We all know that chronic stress is bad for our health; however, many fail to prescribe any legitimate tools for reducing stress. This is likely the result of two primary confusions; a misunderstanding of what stress actually is, and a misunderstanding of how the mind works.

What is Stress?

Most of the time, the word stress is not clearly defined. Also, keep in mind that the meaning of a word changes with the context. In medical terms, stress is anything that throws off the equilibrium of the body. This brings endless causative factors into this definition of stress; poor sleep, bad diet, physical trauma, chemical toxicity, biological imbalances, and also psychological stressors.

However, most of the time, people hear the word “stress” and instantly think of or refer to psychological stress. In this case, the next question is, what is stress in the psychological sense?

First, let us breakdown, and define the term psycho-logical. Psych, refers to spirit and logical means reason.  Looking to the Serbian language for help, logic or reason is the mental process of connecting the cause to the effect, that’s what it means to understand the reason, “what caused something to happen?”

So, psychological stress is a stress a spiritual being experiences when they cannot understanding something in life, they don’t know why something happened, how to make something happen or more literally, how an effect (experience) was caused. When you can figure something out, psychological stress usually dissolves.

Putting this together, when handling stress, we have the primary objective of first identifying what sort of stress we are experiencing. While psychological is probably the most dominant source of stress people experience, it is not the only stress people deal with.

The second objective in handling stress is understanding the golden ratio. Not all stress is bad, and to completely get rid of stress wouldn’t make much sense. Keep in mind, stress is simply a conflict, a problem, to be exact it is a force, counter-force. So in this way, to get rid of all our problems in life would be foolish because without any challenges, we wouldn’t grow, and at worst, we would be existentially bored.

Therefore, when it comes to stress and problems, there is an optimum ratio of 80:20. Meaning, 80% of our life should be effortless and pleasurable with 20% (maximum) challenging and painful, just enough to make things interesting. Think of it this way, if life were a game (considering we all feel like we are either winning or losing depending on circumstances), then to have a game, we must be able to win or lose in order to make it interesting. If you were playing a game of basketball, if you had no competition, no challenge and were winning with great ease, you wouldn’t have a game. Also, if you were losing without hope, you don’t have a game.

So, an optimal condition is to have enough challenge to make it interesting without too much struggle. You could in essence apply this to all areas of life; your health, relationships, finances, etc. 

With this being said, let’s look at the many ways stress can manifest…

The Different Types of Stress 

  • Physical stress: Starting with the good side of physical stress, some enjoyable exercise or physical work is usually helpful. Regular exercise  builds resilience in your body if you will, making your body more capable of handling physical stress. It is also a great way to eliminate excess stress hormone. However, too much exercise and you experience diminishing effects. Then there is obvious harmful physical stress like intense injury, accident, and physical trauma. All of these can suppresses immune function by elevating cortisol and lead to inflammation. And finally, too little exercise and poor posture, can put a stress on a body that is designed to move. This can cause poor breathing, muscle function, circulation, and organ dysfunction.

  • Biological/Chemical stress: Interestingly enough, just being alive can be stressful. Take the metabolic system for example; the process of digesting and metabolizing food can create stress. There is usually always some degree of metabolic waste that occurs after eating. Like money, it takes energy to make energy. So like all other stresses, we are striving for the proper balance. In regards to biological or chemical stress, the release of chemicals like hormones and neurotransmitters are necessary for health. For example, when we consume carbohydrates, the body produces serotonin, a brain chemical. Serotonin nourishes our nervous system to a degree, but too much of it can lead act as “excitotoxin” and cause cell death. Other examples of harmful biological or chemical stress include chronically low or elevated blood sugar, autoimmunity, or any hormone or body chemical that is either in excess or a deficiency.

    Other than keeping a proper balance within our biology, there are more obvious harmful chemicals to avoid, such as most synthetic chemicals. These are commonly found in alcohol,drugs, medications, estrogen-mimicking substances and agricultural chemicals like pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides. If body is over-burdened by any chemical, it can stress the metabolic, immune and detoxification system to the point of disease. 

  • Electromagnetic stress: There are magnetic forces in nature that can help or harm us. The more nourishing of them include moderate exposure to natural sources such as sunlight and the electromagnetic field in the earth. Sunbathing (without burning), walking barefoot outside and just being outdoors are all generally helpful to the body. In the right amounts, they grow our food, balance our hormones, energize us and influence our circadian rhythm.

    Again, as with all stressors when the scales are tipped, things go wrong. In regards to electromagnetic energy, overexposure to sun (sunburn), radiation, too much technology use such as computers, cell phones, and other electrical devices, can all harm the body. The heat from a computer screen can burn eyes and negatively effect our nervous system. Even using the cell phone puts off radiation, which can be felt if you hold it long enough. Therefore, is best to moderate exposure to all of these.

