12 Ways to Improve Your Stress Resilience

Betty Rocker (00:16):
What’s up, rock stars Coach Betty Rocker here. And thank you so much for tuning in today because I really wanted to talk about this important thing, which is stress management. And why I talk about stress management and why I think it’s just as important to schedule in the same way we schedule in our workouts is because the resilience that we can build through practices like mindfulness and meditation help us respond better to the stress we deal with and the anxiety we feel in our day-to-day life, it’s like how your workout gives you more physical strength to handle the tasks you do in your daily life. Your stress management practices built up over time help your body deal with the burden that stress places on you and helps to mitigate its impact. So you know, let’s talk a little bit about how that stress response actually works.
(01:08)
So when we’re triggered by a stressful event, a signal is sent to the command center in our brain, which is the hypothalamus, and that regulates our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous response systems. So the sympathetic nervous system triggers the fight or flight response, which provides your body with a burst of energy so it can potentially respond to danger. The parasympathetic nervous system is the rest and digest response that calms our body. So when something stressful happens, your command center activates your sympathetic nervous system, that fight or flight response and your adrenal glands release adrenaline into your bloodstream, which makes your heart beat faster. Your breathing speeds up and extra oxygen gets sent to your brain. You, your senses get more tuned in like your sight and your hearing becomes sharper. And also blood sugar and fats are released from temporary storage sites around your body, which floods your bloodstream with them to supply you with energy just in case you need to fight or to run away from danger.
(02:11)
Now, after that first surge of the adrenaline subsides, the command center goes into its secondary response system protocol it, it triggers your HPA axis to release cortisol. And HPA stands for hypothalamus pituitary gland and adrenal gland. So there’s a lot involved in this secondary command system right now. Once your sympathetic nervous system has been activated and then it stays activated, your body’s engine is running at like these really high RPMs, you’re all revved up and you’re like ready for anything. And this would be good if you needed to fight or flee from danger. But way too often we’re triggering this system with daily life stress and it’s causing these hormones to be present in our bodies so often that they have a effect. When adrenaline runs through the body too often it can increase our blood pressure and cause damage to the blood vessels and the arteries, which raises the risk of heart attacks and stroke.
(03:10)
And if cortisol levels are elevated for too long, this can create an ongoing buildup of fat tissue and cause weight gain and also break down muscle tissue and impact our immune system health. So I don’t want you to think that your cortisol, which is a natural hormone made by your body, is a bad hormone. Neither is adrenaline. Both of these hormones serve highly important purposes. For instance, cortisol levels run on a cyclical schedule and are normally at their lowest at night and then begin to slowly rise in the early hours of the morning, which is part of what helps you wake up. So when we have normal levels of cortisol, they’re supporting the body’s sleep wake cycle, which is super important. But like we talked about with stress, when cortisol is elevated over long periods of time, not just in an isolated event, we end up suffering the consequences of things like poor sleep, weight gain, muscle loss, and a lowered immune response.
(04:06)
And one of the other impacts that heightened ongoing stress and rampant cortisol in your body can have that also directly impacts weight gain is that it interferes with our insulin response. So insulin is the hormone that helps to unlock your cells to receive the glucose from the nutrient dense foods that you eat. And insulin helps us keep our blood sugar levels stable by unlocking the cells to receive that glucose. And we wanna keep our blood sugar levels stable so we can have that steady energy to think to move and like function. Normally without insulin acting as the key to your cells, your body can’t put the glucose where it needs to go. So insulin sensitivity is the amount of insulin you need to unlock your cells. If you’re insulin sensitive, you need less insulin to unlock your cells to receive that glucose. This is the efficient scenario.
(04:59)
We wanna keep active because your body can store the glucose you don’t need for immediate energy in three primary places, your liver, your muscle tissue, or your fat cells. Now nutrient partitioning describes which of these three paths will be taken and that has a lot to do with your current amount of body fat, your current amount of muscle tissue and your hormone levels, particularly your insulin levels. If you have good insulin sensitivity, muscle and liver storage is gonna be prioritized and you get the bonus benefit of aiding your amino acids and entering the muscle tissue as well for muscle protein synthesis, which helps you repair and strengthen your muscle tissue. Now insulin is a hard worker and when there’s a lot of glucose to process, it jumps into action and portions out the storage it has in each spot in the body. But what happens is if you’ve met your immediate energy needs and your liver is at capacity and your muscles don’t have any more space left, it does the only thing left that it can do, which is put the rest of the glucose in storage in your fat cells.
(05:58)
Now, we may not be super excited about the fact that we’re storing some fat, but the truth is your body is pretty amazing. And this function is an important one because if you ate a meal with more sugar than you need for energy and your other storage tanks are full, the sugar has to go somewhere. The the problem is when this happens, too often a dangerous condition that’s known as insulin resistance can occur if insulin is that key that unlocks the cell door to allow glucose in. Insulin resistance is what happens when the key gets jammed and it can’t unlock the door anymore. And that means there’s more sugar circulating in your bloodstream and the levels keep rising. And this can damage our organs and our nerves and it’s associated with obesity, type two diabetes, high cholesterol and high blood pressure. And once insulin resistance develops the muscles, the fat and the liver cells don’t respond to it properly, which leads to this chain reaction in the body that impacts the effectiveness and balance of other hormones as well.
