The Stress Connection!
When you first embark on your journey back to balance, optimal health and are looking for help, especially when it comes to minerals, it can be overwhelming to figure out where to start!
The information I provide is designed to support you doing exactly that, and to get started. Whether that’s to understand ‘why’ you are where you are on a deeper level or if you are simply asking yourself ‘what do I need to do?’.
Before answering both of these questions, I would like to give you some more context.
What is stress?
Becoming aware, understanding and finally managing our stress isn’t always easy at the beginning. When we are physically, emotionally or otherwise stressed or even when recovering from any perceived stress, our body is losing magnesium, which is affecting other electrolytes. Whether we are conscious of what happens to our body when we are triggered into a heightened stress state or not…our body is more actively pumping blood around our major organs. Biochemical changes start to really add up when our bodies are in a constant fight-flight-freeze state.
With ongoing sustained stress, we lose the functionality of bioavailable copper. Our ability to move iron effectively from storage to the bone marrow to make new haemoglobin blood cells reduces, our ability to heal and recover is significantly impaired and our digestive system isn’t happening effectively. Bioavailable copper keeps the flow of energy creation, enzyme activity, iron flow and a variety of other things, happening.
There is a variety of different stressors we are exposed to on a daily basis and the more we have stress in our body, especially chronic stress over a longer period of time, the more dysregulated our body becomes. Metabolic stress then becomes another stressor itself.
The longer our minerals are kept out of balance, the more our body will become out of balance and our ability to respond to stressful situations decreases. Our body is always trying it’s hardest to keep us in balance and initially it will adjust as best it can. We can experience mild symptoms, which sometimes we are not even aware of, that can sometimes settle quickly or aren’t that severe. We don’t really notice and go on with our life’s.
Before we know, more stress hits us without having had the time or awareness to replenish, and for the body to adjust again, but now the situation is different. Our body has got less magnesium, bioavailable copper, and other nutrients available.
Often things settle again, and we are none the wiser. Then a bigger stress hits, and another symptom or something we can no longer ignore, hits in.
Keeping track of events and using tools like creating a stress timeline, can help to keep an eye on things and see if there are any patterns and habits in certain areas of your life that may be impacting your health negatively.
Ask yourself, in the days, weeks or months immediately before your most dominant symptom occurred, what was going on in your life and environment? Were you experiencing a high stress situation? Or was there chronic stress in the leadup?
Some of us are familiar with the term ‘’oxidative stress’’, and know it’s bad.
However, what we are not being told is that iron, when in excess in our body and not recycling properly, is responsible for a massive amount of oxidative stress and damage within our metabolic system.
What most people don’t realise is, that it is extremely common to have too much iron in our body, but many will show signs of iron deficiency at the same time.
Our bodies are incredibly smart and the reason why this happens is because it wants to protect itself from oxidative stress. In the absence of bioavailable copper (which helps us move iron safely around the body) it stores the iron away in the tissue to reduce inflammation. As a by-product of this process, you may get results suggesting “anaemia”.
However, an important and interesting fact to know is that the term ‘’anaemia’’ itself actually means insufficient haemoglobin which has been turned into, but is vastly different from, an actual lack of iron!