10 Signs STRESS Is DESTROYING Your Body

Hello, Hellchampions. Today we're going to talk about the top 10 signs that you have too much stress and a guarantee that there is no other health topic that affects your health as much as this. But you have to understand the central mechanism behind stress and then you'll be able to transform your life. The thing that manages stress in your body is called the autonomic nervous system, or the ANS, and it processes billions of bits every second. So everything that you don't have to think about, like beating your heart and digesting food and making new skin cells and so forth, it's all handled by the autonomic nervous system. And the ANS has two branches and we're going to talk about them a little bit differently. So you really, really get what they do and why this stuff matters. So basically, there are two branches they deal with things that can threaten you on the outside and things that can be a threat on the inside of your body. And I know that you've probably heard these words before, they're called the sympathetic branch or the fight flight. But don't worry, they're just words. We're going to talk about what they mean. And the other part is the parasympathetic or the feed breed. But what do these have to do with health? And how can they be involved with every health condition? There is. Well, this fight flight system, what it does is it gets you ready for a fight. When there's a threat on the outside, something threaten you, whether it's a bus, you have to jump out of the way or a wild animal or a thug coming after you, you have to prepare your body so you're not a sitting duck. So the fight flight system, it increases your heart rate, it increases your muscle tension, and it increases your blood pressure. Furthermore, it increases your blood sugar. So all of these get your body ready. It's all about getting more resources, more energy out to the muscles so they can run or fight. On the other hand, this feed breed system, what it does is it increases digestion, it increases immune function, it increases reproductive function, and it increases or is responsible for healing and repair. And I know that you've probably heard some of these phrases before, but stay with me because once you really get the picture, then you'll be able to explain not just list the 10 things we're going to talk about today, but also every other thing that can affect your health. So both of these systems, both branches, they're all about keeping you alive. So I marked it in red and green, not because one is good and the other is bad, but because we usually have too much of the fight flight, we have too much of the alarm one. So that's why I put it in red, whereas the green is more of a peaceful soothing that we're going to go after. But again, it's not just how we feel, it's how does this affect your health. And again, both of these are to keep you alive. Now, here's what we need to start understanding about these two systems and why this matters because all of these functions require resources. They require energy and oxygen and so forth. And all of those resources are carried by the blood. So if we want to do more of one, we have to send more blood in one direction at the expense of another direction because there's only so much blood. You only have a finite amount of blood in the body. So if you send more to do something, you have to kind of borrow from someplace else. And here's the key to understand about this, that because of what I just explained, this autonomic nervous system works like a seesaw. So whenever one thing goes up and another one has to go down, it has to be that way. Now sometimes people say that when one turns on the other shots off, and that's not how you want to think about it, you want to think about it as the seesaw when one increases the other decreases. So it's not a total shut off, but it's relative. It's more or less. So very often when I talk about health and I describe these things and I say, well, is your digestion important? Well, of course, you have to break down foods so you can digest them and assimilate them and make body parts. And all your vital organs are driven by this feed breed, by the parasympathetic nervous system. Your immune function is that important. Of course, it is. Otherwise, you would be completely defenseless against toxins and bacteria, pathogens, diseases is reproductive function important. Of course, otherwise, the entire species would die out. And if we couldn't heal and repair anything, then things would just continually break down. If you started bleeding or you hurt something, it would never heal. So a lot of people say, well, this is where health is. This is where it's all about. And yes, that's super, super important. And yet, the fight flight is much, much more important. And it always takes precedence because this is about defending you against that outside threat. If something's attacking you, then you have to act right now. You don't have any time to think about it. You have to react instinctively. You have to rely on your reflexes and animal instincts and save your life. So the fight flight is about keeping you alive in this moment, keeping you alive in the next five seconds or a minute, whereas the feed breed is about keeping you alive and keeping you healthy for tomorrow and next year. So both are critically important, but if you don't survive the next five seconds, then there is no point in trying to drive functions that will get you healthy next year. So these are in no particular order, but the number one sign of stress is muscle