(06:57)
So this is one of the reasons we want to eat balanced meals and be mindful of our sugar intake because of how hard that insulin response system has to work to unlock all of those doors so your body can uptake the glucose you take in and and because we can actually break the lock mechanism that insulin functions as over time by constantly flooding the body with too much sugar, we wanna really be mindful of how we’re eating so that we’re not impacting that process. Now our hormones don’t play solo acts. They are like a symphony and they’re always playing off each other and, and one of the reasons I bring all of this up about insulin is because the risk of developing insulin resistance is really increased by elevated cortisol levels. And as you now know, cortisol is the hormone that gets triggered by stress and, and estrogen is actually a big helper in our cells for optimizing the insulin response.
(07:54)
And when our estrogen levels are low, our insulin receptors become less functional and the body can’t handle glucose as efficiently then either. So if you’re still in your cycling years, you may have experienced the PMS symptom of craving sugar before your period. And one of the reasons this happens is because our estrogen levels are at their lowest point at this stage of our cycle. And if you’re in perimenopause, progesterone and estrogen levels may be fluctuating causing imbalances in the function of these two key hormones, right? And that can also raise your risk for developing insulin sensitivity, especially if your stress levels are high and going unchecked. If you’re post menopause, your estrogen levels have dropped to their lowest point and it becomes essential to pay attention to supporting your body’s insulin response and stress response because some of the support for that system is no longer in action.
(08:46)
So one of your first lines of defense for any life stage is to eat balanced whole foods and avoid foods with added sugar. You know, I’m all about moderation, so I don’t recommend being too rigid and never allowing yourself to enjoy dessert or have sugar, right? But it is so important to understand what too much of it over time can do to your body. So you really wanna watch out for overeating, processed foods, foods with added sugars, soda, alcohol, going too much low fat, which will be less satisfying ultimately, and also speeds up how fast sugar gets into your bloodstream. And when you watch out for these things, it can really help mitigate your PMS symptoms. It can support you in perimenopause and also post menopause and and just increase your body’s ability to handle fluctuating hormone levels more efficiently and easily. And a side note on my low fat comment.
(09:40)
You know, when we include healthy fat from whole foods in our diet, the fat slows down how quickly food leaves our stomach, also having the effect of regulating our blood sugar, which makes it so insulin doesn’t have to work as hard. And also when we eat fiber dense whole food carbohydrates, there’s a similar effect where the sugar doesn’t hit your bloodstream as quickly as the stripped down sort of processed carbs do. And fiber can also benefit you if you’re at a point where your hormones are out of balance. Like say in perimenopause for instance, where we sometimes experience estrogen dominance. One of the cool things about eating a fiber rich diet is that fiber helps bind to excess hormones and carry them from the body. So paying attention to your gut health and regularly including fiber, probiotic rich foods and fermented foods will help you stay more balanced and reduce the inflammation that can occur.
(10:31)
When we eat a lot of food that irritates our gut. And when we include an optimal amount of protein in our meals and and protein is actually even more satisfying than fat or carbs, we’re less likely to overeat or have cravings and also support so many other essential functions we need for good health and fitness. As I’ve talked about a lot before, for instance, the amino acids from the protein we eat help support our muscle tissue repair and strength, but also they form the building blocks for the neurotransmitters in our brain supporting cognitive function and our mood regulation. They help us form important chemical messengers in our body like enzymes and hormones. They also support a healthy immune response, which keeps us from getting sick and helps us get better faster and heal more quickly. So we want those amino acids because they, they do just so much for us.
(11:24)
And including the right amount of protein at every age as women is super, super important. And our needs really do change over time. So we don’t absorb the amino acids from the protein foods we eat as readily as we age. That’s why I recommend if you’re over 40, you consider upping your protein intake and especially paying attention to this if you are active and regularly contributing to muscle breakdown, which is what happens when we exercise, right? We need the amino acids from the protein eat to help rebuild that tissue, as I was saying. And a lot of other important jobs too. If we don’t have enough amino acids circulating in our body from our last meal, the body breaks down our muscle tissue to access the amino acids stored there, which totally undermines your hard work and the reason you were exercising in the first place.
(12:12)
And we know that cortisol from stress also contributes to muscle breakdown and fat storage. So this leads me back to our important topic for today, which is how to support our body’s stress response system and why stress management is one of my four pillars of health. And if you haven’t heard me talk about the four pillars of health before, they are sleep, nutrition, stress management, and exercise. And these four things work together in your body to create this optimal state for things like fat loss to occur, for you to have good energy for you to be able to build and strengthen and sculpt lean muscle. And as we’ve been talking about, the stress response impacts so many systems in our body, but how do we know if we’re stressed or if we’re even dealing with the impacts of high levels of cortisol? So first, you may just know because you feel more anxious or stressed out frequently, but if you want some data to back that up, you can get your blood or urine tested.
