Welcome to Week 3 of The New Year’s Phase 1 Challenge as we dive into building a balance of stress and rest into our lives.
To get started, I wish to draw your attention to the word balance in the previous sentence. When it comes to the health of your body, stress is all about balance: if you have too much, it causes harm. If you have too little, you aren’t improving.
Stress is an important part of life. At its root, stress is a signal to us – and our bodies – that there is a potential threat or challenge and that something needs to happen if we are going to make it through it. Then, once the threat/challenge is gone, the result of the stress serves as a signal to the body to improve so that it is even more capable of making it through that situation in the future:
- See a bear while walking in the woods? Stress will get you running away (or fighting off) by signaling to systems throughout the body to support the higher need for energy and focus.
- Then, following that sprint, the biochemical mixture that has arisen in your tissues will serve as a signal to improve upon your ability to run faster/longer in the future (this includes muscle fiber recruitment, formation of blood vessels, and enhanced mitochondrial capacity).
- Hear your boss tell you a deadline that you don’t think you can hit? Stress will get you focused as you try to get the work accomplished while sending more energy to your brain to keep up with the enhanced demand.
- Then, if that task is accomplished, you walk away with an enhanced ability to accomplish it (or similar tasks) in the future
- Or, if that task is not accomplished, you walk away from work with this task hanging over your head, along with those stress hormones.
Of course, the difference between the two examples is that the first is actually a life-threatening situation, one where you would have once needed to be able to adapt physically to overcome the challenges of the natural world; the second example, on the other hand, is not really life-threatening, although your body perceives it to be in the same way.
There is a second important difference in these examples:
- The first is a short term stress, something that arises quickly, serves its purpose, and then falls away leaving you stronger than before.
- The last bullet point is something that stays with you – that is on your mind all day long, gnawing at you as you try to perform other tasks. This is not a beneficial stress because it does not leave you stronger than before, and instead, is likely a driver of unhealthy adaptations in your body.
The distinction between these cases is what we need to work through this week. When we are presented with a stressor, the body is given the opportunity to improve. However, if that stress is not removed, then it can become a burden on the body leading to dysregulation and dysfunction such as…
- poor blood sugar control
- visceral fat storage
- weight gain (excessive fat storage)
- chronic inflammation
- insulin resistance
… which are all key factors driving the progression of poor health and modern disease.
Let’s dig into how chronic stress causes these issues so that we see clearly why it is a good idea to devote this effort to avoiding it.
Chronic Stress
Stress, from a physiological perspective, is a mix of hormones and other biomolecules interacting via multiple pathways. Two of the key hormones driving these pathways are adrenaline and cortisol. The response to these hormones is complex, but I want to draw your attention to one particular effect:
When these hormones are elevated, your body receives the signal that it needs to make plenty of energy available for cells throughout the body to use, including your brain and your muscles. The result is the release of fat and glucose from storage and into the bloodstream, from which point they can enter different types of tissue to be used up to produce ATP.
This is a good thing if you need to sit down and crank out some work or outrun a bear (or, more applicable to the modern world, run a race or win a match). However, if you don’t actually need to use this energy, then what happens to it?
The answer seems to be that this energy (fats and carbohydrates) go on to cause dysfunction throughout the body. When fat is released from its safe storage in subcutaneous adipose tissue and yet does not get utilized, it has to go somewhere. The answer seems to be that this fat ends up stored in and around the organs (visceral fat), and from there it can go on to cause dysfunction such as inflammation and insulin resistance.
Keep in mind, when it comes to stress in the body, it doesn’t matter where the stress signal is coming from. It could be work or other life demands that send the signal to release stress hormones, or it could be too much time spent exercising. Stress in your body is stress, and if it these hormones stay elevated, the body is forced into a dangerous situation.
This concept is fairly easy to understand as we have all felt it: when the body receives a constant “on” signal for stress, it is put in a constant “go” state, being primed for action. We have all felt this – we know what it is like to feel that excessive “go” signal, and then to burn out over time.
And now, I want to go even further, adding on another layer to this that is a common story for our over-stressed lifestyles. I want to keep digging because I know that this is the story that so many of us suffer through. It’s the story I hear regularly from those I speak to, and it’s a story I, myself, lived years back.
When we find ourselves in a position where we are losing a battle against the industrial world (speaking to the industrial not-so-foods having caused physical effects like weight gain and life stresses having caused a noticeable impact), a common reaction is to devote a serious effort into working off this burden with exercise. This often means more, more, more: more time at the gym. More time running. Pushing more and more.
But remember, stress is stress. If we are already under a stressful burden and then, on top of this, add a high load of cardiovascular stress… well, you can add two and two together.
Dietary stress + lifestyle stress + cardiovascular stress is just a whole bunch of stress.
This is why I spent the entirety of last week teaching you how you can exercise wisely, which means you are better able to avoid this chronic cardio.
This is also why I spent the entire first week teaching you how to avoid industrial not-so-foods and the burden they put on the body.
And with the rest of the week, we will spend our time learning how we can release much of the stress in our lives through different types of practices.
Putting this all together now, here’s what we are avoiding at a physiological level:
- Chronic stress, in any form, which leads directly to visceral fat storage, chronic inflammation, insulin resistance, and other dysfunction throughout the body.
- The behavior that commonly arises as a result of chronic stress, including the consumption of industrial not-so-foods and over-exercising
And finally, here’s what I wish for you to focus on this week:
- Gaining an understanding of the stressful events in your life, whether they are lifestyle or exercise-induced
- Understanding practices that you can use to de-stress
- Building habits based on these practices
We’ll get into 2 and 3 tomorrow, but for today, take a moment to think about how your activities may be adding stress into your life. Is there anything that you are doing in the name of improving that is actually leading to more stress. Is the payoff worth it?