We see it every day, we want to make changes. We want to live better, but in the middle of our process things happen that stress us, for example, any factor that we cannot handle effectively at the moment and we give up, or we are going through a period of significant stress and when that process of stress we end up exhausted or sick.
Chronic stress alters our mood, prevents us from enjoying our lives, causes insomnia, causes intestinal disorders such as constipation, general diarrhea, and even abdominal distension, and in the long run, it makes us sick because it ruins our immune system.
So what do you have to do to eliminate chronic stress without having to go live in the forest to achieve it, stress is present in every challenge in life, be it the smallest, even the great challenges.
For example, people who want to lose weight and do not lose weight despite exercising, people who, although they improve their sleeping habits, cannot overcome insomnia. People, who want to improve their immune system and continue to suffer from allergies annually, repeat candidiasis, but why?
The denominator of all this is chronic stress, but mainly the problem is the lack of tools to manage stress correctly in our daily lives.
Because we are all going to be subjected to stress sooner or later, we are not going to escape, the problem is how our body deals with that stress, and how stress is not going to disappear, we are going to continue to be bombarded day by day with factors that can generate stress in our body.
The most logical response to stop this situation is to improve our natural response to stress in order to adapt without causing illness, making our body function optimally.
The interesting thing is that many people are exposed to high levels of stress and do not recognize themselves as such, but when they relax and when that level of stress disappears, they fall asleep or become ill.
Effect of Chronic Stress
There is a huge variety of symptoms that we experience when we accumulate stress in our body and that we mistakenly attribute to age, overtraining, not getting enough sleep, or any other excuse that seems reasonable at the time.
Some of the most important effects of chronic stress are that first, we have a weak immune system and high blood glucose levels that alter our sugar levels, which obviously leads us to have a desire to consume sweets and difficulty losing fat.
Especially in places related to cortisol, we can have hormonal imbalances such as low testosterone levels, and low growth hormone, with which children exposed to high levels of stress will grow less, a greater tendency to form fatty liver, depression, and anxiety.
Mood changes are caused by the imbalance of the neurotransmitters that control our mood, such as serotonin. Other effects of chronic stress would be cardiovascular diseases, osteoporosis, insomnia, digestive problems, and concentration problems.
How stress works
Stress is a non-specific response of our body to a change in homeostasis, that is, a change in the balance within our body, although this does not mean that the stress in itself is a bad thing since stress fulfills an essential role in keeping us alive, otherwise it wouldn’t exist as a mechanism in the first place.
Stress has the duality that it can be bad and good at the same time, everything depends on the dose, that’s why there is good stress or hermetic stress and bad stress that we call distress, considering that stress and high levels of cortisol during having long been the basis of modern diseases.
Fighting chronic stress head-on can be exhausting
Learn to handle it so it doesn’t handle you
Sources of Stress and Its Types
Today we have sources of stress everywhere, from lack of sleep which is becoming more common, chronic infections, osteoarticular injuries that we have somewhere in our body, and chemical stress due to the drugs we consume such as alcohol, and nicotine if we smoke.
Environmental pollution depends on where we live, chemical products used, poor quality of the water we drink, and electromagnetic pollution because we sleep with the Wi-Fi next to us.
Mental stress due to anxiety, depression, or anger, due to loneliness, they can also suffer from nutritional stress, because you have allergies, due to nutritional deficiency, due to food intolerance, having an unbalanced bacterial flora, financial stress, due to your career, due to love relationships and relatives, add to this cell phone, children, traffic, est.
As we can see we are surrounded by factors that cause us stress, and the way in which we actively manage stress is the key to knowing that it will be entering and leaving our body, otherwise it will undermine your quality of life and your health.
The changes that cortisol and stress generated in the body
Cortisol is the main hormone related to stress, this hormone is crucial because it is released at a specific rate throughout the day, to a greater extent in the morning to help you wake up and be active and it decreases in values throughout the day. Today, virtually every cell in our body has receptors for cortisol, so all of those cells can be affected by stress.
Cortisol and its entire hormonal axis affect your energy levels and your blood sugar level, and above all it does this in the morning, that’s why if I’m stressed I can wake up with high blood sugar regardless of the diet I follow.
This by affecting my body’s circadian cycle, the day and night cycle, so when I’m sleepy it basically alters the speed of my metabolism. It alters the level of information that I am going to have, my blood pressure, and above all my memory capacity.
But why do we have cortisol, why do we have stress in our body? because in the face of a threat, it does not matter if this threat is real, or as in most cases it is imaginary, a lot of cortisol is released in our body to prepare to flee or to fight.
This increases heart rate, blood pressure, blood sugar, breathing, and even muscle tone, but more importantly, in the face of such threats, the brain shuts down all other hormonal axes for a time.
Other hormones shut down during the process that our brain has identified are not necessary for our survival at this time and are not a priority.
But if this stimulus occurs chronically, as in the vast majority of us who are exposed to chronic stress, it slows down the growth of our body, slows down the rate at which our body renews tissues, and reduces the capacity of our immune system.
All this cortisol process stops non-essential activities like your digestive system and uses that energy to face the threat, that’s why it interrupts our digestive processes and causes many foods to dislike you.
Therefore, according to research, it is already known that these stressful events are associated with chronic digestive disorders, such as irritable colon, abdominal distension, reflux, and ulcers.
