Dr Jenna Macciochi

So it's primed for inflammation.

If we're stressed every day because of our, you know, home situation, because of a work situation or family events or things out of our control.

then your immune system doesn't know any different.

It's just like, right, I've got primed for something dangerous to happen.

That priming is this inflammation, this unwanted inflammation, which is then causing more wear and tear on our bodies.

And that ultimately is feeding into chronic disease.

Something we haven't mentioned is that

These chronic diseases, which now replace infectious diseases as the biggest causes of poor health, all have unwanted inflammation as one of their core features.

So if we can have a handle on that, it's going to hopefully interrupt the tide of those developing across the life course.

Yeah.

And the sensing part is the nervous system, which is talking to the immune system.

And I just think when you start to piece that together, to me, I can't think of it differently anymore.

Like that's why I can't think of mental health different from physical health.

Because if I imagine a scenario, oh my God, this is going to happen at work and this is terrible.

Then I'm basically telling my whole body there's a danger and telling my immune system to be on red alert.

But it's all just my thoughts about what might happen before I go to work, for example.

So I think it's sadly we're in this kind of modern world where we're stuck in all of these situations where there's lots of imagined concerns and fears that make sense.

compromise our sense of safety i think we always assume the word safety is like an inherent danger like i'm about to be hit by a car but i think our sense of safety can be compromised by by our thoughts by a stressful email by all sorts of things yeah but by what we consume of course as we're recording this conversation middle of march um

Yeah.

And I think it goes back to our earlier discussion on time.