Chronic Stress & Burnout Prevention

Chronic stress

You’re probably wondering why I’m even bringing this up, because everyone is stressed out and that’s just the way it is, right? Wrong. Remember, just because something is common, doesn’t mean that it is normal. Our lifestyles today place us under a significantly higher amount of stress than we experienced 100 years ago, and this can become a problem when your body can no longer manage the stress you’re under by generating an appropriate stress response.

What is a normal stress response?

Every time you encounter a stressful event, your body responds by releasing a collection of hormones (cortisol being the main one) that travel through your body to act on your tissues to make you ready to deal with that stressful event. The classic example is the “fight or flight response”. Suppose you run into a bear in the woods while on a hike. You’ll probably feel your heart start to pound, your muscles tense up, if you choose to run you can probably run faster than you could otherwise. These are some of the examples of those stress hormones working to get you through that situation. But what is equally important, and often forgotten about is the next phase of that stress response – the recovery phase. Your body needs time after escaping the bear to calm down, turn digestion back on, bring your heart rate and blood pressure back down, lower your blood sugar etc. This is the phase that many of us are missing when you think about the stress we encounter in our lives. Your response may not be as pronounced as it would be running into a bear, but every stressful situation you face generates this response to some degree. When you think about how many times you encounter stress during your day, how much time do you have afterwards to recover? Does the stress even stop?

Stuck in chronic fight or flight

Falling into this pattern of a constant stress response has its effects over time. As you can imagine, being in fight or flight long term can be dangerous for your health, and your body can sense this so it responds by gradually ignoring the stress hormones in an effort to survive. As this survival mechanism becomes more pronounced, your body is becoming less and less responsive to the cortisol being released, almost similar to insulin resistance in pre-diabetes.

An important distinction – this does not cause Addison’s disease. Chronic stress causes a functional issue with how your body responds to hormones, although you are still capable of producing them. The good news here is that this pattern can be fixed!

Testing

One of the most useful tests we use is a salivary analysis to determine your cortisol levels throughout the day. This helps us in staging the hormonal dysfunction so we have a better idea of which treatments will be most effective.

Other hormone testing methods may be useful in some situations, such as analyzing these hormones through urine, or blood.

In order to determine if there are other causes for your fatigue, and other symptoms, blood tests may be necessary to assess for nutrient deficiencies or other hormonal dysfunction.

Treatment

Step 1: Treatment is individualized to your specific situation. Once we determine the stage of hormonal dysfunction you are experiencing, we may recommend supplementation with vitamins and herbs to support your stress response. This is different from the effects of caffeine, which demands cortisol (and epinephrine) release from your body.

Step 2: Diet analysis to assess your nutrient intake will also be useful to determine if you are eating and absorbing enough nutrients to maintain proper body system functions.

Step 3: Depending on your symptoms and the stage of severity, a small series of vitamin and nutrient IVs may be helpful in supplying you with higher doses of the nutrients needed to replenish any nutrient deficiencies, and supply your body with the necessary ingredients for effective hormone production and utilization.

Step 4: We will also discuss lifestyle changes to alleviate and/or manage your stress to allow for appropriate recovery time. This doesn’t necessarily mean taking time off or multiple vacations (although who wouldn’t want that?!). What determines how your body response to stress is how you perceive things around you, as your thoughts and emotions can generate biochemical reactions.