Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Mindset matters.
[00:00:05] Hi, I'm Dr. Charisse Johnson, a licensed clinical mental health therapist, mindfulness practitioner, and author. One of my primary specialties is working with people who want to heal their relationship with food and their body. Welcome to Mindset Matters. Stress is one of those dynamics that will always have an impact not only on our everyday life, but definitely have an impact on the way that we reach for certain foods or what we crave and how much we consume. We can often be unaware of the true impact of stress and all the many different types of stress that can be a part of life at any given moment. Even the dynamic of what is stress is something that we say all the time, but it can be completely ambiguous. So one of the things that I want to do today is I want to share with you there are so many different types of stress, and I want to share them with you so that you have an opportunity to identify what do you notice in your own life? Where do you see multiple kinds of stress at play in your life? And then kind of move them into an umbrella of three different categories. And from there we'll talk about the impact of stress on your brain and appetite. And then what does research say about what you can do as an individual, regardless of your background, to help navigate and manage stress in a better way? So, types of stress. First is acute stress. Acute stress is short term. It often arises from immediate challenges or pressures. These are those every day or every week or every so often. Dynamics that pop out of nowhere. A flat tire, a sick animal, an instance where something happens unexpected. Acute stress is always going to be a part of our lives. But what makes it acute is there's an ending in sight. We know that when acute stress comes, it's going to be short term. So we tend to do okay with it. But there's a caveat. How well we do with acute stress really depends on all the other types of stress and if they're still at play in our lives. Next would be chronic stress. So when you're dealing with chronic stress, it's something that is persisted over a longer period of time due to ongoing issues. For example, we know that people who often have a lot of chronic pain will experience chronic stress. Or if you are a caregiver or a caretaker for an exceptional child or parent, anything that you have in your life that has been pervasive over time and there is an indeterminate ending, can be a chronic stress. Next is eustress. E U S T R E S S so this is a positive stress. This is the stress that motivates us and energizes us. You have a new job, you have a new opportunity, you have a new outlook, new goals, a new year. But I bring that into the discussion because even good stress is still a stress on the brain and the body. And an overload of good stress has the same influence on the way our brain organizes, on the way that our nervous system organizes, and on the way that we kind of engage with our body and engage with food. Then there's distress. So when distress is present, there's the negative stress that leads to anxiety, depression, or a host of other health problems. And not just mental health problems. Distress can create a lot of physical distress, such as acid reflux or gerd, which is kind of similar. Digestive issues, tension headaches, difficulty sleeping, inflammation in the body. The list goes on and on. So always keep in mind, especially when you feel like you have some physical stress that showed up and you're not sure why, that it could be any level of these types of stress, that your body is saying, we can't take much more. Next, we have physical stress. So physical stress arises from physical factors such as illness or injury or even environmental factors, like if you live in an area that's too hot or too cold and that's not good for your body and that continues to add stress on you. For example, fun fact, there are some people who struggle with anxiety. And as a result of the anxiety that they struggle with, then being too hot actually activates them and triggers them in ways that are extremely uncomfortable. So we don't always think about our physical environment as a dynamic of stress, but it absolutely can be. I also want you to consider if you have a loss in your physical environment in terms of fires or storms, that is a type of physical stress. Because you have that geological stress where your physical environment looks different, so you're not able to ground yourself. You don't have the same level of familiarity, and you've lost attachment to the things that are around you. And that's a very real factor in this day and age, whether it's something that you're living, something that someone else that you know is living, and something that we continue to watch because we can also accumulate stress, what we call vicariously, which means from watching it play out in the media. Next, we have emotional stress. When you're going through or dealing with emotional stress, it involves psychological factors, and it can stem from challenges such as