Stress may be the one thing that nobody really pays attention to that can have the greatest impact on your health and by recognizing the subtle signs of stress that we're going to talk about in this video and most importantly by understanding what they mean and how they affect the body you can really make a difference in your health. When a doctor takes the time with the patient to make a proper history very often they'll find out that in as much as 80 percent of the cases they had a stressful event right before.

The onset of whatever the problem is. The CDC believes that as much as 75 percent of all doctors visit for all reasons are actually stress related but if we ask OSHA then they say that that number is 90 percent of all doctors visits are related to stress and we've all heard that stress is bad stress is involved with all kinds of different conditions but in this video we want to really understand and explore how does that happen? How does stress do that? How does stress make you feel bad? How does stress break.

Body parts? Stress can be very blatant kind of in your face but it can also be much more subtle so one of the most common things that people don't realize is stress is just feeling uneasy you're just not feeling quite right there's something off you're not totally at ease or totally happy and that could be because you're feeling busy you're feeling like I have to do something there's always something left undone or it could be that there's so many moving parts in your life and you feel that you have to.

Control them that it's your job that something bad is going to happen if you don't take charge and handle all of them it can be that you're always on call like with phones and emails you're always waiting for that next message that next notification and that email to respond to and we could summarize that as simply the feeling of I should but stress is not just about how you feel it's about the stress response it's about how your body has been conditioned to respond to all the events of your.

Everyday life and that may or may not be something that you're aware of that's why we have to really learn to pay attention to these things you have something called the autonomic nervous system that's the part of your nervous system that you're not aware of it handles everything about your body that you don't have to think about and it has two branches they're called the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system more commonly we call them the fight flight system and the feed breed system and.

Another way of remembering that is as the four f's we have fighting, fleeing, feeding, and procreating of course but the thing to understand about these is that it's a resource allocation system you have only so many resources in the body and all of those resources whether they're food or nutrients or oxygen they're distributed through the blood so basically what this comes down to is how does the body distribute the blood how does it allocate the resources and you want to think of that as a balance scale.

That whenever one side goes up the other one has to come down and that's how this works as well so when you have a stress response you're going to increase the sympathetics and you will decrease the parasympathetics and vice versa but 99.999 percent of the time in our modern society our problem is that we keep turning on the sympathetic, the fight flight response and the fight flight response is exactly what it sounds like it's there to help us in a situation of fight flight so when we're stressed when we have.

Something chasing us when we need to run away from something to save our lives then our heart rate will increase and our blood pressure will increase we have certain hormones to help us through that they're called adrenaline that will create vasoconstriction to get the blood running faster out to the muscles that can do the work but also things like cortisol that will increase blood sugar to give us fast energy if we have to run so fast that we develop lactic acid and also of course to run we need muscle.

Tension so all of these things are hardwired in and they happen in a millisecond before you're even aware that something has happened in your external world your nervous system has detected it just in case you need to jump out of the way really really fast so in other words the sympathetic is about speeding things up it's about revving up the engine to take care of emergencies and defend yourself the parasympathetic is the exact opposite when there is no emergency then the sympathetic can back off a.

Little bit and we can increase the parasympathetic and get back into balance and the parasympathetic is responsible for digestion for cell-based immune function fighting off diseases for reproduction and of repair so healing body parts healing vital organs and even the DNA repair that they're learning more and more about that your body actually goes through and repairs your DNA molecules all of these things are part of your parasympathetic so whenever you have an increase in stress and again whether it's real or.

Imagined whether it's something actually chasing you or you're just imagining a stressful event or you're feeling a little tense whenever that goes up the parasympathetic is going to go down and we talked about blood flow so think about this as two faucets that whenever you turn one on you're going to turn the other one off to some degree so when you increase the sympathetic it's like you're turning off the faucet for your parasympathetic you're shutting off or shutting down reducing the resources for your.

Digestion your immune system your reproduction and your repair and once we understand that principle a lot of these symptoms become very very obvious so as a direct result of sympathetic activity we have neck tension and headaches because when you have the muscle tension not only is the running muscles that you tense up but it's the protective muscles so you pull up your shoulders up and forward you clench your jaw so right here you have neck tension and TMJ and whenever you engage those.

Muscles you're very prone to get headaches as well so that's number two number three is heart arrhythmias because the sympathetic is going to speed up heart rate while the parasympathetic tries to slow it down so with a lot of sympathetic activation while the heart is trying to slow down naturally is going to cause a lot of imbalance and confusion and number four is hypertension or high blood pressure and that also makes sense because when you're running from something when you're exercising you.

