Stress Resilience and Sleep
Let’s look at stress resilience and sleep today.
Stress resilience basically means how speedily you recover, when you are in a stressful situation. Some people are amazingly resilient, which is genetically determined and some just aren't.
Why is stress resilience important for sleep? How does it impact our sleep and how does our sleep impact our resiliency?
When we are under pressure (stressed), which in this day and age is most of the time, due to many deadlines at work, complicated relationships, financial pressures, our body increases the production of the hormone called cortisol, in order to make us stronger, and quicker. As a result, we have more shallow breathing, and all our energy is around our upper body area, and much less towards our digestions, or our reproduction organs, which our body doesn’t consider a priority at that point. Why not?
Well, years back there was no connection between stress and the stock market, but instead having to fight for your life because there was an animal hunting you, or you were living in danger, where you had to physically get out of the situation. That's why the body is pumping more blood into our system. Cortisol is really important. It is vital and gives us energy. Interestingly, cortisol will go up and down again, like a thermostat. If you under pressure, your body will pump more cortisol into your system, but then it goes back to its happy place again.
The problem we are facing these days is that we are chronically stressed most of the time and our cortisol level is high all the time! The issue with that is that cortisol is a catabolic hormone.
Cortisol is really aggressive to your intestinal lining and it destroys those little hairs on your intestine, creating leaky gut. It can create a hormone imbalance.
Next, you have a chain reaction of side effects on your hands; one of them being insomniac and also being less psychologically stable to deal with stress.
Stress Resilience and sleep
Most people with great resiliency will have their cortisol slide back into normal very rapidly. But some people, will reach the top and then their cortisol level will go down, but not into its happy place, but rather into a deregulation mode, where everything is upside down.
If you did a regular lab test, your cortisol might be in the number that is a happy place, but you are exhausted. Well, truly, you are not in your cortisol happy place, instead, you are in a compensatory phase. If it goes further down, we call it an exhaustion phase, which is where you have all kinds of symptoms popping up frantically. Again, this is genetically predetermined. Some people can live with high-stress levels for years and will never get into the compensatory phase. Others just have a week of a little stress and have reached their limit.
So, it's really important to keep your cortisol in check, because once your cortisol goes over the edge, it's detrimental to sleep. It's an anti-sleep hormone, so to say. Also, if you have all kinds of inflammation, due to cortisol, or have issues with your intestines, it is going to impact how you psychologically deal with stress and then you enter a vicious circle. Unexpectedly, psychologically speaking, you deal less well with stress; meaning that you have more cortisol in your body, and again cortisol is the reason for your psychology not dealing as well with it.
I hope Stress resilience and sleep has been informative to you. At Sleep Like A Boss, we look at stress resiliency, because it is absolutely crucial for your body to be well-balanced and for sleep to feel happy and welcome with you.
Let me know if you have any questions.
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