Let's talk about the biggest barrier to recovery and actual healing and that is stress.

In the activation of the flight or fight mechanism, it's called the sympathetic nervous system and a person is in sympathetic dominance and you have high levels of cortisol and high levels of adrenaline, both produced by the adrenal gland.

The activation of the sympathetic nervous system and the activation of cortisol really wasn't designed to go more than 90 seconds.

The problem is nowadays, it's just all day long. Our environments, our life is filled with things that keep us in stress mode.

When the body is in flight of fight, it's preparing for emergency survival, running away from something or fighting and you will not heal 100% if you're in this mode.

Many people have the switch turned on and they just can't turn it off and this prevents the sleep which has an entire cascade of additional things that can happen.

I did a whole video on that. It also release glucose. Your body has a stored glucose is glycogen, it's going to release glucose when you have high levels of cortisol.

Even another name for cortisol is glucose corticoid. It's a glucose controlling hormone and it will activate insulin. That's why a lot of times people become diabetic when they have stress for too long.

So you're not going to be able to recover. Your digestion is not going to work that well. The speed of wound healing is less.

You retain sodium and you'll dump potassium. The more stress you have, the more that you just will lose potassium.

Chronic stress destroys something your brain called the hippocampus and hippocampus has to do with memory, learning and locating yourself in time and space.

So you're like, okay, where do I do it? Those keys? Where did I park? You're studying something but it's just not quite going in.

It could be from the stress affecting this brain structure.

Also, stress is the main activator for disease and especially infection. It's almost impossible to get sick if you're stress-free.

It's virtually impossible to have a disease if you don't have any stress. You take a look at anyone who had a disease or an infection and they had stress right before that happening.

Chronic stress then causes cortisol to be resistant. Very similar to insulin resistance. You can have cortisol resistance.

So your body is pumping out more cortisol but it's not really working.

And because cortisol is an anti-inflammatory, that function doesn't work anymore and you just become one big ball of inflammation.

Being in the flight of fight mode too long can increase your risk of heart attacks and it can even cause a loss of bone formation.

I had a patient when I was in practice come in the office and she was postmenopausal.

She her entire spine collapsed where she now she's like a hunchback and the bones are literally caved in on each other.

It was really, really weird. So I sent her out to get tested and her cortisol was off the charts.

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