How many of you regularly feel stressed? How many times a week do you catch yourself thinking ‘I’m so stressed out!’?

In this blog, I want to give you some really important information on stress. And it may not all be what you think I’m going to say.

 What is stress?

If I asked you to describe stress, you might say something like ‘it’s that feeling when you are running around at a million miles per hour, trying to catch your tail’, or ‘the feeling I get when my boss has just piled 10 huge jobs all with urgent deadlines on my desk’. Yes, the feelings that people describe when demands are put on them are greater than their ability cope, is stress, absolutely it is, but there are many other causes of stress to your body that you may never have considered. Indeed, your body can also be stressed from a bad diet, lack of sleep, lack of movement and too much exercise to name a few. You could describe it as your body’s way of responding to ANY kind of demand or threat (whether it’s real or imagined).

According to Dr. Hans Selye (acknowledged as the “father” and pioneering endocrinologist in the field of stress research), stress plays a role in every disease and induces hormonal autonomic responses. Over time, these hormonal changes can lead to ulcers, digestive dysfunction, high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, arthritis, kidney and heart disease, depleted adrenals, allergic reactions and even cancer.

How many people do you know with hormonal imbalances? By this, I mean anything from a headache before a period is due to serious sugar cravings. (And by the way, these conditions are not normal! It’s just that so many women suffer from them we have come to accept that it’s just part and parcel of having a period. A period should just come and go without any symptom at all. Wow ladies, wouldn’t that be nice!) Hormonal imbalance are caused when the important hormones in charge of keeping our menstrual cycles in check are not being able to be used to their full potential as they are having to be used to support another system within our body which is ‘stressed’ and our body/brain thinks is more urgent. Remember our body will also be working it’s hardest to support us and keep every system running as smoothly as possible even if this does mean compromising here and there.

We all experience stress and have various coping mechanisms – some healthy and others not so healthy. While short bursts of stress are not harmful, it is continual, long-term, chronic stress that’s damaging to our health. There are over 1,400 chemical reactions that occur in our bodies as a result of chronic stress.

What are the sources of stress?

Life is super busy for most of us these days and there are lots of pressures on people. It seems the more advanced we get as a race, the more opportunities for stress are creeping into our lives-

• Physical stress – digestive distress, leaky gut, nutritional deficiencies, inflammatory foods, imbalanced hormones, food intolerances, chronic illness, toxic overload, GMOs, pesticides, gluten, sugar, excess carbohydrates, processed foods, chronic infections, pharmaceutical drugs, overuse of antibiotics, antacids & anti-inflammatory drugs, extreme heat or cold, disrupted sleep, excess body fat,

• Mental stress – Jobs, retirement, disrupted sleep, finances, processing all the information we see and hear from overstimulation from phones, texting, email, video and computers, economy

• Emotional stress – relationships with lovers, divorce, hormone imbalances, depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, negative thoughts, bad relationships with friends

• Environmental stress – electromagnetic stress from computers, cell phones, microwave ovens, toxic chemicals, environmental toxins, plastics, GMOs

• Spiritual stress – unhealthy beliefs, false statements, negative mindset, not living out of integrity, lack of passion or purpose, drug and alcohol abuse, not taking full and complete responsibility for one’s actions, words & thoughts

I hope that has helped you to understand how easy it is for our bodies to suffer from forms of stress. Unfortunately it’s the stress hormone cortisol (which gets released every time we get a bit stressed) that becomes unbalanced and causes health issues for some of us.

We can never avoid stress all together but we can all make positive changes to lower it, whether it be more ‘me time’, a change in diet, a change of jobs, trying some breathing exercises or staying away from laptops after 8pm at night.  Try your best to promote your system into what we call a parasympathetic state which is a calm, relaxed state – and the only way it does that is by not being stressed!!

On that note, take three deep breaths in through your nose and out through your mouth, pausing at the end of the in breath,  breathing into your stomach not your chest. Very importantly, don’t lift your shoulders up to your ears as you breathe in.

I hope that has made the causes of stress a bit clearer and that you might be able to take some steps to take a little of the stress out of your life as a result. Deep breaths!

Love Kate x