Tag Archives: stress

road to recovery is a slow upward trend graph

Why do I feel worse today than I did yesterday?

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“I am following the diet strictly and was feeling better for a week, until yesterday. Today I have symptoms again! I am not better. It isn’t working!”

The road to recovery, with the right treatment plan, should be a slow upward trend. And although moving forward, this process also comes with lots of ups and downs. Healing the gut means a lot of good days and lots of ‘crappy days’.

Why crappy days?

There are so many factors that influence how happy our gut is.

  • Do you get enough sleep? Most of us are on our phones or staring at the TV the last couple hours before bed. This throws off our natural circadian rhythm, and when we don’t sleep well our cortisol levels rise.
  • Stress: If we have high cortisol, this triggers inflammation and inflammation is bad news for the gut! High cortisol, due to a lack of sleep or even as a result of stressful events or our busy jobs, has been shown to negatively impact the levels of beneficial bacteria in our microbiome. Although we are still in the beginning stages of understanding all these complex and dynamic relationships, research shows how much our lifestyle can positively or negatively impact our gut health.
  • Hormones. Women, what time of the month is it? Sex hormones play a major role in our gut functioning.
  • Germs. Are you fighting a cold, getting over a cold, or possibly have a touch of food poisoning.
  • Did you eat something that didn’t agree with you? I know how hard it is to follow a strict diet, and to expect results for your hard work. But sometimes we indulge in the wrong places without realizing it might be a problem. For instance, we are strictly gluten free, but we had a box of gluten free cookies. Well, that’ll mess up your gut!

These are just a few of many, many factors that affect our gut health and the symptoms we experience.

Sleep and stress are often the first things to ask yourself about when trying to discover why you are symptomatic.

Stress reducing:

Sleep:

  • Have consistent bedtimes
  • Get rid of the screens in the bedroom
  • No smart phones or tablets 1-2 hours before bed.
  • Don’t eat at night
  • Sleep in a dark cool room

Our gut is our second brain and just like we (ourselves, our mood) can’t expect to feel happy all day every day, we can’t expect our gut to be happy all day every day either.

The road to wellness is a slow upward trend.

The goal is to improve over time. Try to step back from the individual days of ups and downs and look at the overall progress. As long as you are on an upward trend; you are making progress. The graph demonstrates what I mean.

What happens to the body in times of stress?

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Cortisol and adrenaline are released by the adrenal gland in times of stress. These hormones perform a variety of functions to prepare the body to cope with perceived threats. These hormones have a vital role to serve, but you don’t want them in your system long term. The problem is that we experience a trauma, the “threats” and therefore stress response tend to be constant and ongoing. This causes the levels of the stress hormone cortisol in your system to be chronically elevated.

When cortisol and adrenaline are elevated, all hell breaks loose in the body.

  • Digestion is inhibited. All the important digestive juices like stomach acid and enzymes are prevented from being released. When that happens, you can’t digest your food. The undigested food continues down the tract, where it feeds the microbes instead of you, causing an imbalance of gut bacteria (more below). As a result, you get bloated and you have indigestion.
  • Cortisol creates an unhealthy environment in the gut. Besides the digestion inhibition, stress actually feeds the bad bacteria in your gut, injures the lining of the intestinal wall, and increases inflammation. These three things are the root cause of all gut issues as well as most other health diagnoses in the entire body.
  • Cortisol suppresses the immune system, so your body has more difficulty fighting off germs. You will get sick more.
  • Cortisol also interferes with sleep.
  • Cortisol is made from the same building blocks in the body as other hormones. If the adrenal gland needs to keep producing more and more cortisol, it will steal the building blocks from other hormones. So, your thyroid hormones and sex hormones will be low. This can lead to fatigue, weight gain, digestive problems, hair loss, loss of sex drive, disruption of menses, and more.
  • High stress, imbalanced hormones, and gut issues all affect the brain. Mood and cognition will suffer.
  • High stress hormones disrupt your blood sugar leading to cycles of sugar craving and crashes, fatigue, and weight gain or loss.
  • After a period of heightened stress, the adrenals are fatigued, and can’t produce sufficient cortisol. Low cortisol levels lead to a (now familiar) host of problems, such as gut troubles and fatigue. This is sometimes termed “adrenal fatigue” but the more scientific name is HPA Axis dysfunction.

 

What can be done?

There are many treatments and things to combat all this harm to the body. A few are described below:

  • Eat a whole foods diet. Cut the sugar and processed foods. Processed foods come from a factory, box, or bag. Eat nutrient dense real foods that come from an animal or the earth. A sweet potato, an apple, or a piece of chicken are all whole foods.
  • Eat regularly. Do not skip meals which puts stress on the body.
  • Take a high-quality multivitamin. Other supplements can help too. Examples would be a B complex, fish oil, Ashwagandha, Rhodiola, Phosphatiylserine, Magnesium Glycinate, Passionflower, or Probiotics. It is always recommended to be under the care of a supplement expert to know what is right for you.
  • Prioritize sleep.
  • Deep breathing or meditation.
  • Get sunlight and fresh air every day.