grief, loss, or relationship issues. Of course, that can go on and on. But anything that starts with a emotional Strain, and that's going to be pervasive and happen over a long period of time, is another type of stress, work related stress. So that might be geared towards your workload, deadlines, job security, workplace relationships, feeling like your work environment is toxic, that you don't get along well with the people that are in your environment, or you just don't find the environment stimulating anymore. It's no longer what you want or what you need. There's been a lot of change in transitions or merger or buyout, and you might feel very stuck or underwhelmed or overwhelmed in that environment. Workplace stress is a significantly overlooked type of stress. It's one of those where most of us know when we're in situations where there's workplace stress, but then there's this part of us that almost tells ourselves like, oh, this is normal and you're used to it. Please know you getting used to stress is actually a myth. The body does not like stress. The body struggles. When stress accumulates over time, it impacts your allostatic load. A L L O S T a T I C I won't nerd out and go all into your allostatic load, but it's basically your accumulative load of stress and challenge and struggle that happens over time. So hands down, without a doubt, the body has no desire to get used to prolonged stress. So if you're the person that has ever told yourself, oh, I handle my stress well, no, no ma'am, no sir, that is actually not true. Somewhere along the way, if we took inventory of what you're feeling, I have no doubt that we would find that you're seeing the impact of stress. In some ways. You just may be so accustomed to dealing with those physiological or psychological dynamics that you ignore them. But really what we want is for you to be so intentional about understanding the types of stress that are present in your life and how they're impacting your relationship with self and others, that you put an intentional plan in place and understand what is it that you need to help mitigate the impact of stress. The last two types that I want to go through are situational and social stress. So situational stress can involve anything that's geared towards transition and change. It could be a move to a new city, a natural disaster, facing a major life change. So notice that situational stress is somewhat similar to acute stress, but it still often involves change and transition. Those changes and transitions may be necessary, they may be something that you signed up for, but they can still be a level of stress that you want to pay attention to in your life and make sure that you're not overlooking it or not considering it. When you're looking at how am I nourishing myself? What am I noticing about the way that I am engaging with the things that I put into my body, not from a place of shame, but a place of awareness and recognizing that you have the power and the ability to make the best possible choices for yourself. But that's only if you pay attention to how you're engaging with what nourishes you and how it's making you feel and how that fits into the realm of the life that you're living and the stress that you're managing. The last type of stress that I want to highlight is social stress. This stems from your interactions with others, period. If you are an extrovert and you love and enjoy a lot of interaction, but you're in a season where you're not able to get as much of that as you need, that could be a type of stress for you. If you are more along the introverted spectrum and you get overwhelmed and overstimulated by too much interaction and you're in this new job role that requires you to be out and about more than ever before, you may be really excited about the job role, which is a type of stress, but you are really managing. Wow, how do I do this? This is hard for me. This is a little bit more than I'm used to do. I have the stamina for this. And one of the first places that you may see your whole engagement with the factor of social stress is that it shows up in what you eat and you might find yourself eating or drinking things to help manage what you're feeling and how your body responds to social stress. Now we can take all of these types of stress and fit them into three buckets. Before I get into those three buckets, let me name all of the types of stress that I just went over in case you missed anything. Acute stress, chronic stress, eustress EU s T R E S s distress, physical stress, emotional stress, work related stress, situational stress, and social stress. Now I'm curious, how many of these types of stress are you managing in this current season of your life? I want you to take a moment and really maybe put a little check mark or tick mark beside what you know is true. I also want you to consider when I say current season, think about what you've experienced over the last 60 days. Here's why that's crucial.
[00:12:20] One instance of stress takes on average, are you ready?
[00:12:27] Three months to heal from, to move through, to resolve.
