Is your mood, memory, or weight feeling out of sync? Stress has become a baseline pandemic-WFH vibe. You, your family, your coworkers, me, who is immune? The pandemic, politics, 24/7 news cycle isn’t going away. While we can try temporary measures to put the global problems out of our minds, baseline stress levels remain elevated in all of our minds.
Every month I partake in a five-day cleanse where I lose 3-5 pounds, feel focused, and have improved sleep. When I started the cleanse last month, I became bloated, gained weight, couldn’t focus on composing a basic email. Are you also finding that your routine health & wellness rituals are no longer useful or working? The culprit? Hormones in your brain and body.
Why is your stress level remaining high?
Subconscious triggers are reminding us that our lives are different today.
Examples of subconscious triggers- working at your dining room table instead of driving to the office, children talking to their teachers on Zoom, Friday night date nights in your living room instead of your favorite movie theater. All of these subconscious triggers keep our stress hormones elevated without us realizing there is a problem.
Why? Our disrupted routines and lives; we are all still grieving the loss of normalcy. Add in obvious triggers like a US election and rising COVID19 rates: our brain stress hormones spike again. Mental health studies in North America show that baseline stress levels remain higher for adults working from home than during other times of national crisis.
Elevated stress hormones in the brain disrupt all the hormones in your body.
When I say hormones, it is easy to think of sex hormones like testosterone or estrogen. Fifty hormones in our brain and body govern our memory, mood, immune system, digestion, and other body functions.
When we are stressed, corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) is pushed out in the brain. The entire hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis is disrupted. What does that mean? A disruption in the whole hormone system occurs, such as increased cortisol from the adrenal glands, and strain on your thyroid gland.
Stress in the brain can shut down your memory, mood, & weight control.
How do you know if your hormones are off-balance right now?
Common symptoms include:
- Difficulty sleeping, waking up exhausted
- Working a brain dog, can’t focus, feeling anxious
- Gaining weight despite a healthy diet.
- Gas, bloating, constipation, and digestive issues
- Feeling irritable, moody “for no reason.”
How do we find balance in an imbalanced world?
We are running a marathon, not a sprint. Solutions to lasting balance in your brain and body do not involve a quick fix, pill, or supplement.
During our corporate workshops, we are seeing participants report a 25% reduction in stress test scores. How? Making sleep and sleep hygiene a priority.
OUR GIFT FOR YOU
In partnership with MediMind by Cloud 9, we are offering you this healing gift. I am honored to join the advisory board of Cloud 9, which creates medical grade meditations in an app that is being used in hospitals and clinics all over North America.
My recommendation in their expansive library, try the guided meditations for sleep. When my thoughts are chaotic, my choice is sleep music on this app.
Here is access to a FREE 90-day trial for our #brainSHIFT community: https://bit.ly/3nuCmM5