tension. How many people do you know that have muscle tension? And this would be especially in the neck area, in the jaw area, in the shoulders and in the back. And when you think about it or when you hear someone complain about muscle tension, isn't this typically where it is? Now, why does stress make it turn up in those areas? Because if you are in a war zone, if you're being chased by an animal, if there's a lot of threats around you, these are the first places that you want to tighten up to protect yourself. You want to pull your shoulders up to protect your neck. Because if you get a blow, then it could knock your head off. So you want to make sure everything is tight and stable to protect you. Also, if you bite down and protect your jaw, it's less likely to get broken or dislocated. Because if you break your jaw, you can't eat and then you die. So these are all survival mechanisms. And sign number two is digestive problems. So we have to realize that feed breed is completely responsible for all digestive function. Anything that happens from the time you put something in your mouth to where you digest it, and it comes out the other end, you're supposed to have extracted a bunch of nutrients. And all of that is controlled by the parasympathetic, by the feed breed. So one way you can think about this is like a faucet. And this faucet turns on or off the blood flow. So whenever you have a stress response, then you're going to increase the blood flow to the survival towards the outside. And to the same degree, you're going to reduce the blood flow, the resources to everything that goes on on the inside. All your digestive function, all your vital organs. And there's so many people. Maybe you have fallen into this trap of you try so hard to eat all the right foods. You make sure that it's organic and it's pure and it's raised the right way. But then you're stressed. And now you can't turn on. You can't send the right kind of resources to your digestive tract. And now as a result, you have IBS, irritable bowel syndrome. You might have constipation where the peristols is also completely controlled and driven by this parasympathetic, the feed breed. If you turn off the blood supply and the resources to the gut, now you can get hypochlorhydria, meaning you don't make enough stomach acid without that acid. Now you don't make enough enzymes to extract and break down the food. And of course, now that could lead to malabsorption. So what's the point of eating the perfect food if you're going to be stressed and not be able to extract the nutrients from it? And we also have to realize that we talk about stress and people from think that's just about how you feel, but stress could be real or imagined. It's not about the thing outside of you. It's how you react to it. It's how you perceive it. So people are very different and we can train ourselves to think in certain ways. And if you tend toward anxiety, if you tend toward fear, if you tend toward worrying about things, then you pretty much always are increasing that baseline for the sympathetic, for the fight flight is always going to be a little bit higher. And these things start getting programmed in utero. So it starts before you're even aware of it, but it doesn't mean that you're helpless. It doesn't mean that you're a victim. It means you need to understand it so you can start doing something about it. And closely related to digestive problems are skin problems because a lot of stuff that comes out of the skin and inflames the skin and poisons the skin is because the gut isn't working. And the same thing with frequent illness, it's all about immunity. And this goes of course together with the digestive issues that we just talked about. And we're finding out more and more how important your biomes, the bacterial culture in your gut. And they are responsible for a lot of functions in your body that we still are just trying to understand. The bacteria in your gut have somewhere like 100 to 200 times more DNA. They have the capacity to break things down that you can't. And they have the capacity to make nutrients that we can't. So just as important as eating the right things and feeding ourselves is eating the right things for your microbiome. Sign number five is libido, which has to do with reproductive function, the propagation of the species, which is super important. But there's a time and a place. So one part of this is erectile this function, which is becoming more and more common as well as infertility. Now, if we think about this, it makes perfect sense because if you're being chased by a wild animal, that is not the time to have an erection. It's not going to be very useful in that situation. It's not really going to scare anybody. So when we have a fight flight, then it's automatically going to turn off all sexual functions. Sign number six is sleep problems. And this is, as you probably know, one of the biggest problems we're facing, there's very, very few people who are getting enough sleep these days and who are getting the quality of sleep that could really make them function at their best. And again, this makes perfect sense in terms of fight flight and feed breed because if you're being chased by an animal, if you have real or imaginary stress, like we said, imaginary could be the news, it could be bills, it could be a boss, it could be a hypothetical conversation that you're having with someone. And that causes all these thoughts to just go round and round in your head and just won't shut down. That's a form of stress. And it's going to act the same way as something chasing