The Dr. Hyman Show - How Chronic Stress Creates Hormonal Havoc

Episode Date: March 24, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health and Mitopure. Chronic stress has become epidemic in our society where faster is better and we attempt to pack more obligations into our ever-expanding schedules. In the face of chronic stress, insulin increases and your adrenal glands release hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. These hormones flood your system, raising your heart rate, increasing your blood pressure, making your blood more likely to clot, damaging your brain’s memory center, increasing belly fat storage, and generally wreaking havoc on your body. So what steps can we take to manage stress? In today’s episode of my series I’m calling Health Bites, I talk about how chronic stress creates hormonal havoc and how to use diet and lifestyle practices to reduce its negative effects. This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health and Mitopure. Rupa Health is a place where Functional Medicine practitioners can access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 35 labs like DUTCH, Vibrant America, Genova, and Great Plains. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com. Mitopure is the first and only clinically tested pure form of a natural gut metabolite called urolithin A that clears damaged mitochondria away from our cells and supports the growth of new, healthy mitochondria. Get 10% off at timelinenutrition.com/drhyman and use code DRHYMAN10 at checkout. Here are more details from our interview (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): The dangers of chronic stress (3:16 / 1:35)  How stress affects hormones (4:02 / 2:42)  How diet affects our stress response (4:56 / 3:56)  The importance of working on your mindset (8:07 / 5:52)  Simple techniques to reduce stress (8:52 / 6:37) 

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. One of the things we don't realize is that stress is also controlled by what we eat. Our diet plays an enormous role in our stress response. Hi everyone, it's Dr. Mark. As a functional medicine doctor looking at hormones, organic acids, nutrient levels, inflammatory factors, gut bacteria, and so many other internal variables, it helps me find the most effective path to health and healing for my patients. But such extensive testing can be very complicated and time-consuming for both the practitioner,

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slash Dr. Hyman, D-R-H-Y-M-A-N and use the code Dr. Hyman10. And now let's get back to this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Everybody, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy, a place for conversations that matter. And today's podcast is a little bit different. It's a health bite, a little chunk of information that will help provide you with small steps that you can take daily that can lead to significant changes in your health over time. So let's talk today about something that is affecting all of us, chronic stress. Now, this is something we never had to deal with historically as a species, but now we do because of all the changes that have happened in our world and the crazy work

schedules and family obligations and political crises and climate crises and war and economic crises and you name it, we're pretty much inundated with lots of stress. So we have to learn how to take care of ourselves within that context. And the problem is chronic stress is deadly. It kills us, literally kills us from heart disease, cancer, dementia. I mean, just literally being stressed and having high stress levels chronically will shrink the memory center of your brain called the hippocampus. It also makes you gain weight and it causes you to be diabetic and it causes a whole host of other things, including depression and infertility and sexual dysfunction. I mean, you name it,

stress is a killer. So we now understand how stress impacts our biology in a real practical way. It is in fact the biggest thing that's driving so many of the dysfunctions we see around chronic illness, and it either makes worse or causes most of the things we see every day in medical practice. Stress jacks up your cortisol levels, which then causes your muscles to waste away, your blood pressure to go up, your blood sugar to go up, increases belly fat, causes your memory to go down. And you see this phenomenon of weight gain, insulin resistance, and diabetes, ultimately even type 3 diabetes, which we now refer to as dementia. So when you also are stressed, you produce adrenaline. And adrenaline also makes you feel hyper, anxious, irritable, gets your heart rate up,

your blood pressure up, causes your blood to clot more likely, damage your brain's memory center, and just causes a lot of bad problems. So if you're thinking about your daily life, when you are going about your day, if you start off the wrong way, you're going to be in trouble. And one of the things we don't realize is that stress is also controlled by what we eat. Our diet plays an enormous role in our stress response. And so when we eat certain foods, it literally jacks up adrenaline and cortisol.

