Want to feel better than you’ve ever felt?

Here’s another excerpt from my 10th book, The Secret of Vigor – How to Overcome Burnout, Restore Biochemical Balance and Reclaim Your Natural Energy

Some of the most popular New Year’s resolutions every year are:
*Lose Weight
*Get in Shape
*Reduce Stress
*Get Healthier
*Win the Lottery

The Secret of Vigor can help you with 4 out of 5 of the most popular resolution goals, so I’ll be posting excerpts from the book for the next several weeks – so please stay tuned for each installment.

If you simply can’t wait, then you can certainly get a copy at http://amzn.to/1eju3wu or at your favorite library or bookstore.

Stress Hormones, Depression, and the Loss of Vigor
Just as overexposure to certain hormones is detrimental to health, so is underexposure. Consider the effect of the primary stress hormone, cortisol, on the brain. We’ve known about the links between stress and depression for decades. In the United States alone, stress-related depression accounts for more than $30 billion in annual medical expenses and lost productivity.

Researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College, in London, have determined that stress-related depression actually progresses in two distinct phases. The first phase is characterized by an overexposure to cortisol, creating a “toxic” effect whereby too much cortisol actually destroys crucial brain cells responsible for good mood. The second phase is a compensatory mechanism where the brain becomes resistant to the effects of cortisol as a way to “protect” itself from cortisol’s damaging effects. So the brain cells (neurons) are now deprived of cortisol, creating a dramatic underexposure that leads to a host of memory and psychological problems.

Unfortunately, this syndrome of cortisol resistance leads to a deepening of depression and symptoms of fatigue and confusion, a combination that is very much like the symptoms seen in people with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). A similar scenario occurs for other hormones, whereby over- or underexposure leads to a host of physical and psychological dysfunctions, which are alleviated upon restoring metabolic balance.

Want to feel better than you’ve ever felt?

Here’s another excerpt from my 10th book, The Secret of Vigor – How to Overcome Burnout, Restore Biochemical Balance and Reclaim Your Natural Energy

Some of the most popular New Year’s resolutions every year are:
*Lose Weight
*Get in Shape
*Reduce Stress
*Get Healthier
*Win the Lottery

The Secret of Vigor can help you with 4 out of 5 of the most popular resolution goals, so I’ll be posting excerpts from the book for the next several weeks – so please stay tuned for each installment.

If you simply can’t wait, then you can certainly get a copy at http://amzn.to/1eju3wu or at your favorite library or bookstore.

Stress and the Well-Trained Athlete
Stress researchers, including myself, frequently study competitive athletes. For obvious reasons, athletes are extremely interested in balancing the “dose” of stress they deliver to their bodies with the amount of recovery necessary for optimal performance.

Counteracting the muscle-wasting and fat-gaining effects of prolonged cortisol exposure becomes a large part of maximizing performance gains while minimizing the risk for illness and injury. For many athletes, the delicate balance between training “stress” and recovery poses a significant dilemma: To become faster and more competitive, they have to train hard, but training too hard without adequate recovery will just make them slow, because they’ll be tired or get sick or hurt.

Athletes who excel at the highest levels are those who are most adept at balancing the three primary components of their programs: training, diet, and recovery.

A phenomenon known as “overtraining syndrome” has been linked to chronic cortisol exposure, exactly the same situation that the average person faces in their battle with daily stressors and the struggle to maintain biochemical balance and high vigor. Although chronic overtraining is easy to recognize by its common symptoms of constant fatigue, mood fluctuations, and reduced mental and physical performance (sounds a lot like the burnout and lack of vigor suffered by many nonathletes), it may be difficult to detect in its earlier stages, just like the early stages of stress.

Therefore, competitive athletes, like everyone, need to become adept at balancing exposure to stress with recovery from stress to approach the optimal physical and mental performance they are looking for.

Want to feel better than you’ve ever felt?

Here’s another excerpt from my 10th book, The Secret of Vigor – How to Overcome Burnout, Restore Biochemical Balance and Reclaim Your Natural Energy

Some of the most popular New Year’s resolutions every year are:
*Lose Weight
*Get in Shape
*Reduce Stress
*Get Healthier
*Win the Lottery

The Secret of Vigor can help you with 4 out of 5 of the most popular resolution goals, so I’ll be posting excerpts from the book for the next several weeks – so please stay tuned for each installment.

If you simply can’t wait, then you can certainly get a copy at http://amzn.to/1eju3wu or at your favorite library or bookstore.

Stress Hormones in Action
When you encounter anything that causes you to feel stress, your cortisol levels go up. If you experience stressful events on a regular basis and are unable to effectively rid yourself of the stressor, then your cortisol levels stay constantly elevated. The elevation of cortisol leads to further problems with biochemical balance, such as reduced testosterone and interference with other hormones (such as insulin and thyroid hormones).

