Health matters: How stress affects our health

Hans Seyle defined stress in the early 50’s of the last century. He said this is the summary of all our possibilities to adapt, to different challenges from the inside or the outside of our body. So it’s not only the stressor which makes us react, it’s also how we react to this stressor. Stress regulation is a general regulation in our body. From evolution this is the most important regulation we have developed to survive. If a wild animal attacked us we decided very quickly to run away or to fight (flight and fight mode). Then, if we survived and this was the only thing which really counts, we have taken a break and this is the main difference to our days — we don’t have enough time to rest after we did some activities. If we have enough time to rest and regenerate we don’t get really stressed, if we don’t have enough time we create a negative form of a stressed reaction with the different complaints and diseases.

Seyle identified three organs system which are mainly involved in stress situations: it’s the stomach creating some imbalances of alkaline and acidity, it’s the thyme involved in the immune system and development of allergies and intolerances and it’s the adrenals as an entrance to the hormonal system and the imbalances in the hormonal system. If we look at the increasing amount of diseases in that organs, we know that stress has become a global problem and even the WHO has mentioned stress as the most important disease of the 21st century.

To compensate stress, we need a lot more minerals and vitamins and because of the increased metabolisation of these substances we get deficiency of them and complaints and diseases on totally different places. So some people develop a problem, for example in the muscle, because of a deficiency of magnesium which is the result of an increased metabolisation of a stress reaction. To identify stress we have different possibilities — we can measure the minerals, we can measure indirect reactions and we also can measure the function of the hormonal system, even the range of hormones could give us an idea if somebody is stressed or not.

Eating salads and fruits after 4 pm adds more stress to the body. We do regulate everything in the body by rhythm and also in our intestinal tract we have a rhythm where we know that we have more energy to digest food in the morning and less in the evening. So if we eat raw foods like salads and fruits, we need a lot of energy to digest it and if we eat them in the evening we don’t have enough energy to do that properly. If so, we create a lot of mal-digestive processes, like fermentation, which gives us alcohol, acidity and gas, which will be reabsorbed and spread all over the body. So at the end of this process
we create a lot of problems which could be an influence for the metabolism — we call it intestinal autointoxification.

If you look at the definition of stress above, we can see that we have to react to those substances and this has an influence also on the hormonal regulation. All the toxicity created in the body has to be metabolised and detoxified. If you’re able to do so, it’s ok, if not, we create some stress reactions and if we do that more often or even regularly, we always have a stress situation in the body which is not a healthy situation.

To reduce the stress in our system it’s very helpful to create a rhythm in our lifestyle. That means: have regular meals (breakfast, lunch and dinner) have a break in between, for example after 90 minutes of activity, have a break of 10-15 minutes. where your body can have a rest, have a cup of tea or walk around your desk, or even if you’re in a meeting have a break and your day off should be just for fun. All these activities help us to reduce our over-activity and help us to compensate stress situations.