What’s stress got to do with it?
Introduction
When you first find yourself looking for help in this area, asking yourself “do I need more minerals?” and “where do I even begin?”, it can be really overwhelming.
There’s a likelihood that you may be aware you have had some big stressful times in your life, but maybe you feel like it’s “just life” and that everyone has stress in their world.
This is absolutely true – everyone has one form or another of stress, and most of us end up with deep layers of it over a lifetime, but it actually also has a significant impact on minerals and nutrient balance. This means that when we look at protocols or ways to help you feel better health wise, we at Supporting Balance want you to learn about what stress contributes to where you are at.
The information on this page is designed to help you get started on learning more at the level you want to learn at – whether that’s to understand the deeper level of ‘why’ you are where you are, or just the ‘what do I need to do?’.
Before both of those can be answered, it’s worthwhile reading on to get some context.
Understanding and Managing Stress
Understanding how minerals and stress levels relate can get really complicated. We will start simple an dbuild our way up to help you! If you aren’t sure on what something means or how it relates to your situation, there will be options outlined below to help you get support.
When our body perceives danger or at risk of harm and/or is stressed, we not only release adrenaline, potentially cortisol and other ‘react now’ type signals, but we also lose magnesium and potassium.
It’s part of the stress response our adrenal glands trigger to help keep us safe.
With sustained stress, this cascades into changes in other important minerals – one of the biggest ones being a loss of bioavailable copper. This important mineral keeps the flow of energy creation, enzyme activity, iron flow, histamine management, tissue repair and a variety of other things, happening. The more we have stress in our body, especially over a period of time, the more dysregulated our body becomes.
Metabolic stress then becomes another stressor too, on top of everything else!
The longer our minerals are out of balance, the body will become more out of balance and have less ability to weather stressful situations. Initially it adjusts as best it can, and we get mild symptoms that often settle quick enough or aren’t that severe, so we don’t notice.
More stress hits us without time for replenishing, and the body again adjusts, but now it has less magnesium, potassium, bioavailable copper, and other nutrients available.
Things often settle symptoms wise after the source of the stress has gone away and we are none the wiser. The thing is, that remaining little niggle or new symptom is likely to reappear or increase in severity over time, after a future bigger stress event. It may even be just the beginning before another symptom.
Often this time is when we REALLY know something isn’t right, but we’re now more tired or feeling sicker than ever, and it’s a higher hill to climb.
At what point does it become something we can no longer ignore or tolerate?
We then go to a Dr or maybe even a natural health practitioner. They do a heap of tests, say everything is “in range” and to eat well, get more sleep, keep an eye on stress and you’ll be fine. Maybe they’ve scared you with a diagnosis or something that doesn’t really feel right.
Maybe that’s where you are at now, or you are starting to see an accumulation of symptoms in yourself or someone else you care about, and you’d like to pause that change and help get symptom relief.
The iron connection…
This section is a bit more technical, but I’ll try to keep it easy to understand!
Minerals in our body all do many tasks – generally speaking one mineral doesn’t do just one job – they tie intogether to be a network of recycling nutrients. Especially once we are an adult, we have a lot of the nutrients we need to function day to day – we top up with extra nutrients (via food and water) and we do lose some via excretion pathways (toilet, sweat, breathing out)…. but we also need these key nutrients to recycle, in order to keep in optimum health.
We need ‘bioavailable copper’ in order to move iron around for example, and to keep it in forms that don’t cause us harm. If we don’t have enough functional copper, we can have trouble moving iron around, making new blood cells, with histamine issues, hormone imbalances, energy creation issues and so much more. VERY important.
These are contributing to increased oxidative stress.
Many of us have heard of the term oxidative stress, and know it’s bad, but really, do you know what it actually is? It’s “accidents with oxygen” – think of iron chains or plates left outside in the weather – they rust. THAT is oxidative stress! Oxidation of a metal.
One source of oxidative stress that is rarely considered unless you have the condition ‘hemochromatosis’, is iron being in excess in our body tissues.
You may have been told you’re low iron or anemic, so you can’t possibly have too much… but there’s actually a lot more to this than it may seem! Chances are, you’re lacking that bioavailable copper, to help you recycle and manage your iron.
Excess iron is often actually loaded in our liver, our muscles and other tissues, and when it’s not managed well, it is responsible for a massive amount of damage within our metabolic system. Our blood may be showing “low iron” but those blood tests aren’t looking in these tissue locations.
It is actually more common than you would believe, to be experiencing this imbalance – the body is REALLY smart and has protections in place to stop too much from being in the blood at any given time, and so when it senses oxidative stress may be high, it’s much safer for our health to have the iron out of the blood. It can help prevent us from infection and injury by doing this. As a result, many people show signs of what is touted as iron deficiency or anemia, at the same time as having too much of the ‘unbound’ (unusable) form in other locations.
What starts out as ‘low iron’ in the teenage years, with heavy periods… turns into years of iron supplements and/or transfusions that don’t ‘stick’ and continued increasing bleeding. You get told ‘your body just can’t seem to hold onto the extra iron!’ and you feel like your body is broken. It’s not doing what you want of it.
But what if it is working to help you, and it never needed more in the first place, but needed help with nutrients to recycling the iron you have?
The work that we do here at Supporting Balance is designed to help you optimise the recycling of nutrients, while giving you a chance to understand how the stress and trauma of our lives, also contributes.
The following steps are part of the Root Cause Protocol.
The approach we take here at Supporting Balance is to utilise these steps while gently learning how our nervous system works, so we can nourish, replenish and get our nutrient system recycling in an gentle and sustainable way.
