Does Stress Cause Inflammation?
“If you don’t make time for wellness, you’ll be forced to make time for illness.”
I’d ask you to reflect on that for a moment.
Most of us know the uneasy feeling of stress too well. Anxious, nervous, perturbated, always on the edge. Stress at work, stress at home, stress to show up in social settings… the list goes on. In the last one and a half years, we’ve all been subject to even more stress due to the uncertainties and additional pressures that have become our norm.
Most of us also know that it would be beneficial to reduce stress levels in order to improve our quality of life. What does this mean in practice though, do we even still know what our bodies feel like to be stress-free? Is it even possible to live stress-free? What happens to our bodies through extensive experience of stress? And, have you ever asked yourself if your capability of handling stress is affected by the things you eat?
Let’s start with the basic, but important details to understand what happens in our bodies when we are exposed to stressful circumstances.
Stress is a physical response to feeling challenged or threatened. Consequently, when we are under stress, our bodies go into a “fight or flight” mode. While in this mode, the stress hormone, cortisol, is released and causes the body to direct resources away from functions that are not considered essential in life-threatening situations – these include our immune response and our digestive system. Stress is not all bad - it is sometimes helpful to exhibit a stress response as this can help provide energy and focus to overcome the stressful situation. However, this “fight or flight” response is meant to be a short-term state for an extraordinary situation - in which case, a temporary shutdown of the immune system wouldn’t cause great problems. Yet, today a stress situation has often become the norm and not the exception, so many of us are in a constant state of “fight or flight”, with our immune system and our digestive system being shut down for longer periods of time until the perceived threat is over.
Inflammation is a biological response of the immune system that can be triggered by a variety of factors, including pathogens (e.g virus or bacteria), damaged cells (e.g. from injury) and toxic compounds (e.g. from chemicals, allergens or foreign bodies that are too large to be digested). It is a smart function of our body to protect and allow our immune system to fight the invader and when healed the inflammation disappears again. Yet, if the threat remains, especially as our immune system is compromised due to stress, inflammation becomes perpetual. Inflammation on the surface of the body is commonly described as heat, redness, swelling, and pain. This can be seen. However, what happens deeper under the surface? Chronic, low-level inflammation at the cellular level is commonly known as the “silent killer” as it can develop without pain or any external sign.
Eventually, because our immune and digestive systems have been disengaged whilst your body is in the “fight or flight” mode, over longer periods of time, inflammation continues to be present causing eventual tissue death, thickening, and scarring of connective tissues, which in turn can lead to a host of chronic health illnesses increasing cardiovascular and bowel diseases, diabetes, arthritis, and some cancers.
As you can see, inadvertently constant stress can cause inflammation to linger which in turn creates a risk to our health.
We need to reset in good time. What can we do?
Of course, it’s not always possible to eliminate the stress in day-to-day life, but we definitely can take steps to control its effects. We can learn stress management tips. We can appreciate the importance of sleep. We can prioritise self-care. We can commit to exercise. We can do yoga. We can embrace deep breathing, meditation, and relaxation techniques. And, maybe most importantly, we can control what we eat and reset our digestive system for instance with regular cleanses or periods of detoxification.
What we eat is crucial and a key foundation of it all, as what we eat influences how we sleep, how much energy we have to exercise and our mindset, our thoughts and mental health. We can meditate all day long, but if we are simultaneously eating processed and other inflammatory foods, we are not allowing our systems to reset and function as they were meant to. Therefore, a key component of a body cleanse programme, is the reduction of inflammation in the body, which means loading up on anti-inflammatory foods and cutting back on inflammatory foods, along with other healthy lifestyle choices.
A common reaction to the topic of a detox/body cleanse is: “I don’t want to restrict the food that I eat.” If you compare a list of what you can eat (anti-inflammatory) versus a list of what you can’t (inflammatory) to reduce inflammation in your body, you will soon realize, this is not a restrictive diet. Quite the opposite, it might open up a whole new world of food possibilities for you:
There are plenty of ways to eat well without taking up stacks of time nor needing to love to cook. A little planning, a little preparation and a real commitment to change is all you need to start a great journey on the road to optimal wellness.
This is why I developed my 12-day body cleanse group programme which is also a key element in my 1:1 programme. It is not a fad or a trend but developed to support people to assist their bodies to cleanse.
In the 1:1 programme, I have devised it to incorporate other lifestyle aspects in addition to just the food element to enable your body to begin healing from the consequence of the high levels of stress most of us are facing. These include adequate hydration, optimal sleep, regular movement, mindfulness, and other self-care remedies and will help to maximise the benefits of the programme. Of course, the group programme is a great start and the 1:1 obviously goes into much greater depth being a 3-month programme and personalised to your current situation.
If you don’t want to be forced to make time for illness, make time for wellness. Today.
You can still join the September group body cleanse programme, sign up on my website: https://www.annepetersencosta.com/events/rejuvenate-sep2021
If you prefer to do this in a personalised 1:1 programme, take advantage of the 20% off that I have running until end of September : Restore and Transform — Anne Petersen Costa