Should have higher blood pressure because that blood pressure moves the blood faster out to the muscles doing the work but when it comes to blood pressure we need to understand that there's two components and the first is metabolic and if you have insulin resistance metabolic syndrome then that high insulin level is going to cause sodium retention in the kidneys high insulin is going to trick or confuse the kidneys it's going to make them more prone to retain sodium and with sodium follows.

Water so now there is one aspect of high blood pressure but the other aspect is what we talked about the neurological that if you're feeling stressed whether it's a real or imagined situation even if you did run and defend yourself but then you come back to safety now if you're still feeling tense about it your body is not ready to let go and with a little bit of tension you're still going to have that high blood pressure I think the single biggest problem with our health care system or so-called health care system today is.

That we have forgotten the most basic truth and here it is health is when everything works and I tell my patient this disease is when something is not working and this sounds like kindergarten but we have a whole healthcare system that has forgotten this and when i talk to people i say the thing that you came in for the problem that you have the arrhythmia the headache the shoulder pain the autoimmune disease is it because everything's working or because something's not working and they always say that it's.

Because something is not working so then I asked them do you think we should leave it alone or should we make it work again and I always get the same answer of course we should make it work again because then the body returns to health but when was the last time that you went to a doctor and they said why don't we make it work again because it's not part of their model it's not part of our health care model we treat symptoms with medication or with therapy but every focus is on the symptom we don't.

Try to figure out what's not working and that begs the question of course what is it that has to work and whether you call it god or source or innate intelligence or anything else I think we can all agree that there's an organizing power in the body there's something that makes it work that we don't quite understand that's bigger than we are your heart beats 100 000 times per day and then think about when you go to the gym and you're exhausted because you did 100 reps right imagine the heart 100 000 reps.

And it gets no breaks ever no little pit stops for replacement ever it just keeps going and keep going keep going and with every heartbeat it moves somewhere between 50 to 100 milliliters of blood so that's four to eight liters per minute 360 liters per hour 8 000 liters of blood every day that's a huge container of blood and in this bloodstream you have some 25 trillion red blood cells and they're traveling through 60 000 miles of vessels and every red blood cell every one out of the 25 trillion.

Completes a complete tour through the 60 000 miles of vessels every minute of your life now do something for me take a deep breath in one two three four well guess what happened during that breath you just lost 15 million red blood cells but don't worry because in the same time period you made 15 million more red blood cells and don't worry the dead ones they're going to be filtered out through your spleen they're going to be put to good use all the spare parts are going to be magically put in order again.

And now take one more breath for me one two three four and during that breath every one of your 40 trillion cells performed some 500 000 chemical reactions each that means that every breath you have two times 10 to the 19 chemical reactions taking place in your body and you don't have to lift a finger you don't have to think about it it does it for you and these are reactions to make energy these are reactions to neutralize toxins to eliminate waste to make hormones to make enzymes to assemble new.

Body parts even in all these quadrillions of reactions they are not just happening they are not random they are being coordinated every molecule is where exactly where it's supposed to be but here's the point and listen very carefully when you are stressed you are telling your body that all of these things that we just said that the body does they're not all that important right now when i'm stressed the only thing important is to put out that fire to defend myself healing gets put on the back burner and if we.

Have chronic stress if you have these stresses and they turn into a pattern and a behavior and a personality then we're saying that that healing part is never very important the next set of symptoms have to do with a decreased parasympathetic activation and how can that happen well remember our seesaw our balance scale whenever the sympathetic activity goes up the parasympathetic goes down by default by hardwiring and why does the sympathetic always come first always because it's about.

Defending you in this moment whereas the parasympathetic is about repairing and putting you back in shape for tomorrow and next month and next year which seems really important but if you don't survive this next second then there is no tomorrow to take care about so the sympathetic always comes first and the next symptom is number five frequent infections and I can still remember in chiropractic school when we had finals we were sitting in this big room with a hundred people and during that test there.

Would be not a silent moment everyone was coughing and sneezing and sniffling everyone had a cold because they had not enough sleep too much stress too much coffee too much sugar number six is IBS irritable bowel syndrome which is alternating constipation diarrhea or really any other digestive upset any irregularity and why is that because when you're stressed you're shutting down your parasympathetic and your parasympathetic is 100% responsible for the motility for the digestive juices.

