Welcome my friends. This week I'd like to have a conversation with you about stress.

Stress is the number one epidemic of our civilization.

Every day you hear people saying I'm so stressed. So how do we define stress?

Well here's a good definition of stress. Stress is the interpretation of threat.

Once again, stress is the interpretation of threat.

It could be physical threat, it could be emotional threat,

it could be a perceived threat even though the situation is not threatening but you think it is.

And as soon as you interpret that you are threatened, then the body goes into what we call the stress response.

And this stress response is driven by the sympathetic nervous system.

The sympathetic nervous system is mainly concerned with our survival.

So a long time ago in our evolutionary history

when we were part of the food chain in a jungle and a saber-tooth tiger wanted to have us

for lunch or dinner and was coming at us ferociously.

We had no choice other than to either kill the tiger,

which we became pretty good at. Tigers are now at risk for extinction in many

parts of the world. So either we had to kill the tiger or we needed to run. And this part of our activity, of our brain activity, is triggered by a part of a brain

of a brain that is called the midbrain or the reptilian brain.

And it executes what is called the fight of flight response.

Fight, kill the predator or flight,

run away from the predator.

There's a third element also to this in some species is called

fight flight or freeze. So if you freeze then the predator might think you're

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