If you really want to be very very healthy, you will want to reduce your stress level.
When you become stressed, your body secretes the steroid hormone cortisol.
The effects of cortisol include:
- Weakens your immune system. Cortisol prevents the proliferation of your T cells.
- Reduces bone formation. Cortisol reduces calcium absorption in your intestines.
- Increases the time it takes for you to heal from wounds. People with the lowest level of stress hormones recover the fastest.
- Makes you fat around the midsection. Cortisol causes your liver to convert non-carbohydrate sources into glucose, a process called gluconeogenesis. That’s why when you are very very stressed, you can still have trouble losing weight even if you are eating a low carb diet.
- Gives you wrinkles. Cortisol inhibits collagen formation.
- Makes you retain water.
- Kills your brain cells, making it harder for you to learn and remember.
- Increases your blood pressure.
- Shuts down your reproductive system, making it harder for women to conceive babies and increasing chances of miscarriage should they actually become pregnant.
- Makes you depressed. Cortisol reduces the levels of your serotonin, the feel happy neurotransmitter.
- Lowers your metabolic rate. Cortisol lowers your thyroid function.
- Breaks down your muscle tissue.
- Decreases the production of your sex hormones, both for men and women, thereby suppressing your sex drive.
If you recognized that you are indeed very, very stressed, you may want to take the following steps:
- Ask yourself which stresses in your life you could actually eliminate. Being healthy is not just a matter of eating better, taking vitamins and exercising. In fact, you could do all these and still be fat and unhealthy until and unless you root out your key stresses.
- Make a plan to reduce the stresses you can eliminate. The fastest, cheapest way for you to get better will be to remove the stress.
- For the stresses you can’t eliminate, change your attitude. Make an appointment to see me for healing work. I can work with you to identify your primary emotions and use kinesiology or a medical intuitive reading to shift your perception.
- Make time literally every day of your life to do some activity that will reduce your cortisol level. The more busy and stressed you are, the more important it is for you to include these activities.
Activities that lower your cortisol level include:
- Yoga
- Tai chi
- Qi Gong
- Meditation
- Hot baths
- Naps
- Listening to music
- Getting enough sleep
- Keeping your blood sugar balanced by eating small meals every 3 hours
- Deep breathing exercises
- Massage
- Reiki
- Walking in nature
When you are very very stressed, recognized that this is like over spending your money. Sooner or later, you will have to pay the consequences. Put a stress management plan in place and make a commitment to yourself to keep it.
What is healing? Healing happens when we face our stresses head on.
