Feeling a little frazzled? Let’s have a closer look at stress and what it does to us.

How is that glorious life of yours looking after lock down? Have you made the changes that you wanted to, when you had so much time to just sit and think about what was important to you and what wasn’t. Remember those things you said, like, hey I am not going to do this anymore, I am going to make some changes to my life when we go back to “normal”? Well I was just wondering whether you had made those changes or not??? Just wondering…..

Anyway, today I wanted to share with you some of the stages of burn out and what they look like because in our quest to be everything to everyone and have everything all at once we often seem to get caught up in doing everything now, having everything now which can often leave us chasing our tails and feeling a little frazzled.

And when we are feeling frazzled it means we are probably feeling a little or even “a lot” stressed - and hey my gorgeous peeps stress lowers mood, mindset, motivation and mojo - SO, I hope you are with me that, that just doesn’t sound like fun at all….. So, I just wanted to give you a little bit of background into what stress can do to our bodies and how simple it can be to fix.

Stress comes in lots of different forms - work, life and emotional stressors, GI stress - stuff that is happening in our gut that we may or may not be aware of - parasites, SIBO, Candida, Viruses - all of these things create stress in our body. Stress effects our hormones which effects our immune system which all turns out to be a bit of a viscous cycle for the body. In order to help the body out we need to work on all three things. Our body is always trying to find a way to balance and regulate itself (a pretty clever cookie really!). So we need to figure out what it is that is stressing the body so that we can work on that (is it food, stress, leaky gut, parasites, toxic overload etc.).

If you know that you are going through a bit of a stressful time (and that this is for a short period of time!) then look at taking some B vitamins and get more sleep!!!! Our bodies are designed to handle stress for short periods of time…. Just not so much for longer periods.

I have talked about our diurnal rhythm before (basically about our sleep and wake patterns) and how there is no such thing as a night owl, that we should all be getting to sleep between 9 and 10pm and that we should be getting up around 6am. This should be our norm…. Can we have some late nights here and there? You bet ya…. but 10 -6 should be our “norm”. YEP that’s right, EVERYONE’S norm (and I know that some people are shift workers or there are other reasons but this is looking at the best for your body, your health and your longevity). I have talked about our cortisol levels (stress hormone) and how they start to decrease around the 9pm mark and that is when we should be heading off to bed and how they start to rise around that 6am mark - that is our normal curve - For my sleep story read here.

However, what happens when it all starts to go wrong. What happens when you have have prolonged spells of stress for whatever reason, what starts to happen to your body?

Well it starts looking a little bit like this.

The Alarm Stage is High Cortisol.

Your cortisol levels will remain high throughout the whole day. You will feel like you can do it all, you will always have cortisol circulating in your body so you will be capable of doing so much….. However, your body is not designed to be like this for long periods of time, it is burning your body out. You will be using lots of minerals like calcium, sodium, magnesium and potassium. Often we wont see someone coming into the Dr’s office with this because they are so hard out and still feel great BUT it is a warning!!! If you know that you are doing lots and that you have lots going on and that you are feeling amazing.. Just take some time to breath, take some time to reset your body and fill it with extra vitamins and minerals as you will not be able to carry on like this forever!!! Make sure that this is for a short period of time and that you compensate this time with calming relaxed and healing times as well.

OK so what next……

Resistance Stage - Diurnal Dysfunction. We often will see this as being tired and wired and I think you will be able to relate to this when I explain (either for yourself or someone else you know). This is when you are no longer really adapting to stress in your life. You hit the off button on the alarm a few too many times. You need coffee to get you going and if you needed coffee before you will need more now, just to get you through. AND then viola at the end of the day you have lots of energy again. Your cortisol levels are not at an all time low but they are at a more constant level throughout the day and often going up slightly as you go to bed. There is no major rise in cortisol to signal the beginning of the day or no calming of the cortisol at night time…… You are no longer feeling energetic throughout the day and then you are not able to sleep at night time either, your joy for life will be diminishing!! The body will be trying to replenish and re-balance and will be depleting your stores of essential vitamins and minerals that normally help to keep you well and energised.

You guessed it, next comes the

Fatigue stage - Low Cortisol. This is more like chronic fatigue/adrenal fatigue. The body is worn out, and your cortisol levels are low all day. Often you may feel like you have flu like symptoms, swollen glands, tired, overwhelmed, there is no fight or flight response anymore. You often feel anxious and irritable. This is when you have had too much stress input in your body for too long. It is possible to come back from this but it is all about healing your body, taking the time to heal and resetting your priorities. You will need to push away the things that you no longer need and prioritise the things that you do.

Because the body has the amazing ability to heal itself it does what it can to keep you in balance and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realise that this must effect other parts of the body. Your hormones take a bit whack at this stage and your sex hormones are really mucked with. In the short term your body just produces more hormones to keep up with everything that is going on. Progesterone often takes a hit as it will go to cortisol instead to keep you going. This can then lead to estrogen dominance in the form that your estrogen/progesterone balance is not right anymore because your progesterone is lower than it should be. Then finally the body just can’t keep producing the hormones that it needs and we then end up with disease.

These processes that the body goes through are amazing and they are normal it is just that we are not designed to stay in this state for long periods of time. We need to have stress free times and calm times doing nothing!!!

Remember your body is an amazing machine and can heal itself given the right circumstances. Focus on the 80/20 rule - 80% of your results will come from 20% of your actions. Make sure the foods you are eating are not stressing your system and supplement to calm the SNS

Your easy wins are

• GET better sleep - practice 10pm to 6am

• Reduce Stress - Gentle exercise - yoga, stretching, walking, breath, meditate, calming activities - art, music etc. Hard out exercise is just another form of stress when you are in an already stressed state.. Think gentle on yourself!

• Eat Well - Remove gluten and dairy. Digestion will not be as robust when you are stressed so eat easy to digest, soothing, warm, cooked foods - Organic where possible.

• Supplement - Multi - B Vitamins - Vit C and Zinc - Adrenal support - Magnesium and Omega 3

Look at ways to continually reduce your stress load - always prioritise time for you to have your down time and look after your body. It is a lot easier to keep well than it is to come back from a complete burn out. Listen to what is happening inside your body and what is happening in your life and make changes early to minimise a disease outcome… Our beautiful bodies can only take so much……. so please be gentle and loving towards them…

Have a think about what your life looked like during lock down. What things were taken away that you really don’t need to bring back. How can you make your life the life you dream of - do you really need to keep striving for more all at once to the detriment of your health and wellbeing???

Love you all lots, take care of yourselves and practice some awesome self care things today!!!

Big Love

Mel

xx