[00:12:37] Can we be honest? Most of us don't get that kind of time to recover from a type of stress. And if we have multiple types of stress impacting our lives at the same time, that prolongs the amount of time that it takes for us to resolve it in our brain, in our nervous system. So if you've ever said to yourself, why do I feel this way? I was doing well with how I was caring for myself and I am struggling so much to regain that, then we would want to look at the types of stress that you're managing, how long you've been managing these stressors. What else is happening in your life aside from what's on here? I didn't include financial stress. I could have, and it's one that I'll actually cover in an entire podcast because financial stress is one of the key factors of distress, of mental health challenges and impacting the way that we nourish ourselves. But I'll save that for another time. But that plays a big part in why you might feel the way you feel and then go, it's been six months or eight months or a year and you're still falling off. If that's you, it's okay. Knowledge is power, right? Get this knowledge in, get this understanding in, come back, connect with me. And we're going to work some through some of this to the best of our ability. Now we can fit all of these types of stress into three essential buckets. Good stress, tolerable stress and toxic stress. Good stress is the stress where we rise to the challenge. We know that it's going to be for a short period of time and there's going to be a reward or an outcome on the other side of that. Now let me give a quick, what's the word I want to say warning or thought around good stress. Let's say that you're an entrepreneur or a busy professional and you often consider everything a good stress and have a huge appetite for achievement. Nothing wrong with that. Kudos. Bravo. But what I do want you to understand is that even good stress has an impact on the body, has an impact on your sleep and wake cycle, on your metabolism, on the way that you nourish yourself and the way that you're going to interact with others. So if you are signing up for good stress because you're a high achiever, I still encourage it to be time limited. You want to make sure that you're not rising to the challenge for the next five years. There is a way to allow good stress to ebb and flow in your life so that you're still making sure that you have some level of balance. So all of my high achieving professionals, you cannot operate at 200% for the rest of your life. You are going to crash and burn and experience burnout or feel like you hit a wall again. We will talk about it as time continues to go on. So good stress is still stress. The brain responds the same way over time. So you want to make sure that any level of stress that you have is always balanced and interrupted with seasons of rest and recovery. Second bucket is the tolerable stress. This is the dynamic of bad things happen. But you have a healthy brain architecture, which means that you have a fairly decent capacity to manage stress. You know how to move through it. You have different things in place that help support you. And so up to a degree, stress for you is tolerable and does not take you out. Then there's toxic stress. Toxic stress can be good stress or some of the more moderate stressors that we have, but it can move to toxic if we're in a season or a situation where bad things happen repeatedly, too frequently, too often, and we have limited support and we have impaired brain architecture. And impaired brain architecture can come from childhood traumas, historical dynamics where we have not had the ability to manage our impulse well because so things continue to happen to us quickly. Where you've had to grow up too fast situationally, but emotionally you often live and operate in functional freeze, which is that numbing dissociative detachment. Again, for those of you who are listening and are like, okay, you lost me for a minute, I have no idea what you're talking about. Stay tuned, we'll get there. It will continue to make sense. Those of you who are more familiar with me will understand some of that language. But in essence, toxic stress means bad things happen happen. And I am not in a good place. And as a result of that not being in a good place and already being in an impaired place where I need some rest and some recovery and healing, I'm not going to handle stress as well. Those are the moments that you feel like if anybody asks me to do anything else, if anybody gives me one more responsibility or expects another thing out of me, I am going to lose it, you know, in that moment that you're in a place of toxic stress.