For your hydrochloric acid for your enzymes and so on and number seven is a decreased sex drive erectile dysfunction and infertility and again that makes sense because your body is really smart it prioritizes things and if you're being chased by a bear then you're not going to be saved by an erection so the body puts those functions on the back burner and as much stress as we have today is there any wonder that infertility clinics are popping up like fast food restaurants then there's some symptoms.

Based on indirect sympathetic mechanisms and that would be food and sugar cravings and why is that because most of the time especially when you're relaxed your body relies on an aerobic metabolism so it's burning fat and carbohydrate in the presence of oxygen but when you're stressed when it's anticipating maybe having to run for it then it's preparing to go more into glycolysis if you have to r.

Un really fast then you're going to break down glucose and make lactic acid you're going to shift into glycolysis and then your body prepares itself by raising the blood sugar some and you can do that with cortisol which is a stress hormone or you can eat something and typically the body wants to make sure it's got all bases covered so it's going to try to make you eat something number nine is autoimmunity and even if we don't know exactly how the stress causes the immune system to get all that confused it's.

Very well documented that most immune issues are going to get altered with stress and they found that with childhood trauma or abuse even a single or a couple of severe incidents then they've seen 65 to 95 percent increase in multiple sclerosis they have found a hundred percent increase in rheumatoid arthritis based on childhood trauma and a 300 percent increase in Lupus and these were just a few that I found in a few minutes I bet you pretty much any disease that you google or that you search you do some.

Research on you're gonna find a strong connection between autoimmune disease and stress and trauma and like a lot of things you want to think of stress as momentum it's like a skill that you build up and once it gets going and you have that skill then you're going to feed it and it's going to keep going on its own so a stress response they've done some research on this and they had people sit down and imagine sitting in traffic for a couple of minutes that's all they did and then they measured cortisol which is a.

Stress hormone and they measured immunoglobulin A which is an immune marker and what they found was as soon as they imagined the stress they weren't even in an actual situation they just had them in a comfortable chair and they thought about it for a couple of minutes their cortisol would shoot up and their immune level, their IgA, would go down but then they told them okay thank you now go about your day but they measured this throughout the day and eight hours later they were still in a stress.

Response just from thinking about it for a couple of minutes whereas if they had them do some relaxation exercises if they had them practice something to kind of break that momentum then it was back in five minutes they were back to normal so every time you have a stress response it tends to stay on unless you pay attention if you are mindful if you start noticing how you feel then you can do something about it and i don't think that there's anything more important that we can do in our lives.

Than to notice how we feel notice as we go through our day before you pick up the phone before you answer the phone whenever you get into meet with a person whenever you're going to do something or write something notice how you feel because if you calm yourself down instead of being agitated the results of what you're going to produce is going to be completely different it's going to change your life so pay attention and if you don't feel great and peaceful then just take a deep breath and notice where.

You are and notice is this how I want to feel and then just choose how you want to feel and the second thing you can do of course long term is meditation because this is practicing every day on a regular basis to break that momentum and to install another momentum piece by piece symptom number 10 is poor focus and how does that happen how does stress do that well the brain uses a lot of energy twenty percent of all your energy that means twenty percent of all the blood flow is to supply the brain with.

Oxygen and nutrients but when we're stressed then that blood flow leaves the frontal lobe and goes down to the brain stem so it kind of looks like this from the frontal part and down to the brain stem which is our animalistic part it's our more primitive part where we can react instinctively and of course it's not a complete on off it's a percentage of the blood the body makes a reprioritization and says the brain stem is more important right now so all of the things that make us uniquely human are a result of.

Our frontal lobes so things like creativity and planning things like motivation, the ability to visualize things all of those things are going to be reduced and they're going to be replaced with spontaneous knee-jerk reflex action and one more thing to really understand is that most of what the brain does is to turn things off the way that we achieve balance in life is the brain receives information and it responds to some and it shuts off others that's how we can focus pay attention and have peace and balance but if.

We lose some of that frontal lobe activity now there's going to be a lack of inhibition the brain is not going to turn off so many things anymore and now things we don't want are going to start popping up and things like anxiety and muscle tension are not going to be as controlled as they were and as a result we could also get poor posture because a defensive muscle tension posture sort of looks like that so a lot of the things that you see with people rounded shoulders turned in hands forward head carriage that.

Is a direct result of stress so stress and stress responses are actually really good things despite everything that we've talked about because we need the stress response to stay alive in the moment but then we need to learn how to turn it off we can't let it develop that momentum and take over our lives that's why dogs are so happy and so peaceful because they get stressed but when the danger is over they know how to shut it down they know how to get back into balance and we can too if we just learn to notice how we feel. 

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