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Chapter 1: What happens to your body when you experience chronic stress?
What is actually going on in your mind when you feel stressed?
Almost every part of your body, hormones, nerves, blood vessels, heart, muscles, liver, almost everything is affected by this stress response. The problem is that there are no longer sabre-toothed tigers around, right? And modern-day stressors are very different to how our body adapted. That whole thing of, I was scared I nearly shat myself, is because, you know, that... This has been...
I can sometimes wake up ready for the day, the whole day's on edge and then I go to bed and I start planning the next day's activities. So I'm stressed all day long.
With chronic stress there is no recovery. You are constantly in that state of high cortisol which has a negative impact on a lot of our body over time.
A great, big, warm welcome to no appointment necessary. My name is Cherry Healy.
And I am Dr Amir Khan. I'm usually at my surgery up in Bradford, but once a week I get the train down to London and I record this podcast for you guys.
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Chapter 2: How does modern stress differ from historical stressors?
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And also email us your questions, whatever it is. We absolutely love hearing from you. The email address is in the show notes. Right down to business. This week's check-in is all about stress. In this episode, we're going to find out how stress impacts your body, from your heart to your hormones, to your brain, to your gut. And we'll find out how to spot when it's actually causing you damage.
What are the red flags to look out for? For this episode, we've partnered with Randox Health and their Every Man and Every Woman Check. Dr. O'Meara, do you know about these?
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Yep. And to find out more, just head over to randoxhealth.com.
Right, let's talk about stress. Yes. There's good stress and there's not good stress. Yes. So we're going to work out which is which. First of all, what is stress to you?
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Chapter 3: What are the signs that chronic stress is damaging your health?
So our body adapted to stress like physical danger, which you had to get away from. Perhaps even hunger as well was a stressor when we were evolving. But now those things don't really factor into modern Western lives. And so what we see stressing us out are things like work, finances, family relationships, all the things that we can't actually run away from. Voice notes. Voice notes.
Stop sending them to me.
And they're so long. 11 minutes. There's like two people in my life who can do that. Everyone else, please don't.
Don't, don't. So we can't run away from all of those things. However, our bodies haven't adapted to modern day stresses. They still respond in the same way. So you get that surge of adrenaline, which makes you run away. So your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure goes up, your anxiety levels go up. But there's nothing to run away from. Everything is still present. And then you've got
the surge of cortisol, which stays high because the stresses haven't gone away. Now, the key thing here, with good stress, you get all the surges of those hormones, you do whatever you need to do, and then there's a period of recovery. And a good example of that is, let's say you're preparing for a concert.
So you get all that anxiety beforehand, but actually it's quite positive because it helps you perform to the best of your ability. You do the performance, you get all that reward, and then you recover. Right. With chronic stress, there is no recovery. You are constantly in that state of high cortisol, which has a negative impact on a lot of our body over time.
Because now we have perceived threats rather than an actual threat, the saber-toothed tiger, we've got voice notes and emails and problems at work. Would you say that a lot of people are in that perpetual state of stress and never experience the recovery stage?
Yeah. Because we're constantly being stimulated by all of those things. All the email notifications, the voice note notifications, always having to be available for whatever, where before we weren't available for things. You know, you take a break and you recover from that constant stimulation. And that's just modern life. We haven't even talked about
cost of living we haven't you know there's also if you've got a a poor relationship with your partner or you've got stresses because your children are stressed at school or you're a caregiver or you're suffering from burnout all of those things together mean that the
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Chapter 4: How does cortisol impact your weight and metabolism?
Don't think of it as, well, nothing hurts, so I don't need to go. There are lots of other things that we can do to support that.
And often it can cause more serious medical problems down the line. So I suppose you as GPs want to catch it before it gets that bad.
Absolutely. And then there are the lifestyle things that we talk about, which we should all be doing to manage our stress. A break from your screens, really regular breaks from social media.
Letting yourself be a bit bored for five minutes on the bus and being careful about how much news that you consume. It's really important to stay informed and also to know what's going on and care about other people on the planet. But I think there comes a point where you just have to turn it off. You're not supposed to consume the world's problems on a tiny screen at 10pm.
No, absolutely. Food, you mentioned food, whole foods. Get 80% of your nutrition from whole foods. How does bad food contribute to stress? It affects your hormones in a number of different ways.
So again, if you are eating ultra-processed foods or foods with a lot of sugar in, it pushes up your insulin and that can affect your weight and that can then put on... That can affect other hormones because fat cells create all sorts of different hormones. So it all adds up to stress as well.
You've got this funny security guard in your brain and so many different things affect whether that security guard is allowed to... Have a break.
Focus on sleep. You know, we've talked about, we've done a whole episode on sleep and we've put some techniques in them, how to get to sleep, one called cognitive shuffling. It's really good for stress. If stress is keeping you awake, go back and have a look at that episode. But sleep is a real down regulator of stress. It will really help.
It's so difficult because if you're stressed, it's like...
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