Pillar of Health 3: Stress Management

Probably the most mind-blowing thing I had to first understand… when it came to optimising my own health and wellness… was the concept of stress. 

When I first started wanting to optimise my body I had the pretty typical attitude of nearly everyone who has intentions of wanting to look better and feel better… 

I just wanted to get healthy through exercise and strength and conditioning. I wanted to get stronger, to improve how I looked, and how I felt.

The problem was… and this applies to most people who walk into a gym with the good intentions of wanting to improve how they look and feel…. I was not managing my stress effectively.

The truth is that if you’re body is under too much stress:

• You won’t have a positive reaction to exercise,
• You won’t have the motivation to follow a program till its end,
• You may create a bunch of muscle imbalances,
• You won’t have the energy to want to exercise when you should,
• You won’t have the mindset to effectively want to continue pursuing your dream/goal/objective.

This just means that any pursuit of heightened health and wellness is going to be ineffective.

The most important thing you can do is identify the stressors in your mind and body; whether they be emotional, physical, mental, or even spiritual.

The key thing to know is that stress summates in the body.

This means that any types of stressors you may have in your life just add up inside of you and accumulate. Like water filling up a faucet. If you don’t have enough resources on board to effectively deal with this (to let the water drain out of the faucet) you can start experiencing the effects of poor stress management:

• Feeling excessively tired,
  
• Poor posture, 
  
• Being overweight/underweight, 
  
• Poor skin quality
  
• Low sex drive, 
  
• Anxiety
• Chronic pain
• And a whole host of other symptoms

Stress is known as the cause of all disease and dysfunction.

The person who can handle their stress levels the best is going to enjoy long lasting vibrant health the most. 

A real useful bit of information is to understand how your Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) has two branches to it.

There are two sides to the ANS. The sympathetic branch and the parasympathetic. They both work together and functionally interplay. 

Sympathetic: Activating catabolic hormones. Too much stress = too much cortisol. Which leads to fatigue, breakdown, depressed immune system, decreased growth and repair.

Parasympathetic: Anabolic hormones: growth, repair, digestion. 

If you’re not managing your stress effectively, you’re currently activating the sympathetic branch too often and not getting enough parasympathetic activation.

Too much Sympathetic activation results in living life with excess stress hormones running through your system.

Getting to the root of this, enables you to live with balance. Which sets the stage to optimal living, health, and high energy.

 I go into all of this in great detail in my online workshop, but if you’re interested in doing a deep dive into how would be the best way to get rid of your unwanted symptoms and optimise your body and mind, book a free call with me: https://pierrehigginson.com/call-enquiry/