People generally know a couple of things things:
- They don’t like to feel stressed (physically, or in a “stressed” state of mind)
- They are aware of some level of mind-body connection
- There’s some sort of connection in how we live our life and how we generally feel
So, to go a bit further, here are three things I see a lot, which exacerbate the issue of stress (when the physiological load on the system is higher than the available resources). For further reading, some of this is based off of the work of Dr. Ray Peat, Dr. Broda Barnes and Hans Selye. Other aspects are based on experience of pushing to wrong way for a few too many years.
1. “Quitting” sugar, or avoiding fructose or carbohydrate. Carbs are our primary source of fuel for the brain (at all times) and primary source of fuel for the muscle (during activity). A lack of carbohydrate for fuel will start to break down free fatty acids in the muscle tissue and increase cortisol (stress hormone). A state of low blood sugar will increase cortisol (stress response).
2. Fasting, skipping breakfast, poor food frequency. Again, a decrease in blood sugar can create a stress response. Skipping meals could be the single simplest way to signal to the brain that we are in a state of scarcity and need to be alert (cortisol) to find more food. Hence sleep issues – people often awake between 1 and 2am with hyper cortisol and hyper-adrenaline states.
3. Too much or the wrong type of exercise or “movement”. Somewhere there was a mistake when a few people shifted from “movement is healthy” to you need to train every day, or “move” multiple times every day (don’t worry, been there..). It doesn’t matter if it is lower level mixed in with the higher intensity stuff, there is still a load on the available resources. Endurance sports, high intensity training etc should be avoided when stress is high, both of these forms of breathless exercise reduce carbon dioxide levels (calmative) and can decrease body temperature and pulses (metabolism) and increase stress.
In a few of the cases, the mistake is thinking that the short term cortisol spike (“feels good to blow off steam” or “wow I feel so alert after not eating breakfast, I can go all day!”) is long term beneficial. Instead of down-regulating a stressed system, it’s up-regulating it further, prepping the system to mobilise and find more food.
