Never Be Stressed Out Again

You know, you can't escape stress. Stress is everywhere, right? But really it's about the tolerance of stress, your reaction to stress. Today I'm going to take you in a completely different direction. I normally talk about nutrition and talk about exercise and talking about sleeping, but this is a completely different way of handling your stress. You've probably heard of the adrenal glands, right? And cortisol, which is the stress hormone and the flight or fight mechanism, which is part of the autonomic nervous system as it releases adrenaline and those two hormones adapt the body to stress states. So they're going to increase your pulse rate. They're going to actually shift your metabolism to more quick energy through sugar burning. Here you are, you know, long after the stress and your body is still in this stress state. What do you do? Well, there's some completely new information that you probably never heard. In fact, I just recently learned about this in school. I studied about this hormone called oxytocin, right? And oxytocin has everything to do with pregnancy, a mother bonding with the child, lactation, uterine contraction during pregnancy. It's also involved in the sexual act, but overall I thought it related only to reproduction. In fact, the Greek word for oxytocin comes from two different words, which means swift childbirth, right? So if you have enough oxytocin, you can have a baby very A to B, but I didn't know this and maybe because they haven't really discovered this until fairly recently, but oxytocin is involved in some other things that can greatly counter your stress. In fact, it is the most important hormone in counteracting cortisol and the flight or fight mechanism. In other words, oxytocin modulates or regulates the H P a axis. And I'm talking about where the stress hormones come from the hypothalamus pituitary, the adrenal. And so oxytocin is a major hormone involved in regulating your mood, specifically anxiety and stress. You have a lot of problems, right? And you're worrying a lot. It's also involved in social biology. What is that? Well, social biology has to do with social helping others and the welfare of others. And they did this experiment on sheep where they had this baby lamb and they somehow removed the oxytocin from another sheep that wasn't the mother, because the actual mother wasn't around. And there was no maternal bonding or helping from this mother sheep to the lamb until they injected into the cerebral spinal fluid, some oxytocin. And so this female sheep was not the mother. Then started taking care of this lamb. So I found that very, very interesting. Now oxytocin also prevents the atrophy of the hippocampus. Now the hippocampus, learn this in my other videos is all about involving the prevention of Alzheimer's and dementia. So it's involved in memory, focus, cognitive function, ability to learn, et cetera. And so we know that stress shrinks and causes the hippocampus to atrophy. Well, oxytocin protects the hippocampus, which is why they sometimes use the oxytocin nasal spray in Alzheimer's patients and other patients that have anxiety and things like that, which is quite interesting. They basically found this relationship to when someone sprays oxytocin up into their sinuses, their fear goes down and their trust for others goes up. Now, if you think about what fear is, it's the opposite of trust, right? Like you're not trusting anyone, right? You're backing away. It's kind of a survival mechanism. If you happen to see a snake, you're not going to trust that the snake is not going to bite you, right? You're going to fear and run away from the snake. So that will keep you alive. So anytime fear goes up, you know, trust typically goes down and they found oxytocin was involved in lowering fear and raising trust, which is interesting. So that's all really cool. But now how do we trigger more oxytocin? Okay. So check this out, bonding with other people and cats, very, very therapeutic to spike oxytocin. A lot of people will state that when they hang out with their pets or bond with other people, their stress goes down considerably. Another thing they found to trigger oxytocin was volunteering, which is interesting. And that hormone goes up. Another thing that will trigger it is donating, right? Donating to something interesting. Another way to increase oxytocin would be sharing with another. Another one is storytelling actually increased not only oxytocin, but it also decreased cortisol. Interesting. And even hugging someone will increase oxytocin. So when you think about it, what all of these things have in common, helping the welfare of another, which is very interesting because personally I find that when I help people, it's actually a therapy for me. In fact, your stress goes down. You feel good about it. It's really difficult to have stress while you're helping someone. And so this goes beyond just the diet and the exercise and all that. It's something that you can do to increase oxytocin to help your own stress, but go ahead and comment down below. If you find that when you help people and feel better and you're less stressed. Now, I'm not suggesting that you go up to every single neighbor and start hugging people, but I'm suggesting that just the awareness of all these other social things that you can do is something that can lower your stress and help another. Now, that being said, there are a couple of nutritional factors that are also involved too, because they found that vitamin C helps increase oxytocin. This is why, for example, your adrenals have a very large supply of vitamin C. Magnesium is also involved in helping make oxytocin. And so you need those two nutrients, right? And then also you need the cholesterol. Okay. So cholesterol also is involved. So if you are on a low cholesterol diet, that could be a problem. Estrogen also increases the receptor or oxytocin. So this could explain when a woman goes to menopause, the anxiety goes up because the estrogen does go down and that estrogen is needed for oxytocin to work. But anyway, I think this is just fascinating information. I've never known these other functions of oxytocin, which relate to just really helping people. That gives us another solution to staying stress free. Now, if you have not seen my webinar on stress, doing acupressure, that's a really good one to watch because there are physical things that you can do to extract stress. And I do this every night before I go to bed. And I put that video up right now.