(13:08)
Usually my doctor has me do a couple of different types of tests. A Dutch test checks my cortisol and sex hormones and you have to urinate at specific times of day at a specific point in your cycle for that one. Then there are blood tests. And if your doctor is looking at cortisol levels, they’ll usually have you get a blood test first thing in the morning before you eat. There are other times of day they might ask you to do that too, just depending on what they’re looking at. So make sure you really follow their, their guidance. If you wanna get a clear picture of where your cortisol levels are at specific points of the day, you can also get your blood pressure checked. If you see your doctor, they probably check your blood pressure. And learning your ranges can be really helpful in establishing a baseline.
(13:48)
If our blood pressure is high, it can indicate that our heart is working too hard. And if you’re chronically experiencing stress, this can elevate your heart rate and create that higher blood pressure. One way that you can sort of self monitor your stress levels is to check in with your heart rate over time to get a baseline number for yourself. And you can take your own heart rate by setting a timer and feeling your pulse and counting the beats per minute. Many wearable devices are also gonna give you heart rate monitor. And one thing that I suggest with any of these self-monitoring methods is to look for patterns over time, not to take a single data point as the only indicator of your range, especially as women since our hormone levels are gonna fluctuate. And this can cause some variation in our stress response.
(14:33)
And you know, for instance, I wear an Oura ring, which tells me my resting heart rate daily. I try to look at trends when I look at that data. Like I was saying, I can usually tell when like my resting heart rate is elevated above my normal range, and it’s usually pretty easy to pinpoint the stressor in my life that’s causing my heart to beat faster. But sometimes I need to do a little investigation because it could be coming from a food that’s causing me to have a reaction to it. It could be coming from where I’m at in my cycle. It could be that something’s stressing me out and I’m not really tuning into that fact. And it’s just really interesting stuff to think about. So another interesting metric is our heart rate variability or HRV for short. And this is how frequently your heart beats.
(15:15)
And it’s an important stress indicator, though the ranges are highly individualized. HRV is linked to your autonomic nervous system and the balance between the parasympathetic nervous system, which is our rest and digest response, and the sympathetic nervous system, which is our fight or flight response. Your autonomic nervous system helps balance these systems and helps you respond to the daily stressors and regulate your heart rate, your breathing rate and your digestion. And HRV rate helps us to estimate the balance within the autonomic nervous system. The nervous system influences how your heart beats your rest and digest system tells your heart rate to slow down, which creates more variability between the beats of your heart and your fight or flight system tells your heart rate to speed up, which decreases the space for variability between the beats. And these two systems can really vary over time. They can be like pushing and pulling against each other throughout the day.
(16:09)
So as a general rule, when you’re looking at HRV for clues as to how your body is handling stress, a higher HRV is associated more with the rest and digest state general fitness and like good recovery where the lower HRV is gonna be associated with the fight or flight response, stress illness or over training. And that really brings me to how we can work on increasing our body’s resilience to stress. I mentioned that over training can impact your heart rate variability, which is an indicator that your body has too much stress to handle. But we also know that exercise is a hallmark of a healthy lifestyle and something that can help bring our stress levels down. And I’ve, I’ve said before that exercise is a healthy stress when we are healthy. Exercise is actually a fantastic way to build more resilience to stress. But we must approach this process with respect for our energy levels, our capacity for the workouts we’re doing at any given time, and the way we nourish ourselves with the building blocks the body needs around our workouts.
(17:09)
And this really becomes essential to pay attention to as our hormone levels change as women. First, we wanna be mindful of not over training when we’re still in our cycling years, approaching our period when estrogen levels are lower and progesterone levels are higher. This time of our cycle is when our basal body temperature is slightly heightened and our sleep is often disrupted as a result, meaning we won’t recover quite as efficiently as we do in the first half of our cycle when estrogen is higher. We also have slightly elevated levels of inflammation in our body in this second half of the cycle leading up to our period. So backing off on the training intensity can help your body handle the stress response better. But having a regular exercise practice is awesome and supportive as a life practice, and we should cultivate that. And I really encourage you, you know, to use balanced training plans, my balanced training plans for instance, and follow your natural cycle and energy levels throughout the month as you approach your workouts.
(18:08)
You’ll also really benefit from following my strategic training plans if you’re in perimenopause, when estrogen and progesterone levels start to become erratic and imbalanced and, and our testosterone begins to drop because I am customizing the programs for women in this life stage. And the shifting of our hormones has this compounding effect of making it harder for you to recover from your training and support that muscle repair and rebuilding, plus lose body fat. But if you pay attention to strategically timed recovery days and up the intensity of the workouts when you train, you won’t be overtaxing your stress response system. You can start to give your body the time it needs to repair and recover and keep your system working efficiently even as your hormone levels begin to decline. This is also so important for you post menopause. This is when you wanna absolutely be polarizing your training, making the workouts you do really effective by coming to them rested and recovered, and of course fueled this will really help you enjoy a healthy stress response to the workouts you do and have the recovery time you need since estrogen and progesterone levels that used to help drive..