Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | The Best Type of Exercise to Reduce Stress and Anxiety | Dr Roger Seheult #363

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to

Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 242 of the podcast with California-based medical doctor, Dr. Roger Schwelt. In this clip, Roger explains the connection between stress, inflammation, and our immune systems, and he shares the type of exercise that studies show is most effective at lowering stress, anxiety, and fear. anxiety, and fear.

Starting point is 00:01:52 So when we're looking at inflammation, how does stress fit into that? What does the science tell us? If we look at stress and see its effects with inflammation, it becomes very apparent very quickly. So there's a number of researchers, to give you an example here in Pittsburgh, that looked at stress and inflammation and the immunity specifically, how this affects immunity, because I think that's a big thing as well. We all know about cortisol. Cortisol is a hormone in the body that gets released during stressful situations. It's a stress hormone. And I want to make sure that I'm using the word stress here appropriately. There is stress that we feel mentally, and there is stress that's going on in the body. And I want to make sure that when we talk about stress, we're talking about that specifically. So when there is stress in the

Starting point is 00:02:40 body physically, there is that stress hormone cortisol, which is released from the adrenal gland. And one of the physiological downstream effects of cortisol they found was a way that it shifts the number of white blood cells. There's different types of white blood cells, not to get too technical. There are white blood cells called neutrophils, and there are white blood cells called lymphocytes. And the ratio of these two, to give you an example, changes when cortisol levels go up. There's supposed to be more neutrophils when cortisol levels go up. And this is a natural response that is mediated through the cortisol receptor. So cortisol hits the receptor. This receptor then causes this

Starting point is 00:03:23 downstream effect of neutrophils going up and lymphocytes going down. What they found was that when this happened, if the subject was under a lot of mental stress, so stress from every day, stress from a wedding, a divorce, a loss of a job, a gain of a job, it doesn't matter, any kind of stress, that they no longer saw neutrophils going up and lymphocytes going down. There was a completely blunted response. And what they determined was, is that the receptor was no longer transmitting the signal of that cortisol binding to it. In other words, this was known as cortisol receptor resistance. This receptor resistance was the result of stress. And not only were there effects

Starting point is 00:04:13 from stress in that situation, but there was also issues in terms of infection. So what they did was they took these subjects that had a blunted response, and then they subjected them to rhinovirus, which is basically a common virus that causes a common cold. And what they found was that cold symptoms appeared more commonly in those patients that had this blunted response. In other words, this cortisol receptor resistance. So here is direct evidence that something that we know all the time, we know this innately, we know that if you're under stress, you're more likely to get infected. But we can actually see now the results of where cortisol is supposed to have a downstream effect. This downstream effect is gotten rid of. And it's

Starting point is 00:05:01 exactly in these patients who have stress that gets rid of this downstream effect because of receptor resistance that causes these people to have more symptoms of the rhinovirus infection. So here's an example where inflammation, stress, immunity all sort of come together and cause this kind of interaction. Yeah, super fascinating. And I guess for many people, they are becoming more and more familiar with this idea of insulin resistance, that this hormone that does many things, including keeping your blood sugar stable. If we insult the body, you know, year after year with highly processed foods, pro-inflammatory foods, then actually the body becomes resistant to that

Starting point is 00:05:44 hormone. But the way you just described our study is, it's sort of saying it's the same thing for stress. We can become resistant to stress hormone, you know, or the receptor. It just doesn't work as well. If we're exposing ourselves to too much stress, then the response in the body starts to get blunted and I think that's something that's not commonly known because many of us think we can get away with pushing it every single day, every single week, month after month but you're shown with just that one study and I know there are many others that it has a direct response on your immune system, a direct response on how inflamed you are. So managing stress is clearly another key strategy at trying to keep our inflammation levels down.

Starting point is 00:06:33 Exactly. And let me just add to that because we think of it in terms of infections, things from coming from the outside to infect our bodies and how to fight those things from the outside. There are other things that our immune system has to deal with on a daily basis. It has to deal with basically the garbage that our cells make. In fact, cells become damaged and those cells that become damaged have to be dealt with. And if they're not dealt with, these damaged cells accumulate and our body starts to look like a trash dump. If our immune system is not taking away the trash, taking away the dead cells so that new cells can replace it, we have a problem there as well. So imagine somebody with chronic stress.

Starting point is 00:07:16 Imagine someone who's not allowing their immune system to do the things that it needs to do. Our body's cells, instead of being brand new, ready to go off the assembly line, we're dealing with last year's version, version 1.0, because our immune system hasn't dealt with these damaged cells. What about a different kind of stress, fear? Fear itself is not necessarily a helpful thing for your immune system to work well. So are you familiar with any research on fear and how that plays into our immune system? I'm reminded of a really interesting study that was done by Jennifer Heiss at the McMaster University, where she took students that were in the last six weeks of their term. And boy, if you want to incite fear, think about this. Here you're a

Starting point is 00:08:06 college student. You're at the end of the term, six weeks to go. You have your major exams. Your career is based on getting a good grade in college and your good grade in college is based on doing well. There's fear there. There is anxiety. There's no question about it. And what they did was they randomized these students to three different groups. There was one group where they did nothing. It was just, you know, do whatever you want to do and study for your exams. And the second group was a moderate intensity exercise group where they exercised three times a week and they got their heart rate up to about 75% of their maximum predicted

Starting point is 00:08:43 heart rate. For those that don't know, your maximum predicted heart rate is 220 minus your age. And so if you take that number, multiply it by 0.75, that's kind of where they would get their heart rates up to. And they did it for about 20 minutes a day, three times a week for six weeks, the last six weeks of the term. And then in the third group, they did high intensity exercise, still 20 minutes a day, still three times a week, except they got their heart rates almost close to about 100% of their heart rate. So very intense exercise. And then what they did was they looked at depression scores.