  • Mental stress: The mind is an energy producing phenomena, if you’ve ever thought hard enough, you know what I mean. Not to mention, it is our intentions, thoughts, ideas and considerations that project us through life. Using the mind to the point that it is helpful includes using our imagination, setting worthy goals, communicating, sharing ideas and views of life to create harmony. Others include overcoming obstacles, learning new skills, and seeking fulfillment or excellence in a trade.

    Mental stress becomes a problem when we are mentally reactive (act without first looking at whats actually happening), having suppressive or negative thoughts, worrying, hopelessness, and generally thinking less of ourselves. Basically, anytime you are not using your mind and it is using you, its going to feel stressful. More specifically, stress being a force, counter-force, it is more so when we have an idea that is met with a counter idea. Such as wanting to do something, but not wanting to do it at the same time. Other examples include intentions, counter-intentions like “I am going to get married”  but reactively you think “But I am not ever going to find someone to marry.” This force, counter-force is a mental conflict and creates mental pressure and possibly even a major cause of headaches. In my latest book The Fundamentals of Success, I go into detail about mental conflicts and give exercises for handling them once and for all.

  • Emotional stress: Emotional stress is similar to mental stress and is actually a byproduct of mental stress. In short, our thoughts create our emotions. If you have the thought “I am no good” you will certainly feel no good, perhaps you will go into grief, sympathy, undeserving, or shame. Emotional stress is actually quiet simple anatomically speaking; it is feeling an emotion that you don’t want to feel (emotion, counter-emotion). It is wanting to feel an emotion that you are not (i.e I want to feel joy, but I feel numb). Also, repressing or suppressing, any feelings is an emotional stress.

    Again, in my newest book The Fundamentals of Success, I go into great detail about the thoughts behind all emotions, how they are created, and what to do to experience greater emotional wellness. I highly recommend this read for anyone who is mentally or emotionally stressed.

  • Nutritional stress: As mentioned, digestive and metabolism is a stress. Expanding on that subject, nutrition can be a place for stress in many peoples lives. The “stress” from nutrition boils down to the digestive process. It takes energy, a lot of energy, to digest our food. The stress comes from metabolizing the food and using its energy as your own, extracting the nutrients and assimilating them into the body are also a healthy stress for the body. We cannot avoid eating, which would really create a biological stress. We simply want to eat foods that are easy to digest, creating the least metabolic waste possible. In my online course Perfect Digestion,

    On the other hand, eating foods that are highly difficult to digest, eating too much or too little, or eating foods that contain little to no nutrition can create a major stress on the body. To refine, nutritional stress comes down to eating something that is taking more energy from you than you are gaining from the food. That is why most fast-foods and junk foods are so stressful on the body – they are usually very hard to digest, not a biocompatible food and therefore put our bodies into a stressed state. 

  • Thermal stress: Last but not least, temperature can be a cause of stress on the body. Keeping our body temperature at its desired 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit is a major biomarker for good metabolic function. Usually a reading below 97.8 – 98.6 F strongly indicates hypothyroid. When the body temperature fluctuates too much outside of this point, the thermoregulatory part of the metabolic system becomes stressed. The body has to draw its energy stores and release stress hormones to keep us balanced.  Keeping the thyroid healthy with a diet that has an optimal calcium to phosphorus ratio, one rich in organ meats, gelatin/collagen, and low in PUFA is a good place to start. And of course, keeping the temperature in living environment in a good range is key. 

Internal and External Stress

Simplifying stress as a phenomena, you could say that all stress is a conflict; two opposing forces of equal strength. In other words, stress is pressure. Applied to the physical, when the body is injured, upon impact, there is a pressure, two opposing forces and it creates physical stress. This can be applied across the board of stressors, mental stress is the result of two opposing ideas, thoughts. Emotional stress is opposing feelings (wanting to feel good when feeling badly).

From this point of view, all stress usually has two components, two forces and these can be either internal or external. So, sometimes we are creating our own stress by resisting, fighting back. For example, suppressing your own emotions is an emotional stress created by us, internally. Other times, the stress is generated from the outside, by another person or by the environment. For example, wanting to see your girlfriend but she lives across the country. The physical distance opposes your intention.

  • External: These are forces that come from the outside such as sunlight, physical impact such as injury, environmental toxins, chemicals, pathogens or another person that either stop or oppose your intention. Relationships can fall into this category, which involve another person who can inhibit, reject or oppose you.

  • Internal: These are forces that occur inside of the body, mind or spirit, they are often a reaction to external stress.

