Stress and The Effect On Our Body (and Hormones!)

How much stress are you experiencing?

When we talk about stress in 2019, no longer are we talking about a Sabor-tooth tiger coming along and trying to chase us. Stress in 2019 means an argument with your partner, work deadlines or an internal source: alcohol, gluten, sugar, surgery, dairy, toxins, circadian rhythm issues, your perception of stress and lack of resilience.

How does stress ‘fight or flight’ affect our body?

Stress involves a part of the autonomic nervous system called the sympathetic nervous system (SNS). The body shifts energy resources towards fighting off the stress response and signals the adrenal glands to release adrenalin and cortisol. These cause the your heart rate and blood vessels to dilate, digestive process to change and releases glucose into the blood stream to deal with stress.

The Hypothalamic Pituitary Adrenal Axis or HPA axis for short collects data from our body (through a negative feedback system) in regards to stress and governs our endocrine (hormone) system. Our bodies won’t wait to distinguish between a life-threatening survival response like running from a bear or being stressed over what our boyfriend said last year.

Our bodies react, and if you’re constantly stressed by any cause, it works OVERTIME before it starts to say, enough is enough. But what else does cortisol do, you might ask?

Cortisol also

• Mobilises stored energy, which may lead to insulin resistance over time (just incase you get need energy to run from that bear). Stored glycogen is brought back into the blood stream as glucose and you can imagine how may times over this may happen. Eventually, the body says NO MORE, and stops being as sensitive to insulin. Thus, this can affect your mood and neurotransmitters.
• Sends a message to your Hypothalamus in the brain to down-regulate Ghrelin (losing your appetite).
• Cortisol also suppresses the highly demanding metabolic processes of the immune system, this helps the protect us from over-activation of our immune system. – Noticed you get sick more when you’re stressed?
• May impair Serotonin, the feel good hormone.
• Cortisol raises your blood pressure and blood volume – for injury prevention.
• Could affect HPT (thyroid axis) due to chronic overtraining or under-eating. Remember, chronically under eating is a SEVERE stress to the body and can lower thyroid hormone
• or HPO (ovaries) or HPG (gonads), thus causing hormone changes or down-regulating (slowing) some of these pathways down. – no bueno if you’re looking at getting pregnant.

Stress can be the root cause of hormone imbalance and should not be overlooked when you’re trying to change your lifestyle and nutrition habits.

Some types of stressors affecting our health in 2020:

When stress becomes chronic and mismanaged it is a detriment to our health and well-being.

Prolonged stress leads to hyper physiological levels of cortisol. This alters the effectiveness of cortisol to regulate both the inflammatory and immune response because it decreases tissue sensitivity to cortisol (Segerstrom, 2006)

However, some unconscious contributing factors may be:

Inflammation within the body caused by poor nutrition choices, alcohol, drugs, sugar, leaky gut, leaky brain etc. Digestive issues from inflammatory foods or detox issues

Blood sugar regulation issues: Stress signals epinephrine/cortisol to the body to raise blood sugar (via stored glucose) to generate energy to respond to stress.

Stress may provoke blood-sugar swings, which affects blood glucose balance > thus overtime, insulin resistance. Insulin opens the cells to uptake glucose for fuel to generate energy, thus insulin issues may result in energy issues or
Electrolyte imbalance (from aldosterone and adrenal hormones). May be seen as symptoms such as irritability, nervousness and mood swings.

Circadian Rhythm issues – Lack of an optimal sleep/wake routine can heavily affect the brain and HPA axis. We need 7-9 hours each night to undergo detoxification of waste (especially in the brain), hormone regulation, memory recall, metabolism regulation, fatigue reduction, recovery, and inflammation reduction. Melatonin is a very powerful antioxidant that tells us when its time to go to sleep and it shares an inverse relationship with cortisol (High Melatonin at night, low cortisol and visa versa in the morning).

Perceived Stressors
Sometimes the perception of stress can be stressful to us; unknowingly too. It’s super important to attempt to dial down after a stressful day or show gratitude for the day ahead. Implement mindfulness, deep breathing, yoga, gratitude and meditation. Meditation increases the size of the pre-frontal cortex, which houses emotion and intellect.