you. And again, if you're being chased by something, is it better to be awake or to fall asleep? Well, obviously, if you're being chased, you want to be awake. So your body is going to make sure that you stay awake. And there are two hormones that do this. Melatonin is the hormone that puts you to sleep. And cortisol is the hormone that wakes you up. So what's supposed to happen is at night, if we manage to wind down, if we manage to reduce our sympathetic activity and relax a little bit, then we bring this sympathetic and parasympathetic into balance. That allows the pineal gland to release some melatonin and we fall asleep. And then in the morning, when we're supposed to wake up, a little bit before we're supposed to wake up, your body releases cortisol and cortisol effectively shuts off melatonin. But cortisol is also a stress hormone that's going to raise blood sugar. So when you have stress, real or imagined, and you make more cortisol, then that is going to shut off the melatonin. And now you can't fall asleep. Sin number seven is a reduced concentration and inability to focus properly. And this has everything to do with the frontal lobe. So we taught before about how this autonomic nervous system is all about allocating resources, about sending the blood with the resources to the places that need them the most at that time. And when we have more of a fight flight, we in a send resources to the muscles and to the heart, we can increase blood pressure and blood flow and so forth. Well, the same thing, same mechanism, the same principle applies to the brain. So there's this brain and here's a brain stem. And now in the frontal lobe, in the front part of the brain is where we have our most unique human functions or ability to focus and concentrate and plan and get motivated and have abstract thought and be creative. It is all in the frontal lobe. But when you're being chased by a wild animal, you don't need all that function. That's not the time to create poetry. Instead, you want to activate the brain stem. This is the most primitive part. This is where our reflex behavior, our instinctual behavior, our animalistic reflexes reside down here. So when you have too much stress, when you have too much sympathetic activation, the body is going to shift the blood flow from the frontal lobe to the brain stem. And now you simply don't have enough blood flow to think clearly. You have reduced the frontal lobe activity at the expense of the brain stem, which is very appropriate when you're in a fight flight situation. Number eight is anxiety and there's a similar mechanism to irritability and depression. And this relates very much to everything that we just talked about. So remember when we said that if we don't survive the next few seconds, it doesn't really matter how good our gut health is because there will be no tomorrow. So the sympathetic, the fight flight has to react instantaneously. It has to react so quickly it doesn't even reach the conscious mind. It has to kick in even faster than that. And when it does, again, it does it at the expense of the parasympathetic of the organ of the inside healing. But if there was nothing to reset it, then we would just flip that switch and then we'd be stuck in that heightened fight flight response forever. And of course, that's not how it works. So the frontal lobe, our executive function is the thing that turns that off. And the better our frontal lobe works, the stronger it is, the better it's going to be able to properly and quickly get us back to balance. So there's some very unique functions that the frontal lobe does in regulating and turning off things. The frontal lobe actually does much more turning off than it does turning on. And one of the things it turns off is that switch. When the switch triggers that fight flight, the frontal lobe is what turns that back off. Also through a couple of different mechanisms, the frontal lobe regulates muscle tone so that we have the proper muscle tone everywhere for posture, but also so that we don't have that excess stress-related muscle tone in our neck jaw and shoulders. And it also turns off uncontrollable thoughts, uncontrolled. So anxiety, stressful thoughts, panic attacks, those are uncontrolled thoughts. They are invited thoughts that spiral out of control. That when there's nothing to turn them off, then they just kind of take a life on their own. And this is the mechanism that controls all of these functions that we talked about. And now let's talk about something where we can apply a lot of this, which is public speaking, which is terror to some people and other people simply love it. So it all depends on how you interpret that. But for a lot of people, it will result in increased sweating. So the ninth sign of stress and stress. sympathetic fight flight responses are sweating. And one reason for that is that the sweating is on the skin. And if your hands are super, super dry, you can't properly grip things. So if you have a weapon or a stick or a club, you need just a little bit of moisture to get a good grip. And that's where the body turns on that sweating response. So this would be sweating that is not related to heat or exercise because of course that's an appropriate way of just disposing of too much heat. And what if you notice that you have arm sweat, for example? And you notice that you have a lot more on one side than the other. Well, you really don't have one brain. You have two brains. And each side of the brain controls one side of the body. So because we talked about these mechanisms, the well-functioning frontal