Stress and Your Health

Stress and Your Health

Have you heard? There is a killer on the loose! It is reducing the quality and quantity of life of many people in North America – perhaps even you! It steals the joy and pleasure from your days and nights. It makes you miserable, and can make you sick. You become more susceptible to diseases such as heart attacks, cancer, and diabetes. Once you are sick, stress keeps you from responding as well to medical care. Yes, stress can be a killer!

The Internal Battle

Stress is short for distress. Distress describes an unpleasant influence by forces outside or even inside your body trying to tear you apart. Distress can come from your environment, your body, or your thoughts.

The opposite of stress is homeostasis. So, when stress is constantly trying to pull you apart, homeostasis is constantly working to put you back together. Homeostasis is the process your body uses to combat stress.

Rather than being just a single event, stress accumulates over time. Homeostasis then, must be constant, relentless, and dynamic in working to return you to a normal state. It must do this no matter which direction stress is pulling you.

Homeostasis is a very important process in your body that you need to support in every way. Homeostasis encompasses all of your resources:

• Your brain and nervous system
• Your immune system
• Your hormonal system
• Every other body function

Let’s look at an example of the battle between homeostasis and stress:

Stress triggers the fight or flight mechanism. Your body will prioritize resources to meet specific demands of stress. In fight or flight, your body prepares to do battle or run away. Either of these actions will require fuel – and right now!

Where do you get that fuel? From organs you don’t need at that moment to survive.

So if you are being chased by a lion, you don’t need digestion. Stress will take nutrients from digestion as fuel to meet this particular crisis. The same is true for other organs and systems: Stress will literally steal nutrients from your reproductive system, your bones, aspects of your immune system, your nervous system, and more – all in an attempt to survive.

Now, assuming you survive the stress, does homeostasis put the nutrients back in those systems? No, not at first. It takes them out quickly and returns them slowly, just in case there is another lion around.

This deficit accumulates over time.

Gradually, you begin to show signs of chronic stress that we call premature aging:

• Your blood sugar becomes more difficult to control
• Your arteries begin to clog up with cholesterol
• Your muscle mass begins to melt away
• Enzymes in your cells begin to turn off and caramelized sugars begin to damage your brain and nerves
• You can’t think and you have no energy

Your body cannot stand this kind of stress and it breaks down.

This illustrates why you need nutrients from food and supplements to combat stress. The more nutrients you have "on board", the less fuel your body will have to steal during a crisis. TriVita’s Adaptogen 10 Plus is a breakthrough scientific formulation that offers a natural way to ease anxiety and stress.

With the proper nutrients and nourishment, you will be able to resist the relentless killer that stress has become in our society.

Learn More…

• Tips for Reducing Stress in Your Life
• How Stressed Are You?

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Please note that Weekly Wellness Report topics will be chosen at the discretion of Brazos Minshew and based on general relevance.

These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA, and are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.