Stress…The Good the Bad and the Ugly!…and the 5 minute solution!

As a wellness doctor, I get funny looks from people when I tell them – “Your body’s stress response is actually good for you”. No, I haven’t fallen off my rocker! Let me explain.

From the founding principles of chiropractic, we say the body is intelligent. In fact, it knows more about what it needs in every moment of the day than all the greatest scientists in the world put together could ever figure out. Now, let’s look at how stress affects the body and you will see that the body is actually reacting intelligently…but it eventually could kill you!

To start off this conversation let’s ask…what is stress? Well, in simple terms it is a response. Your body is responding to something that is causing it to change. There are actually a couple categories of stress. There is surprisingly ‘good’ stress for your body; an example of this could be a good form of exercise. You are ‘stressing’ your body, pushing it, making it do things it’s not usually doing, but in the end, this could be beneficial for you and your health (we’ll explain the best ‘de-stress’ form of exercise shortly). This ‘good stress’ has been termed eustress. (There has also been a term for a neutral kind of stress which we won’t get into here) Now, let’s talk about the ‘bad’ stress, which I will call ‘dis-stress’… yuck!

The ‘dis-stress’ adaptation response

This is simply your body reacting to something that it perceives as a threat to your existence, so it will do everything it can to keep you alive long enough to get you out of the threatening environment in order to survive and it will be intelligent in its reaction. Would you agree that all living things have an inherent programming to stay alive at all costs?

Well, let us have a look at the human body’s reaction to a threat or a ‘dis-stress’. (I thank Dr. James L. Chestnut B.Ed. M.Sc. D.C. C.C.W.P. who explains this in more detail in his book The Wellness and Prevention Paradigm) In essence, humans are actually hunter gatherers displaced through time into our current ‘concrete jungle’. In the past, a life threatening event could be a hungry tiger coming at you full speed! How is your body going to react? What do you need to do to survive? RUN! And run fast! Or if you are braver, you can try to beat it up in a fight! Now, this is a key thing to keep in mind, your body reacts exactly the same way, regardless of the stress. So, modern stresses are not a tiger, but are things like; taxes, bills, job interviews, layoffs, your boss yelling at you, traffic jams, family problems, pollution, the flashing lights of a police car in your rearview mirror…etc., get it? In order to ‘survive’ the tiger (insert your modern day stressor here) your body will get you ready to run as fast as it can, so here are just some of physiological events that will happen to keep you alive…intelligently!

First your body perceives the threat though your nervous system and direct signals are sent right away to your adrenal glands to produce your ‘stress hormones’ namely adrenalin. Then, in order to run for your life, here are some of the other reactions; your heart rate and blood pressure rise, blood flow to non- essential functions in the body is decreased in order redirect it to the working muscles. Therefore, short term memory and learning centers in the brain and your gut get less blood flow. You need fuel to work those muscles, so your cells will develop insulin resistance to keep glucose circulating through your blood to feed those muscles. Just in case the tiger gets a claw on you and you get scratched, your body makes your blood stickier so you don’t bleed to death, thus you will have increased platelet clotting factors and increased cholesterol which aids in clotting. Yes, your body is raising your so-called bad cholesterol,but it is in your best interest right now. It raises your cholesterol not only for clotting, but also amazingly enough, that adrenalin we mentioned earlier is actually made from cholesterol precursors. What also happens is that your immune system,which is a very metabolically demanding system that takes a lot of energy to run, will actually be down regulated in this immediate ‘dis-stress’ adaptation response.

Wow, I am tired just writing all that! If you look at what just happened, your body just did everything it could to help you survive the moment in order to get out of that dangerous situation so that you could survive to live another day and all those internal adaptive changes would reset back to normal after you exerted yourself. The big problem is, if your stressors are chronic and recurring like in modern day life and you don’t do something to reset that system (which I will tell you about below), your body never really has a chance to reset and unfortunately all those things your body did intelligently to help you survive will eventually lead to your demise! If you look carefully at the list of things your body did, they will eventually lead to the biggest chronic diseases and killers in society. For instance, the increased; heart rate, blood pressure, cholesterol and clotting factors can lead to strokes, heart attacks and cardio-vascular disease. Increased blood sugar and insulin floating around can lead to diabetes and certain cancers. Less blood to certain parts of the brain- dementia and other brain disorders.Less blood flow to the gut- Irritable bowel, crohns, colitis etc. Decreased immune system function – infections, cancer, auto immune diseases etc. NOT GOOD!

The Surge Training Solution- where just 10 minutes a week could help save your life!

So, what is the solution? If you look at what your body got you ready to do when the tiger showed up, it was to RUN and run fast! Well, if you actually DO that, your body will reset the ‘dis-stress’ adaptation response and your body systems will head back to normal levels. Most people know that exercising is ‘good’ for you. However, in the modern ‘image conscious’ mind set, many people are doing ‘fat burning’ or aerobic exercises which usually mean long times on the treadmill or elliptical or whatever. There is no doubt this type of training can improve your body in certain ways, but long laborious exercise in the gym can actually BE stressful for some people and often your brain will start producing chemicals that start to make you dislike exercise! (No wonder people don’t stick to their exercise routines)

What if I told you in under 5 minutes a day a few times a week, you could have profound effects on decreasing stress and actually burning fat too? The answer is a new concept in exercising called surge or burst training. The notion here is you do what your body got you prepared to do when the tiger (your modern day stressor) hit you. So, here the exercise is very intense but brief. Remember, you need to outrun the tiger, not out marathon him! So, what does a surge session look like? Here is a simple session I explain to my patients (there are many variations): you run on the spot punching your arms in front of you vigorously for a ‘surge’ of 30 seconds, then you rest for 30 seconds. Then you do another ‘surge’ of 30 seconds followed by another rest of 30 seconds, then you repeat that cycle one more time. That’s it! In about 3-4 minutes you are done exercising! Can you believe it? What you just did was what your body had prepared you to do… RUN.

Here are some key things to keep in mind about this type of exercise. The intensity of the bursts need to be very high, you really need to be moving your body almost as fast as you can. (This is safe in a certain way because your ‘as fast as you can’ is different from everybody else, so you are going at ‘your’ fastest pace). It is important to really get as many of your muscles involved as possible, which is why you should also be thrusting your hands forward as you run on the spot as if you were punching that deadly tiger right in front of you! You can also thrust them toward the sky as if you were climbing a tree.

What if you’ve got bad knees and can’t run on the spot? Just stand there and do the punching as rigorously as you can. You could also try to do this on a mini-rebounder like the cellerciser by David Hall which I mentioned in a previous article on this site. This will make it easier on your joints and yet give your workout a boost of efficiency. This surge training, because of the intensity, only needs to be done every couple of days. So literally a few minutes a day 3 times a week and you are ‘de –stressing’ your body.

A big side benefit of burst training is that is helps your brain liberate the ‘feel good’ hormones and you will actually start to ‘like exercising. (Also testosterone and HGH – human growth hormone -help your body repair and grow and build lean muscle mass). The other side benefit is that your body will actually preferentially start to burn fat over the next day or two after this session. How cool is that?

Dis-stress also can have a profound impact on your posture as well. I may get into that in a future article, stay tuned!

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Dr. Marco Caravaggio is a family wellness chiropractor that utilizes a low force chiropractic technique called Network Spinal Analysis (NSA) and focuses chiropractic functional neurology. He is located in the Network Family Care Center in Markham, Ontario, Canada. He can be reached at info@NetworkFamilyCareCenter.com and is online at http://www.DoctorMarcoDC.com

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