What foods are those? Sugar and starch. Basically, anything that turns to sugar in your body is seen as a biological stress. Even if you think you're happy and relaxed while you're eating it, the consequences in your body are just like those of when you're attacked by a mugger or you're being chased by a tiger. The real physiologic responses that happen in relation to our daily lives are no different depending on what the stress is. So whether you're running from a tiger or being, you know, being upset with your spouse or you imagine somebody's mad at you and they're really not, the stress response is the same. In fact, stress is defined as the real or imagined threat

to your body or your ego. So it could be a real threat to your body or your ego. So it could be a real threat to your body, like a tiger chasing you, or it could be an imagined threat to your ego. Maybe you think your boss is mad at you and is going to fire you, but actually doesn't think that at all and wants to give you a raise. You have the thought. The thought creates a stress response. So our thoughts create our biology, and we have to learn how to manage our minds in order

to manage our biology, and we have to learn how to manage our minds in order to manage our biology. And so let's talk sort of a little bit about diet again. Because what we found from the studies is that when you eat food, it's not all the same. Food is information. It's not just calories. And the information in processed food and starch and sugar increase our stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol. And I remember one study, they looked at overweight kids, I think boys, and they, teenage boys, and they gave them three different breakfasts, an omelet, steel-cut oats, and regular oats. What was interesting is that they were all identical in calories. So the calories are the same. And what they did was they, these kids, why don't you go

and sit in this room and hang out, read, play games, whatever you want to do. But when you're hungry, just hit this button, we'll bring you food. And so what they found out was when the kids had the oatmeal, they ate 81% more food than the omelet, even though it was the same calories over the course of the day. And with the steel cutouts, it was still 51% more food. But what was interesting was that they also had a catheter in their blood vessels and they drew their blood every little bit. And they found that when the kids ate the oatmeal, it was like a stress response in the body there. Not only their insulin and blood sugar went up, but their adrenaline and their cortisol went up.

So when we eat refined foods, they are hugely damaging. So just in the same way, you can eat food to actually help reduce your cortisol level. You can actually balance your insulin levels. You can actually reduce adrenaline by eating foods that help you reduce your cortisol level. You can actually balance your insulin levels. You can actually reduce adrenaline by eating foods that help you calm your nervous system, which are whole real foods. Good healthy fats like olive oil, avocados, nuts and seeds, high quality protein, regeneratively raised animal foods, eggs, chicken, fish, regeneratively raised meats. You know, even whole beans and whole grains can be very calming and helpful.

Although if you eat too much starch and you're insulin resistance, it can still be a problem. And, and then of course, all the, the plant foods, vegetables, they just are super full of phytochemicals, anti-inflammatory compounds, stress reducing compounds. And, and they're, they're really powerful. So when you shift your diet, you're literally going to change your stress response and change your biology. So what can you do other than looking at your mindset? Because a lot of the stress we respond to is the creation of our mind. You know, Gabor Mate, who's written a lot about trauma, which is real trauma, he says, trauma is not what happens to you. It's the meaning you make from what happens to you. So two people can experience the same event and have very different responses and it can be registered very different in their biology. So it's important to understand

that you have to get your mind straight. And that's not as easy as it sounds because we are kind of conditioned to believe our thoughts. And, uh, you know, my friend, uh, Daniel Amon says, you know, we should stop the ants in our head, the automatic negative thoughts. Easier said than done, but it's an important practice. Start witnessing and looking at your mind. And some of the practices that I'm going to share with you now are very effective in helping us reset our minds as well as our bodies. The first is deal with the root causes of stress, right? So there can be physical stresses like a disease. I mean, I had mercury poisoning, Lyme disease, mold toxicity. These create a stress in the body.

So you have to deal with whatever true physical stresses there are and get rid of them. Gluten, nutritional deficiencies, all the things that are really driving so much disease. And we see this in functional medicine and it really is looking at the whole scope of what creates balance or imbalance in the body and dealing with that. But once you've done that, and there are no sort of objective external stresses, how do you start to reset? Well, you have to learn to actively relax. It's something we don't get taught. We don't have to sleep and eat and exercise, but most of us don't understand that we have to actively relax. It's not just sitting on a couch watching TV. It's actually helping your body get into what we call a parasympathetic state. And this is not as easy

as it sounds. You can do it through meditation. You can do it through a breath work. You can do it through massage. You can do it through prayer, through chanting, through yoga, through various kinds of things that help your body reset your nervous system from an overactive, stressed, sympathetic response to what we call the relaxation response. Meditation is a very powerful tool. It's available to all of us. It's free. You can learn how to do it online. There's courses and programs. You can read a book about it. It's not that hard to do. It's basically just sitting and watching your thoughts and not getting caught up in them, but letting them pass using your breath as a, as an anchor or a mantra. There's a lot of different techniques

