
Posture ➔ vital for all of you WFH people- keep your computer at eye level, take short, frequent breaks, move your mouse to your side (brings shoulders back), be aware of your posture and correct it regularly throughout the day (shoulders down and back, head neutral).
Diet ➔ My favorite rule for a “diet” is the 80/20 rule. 80% of the time you eat whole, real foods and 20% of the time you have Chick-fil-A and a pint of Blue Bell.
The 80/20 rule applies to stress management as well. 80% of the stress reduction is accomplished with the first 20% of effort. Don’t procrastinate your stress management for Monday or next month when you have less going on. Take time out to do it almost daily. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Stick with it and the changes will come!