Are You Living Off Stress Hormones?

Is it just me, or do people seem more stressed to you these days?

If you often experience the feelings of stress, anxiety, exhaustion, or overwhelm, there’s a really good chance you are living off of your stress hormones.

A few months ago, I wrote about the overload of information that we are now faced with and it clearly resonated with people because it was one of our most commented upon blog posts ever.

I believe that the volume of information coming at us is one cause of our stress, but there are clearly other factors as well. Work, finances, parenting (especially parenting more than one child or being a single parent), marital conflict, illness, death of a loved one, natural disasters—all of these experiences, and more, can create a stress on our system.

Understanding How our Nervous System Works

The Sympathetic Nervous System is the alarm state that our bodies go into whenever a threat is perceived. This is often called the “fight or flight” response. Its job is to activate glands and organs to help us spring into action or defend the body against attack.

The Parasympathetic Nervous System is the biological counterpart to the sympathetic nervous system. This is known as the “rest and digest” system – although we refer to it as the rest, digest, and heal system. When parasympathetic activity dominates, healing and regeneration occur. The body performs activities like digesting, detoxifying, eliminating, repairing, and building immunity.

Most people today are constantly on the go—running to their jobs, tending to their families, their commitments, and their deadlines. Simply put, their whole body is almost constantly in a “fight or flight” state and they are living in Sympathetic overdrive—living off of stress hormones.

The truth is, some people are so accustomed to these feelings that they don’t even know how stuck in the “fight or flight” mode they actually are!

But when the Sympathetic System dominates, there is a breakdown in digestion, detoxification, elimination, and immune functioning that may clue you in. Put simply, you get sick. You may experience weight gain, brain fog, disturbed sleep, digestive troubles, cravings, exhaustion, acute illness or even autoimmune disease.

We are seeing more and more of this in our practice these days.

More people are feeling unwell—and many of those people are facing a difficult struggle to get healthy again. 

What’s Going On & What You Can Do

Even if you are eating all the “right” foods and taking all the “right” supplements, there’s still more to the puzzle.

If you want to regain your health, you have to stop living in your Sympathetic Nervous System (your fight or flight nervous system) where your body constantly feels like it’s in danger, and help your body to shift into living in your Parasympathetic Nervous System (your rest and digest nervous system) where healing and regeneration can occur.

This is where we can help.

We believe that if you give your body the right conditions, it can begin to naturally heal and re-balance itself.

In our program, The Mindful Reset, we will spend 2-weeks together helping your body to re-enter its healing state. The activities that we will be teaching will assist you to feel calm, safe and relaxed and will therefore shift you into your Parasympathetic Nervous System. This will allow you to find the calmer, more relaxed, and healthiest version of you!

This program is special to us. It has grown out of the one-on-one work we do with clients as well as from the things that have helped us personally in our own lives. (We’ve both written in years past about how stress has impacted our health: my health struggles after our daughter’s birth; and then Roy’s from the stress of those years.)

If you feel stressed, anxious, exhausted, or overwhelmed then you owe this program to yourself.

There is no need to go through life feeling depleted and sick when you can feel vibrant and rejuvenated again.

We’d love to support you—and see your story alongside our amazing participant successes!

You can learn more about the Mindful Reset Program here.