This process can be compared to what happens with a line of dominoes, where tipping one hormone off balance (cortisol) leads to a disruption in the next (testosterone) and the next (insulin) and the next (serotonin) and the next (thyroid) and so on, until eventually the balance of your entire system is upset and you feel terrible. Also lined up like dominoes are the other Pillars of Health, where cortisol excess increases levels of inflammatory cytokines, oxidative free radicals, and glycating sugars. This increase in stress-induced oxidation/inflammation is due, in part, to the fact that excess cortisol stimulates a chronic immune response that is accompanied by a “respiratory burst” from macrophages and related cells. And this response is also partly due to the increased creation of AGEs (advanced glycation end products) that is triggered by the cortisol-induced elevations in blood sugar.

Elevated cortisol levels are also associated with reduced levels of testosterone and IGF-1 in subjects exposed to high stress. (IGF-1, or insulin-like growth factor 1, is related to growth hormone.) Because testosterone and IGF-1 are anabolic, or muscle-building, hormones, the research subjects exposed to high stress also tended to have reduced muscle mass and higher body-fat levels. And they also tended to have a higher body mass index (BMI), a higher waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), and abdominal obesity (an “apple” shape). Researchers at the Neurological Institute at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) have linked excessive cortisol levels to depression, anxiety, and Alzheimer’s disease, as well as to direct changes in brain structure (atrophy) leading to cognitive defects—meaning that cortisol can shrink and kill brain cells. All this research points to a consistent reproducible finding—that chronic stress leads to biochemical/hormonal/metabolic disruptions that put the body in a state of accelerated “breakdown” in tissues throughout it, including the brain, heart, blood vessels, muscles, bones, immune-system cells, etc. At the same time, these disruptions also suppress the “buildup” of healthy tissues, because chronic stress retards tissue growth—except for abdominal fat!

Scientific research and medical evidence clearly show that a sustained high level of cortisol—triggered by chronic unrelenting stress and leading to a cascade of further biochemical disruptions—has debilitating effects on long-term health. Among these many effects is an increase in appetite and cravings for certain foods, especially sweets.

Because one of the primary roles of cortisol is to encourage the body to refuel itself after responding to a stressor, an elevated cortisol level keeps your appetite ramped up, so you constantly feel hungry. In addition, the type of fat that accumulates as a result of this stress-induced appetite will typically locate itself in the abdominal region of the body (probably so it is readily available for release during the next stress response).

The major problem with abdominal fat, aside from the fact that nobody wants a pot belly, is that this type of fat is also highly associated with increased cellular damage from glycating sugars, oxidative free radicals, and inflammatory cytokines, all of which increase the risk of developing heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.

So now you have a bit of appreciation for the challenges to biochemical balance that chronic stress causes in the body. When cortisol goes up or its normal rhythm is disrupted, a cascade of biochemical events is set into motion that disrupts other hormones, including testosterone, insulin, thyroid, and many others. Elevated cortisol also unbalances the ratio between various neurotransmitters (dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, and others) and other metabolic proteins (such as cytokines, which are involved in inflammation).

Want to feel better than you’ve ever felt?

Here’s another excerpt from my 10th book, The Secret of Vigor – How to Overcome Burnout, Restore Biochemical Balance and Reclaim Your Natural Energy

Some of the most popular New Year’s resolutions every year are:
*Lose Weight
*Get in Shape
*Reduce Stress
*Get Healthier
*Win the Lottery

The Secret of Vigor can help you with 4 out of 5 of the most popular resolution goals, so I’ll be posting excerpts from the book for the next several weeks – so please stay tuned for each installment.

If you simply can’t wait, then you can certainly get a copy at http://amzn.to/1eju3wu or at your favorite library or bookstore.

Stress Hormones Defined
A number of different biomarkers have been used in studies of chronic stress and stress-hormone balance. To help you better understand some of the concepts and vocabulary used to explain the biochemical activities that stress sets into motion, here are brief descriptions of these biomarkers:

* Cortisol is a hormone produced by the adrenal glands. Its main “acute” functions are to increase blood-sugar levels (via insulin antagonism), reduce inflammation, and stimulate immune function. Its main “chronic” effects are to increase blood-sugar levels (via appetite stimulation), increase inflammation, and suppress immune function.

* Testosterone and DHEA (dehydroepiandrosterone) are hormones produced by the adrenal glands. They suppress inflammatory cytokines, reduce oxidative damage, and improve insulin sensitivity—but testosterone and DHEA levels are suppressed when cortisol production is elevated, so you “lose” much of their anti-inflammatory and antioxidant benefits during periods of chronic stress.

* Epinephrine, norepinephrine, and dopamine are catecholamines produced in the brain. They increase during acute stress and are involved in brain function and vigilance, but production is suppressed during chronic stress, leading to fatigue, depression, and low vigor.

* Interleukin-6 and TNF-alpha are inflammatory cytokines produced by immune system cells. They normally are produced to slow acute tissue damage, but when produced chronically, they actually lead to accelerated tissue damage.

* C-reactive protein (CRP) is a protein synthesized in the liver. It is elevated during chronic inflammation.