out there. Exercise also is a powerful stress reducer. Think about it. When you're running from a tiger, you know, you're producing huge amounts of stress hormones and then you run and you burn them off. That's what happens is a book called why zebras don't get ulcers by robert sapolsky who studied baboons and stress response actually and the hierarchy of baboon societies and i highly recommend his book a primates memoir which describes his research but he wrote another book called why zebras don't get ulcers which is based oh no i think that was written by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Sorry. No, I can't remember. Anyway, one of those guys. And the book basically said, you know, the zebra is out there eating his grass and hanging out and there's all the other zebras and the lion comes, starts chasing them

and they all run like crazy, highly stressed. And then the lion catches one of them and then the lion eats the zebra he caught. And then the other zebras just go back to eating the grass, even though the lion's still standing there. So they discharge the stress. We don't. We continue to accumulate the stress. So exercise is a great way to reduce depression, anxiety, to improve mood, to reduce stress response in the body.

And that's why you often feel relaxed and calm after exercising. Other techniques are really good. Breath work techniques, saunas, cold plunges, a lot of things that now are being used to help with longevity and biohacking also help to reduce the stress response. My favorite is a hot steam and a cold dip. And that really just kind of cuts all the stress for me. A hot bath with Epsom salt, very easy to do. There's also some supplements you can take. We use a lot of nutrients when we're stressed. Vitamin C, the B-complex vitamins, vitamin B5, zinc, and magnesium. Magnesium is so important. It's the

relaxation mineral. So I highly recommend that people take magnesium regularly to calm their nervous system. Herbs can be very helpful. Adaptogenic herbs can help you manage stress. The astronauts were using it. The Russian astronauts often took these compounds like rhodiola, Siberian ginseng, cordyceps, ginseng, ashwagandha. These are what we call adaptogenic herbs that help modulate the stress response. Also adaptogenic mushrooms, ashwagandha and reishi and many, many others are very effective for helping modulate the nervous system. Now look at your mind, find a way to look at your beliefs, your attitudes, how you respond, think about the choices you have. You know, I think Viktor Frankl, who was an Auschwitz survivor said, you know, between stimulus and response,

there's a pause and in that pause lies a choice and that choice lies your freedom. And I think all of us have just kind of collapsed that stimulus response or just reactive instead of slowing down and looking at our beliefs, our thoughts. And he, he ended the concentration camp, chose not to be angry or mad at his Nazi captors. I remember when I was a young medical student, I went to Nepal and I met with a Tibetan doctor who'd been in a Chinese gulag for 22 years. And I said to him, I said, what was the hardest part about being a prisoner in a Chinese gulag for 22 years. And I said to him, I said, what was the hardest part about being a prisoner in this Chinese gulag? And he said, well, there were a few times when I thought I would lose my compassion for my Chinese jailers. And I thought, wow, this guy was in jail for 22 years in a gulag. And that was his biggest stress was thinking that he could lose his

compassion for his Chinese dealer. So that just shows you the power of the mind to relate to your environment in quite a different way. And I think the other thing is sleep. All of us are lacking sleep and sleep is a huge important medicine for all of us. Lack of sleep creates a whole host of diseases, but also increases our reactivity, our stress response, cortisol levels, makes us hungrier, increases rail in the hunger hormone, decreases PYY, the appetite suppressing hormone. So sleep is a big medicine when it comes to helping reduce stress. So that was a lot of stuff, but it's really important to understand that if you don't

get a handle on your relationship to stress and how it affects you and choose your response differently, then it will have significant adverse consequences on your health. But there are really simple, practical things you can do every day to help regulate your stress response and to have a happier, healthier, more fulfilled life. So that's it for today's Health Byte. Be sure you share this podcast with your friends and family on social media. How you learn to deal with your own stress. We'd love to hear from you. Leave a comment.

And we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do. And introducing you to all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter.

And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you do is go to drhyman.com forward slash pics to sign up. That's drhyman.com forward slash pics, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer. Hi everyone. I hope you enjoyed

this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.