How Worry and Stress Affects You at the Cellular Level

Get access to my FREE resources 👉 https://drbrg.co/3xUW8dr

now today we’re going to talk about how anxiety and worry can affect your cells i do want to mention though stress is good for us to adapt to it and to become better i’m mainly talking about chronic stress because the key factor is duration how much chronic stress does someone go through without recovery if you’re recovering along the way stress is essential okay you can’t live without stress but i’m not talking about that i’m talking about chronic worry anxiety over weeks and weeks and weeks and what that does to your cells now let’s start with your immune cells what’s fascinating is that when someone experiences worry anxiety and stress their immune cells become paralyzed okay very specifically the t cells the t cells are responsible for a lot of things including killing cancer cells including viruses and so if that army that protects you becomes paralyzed that can leave you susceptible to having a lot of problems this is why stress always tends to come right before someone gets an infection someone ends up with a sore throat or they get sick so if you’re trying to think of what would improve your immune system it’s the absence of stress okay now let’s think of a panic attack right what happens is you kind of stop breathing you sometimes even forget about breathing and that can greatly affect your physiology if you don’t get oxygen but in a panic attack you basically lose control it’s the feeling of losing control and some a reactive mechanism kicks in there okay dictated by a certain part of the brain called the amygdala which is all about how the body responds in a state of fear as well as adrenals which is also relating to stress and involving the flight or fight mechanisms and so you have hormones in different parts of your body that are reacting when you’re under a stress state that are going to prepare the body for stress but typically what happens overall in a chronic worry or anxiety state is your cells stop moving everything kind of slows down even the mitochondria slow down and stop doing their function and they actually start creating this thing called apoptosis which is dying it’s like a cellular suicide but typically what we have in this state is we have the cells just stop moving even the frontal lobe of your brain stops firing so you have a lack of it’s called executive function which is decision making planning organizing that shuts down i mean think about the last time you were under a lot of stress or panic you’re not in this creative planning trying to solve problems of your life you basically are getting problems and not being able to solve them and so there’s a lot of indecision that’s connected with the state of worry and anxiety and stress i mean even when people are um i don’t know in sports and they’re playing a tennis match right and there’s a lot of pressure on someone let’s say they’re in a tennis game right to win this last match and then they choke right because somehow this pressure was too overwhelming and they lost some of that executive function that athletic performance you can get brain freeze you can also have writer’s block right i mean try to write a book when you’re under stress your creativity your imagination is crucial for writing playing sports solving problems running a business and doing your profession and so stress worry and anxiety tend to knock the wind out of someone where they lose their cognitive power and their mental capacity becomes crippled so they may lose their appetite they don’t sleep well they’re not recovering and the body can start going downhill so how do we solve this well there are certain parts of your body that are voluntary and certain parts that are involuntary okay and that means that there’s certain parts of your body that are under your control and certain ones that are not under your control the ones that are under your control have to do with muscles okay now you might say your breathing okay is under your control well your lungs by themselves don’t do anything they’re passive it’s the diaphragm that moves the lungs and the diaphragm is a muscle so the muscles are something that you can control and so when you’re in a panic attack and you’re not breathing and the body’s in the stress state you want to start to put motion back into the body and breathing is probably the first thing you need to do there’s a fascinating video that i did on breathing and just a simple breathing technique to pull yourself out of a panic attack to pull yourself out of a stress state simply by regulating your breathing and so as you hyperventilate now we have an imbalance with oxygen and carbon dioxide and now that oxygen cannot go into the tissues and it feels like you just can’t breathe so it can create a lot of issues so anytime you’re stuck in this worry anxiety stress mode there’s a lot of things you can do food wise nutrition wise but also there’s some things you can do just by getting your body into motion okay start to get outside and exercise in nature start speeding up your body okay because you’re countering this slowing down motion and that alone will pull you out of the stress state number three start controlling your breathing as well as your skeletal muscles the two types of exercise programs that i highly recommend would be one yoga exercises okay and i’m not even talking about getting into the philosophy of yoga but the yoga exercises are great for stress because you yourself are controlling your body and your breathing in a controlled way the other system that i really like is pilates that’s another program where you’re controlling your emotions in a certain way and that is very powerful to pull yourself out of a stress day but it’s all about putting yourself in control of your body because in a state of worry and anxiety basically you’re out of control the other thing i’m going to mention with the frontal cortex they don’t really know exactly what that part of the brain does exactly they have some ideas but it does have something to do with executive function planning organizing getting things done those things so the more that you can get an action and get things done the better it’s going to pull you out of that worry stress mode so on that note i think the next video for you to watch would be this one on the breathing technique i mentioned right here you