Starting point is 00:09:20 So the Beck Inventory Depression Score. And they also looked at cytokines. So they looked at IL-6. They looked at tumor necrosis factor alpha. And they measured these in these three groups. So what do you think happened? The first thing that was really interesting to me in this study was when they looked at the control group, there was a change of about six points in the Beck Inventory Depression Scale Score. What does that tell you? That tells you that

Starting point is 00:09:53 after six weeks of immersing yourself in a stressful situation where your career, where your livelihood is dependent on a score, you can quickly become depressed in that kind of a situation, just in six weeks. There's a well-established connection between fear, anxiety, leading to depression. And we saw that very clearly in this study. In this control group, there was also increases in tumor necrosis factor, and there was also a drop in IL-6, which is one of the cytokines that's involved with fighting infections. But let's look at the other two groups, moderate intensity and a high intensity exercise. Which one of those two do you believe did better in terms of mitigating the effects of fear and anxiety?

Starting point is 00:10:50 Well, it was the moderate intensity group. The moderate intensity group not only did not have an increase in depression, they actually had a reduction in depression, actually went in the other direction. In other words, in the moderate intensity exercise group, actually also in the high intensity exercise group, they had a reduction in their Beck Depression Inventory Scale Score. So what do we learn? We learn that exercise is really important in situations where you have chronic fear and anxiety. It can do a tremendous amount in terms of your mental wellbeing and also your physical wellbeing. But in terms of anxiety and perceived stress,

Starting point is 00:11:33 so when you asked the subject, do you feel like you're under stress? The moderate intensity exercise group actually did better than the high intensity exercise group. And that was actually the same for the cytokines. The reduction in tumor necrosis factor alpha was greatest in the moderate intensity exercise group. And one of the major prescriptions that I would advocate for everybody at this point is to get out and to exercise. There's this J curve approach, whereas we're all, if you can imagine the letter J, okay. And we're at the very beginning of that letter J

Starting point is 00:12:13 we're all couch potatoes sitting on our couch, watching television. That's not a good place to be. As soon as you get off the couch and start exercising and start doing something 20 minutes a day, three times a week, you're going to go down. The J goes down. Okay. And as a result of that, your inflammation goes down. Your well-being improves.

Starting point is 00:12:34 Your Beck Inventory Depression Scale Scores start to improve. As it reaches a certain point, though, that if you start to do more intense exercise, you could actually get some reversal of that improvement where it goes back up and even higher as you would see in these high intensity groups. So the key here is what is a good recipe for fear and anxiety among other things?

Starting point is 00:12:57 Number one, moderate exercise. Don't feel like you've got this huge barrier that you've got to overcome and be like these elite athletes that you see on television. No, just getting up off the couch and having a regular routine is so important. Thank you for sharing all that because I think it's such a key point, isn't it? When we talk about movement and physical activity for health, it's like, well, how much do I need to run a marathon? Do I need to be hitting the gym high intensity, you know, for one hour sessions,

Starting point is 00:13:33 five times a week? No, the research that you're sharing is saying that actually, you don't have to do that. You just need to get up, move, go for a brisk walk, maybe 20, 30 minutes, three times a week, you can get a lot of the benefits from doing that. So I hope that is really empowering for people. We mentioned stress and fear. You've mentioned how moderate exercise can absolutely massively reduce your risk of getting infections, improve how your immune system functions, improve your well-being. infections improve how your immune system functions improve your well-being what other things can people do or do you recommend to help them reduce that stress in their life which of course can be very very hard yeah so so the question is is why do we have fear in the in

Starting point is 00:14:18 the first place and if you you know and i'm i'm informed a little bit by my upbringing as well, is being able to have a place to put those kinds of burdens. So there's the spiritual aspect, which is well known in medicine and what we do and having that ability to rest. So as a Seventh-day Adventist, I take a day off a week where I basically disconnect from all of the worries of work and all of these sorts of things. And I can't see why anyone wouldn't do that. I mean, a lot of times we have to do things. There's stuff that has to be done outside and that list never goes away. There's never a point in my life where my work queue is zero and I can say, I'm done. I can go away. And so if you're waiting for that period of time where your work queue is done to be able to just relax and detach, guess what? You're never going to have that. You as a human being are going to have to take the initiative

Starting point is 00:15:16 and say, here's a period of time during which I am not going to be working in my work queue. And I'm going to be able to disconnect from society and actually take care of myself and have a place where I can develop, you know, whether it's spirituality or religion, religiosity. These sorts of things where I can improve my family relationships. These are so important when we look at the research. People who do well, people who live longer. If you look at the research that Dan Buettner has done with the Blue Zones, I mean, there's always a connection of community.

Starting point is 00:15:53 It's not just your immune system. It's not just your sleep. It's also your connection to people around you, knowing that there's a support system there, knowing that there are people that can help you, that has a tremendous effect on our ability to process fear, of being able to process anxiety. You know, there's this expression, no man is an island unto himself. And so from this, we look at the community. We look at our connections to people outside of ourselves.

Starting point is 00:16:24 We look at our connections to people outside of ourselves. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Hope you have a wonderful weekend. And I'll be back next week with my long-form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | The Best Type of Exercise to Reduce Stress and Anxiety | Dr Roger Seheult #363

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