lobe will turn off these stress responses. So you will have more turning off of the sweating on the side where the brain is working better. So if you have a side where the brain is a little weaker, that is where you're going to have more sweating. And you can see this on the palms of your hands. You can see it in the armpits especially. And sign number 10 would be increased heart rate. And how many people have you heard that are given a diagnosis of tachycardia, which means racing heart or pounding heart, heart palpitations, or arrhythmias, or one of the trendy diseases or conditions is aphib, atrial fibrillations, which is getting so, so common. And it's not only caused by stress, but there is a huge stress component of this. So for a lot of people, public speaking will result in these things. But again, it's not the reality of what's out there. It is how we imagine it. It's how we perceive it. We create that stress with our perception. And therefore, we can also change it. And while we're at it on public speaking, how about we give you a couple of bonuses here? Number 11 would be dry mouth. And why is that? Because you remember how we talked about the digestive function, the secretion of hydrochloric acid and enzymes is all under parasympathetic control. Well, the secretions of saliva is also under parasympathetic control. So when you get stressed, you turn off your salivary glands and you get that cotton mouth. And along with that, of course, number 12 would be that you get tongue tied, you get speechless. You don't know what you say. You might even start stuttering. And why would that happen? Because you get stressed, you activate your fight flight system. And that blood leaves your frontal lobe, where your executive function is. And now instead of speaking well, you're getting ready to punch somebody. So you can see from the examples that we've gone through, that they're all related to the same central mechanism. And it's not the only mechanism that makes us healthy or sick. Because obviously, we still need to exercise. We still need to eat right. But it is probably the one that people understand the least. And that's the most undervalued and overlooked. And if you understand these 12, then you can see that these mechanisms cover thousands and thousands of conditions. I don't think that you can think of a single condition that is not related to these mechanisms we've talked about. Then what would the solution be? Well, what you're really trying to do, of course, is mindfulness. The distress is an interpretation. It's a perception. And also, when you're being mindful, now you're allowing more of a relaxation response. So this is the first step in bringing back that balance. And the time to try to be mindful is not when an animal is chasing you. It's overall. It's a little bit. It's every five minutes, every 10 minutes of every day. You're asking yourself, where is my focus? How am I feeling? Then, of course, meditation is a practice to go to a deeper level and get to deeper levels of relaxation. Then movement, what does that do? Well, we said that the frontal lobe is what controls most of this. And the number one thing that strengthens the frontal lobe is movement. More than 90% of what the brain does is to control movement in a field of gravity. So just having your balance moving in a field of gravity, making complex and fast movements is what drives and strengthens that frontal lobe more than anything else. Another super powerful thing to do is breathing exercises, because it's the only autonomic function, automatic function that's usually done for you, that you have complete control over. You can decide to breathe faster. You can decide to breathe slower. You can't decide to speed up your peristalsis, the movement through your digestive tract. You can't decide directly to increase your heart rate or decrease your heart rate, but you can do it indirectly because you can control your breath. And when you breathe in, your heart speed up, because it wants to send more blood to the lungs when there is more oxygen there. And increasing heart rate is a sympathetic-- it's a fight-flight function. Breathing out will slow down the heart rate, because there's less oxygen, so wide-waste energy sending blood there when there's not so much to pick up. And that's a parasympathetic function. So most people breathe too fast and too shallow to allow that system to calibrate. But if you breathe in for roughly five seconds and out for roughly five seconds, now you're allowing enough time for that system to calibrate. And one more thing that you can do is call brain tap, which is a device that we use in the clinic. And I'll put a link down below if you want to get your own. But it's a really cool thing. It's about brain entrainment. So it's a form of induced meditation for the lazy. And once you put that on, you run a session. It doesn't matter if you fall asleep. It still works. Your autonomic nervous system still processes all that information. And it's not instead a meditation, but it is a very powerful supplement, because you can do it like I said. You can fall asleep. If you do a meditation, it requires that you're very, very present and very, very focused. And it will do some things that are different than the brain tap. But if you do both, then you can get some help along the way. If you enjoyed this video, you're going to love that one. And if you truly want to master health by understanding how the body really works, make sure you subscribe, hit that bell, and turn on all the notifications. So you never miss a life-saving video.