Welcome to Fit Body Happy Joints. My name is Shannon. Today we are talking about the use of exercise or cardio as stress relief or as your therapy or as an outlet to cope or manage stress. And exercise can be excellent for stress

management in the right doses, but I really want to teach you how to know when it may be adding to your stress,

compounding the effects of stress, and potentially natively affecting both your health and your body composition.

So we'll start by talking about how stress affects your nervous system.

We'll go in a little bit deeper into how stress affects your hormones, And then we'll go into the differences

between acute stress, which is kind of short-term,

temporary stress, which is totally normal,

and then chronic stress or longer-term stress,

which will have negative health consequences.

And I want to give you some symptoms to kind of look for that may indicate that you're experiencing

chronic stress.

And then finally I want to get into how exercise affects stress hormones and insulin sensitivity

and even body composition and how to know if your workouts are improving your stress or contributing

to it.

So let's start by talking about how stress affects your hormones and your

nervous system. I talked extensively about exercise in the nervous system and

that's episode number 109, so I don't want to get too much into how stress affects your nervous system.

If you want to learn more about that, go listen to that episode.

It's been a fan fave so far and it's been one of my personal favorites,

so I highly recommend you go listen if you're new around here.

But just really briefly, stress is a physical response

that's caused by a perceived threat.

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