Step 1: Start to reduce the metabolic stress on our body.
We start to achieve this by stopping a number of items which make our overall mineral balance worse, and ADD stress to our body.
Identify things you have in your life from the ‘stops’ list, and stop them as soon as is practical. You may use up existing products you have, or stop immediately and swap to alternatives. The choice is yours!
To further continue our rebalancing, we can steadily start the following ‘starts’, introducing a daily serve or small portion of one new or increased item… with a special note to be adding or adjusting only once per week.
That is, add or adjust one item each week, and aim to start your serving as something not at the full amount and keep that amount steady. It’s not a goal of doing 1/4 tsp of something one day, 1/2 tsp the next day and 1 tsp by the third day. Just do 1/4 tsp for the first week. Then add a new item or increase something in week two.
One step added consistently is better than 10 inconsistently.
Give yourself time and grace to change over time – it’s not a race, but a lifestyle change. This is designed to be sustainable via slow and steady changes!
Read more about adrenal cocktails here and magnesium options here.
You can hear me talking about my experience with the protocol and how you can ‘heal your body on a cellular level’ in 180-nutrition podcast here and other podcast or video episodes here. There are also a variety of webinar replays you can access for free here.
Step 2: Nourish your body as best as you can.
We suggest an ancestral diet where possible. Learn what your grandparents and great grandparents (or before!) used to eat and try as many of those foods when they are in season.
Try to sit and relax when you eat, not rush around while doing so! Our bodies divert blood flow away from digestion when we are not at ease during meals – you may eat amazing healthy food, but not absorb nutrients well because your body thinks you are in danger/needing to be ready to run from danger.
Step 3: Identify conscious AND subconscious stresses in our lives.
Get support to learn what alternatives you have and how you can reduce how much your body is in fight-flight.
Most people I speak to have lived through a lot of real or perceived stress by the time we speak – they have been in survival mode a lot of their life, and they often have little awareness of what it’s like to NOT be in survival mode.
It can feel very uncomfortable to be not in a stressed state, and we can end up seeking out ways to feel safe, which brings us right back into stressful events or extra workload – our safety!
When we are physically, emotionally or otherwise stressed or even when recovering from any perceived stress, our body is losing magnesium as we covered above, which is affecting other electrolytes and nutrients. Whether we are conscious of what happens to our body when we are triggered into a heightened stress state or not… our body is more actively pumping blood around our major organs. Biochemical changes start to really add up when our bodies are in a constant fight-flight-freeze state.
With chronic stress, our bioavailable copper reduces, our ability to move iron effectively from storage to the bone marrow to make new hemoglobin blood cells reduces, our ability to heal and recover is significantly impaired, and our digestion cannot happen effectively.
Keeping a diary can be really beneficial for you to keep an eye on things and see if there are any patterns in certain areas of your life that may be impacting on your health.
In the days/weeks/months immediately before your most dominant symptom occurred, were you experiencing a high stress situation? Or was there chronic stress in the leadup?
Get support to learn what alternatives you have and how you can reduce how much your body is in fight-flight.
The darker side to stress in our everyday lives and health
Often people start life off with mineral imbalances and nobody realises until a long time down the road, if they do at all. If we start off life without a full supply of minerals (from depleted mothers), when life’s stresses hit we don’t have the reserves needed to deal with it in the same way that a fully replenished body and mind would.
It’s also more the ‘exception to the rule’ to learn coping mechanisms and ways to approach stress release after big events – it’s more likely we’re taught to just ‘push through’ or to ‘get on with life’ and to push down the stress. This just means our body’s hold onto it even more and revisit that as the only way it knows how to deal with situations. When stressful situations come about in life we’re armed and ready with that one main way to ‘deal with it’… aka not really deal with it at all.
Suddenly we are perpetuating what our mothers, fathers, grandparents, teachers (and beyond) have influenced us with as the only option… it may be yelling (fighting), it may be avoiding confrontation (flight or fawn) or many other ways in between.
If we are a parent, we may see our actions suddenly being very reminscent of our parents – even if we haven’t concsciously thought of those situations since our own childhood. Our body is keeping track!
The first seven to 14 years of our life are very important in learning how to deal with stressful events, conversations, confrontation and more. It’s part of our innate survival – this worked then, and it’s kept me alive thus far, so why not keep doing it?
It becomes we may not have the resources or knowledge to teach our kids great options either… therein the cycle perpetuates itself.
This presents a situation which is a perfect storm for mental health struggles and many other conditions to set in – both that mentally we don’t know ways to help ourselves, to cope with stress and the overwhelm of situations is very real and debilitating.
It also means we don’t have the mineral reserves to manage it either. These mineral reserves would help take the metabolic stress off the body and give the brain and body a fighting chance to stabilise when given the right support of the mind as well.
This is a great example of how important it is to look at supportive therapies such as EFT/Tapping to help us recognise many things in our behaviour that we may do which has come from our childhood conditioning, and may have us stuck/easily returning to fight-flight.
This way our bodies can utilise what we consume to heal, and not be constantly running from the perceived danger that it is currently experiencing.
What next?
You may feel comfortable researching and learning, starting to do the ‘stops’ and ‘starts yourself, and that’s great! There are more suggestions here for doing this with kids too – many of these may apply to adults too.
Keep reading and learning as much as you feel comfortable with – it will help you in the long run to be your own guide.
That said, if you want a supported journey, you are welcome to book in for a session with Kristan.
If you aren’t sure which session to book in for, how about a free, no-obligation 15 minute consult advice call instead?