Chronic stress and fertility
Chronic stress is particularly damaging to the female reproductive organs, and fertility, this happens because the functioning of a hormone called GnRH (gonadotropin-releasing hormone) is blocked, which reduces the production of sperm, and reduces ovulation, lowers sexual activity in general.
So if a woman wants to get pregnant she has to know how to manage chronic stress levels very well, just think of progesterone in every pregnant woman as a process that is completely opposite to the process of stressing me out.
How do we know we are chronically stressed?
The point is that by dealing with stressors for years we get used to them and adapt, thus making it less obvious that we are really stressed, so we cannot identify if we are really suffering from chronic stress.
How can we improve that stress without even being aware that we are stressed, the first thing we have to do is be aware that we really are stressed?
Some way to evaluate them is by measuring something called heart rate variability, which measures how much the beats of your heart vary from each other, the more constant they are without varying their rhythm, the lower the latent heart rate variability.
This serves to measure the health of our nervous system and the recovery that I have, the more variability of the heart rate, the more the parasympathetic nervous system is stimulated and the more I can relax and compensate for all the symptoms caused by chronic stress, this variability is measured in the milliseconds.
When we relax our body releases a substance called acetylcholine and our heartbeats slow down giving more time to each beat to vary the rhythm and thus increase this variability, there are already many fitness products such as watches, and rings that measure the variability of heart rate in milliseconds so it’s interesting since I don’t have to draw blood.
Solutions for coping with chronic stress
How do I deal with stress in a healthier way? Stress leads us to have shallow and light breathing and to be less oxygenated, therefore we can use deep breathing techniques such as Buteyko.
Another would be meditation because if you practice some breathing exercises, you lower your anxiety level by increasing the parasympathetic activity that relaxes me and corrects all these stress-related problems.
At the level of nutrition, they can consume foods that do not generate inflammation, be careful with the foods to which you are allergic or sensitive since these foods are identified by the body as a threat, such as being sensitive to gluten when ingesting it, the body will identify as a threat.
Bacterial flora
Having a good bacterial flora is good since many of these bacteria are necessary to activate the parasympathetic system that calms you down after stress.
But under chronic stress, these bacteria die and others grow in their place which is harmful because it is important that in addition to reducing the foods that cause inflammation, it is necessary to repair our bacterial flora with probiotics and prebiotics.
On the other hand, under stress, probiotics serve to compete with the bacteria that I want to displace, incorporating bacteria that help me increase the amount of serotonin that it produces since it improves my mood and improves my digestive part as well.
Prebiotics are necessary because they are the food of probiotics.
Supplements to lower cortisol level
Within the food supplements to lower the level of cortisol there are vitamins such as vitamin C, which is very good for controlling stress since the lower the levels of vitamin C, the higher the levels of cortisol. Other vitamins that are essential for this process are vitamins. from group B, mainly B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, and B12.
Omega 3 is found both in the liver of fish, mainly that of cod, also a good idea is that while we increase the levels of omega 3 and lower omega 6, we lower trans fats.
Magnesium, since a low level of magnesium, manages to lower the level of testosterone and therefore induce higher levels of anxiety, when you have to face a stressful situation and your magnesium levels are low, you will overestimate the stress and the better Magnesium for these purposes is magnesium Trionate.
Adaptogenic Herbs
An adaptogen is a natural substance present in some plants that work so that our brain and central nervous system adapt to the requirements of each moment, especially when we have less capacity to do so.
Our body is a perfect adaptation machine since man lives in the most variable conditions such as climate, stress, food availability, adaptation to a new professional challenge, and family and social demands.
But despite having this great capacity, it is inevitable that we face situations that are beyond us and that require a greater effort on our part, either because circumstances change or because the passage of time means that we do not have the same response capacity.
Adaptogenic herbs are useful for lowering stress as they lower the impact of cortisol but only in the places where we need to lower it.
If for some reason you need cortisol in a part of your body because you had an accident or an injury, adaptogenic herbs will not reduce cortisol in that part, but if your boss yelled at you, they will help you lower cortisol levels in the blood.
The Adaptogen provides us with the necessary stimulus for the brain and central nervous system to regenerate by their own means, that is, it produces an energizing effect and hormonal rejuvenation, increasing productivity, even in situations of chronic stress.
The adaptogenic herbs par excellence are Ashwagandha, Ginseng, Maca, Reishi Mushroom, and Rhodiola Rosea.
Ashwagandha Health Benefits
Ashwagandha is one of the most important herbs in Ayurveda, which is a traditional form of alternative medicine based on Indian principles of natural healing.
The ashwagandha plant is a small shrub with yellow flowers that is native to India and Southeast Asia. Extracts or powder from the root or leaves of the plant is used to treat a variety of conditions, including anxiety and fertility problems.
Here are the potential benefits of ashwagandha, based on research:
Restilen effectively supports adaptation to a stressful environment. The modern world abounds in stimuli that have a negative impact on the human nervous system, which can result not only in the worsening of one’s mood and a drop in energy but also in the appearance of many diseases.
Our body struggles with stress every day. Its intensity can be different, and the time of negative factors affecting our nervous system can also vary.
Short-term stress is sometimes motivating and is one of the main developmental factors. Unfortunately, sometimes stress factors leave their mark on our bodies, contributing to many diseases.
RELAX
Forget your chronic stress and start living to the fullest, Restilen is for everyone who has ever felt stress, anxiety, or nervousness and wants to relieve the stress.
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