Breaking the Chronic Stress Cycle: How Cortisol Disrupts Your Metabolic Health

Chapters

• 0:00 Chronic Stress Impact on Health
• 1:58 Understanding Cortisol and Allostatic Load
• 4:58 GLP-1 Function and Stress Connection
• 7:03 How Cortisol Disrupts GLP-1 Production
• 8:43 Breaking the Cycle with Lifestyle Medicine

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:26

talking about how the effects of chronic stress and how this does affect your GLP-1 or can increase your overall cortisol within the body. We're talking about GLP medications or GLP stressors, the normal hormone that is produced within the body, and how does it affect that? I mean chronic stress affects all of the body in many ways and can be very detrimental to your health in general, can cause heart attacks, can create more inflammation, which then can cause more disease. So long-term, it's something that needs to be addressed, but in this situation we're trying to find out why is it a consistent problem? So chronic stress is prolonged and consistent stress that your body faces. It's an extended period of time that is ongoing due to life pressures, work relationship, financial worries, health issues, work relationship, financial worries, health issues and over time, your body is activating that fight or flight. So think of it like the fight or flight response. When you are in that adrenaline, high, high adrenaline state, you're not worrying about resting and digesting and taking care of metabolism and that part of your body. Unfortunately, it's wanting to make sure you don't die, make sure that your heart and lungs are working, but when it's a perceived threat and it's not actually a threat, long-term chronic stress can cause problems on the body. There's also allostatic stress that can accumulate. For someone that's accumulative, meaning increased amounts or over abundance of wear and tear on the body, resulting in that chronic exposure. So you have chronic stress. Then you have this possibility of long-term continuous stressors and it just adapts into your body's, becomes accustomed to that stressors and, granted, you may not think it's a big deal initially, but in turn it ends up making major complications of metabolic health issues, immune deficiencies, mental health problems, and it will affect the way you um are like long-term. So if you don't kind of fix that cycle or observe and become more self-aware of when this is happening, that's chronic stress can seriously have a major detriment to you.

Speaker 1: 3:15

Now, the connection here, or the stress hormone, shall they say, is cortisol. It's not the only one, but it is produced in the adrenal glands and short term it's supposed to be there for good reason. Stress is not all bad, you know, it's just like anything else in the body. It's not all bad, but it's about when it's not in balance, it's not optimal and the levels are irregular and you're not at a homeostatic state. Then that's when we have a problem, and so that elevated or de-elevating or a low cortisol can cause problems with them in the body and, sustained over time, impacts the health. So that's where that allostatic and chronic stress come about and you know you're looking at long-term things that will affect them. You may have the diabetes and obesity and heart disease. But then you add in additional stressors that actually will impair your immune system and then put you in turn of having such high fight or flight response or inflammatory responses. Then it will put you in more risk, more health risks and higher chances of mortality and morbidity issues.

Speaker 1: 4:35

So why is GLP-1 and its importance derived from this? So think of it. Because it's derived in the gut, um. It's essential for managing your appetite. It stabilizes your sugar and enhances your insulin secretion when you're influenced um by like being full. So the main thing is is changes is that the GLP-1 is managed by um metabolic efficiency. You know it helps you the overall cardiovascular health, but it's prevented if we don't have um the proper regulation within the body and then more disorders come out, mostly diabetes and obesity. More disorders come out, mostly diabetes and obesity.

Speaker 1: 5:28

And the cortisol levels over time from the chronic stress directly affect the gut, brain access and disrupts that GLP-1 secretion from the L cells in the small intestines. It disrupts that and the studies have shown that high cortisol decreases the GLP-1 production. So you'll hear a lot of individuals and women will say I have all this extra, like 10 pounds sitting on my belly and you know that is usually impaired by the cortisol weight. You know that's that belly weight that you haven't um, given yourself some time to reset. Um and because you're not um, lowering that cortisol levels and it's so important and the only way to do that is um, because what it does there first is that it's impairing your appetite problems. It's not increasing, it's making you want to eat more. Your intake is higher, you have more inflammatory problems, you have more insulin resistance and due to that dysregulation of the gut microbiota, the composition will reduce GLP production and then again will in turn disrupt and have metabolic dysfunction or metabolic disruption. So that is where you know that is coming about and you know the studies have shown, like psychoneural endocrinology. So your mental individuals with prolonged stress lowers their GLP-1, which is also correlated to what you eat, is also correlated to your body index, is also correlated to overall stress and when you have this long term, these markers and your health, your metabolic dysfunction comes about.

Speaker 1: 7:08

Now the goal of me to at least help you along the way is finding out these patterns, understanding ways to break the patterns and breaking the cycle. As an individual with my own life, stressors and health and PTSD and such, I had to learn to break the cycles on a regular basis and find ways to normalize my own health and my weight, as well as the GLP-1. Now major ways to do this and this is helpful for many things, not just for increasing GLP-1, but for your overall health there's mindfulness. I call this mindfully integrated for a reason it improves your GLP-1 response. Regular physical activity that can range from anything from walking to movement to more exercise, strength training.

Speaker 1: 8:05

Sleep Sleep's always optimal in many reasons and I'll talk about this all the time. So life medicine will always be paramount. Seven to nine hours of sleep quality that's really what it comes down to to build up that metabolic function so that your body is able to metabolize without the stressors and rest and digest. And nutritional support. So what you put in your body will have a direct effect. More fiber, more fats, more probiotics improve your gut health. It's about what you're putting in your body. It will have a direct effect on how you feel. I'll put in references on this in the notes and see you soon. Talk to you later.