Let's talk about how your stress can affect your immune system.

Now, when we're talking about stress, we're talking about the hormone cortisol.

Cortisol based on Sibha collection of medical illustrations, volume four of the

underconsystem, under the section cortisol, Dr. Frank Netter talks about the

relationship to the immune system. Cortisol has a purpose of suppressing the

white blood cell. Your white blood cells are basically the army of your immune

system. So cortisol suppresses that function. It inhibits that function. And this

is why if you go to the doctor and you're sick, whether you have, I don't know,

allergies, some skin reaction, some autoimmune disease, they'll give you

prednisone, which is cortisol, it's synthetic version, and that will clear up

the skin reaction, the allergy, or even the poison ivy. And it will also get

rid of inflammation. So it's suppressing this over reactive immune system.

That's what cortisol does. And stress activates cortisol. Now, if you think

about that, stress should improve your immune system, right? I'm going to

explain. There's two types of stress. There's acute stress, and then there's

chronic stress. And this is the one that really is behind so many health

problems, because when you chronically elevate cortisol through years of

stress, or months of stress, or even a sudden overwhelming shock of some

stress, you could create what's called cortisol resistance, okay? Very similar

to insulin resistance, in that this amount of cortisol that's coming out

through the body, may even look normal in your blood, but it's not effective.

It's the cells are not sensitive to cortisol anymore. They're not connecting.

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