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Stress Transformation

What is stress?

Stress is our body’s way of telling us we need to change! And change quickly.

We are all familiar with the ‘Flight or Flight’ response. The signal from our brain in response to stress that prepares the body to ‘run for your life or fight for your life’.

But what happens when you activate this flight or flight response over days, weeks, months or even years?

What happens when feeling stressed or working under pressure becomes so normal that you don’t even really recognise it as stress any more?

When you activate the stress response, certain hormones such as Adrenaline and Cortisol are released. Your system responds to the messages these hormones send and when the threat or stress is over, the body calms back down and you go back to normal.

This is a perfect, healthy response, and is likely to be ‘asymptomatic’.

When you activate the stress response over time, the next thing that happens is that these stress hormones, particularly Cortisol, become chronically elevated.
When this happens, you may feel “stressed”, anxious, have mood swings or feel a little low or depressed.

You may notice that you have problems sleeping – both falling asleep or staying asleep, and it’s common to feel like you do your best work after 9 or 10 pm, as Cortisol affects the brain and disrupts the normal functions of the hormones that create healthy wake-sleep-cycle.

At this point, levels of another hormone, called DHEA may start to drop, and this can have a knock on effect on your sex hormones, creating problems related to testosterone, oestrogen and progesterone. It is possible to be in this second stage for many years, but for some even short-term episodes of stress may cloud thinking, affect sleep and mood and impair performance.

Lastly, when this has all been going on for a while, you enter Exhaustion.
It becomes difficult for your body to continue the output of the stress hormones, and levels of both cortisol and DHEA fall.

Symptoms often experienced here are fatigue, depression, noticeable memory problems and brain fog, hormones related problems such as low testosterone, or difficulty conceiving. There is often weight gain around the middle, sometimes inflammatory problems such as muscle and joint pain, migraines, inflammatory skin problems such as eczema, rosacea and psoriasis.

At this point you may also be taking medications for high blood pressure, high cholesterol and other symptoms of chronic, systemic biochemical disruption.

Long term over-exposure to stress hormones is the number 1 reason people visit primary-care doctors, and is also the number 1 reason people eat poorly, abandon healthy lifestyle habits and self-medicate with alcohol, drugs and food.

Stress impacts our bodies by:

  • Leading to Metabolic Syndrome
  • Impairing Detoxification
  • Creating Gut Disturbance
  • Creating Hormonal Disturbances
  • Negatively affecting the choices we make about food and lifestyle
  • Causing Weight Gain
  • Causing Adrenal Fatigue
  • Impairing Thyroid Function
  • Promoting Inflammation
  • Damaging the brain and affecting mental function

Does this sound like you? Are you wondering what to do about it?

For some, the answer is to make a major change. Leave a relationship, move countries or change jobs.

For most people, however, removing the stressor is not a feasible option, and so learning how to transform the body’s response to stress is vital.

Allostasis, from the Greek root allo, meaning variable, is the ability to achieve stability through change.

Our Stress Transformation program, teaches you how to make small, effective adjustments to the lifestyle and diet, that can have large, positive consequences on the body and on the brain.

Learning how to turn off the stress response when it’s appropriate, and supporting the body so that it doesn’t become overwhelmed by the stress hormones, can be achieved without having to quit your job or make other such major lifestyle changes.

Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning how to dance in the rain .-Anonymous.

Robyn Puglia
FdSc DipION IFMCP
mIFM mBANT

My mission in life is to share my knowledge in order to help people heal. I love to unravel the health stories and the biochemistry to get to the heart of the problem, and to help support nutritional and lifestyle changes that have the ability to transform people’s health. I have seen incredible changes in the health of my clients, and I hope to do the same for you.

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