Relieving Stress 

As you can see, stress occurs in multiple areas of life. It can occur physically in many ways, but also mentally and emotionally. Most of us have used the phrase “I’m stressed,” and are typically associating it with mental and emotional stress. We have an idea that we’re stressed but not quite sure where it’s really coming from; is it sleep deprivation, poor nutrition, toxic relationships, disease and imbalance in the body, or overexposure to thermal and magnetic stress? Finding out the source of our stress is key to achieving balance in the nervous system. The idea is that the more stress your body is under, the more stress hormones it will produce. When the body is over-burdened by too much stress from external or internal reasons, eventually it has no time to produce adequate levels of repair hormones to keep the body healthy and rebuild it. If we approach stress from a one-sized fits all approach we might overlook how our unique lifestyle is creating our stress load. Below I will share a few tips to balance these stressors from a holistic approach

    • Identify Your Primary Stressor: You can’t solve a problem without knowing what the problem is. If I tell you “the answer is 5”, am I right or am I wrong? Well, that depends on the question. Knowing the right question is more important than the answer. In fact, a problem only persists because there is something not being looked at. In other words, many people spend time trying to solve the wrong problems and therefore do not get the problem solved. For example, I see many clients who are trying to solve a particular health problem with diet. However, their diet is fine, many times their diets are excellent, but they have an unresolved psychological stress they aren’t dealing with.  As another example, if you are having a relationship problem that’s persisting, you can talk about all sorts of things and get nowhere, because you aren’t talking about the right thing. If you are unsure if a person wants to be with you, but you’re talking about everything under the sun except for asking them if they want to be with you or not, you will feel unresolved. This applies to all problems; you have to find the right problem before you get the right answer. Some people are highly nutritionally stressed (they eat poor diets) but are otherwise rather mentally or emotionally stable people. Some people are highly financially stressed but eat amazing diets and exercise properly. Others are rich and have no stress economically but do not exercise enough. So as you can see, finding your unique stress is key to handling stress. You might be able to determine your unique stress just by evaluating your life after reading this blog. Once you determine your primary stress, it is a simple matter of removing opposing forces. In other words, take proactive steps to remove what is countering you. If it is nutritional stress, you remove the junk food. If you’d like to learn more about this, I recommend my online course Perfect Digestion, which expands on this subject matter in more detail. If you know your mostly mentally, emotionally stressed, I go into detail on how to resolve this in my book The Fundamentals of Success.
    • Gelatin: If  your stress is biological/chemical or if your psychological stress has prolonged to the point of causing a health problem, you will want to resolve that as well. Biologically speaking, stress is an energy problem that inhibits proper metabolic function that leads to the series of hormonal and metabolic reactions that are associated with biological stress (lipolysis, glycolysis, increased serotonin, cortisol, estrogen, prolactin, leaky capillaries, protein catabolism, etc.) In fact, the capillaries are among the first tissues to be damaged by chronic stress. And one very simple thing you can do to help mitigate the effects of stress in the body is by consuming a generous supply of glycine, the amino acid most abundant in gelatin and collagen. Glycine has a great variety of antistress actions. Glycine is recognized as an “inhibitory” neurotransmitter, and promotes natural sleep (a great agent for remedying stress). Used as a supplement, it apparently has a kind of calming, restorative protective antistress action. It has known abilities to fight fibrosis, free radical damage, inflammation, cell death from ATP depletion or calcium overload, mitochondrial damage, and even diabetes. Glycine has an inhibitory effect that opposes many stress hormones like cortisol and estrogen. It also modulates the cytokines and “chemokines” that are involved in so many inflammatory and degenerative diseases, especially tumor necrosis factor (TNF), nitric oxide (NO), and prostaglandins.  There are a few ways to reap the anti-stress effects of glycine. First, you can take a prepared powdered gelatin doesn’t require any cooking, and dissolve it in hot water, coffee or it can be incorporated into custards, mousses, ice cream, soups, sauces, cheese cake, pies, etc., or mixed with fruit juices to make desserts or gummies.

    • Sleep: There is a strong connection between sleep, stress and metabolism. In short, high quality, deep-sleep is one of the few times our bodies completely regenerate and go into a deep state of homeostasis. Poor sleep, sleep disorders and sleep loss is highly prevalent in the modern world. Underlying mechanisms show that stress is involved in the relationship between sleep and metabolism through hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis activation. Sleep deprivation and sleep disorders are associated with maladaptive changes in the HPA axis, leading to neuroendocrine dysregulation. Excess of glucocorticoids increase glucose and insulin and decrease adiponectin levels. In other words, when we are sleeping our bodies can secrete stress hormones. In a healthy body, they are off-set by thyroid hormone, HGH and other anti-stress hormones. The trick is, bad sleep can cause poor metabolic function and increased stress, and stress can cause bad sleep, creating a vicious cycle. So, the quality of our sleep can make a huge difference in how stressed our bodies are, not just biologically, but poor sleep can inhibit good cognitive function and emotional stability. However, we have the ability to create an environment that promotes good sleep, and therefore prevent stress and promote regeneration. For tips on getting great sleep, read this blog post.
    • Scalp Massage: Another simple, science-backed method for decreasing stress is with a daily scalp massage. In study, a 15-minute daily scalp massage was found to significantly decrease stress hormone levels, namely epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol. 1

Categories: Lifestyle