Emotional Health

While this is a bit of a nebulous concept, emotional and mental health encompasses happiness, emotional resilience and distress tolerance, mindfulness, stillness, and fulfillment, among others. It touches on our sense of individual purpose, as well as our ability to engage in meaningful and supportive relationships with those we love.

It’s important to alleviate stress, which in turn alleviates the stress of your body and its mechanisms. Try yoga because stretching and breath work can bring synergy to your body. This doesn’t need to be an advanced practice. Even five minutes a day of meditation and controlled breathing will revitalize your nervous system.

Stress response

Stress-related illness is on the rise. And rightfully so! The world is a complicated place and it’s really easy to get swept away in stress. Stressors are all around us: on the news, at our jobs, at home, pollution in the air, pollution in our soil, pollution among bad relationships. It’s almost impossible to avoid. So, the goal here is to understand what triggers your stress, what that stress does to your mind and body, and ultimately how you can strengthen your resilience to it.

The problem with stress is that many, if not most, illnesses are caused or worsened by physical or mental stress. **The word stress is when your body responds to a demand or threat. Whether that be acute, episodic, or chronic stressor (examples below). When this happens, your hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis turns on and sets your stress response in motion. The three glands in this “axis”  signal the production of your stress hormones—adrenaline, cortisol, and DHEA—to help you either fight or flight.

You can feel your stress response when it happens: your heart beats faster, blood pressure increases, muscles tense up, glucose levels rise, and you begin to breathe faster. And this stress response will happen with whatever threat you perceive as stressful. This can be a stressor occurring in the moment, like preparing to speak publicly or losing a job. But it also happens when something you imagine is stressful, like being anxious about an incident that might happen.

Ultimately, your stress response can save your life by giving you the strength, clarity, and energy to fight a threat. But, if you are chronically stressed, your stress response turns from helpful to harmful. Here are types of stress that alert and trigger your stress response.

• Acute: moments of stress that are short-lived, like being chased by something, speaking in front of a crowd, or slamming on your brakes. Acute stress doesn’t necessarily lead to illness. Your stress response cools down once the stressful moment passes.
• Episodic: frequently confronting stressful moments, such as social or job pressure, Sunday football games for a superfan, or taking on too much at once.
• Chronic: prolonged stress that impacts your quality of life, like being at a bad job, toxic relationships, bodily inflammation caused by unhealthy foods, financial issues, family conflict, grief, or anxiety. Chronic stress is what causes a ripple effect throughout your body, leading to or exacerbating a current disease

Here’s what happens to your body when stressed:

• Respiratory: the job of your respiratory system is to supply oxygen to cells and remove carbon dioxide waste from the body. In moments of stress, breath is quickened and the balance of gasses is thrown off. This may make you feel light-headed or anxious, which actually exacerbates the physical stress response. So, controlling your breath calms the physical body, which in turn calms the stress response. Intentional breath also grounds your mind and allows it to focus on calming down.
• Cardiovascular: When stressed, heart rate is increased. When chronically stressed, this prolonged increase can impact your heart, blood vessels, and in turn blood pressure. The toll of this can lead to hypertension, stroke, or heart attack. In regards to the circulatory system, stress triggers inflammation. Over time, this inflammation clogs the coronary arteries, which can lead to a heart attack.
• Endocrine: the intricate stress response provides the energy needed to handle the stress. While this helps during moments of stress, chronic stress may impair the dynamic relationship between the immune system and the HPA axis. If these two systems no longer function together, then their job of maintaining/regulating physical and mental health conditions is also impaired. This can lead to chronic fatigue, metabolic disorders (for example, diabetes, obesity), depression, and immune disorders.
• Gastrointestinal tract (GI): the brain and gut are deeply intertwined. The feeling of butterflies in your stomach are nerves responding to a signal from your brain. Anxiety is often coupled with gut discomfort. Conversely, when the gut bacteria is unhealthy, it can influence the brain. Stress or exhaustion can also increase the severity of regularly occurring heartburn pain. Stress can affect digestion and what nutrients the intestines absorb, which can make the intestinal barrier weaker and allow gut bacteria to enter the body.
• Nervous: The central nervous system is particularly important in triggering stress responses, as it regulates the autonomic nervous system and plays a central role in interpreting contexts as potentially threatening. Chronic stress, experiencing stressors over a prolonged period of time, can result in a long-term drain on the body.
• Emotional: the pressures of stress both on the body and the mind can really take a toll, causing anxiety, depression, anger, and/or irritability.

Relaxation response

For many people, relaxing and slowing down are not a priority. However, when chaos becomes the priority, it will cause chaos internally. Identifying the stressors in your life—relationships, work, societal pressures, family, or money—and focusing on things that calm you can help maintain overall control of your stress and allow you to become more resilient to it in the future.

• Identify and reduce the causes of stress: What triggers your stress response and how can you either eliminate, reduce, or mend those triggers? It is important to identify the causes of stress in your life, which can include your job, relationships, financial situation, children, various psychological disorders, and the state of the world. Other causes are physical stress from being overweight; chronic illness; allergens; toxins; poor diet items such as sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, and trans and saturated fats; chronic infections; and alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs. It is important to try to identify these and reduce the effects of these things by eliminating or reducing them from your life when possible.
• Balance your blood sugar: reducing refined sugars and high-glycemic-load carbohydrates; these are carbohydrates that quickly turn into sugar in your blood, such as white flour and white sugar and trans and saturated fats.
• Sleep: at least seven to eight hours a night, to avoid increased hunger and reduce stress hormones. Practice the rhythm method of waking up and sleeping at the same times every day, and eat at regular times during the day. This keeps your stress hormones in balance.
• Activate your relaxation response: find ways to engage your relaxation response more than you do your stress response. What, literally, relaxes you? Sports, hobbies, spending time with good friends, gardening, hiking, going to a comedy show? Weave relaxation activities into your everyday life, which can help:
  • Lower blood pressure and heart rate
  • Improve memory
  • Increase neuroplasticity
  • Encourage better and longer sleep
  • Bring feelings of calm, happiness, and centeredness
• Self-awareness and mindfulness
  • Meditation: helps center your thoughts and take your mind off whatever stress you might be experiencing or perceiving. This calms your central nervous system and the HPA axis.
  • Feeling the stress: understanding where in your body you feel stress can give you insight into how your physical reaction plays out.
  • Self-awareness: understanding who you are, what triggers you, and how you allow yourself to respond gives you power over your stress response. It allows you to be resilient to stress rather than being overcome by it.
• Breathing techniques
  • Lowers blood pressure, heart rate, stress hormones in the blood, lactic acid build-up in muscle tissue
  • balances levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood
  • improves immune system functioning
  • increases physical energy and feelings of calm