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Stress Less
by author Farid Wassef, RPh, CCN

The alarm goes off at 7 am. You manage to drag your body out of bed. Once you’ve been jolted awake by that large cup of coffee, the mental list begins in your head.

Before you realize it, tension mounts and you’ve worked yourself up into a frenzy. You plough through whatever needs to be done in the morning, miss breakfast, and rush out the door to battle the traffic and whatever else dares get in your way. Like a bubbling volcano, when nothing can be solved or completed right away, you are ready to erupt into a tirade. However, throughout most of the day you manage to restrain yourself.

Many of us live in this edgy manner. However, if we continually perceive the ordinary events of our life as stressful, the body’s stress response is constantly being engaged. As a result the adrenal glands are overstimulated and secrete excessive amounts of cortisol, the body’s major stress hormone.

The Cortisol Conundrum

We know that stress affects our ability to think clearly and make effective decisions, and it causes us to feel anxious and irritable. Excessive amounts of cortisol can also lead to a number of health problems: heart rate, blood pressure, glucose, and cholesterol are all elevated from excessive surges of cortisol. The immune system also begins to falter under chronic stress. The thymus gland, the master gland that regulates the immune system, begins to decrease in size from excessive hits of cortisol.

Prolonged elevated levels of cortisol are one of the hallmark features of depression, insomnia, memory loss, and age-related cognitive decline. Furthermore, since excessive levels of cortisol can actually destroy brain cells, chronic stress has been implicated in the development of neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.

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Farid Wassef, RPh, CCN, is co-author of Breaking The Age Barrier: Strategies for Optimal Health, Energy, and Longevity (Viking Canada, 2003). prescription4nutrition.com.

Source: alive #271, May 2005

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Stress Less
Many Canadians suffer from stress. It’s the root cause of numerous health challenges we experience. Finding ways to reduce stress is essential to improve our health and our quality of life.