Your body can be incredibly smart and not on the same page as you at the same time. We often wish that we can do more in a day, but the trick is, your rate-determining factor is not the 24hours in a day, but the amount of energy you have. According to the Annual Stress Survey by the American Psychological Association, 75% of women experience moderate to severe stress, 49% report sleep problems and 40% report physical symptoms as a direct result of stress. Adding the symptoms together, poor sleep and chronically feeling overwhelmed can set the stage for heart diseases, diabetes and cancer later in life.

 

It Is More Than A Feeling!

We all have heard of fight-or-flight response right? Well, it is more than just a feeling when you are being chased by something scary like a tiger – your body actually works overtime to compensate for the stress you are under through this mechanism called HPA axis. It is a feedback response that is supposed to be a short-lived stress response that temporarily elevate your body’s efficiency in order to survive. Human evolution has made sure that we are out of the jungles now, so there are no tigers to run away from. But our stress response stays intact. Your body doesn’t know the difference between the stress of not being able to meet a deadline and the stress of running away from a tiger. In this case, your HPA axis will activate chronically or repetitively each day.

 

Stressed: Body in Overdrive

When your stress becomes distress, you can really feel it! Your cortisol (stress hormone) is chronically elevated or it is elevated when it is supposed to be low (especially at night). This stress response allows to you rush from one place to the next and get a million things done in a day. You may think it is a good thing that you are doing so much, but often times, they can’t seem to turn this stress off – especially at night. Therefore, one of the common symptoms of your body in overdrive is Insomnia. This will cause you to wake up not feeling refreshed, afternoon fatigue that seems to hit around 2-4pm and difficult with focus and memory during the day. If this continues on without intervention, your brain will shut off your ability to function at a high level all the time to give you a break. This will lead to our Adrenal Crash.

 

Stressed: Adrenal Crash

Ever feel wiped out and can’t recover? You are feeling the adrenal crash. This happens when your brain start dialing down the over-reaction to your stress to protect you from chronically overloading your system. Your corticotropin-releasing hormone told your brain to stop driving up your cortisol and your adrenaline production in your body, and causes you to feeling exhausted. At that point, you feel pretty much low on everything – low mood, low mental focus, low metabolism, low memory, low immunity, low hormone productions. Your body is trying to conserve energy so you may feel better again in the distant future. This is also the perfect time for a lot of the infections to take an advantage of your immune system. You get sick, and you recover slower than normal from an illness. If not addressed, you will cause long-lasting damage to your immune system as well as your hormone functioning which may lead to the development of diseases such as thyroid diseases, cancer, metabolic syndrome, infertility, and autoimmune diseases.

 

What Type of Stress Do You Have?

Overdrive	Exhaustion
Insomnia	Getting sick easily
Waking up NOT refreshed	Difficult time recovering from sickness
Afternoon fatigue around 2-4pm	Allergies
Low sex-drive	Increased aches and pains that you have never had before.
Hormone dysregulation (any hormone symptoms that are out of whack)	Excess need for caffeine (or developing dependency)
Fatigue after eating	Fatigue on waking
Having digestive problems	Low blood sugar symptoms (ie. Feeling faint when hungry)
Irritable, anxious and/or depressed	No appetite – especially in the morning
Noticeable increase in cravings	Scattered thinking – can’t focus on one task