Your stress hormones can be your best friend or your worst enemy.
If you are being chased by a tiger or driving up and down a winding mountain road, your stress hormones might just save your life.
Here is the thing. Before you ever release a stress hormone like adrenaline, noradrenaline, or cortisol, your NERVE SYSTEM first has to detect a stimulus. Stress cannot occur without your nerve system detecting a stimulus first.
From that point, through the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis or HPA Axis for short, you release stress hormones. These stress hormones increase your alertness, dump fat and sugar into the blood stream so you have it for energy, and raise your heart rate and blood pressure among other things.
These things can be damaging in the long run, but in the short term they are LIFE-SAVERS!
Now that we established that stress hormones are good in the short term to save your life in the face of imminent danger, how does it affect us in the long term?
If we are under chronic stress, the same hormones that save our life in the short term lead to chronic disease in the long term!
Elevated stress hormones in the long term have been demonstrated to contribute to cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, neurodegenerative disease, and more!
So how do we reduce our stress hormones?
It comes down to how we think, eat, move, and how adaptable our nerve system is. All of these play a large role.
We have to shift from a chronic stress/sympathetic state to a parasympathetic state.
Meditation, exercise, healthy food, and neurostructural chiropractic care all play a role in helping to make that shift happen.
Every small step accumulates to big changes. Every choice moves you in the direction of health or the direction of disease. We need to stop blaming our genes and start taking responsibility for our choices!
It’s not the seed. It is the soil. It is very difficult to grow anything in dry, nutrient deficient soil.
How are you feeding your “soil?”
Sincerely,
Dr. Matt Westheimer