For more on this topic and others like it, check out my eBook.

Everyday Relaxation Tips

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During the day, your body is constantly getting the message that it isn’t the time to relax. There’s always more to do, more to worry about, another text to answer, or another task to complete. You need to take breaks that are actually breaks from stress, so that your body gets the message that it is safe and the stress mode can be switched off. This means not just trading one form of stress (work) for another (social media or email).

Tips and tricks to fit relaxation breaks into your typical day:

  • At every red light, take a deep breath. Breath in for a count of 6, and breath out for a count of 8. Repeat as long as you can.
  • Between clients, take a deep breath (similar instructions to item above). When you do this, try to walk away from your computer or desk to a more relaxing space.
  • Set reminders on your phone, for every hour or half hour. When your reminder goes off, practice deep breathing (similar instructions to item above) or stand up and do some stretches.
  • Listen to music. Turn off the social media and the text notifications and listen to a song or two.
  • Sit and stare at the wall for five minutes. Seriously, doing nothing does something.
  • Get some fresh air and sunshine. Go for a walk around the block, even if it is cold.
  • Find something that makes you laugh. Watch a comedy sketch or read a funny book.

The above is an excerpt from my eBook. For more valuable information check it out!

Tired of being tired?

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phonto

Feeling tired but doc says nothing is wrong? Might be adrenal fatigue. Adrenal fatigue is a diagnosis used in functional medicine.  Most conventional doctors only deal with adrenal problems if your adrenals are down to zero. But what if they are not at zero but are very depleted and you are not bouncing back? That’s a problem that deserves attention too.

Adrenal fatigue is caused by stress. Stress can be physical (infection, surgery), emotional (divorce, death), or environmental (poor diet, toxins). The adrenal glands respond to every kind of stress the same way.

Adrenal fatigue can be sudden, as in a terrible car accident or gradual, with smaller stresses that accumulate or come so close to one another that your body has no time to recover. I’m sure we can all imagine a time where a root canal, major job stress, family member major illness, and a month of binging on holiday candy and egg nog, all can happen at the same time.

Basically adrenal fatigue occurs when the amount of stress is more than the body’s adrenals can cope with.

A short (not complete) list of symptoms:
-Continuing fatigue not relieved by sleep
-Increased effort to do everyday tasks
-Craving for salty foods
-Increased time to recover from illness, injury or trauma
-Skipping a meal causes tons of problems such as worse fatigue and irritability

Conditions associated with adrenal fatigue:
-Chronic diseases
-Use of corticosteroids
-Chronic fatigue syndrome
-Fibromyalgia
-Hypoglycemia
-Respiratory infections

Eating habits are very important in treating adrenal fatigue. Some tips:
-Eat at frequent intervals. The adrenal hormone cortisol is responsible for keeping our blood sugar at normal levels. You need to eat to keep your blood sugar up because your body can’t do it on its own.
-Avoid caffeine, it depletes the adrenals too, making matters worse not better
-Eat breakfast.
-Snack between lunch and dinner and snack before bed.
-Eat good quality whole food.
-Go ahead and eat salt. You need it.

Food sensitivities also play a key role as the offending food causes histamine and other inflammatory substances to be released. It takes cortisol to reduce that inflammation.  That’s taxing on the already drained adrenals.

If you suspect you have adrenal fatigue you should get assessed by a functional doctor or nutritionist and get a personalized plan. You should also check out my eBook!

Eat, Drink and Be Calm

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ID-100306682Most of us are rushing around all day. Squeezing in eating and checking it off the schedule. If you have kids, meals can be even more rushed. The kids are hungry and want the food now, and then you all have to zoom off to school or an activity afterward.

Here’s the problem: when we are in stressed-out-rushing mode our digestive systems are too. This means we digest and absorb less of our food and our body doesn’t receive all that it needs to function well. (And the kids don’t get all they need to grow!)

The cortisol that is released when you are stressed (any time you are not relaxed, you are stressed) causes all kinds of damage to your body.

But what it does to your digestion? It basically switches it off. Less stomach acid and digestive enzymes (necessary for digestion), and less absorption of vital nutrients.

So, here’s what I suggest. Before each meal: REST, For 20 seconds. What you do in that 20 seconds is up to you. Breathe and meditate. Say Grace. Doesn’t matter, as long as you are STILL. Set your body into relaxed-mode and you will get tons more nutrition out of your meal.

Image courtesy of khongkitwiriyachan at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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