[00:18:31] So how does this then impact the brain and appetite? When stress is pervasive in our lives and we don't have a plan in place, or we are not being intentional about mitigating that stress. The neurobiological impact is very significant. And a part of that biological hormonal impact is going to be it changes the way the brain regulates appetite. It changes the way the brain craves certain foods, those preferences, the amounts, whether that's under eating or overeating, along that spectrum. And it moves us away from being an intuitive and a mindful eater to being a more mindless eater. Because stress to the brain just wants escape and reprieve. So when the brain gets stress, things that can occur in the brain are. For example, your white and gray matter is at odds. It becomes in conflict and lowers. And as a result of that, then you'll have a higher propensity to struggle with your mental health. You'll find that you feel more anxious or more depressed or just more low in mood. I get it, some people don't like to hear the word depressed. But I want you to consider a consistently low mood state is depression, right? When we work on adding that to the equation of what we need to look at, it's because we know that the intensity and the frequency of that continues and moves us in a situation that makes life very difficult. We also know that when you have continuous stress in your life, that your memory and focus will be really challenging. There are certain chemicals in the brain that are depleted, and as a result of that, you're going to have poor decision making, which means the part of your brain that regulates the choices that you make and what you reach for, they're going to be offline. They're not going to be on that highest place of value and potential. So you're going to be more likely to reach for things that make you feel good. Now let me say this. There is absolutely nothing wrong with honoring your taste preferences when you are going through life. Nothing wrong with that in any way, shape or form. But what I want you to notice and I want you to consider is when you've moved beyond that and you almost feel like there is this compulsion towards certain foods repetitively, that you've lost the art of having variety, that you're noticing that you're not eating in well rounded ways that honor what your entire system needs, that you are leaning towards this one or two categories, these one or two categories of food, and too much of anything or too little of anything, because it can go both ways, puts you in a place where your body's just simply not going to operate at its best. That will always be the foundation of what this is about. It is not about restriction, it is not about clean eating, all foods fit in moderation, but it is about you having a clear awareness of when I'm stressed. How does that shift and change the way I nourish myself and as a result of how I nourish myself and what I drink and what I take in, how am I feeling, how am I operating and what can I do now? There are so many different factors that impact how we respond to stress, what we may need. We can also look at historical elements of trauma and how that may be involved with the choices that the brain makes at that time. We can look at levels of mental health, we can look at gender, we can look at a number of different dynamics, even age. But looking at all of those things through the lens of research and a meta analysis which happens over time in the study of the brain's adaptation to stress and the way we nourish ourselves, there are some key common principles and practices that we all benefit from as individuals in order to get better.
[00:23:18] Number one is making sure that we improve our sleep quality. So now we're moving towards. You recognize that you have several of these factors of stress. You understand the buckets and you can identify where you fall in them. Right now, in this current season, last week and now, what do you do? You1 work on improving your sleep quality. You2 look at how you can improve your social support. Being around other people that are supportive is a significant way to improve your stress and it helps. As a result of that improvement, our social brain connect with other people. We are then co regulating in good healthy relationship with other people. And as a result of that, it helps relieve the level of stress that we're feeling and actually brings our appetite back to a level of baseline that feels more manageable. You also want to work on incorporating or building and developing a positive outlook on life. Mindset matters, of course, I'm going to get into that very soon. But your outlook on life will be impacted by your stress will be impacted by the food and the drinks and the substances that you consume, because all of those interplay and interconnect with our brain and our cognition. And having a positive outlook on life is a powerful mitigator of stress. I want you to notice the next time you don't feel well, what's the quality of your thoughts in comparison to to when you do feel well? Other things that are going to be helpful is having a healthy diet. What is a healthy diet? We're going to talk about it in another podcast. I won't get into it all right now. But I will say that there is a level of what is a healthy diet that's unique to you. It's unique to your size, your age, your culture, your background, your physical needs, your physical activity, your food intolerances, your pain levels. And I say that because I don't ever want you to think that there is a one size fits all to what's healthy for someone's dietary needs. That is something that, you know, we have general dynamics around. You need a variety in terms of amino acids and proteins and vegetables and fruits and things like that. Of course that fits, but how much of that you need and when there are a lot of different factors, we'll get into that. I may even bring on a guest to talk about that in detail so that you have a really good understanding. But in general, what we eat helps support our level of stress and our ability to manage our stress well. And then last but absolutely not least is moderate physical activity. Physical activity is one of the most helpful things that we can do. Fun fact. Doing 5 to 15 minutes of some type of moderate movement very closely to a stressful situation and moment is one of the most helpful things that you can do to bring the body back down. And I'll actually be talking about that soon. That being said, I hope that you found something that was discussed today enjoyable as you continue to take this information in. Know that anything that I say is information that is based on neuroscience and study in the field of psychology, in the field of eating and related disorders. But it never takes the place of your care team, of your physicians, of your therapists, of the people in your life. So you're not going to find me give you a lot of advice, but more so general recommendations that you take along with the knowledge of yourself. I have this saying, I'll say it everywhere that I go. Knowledge is not power without apprehension application. So find something that you heard and act on it. Look at your types of stress, identify what you need in order to help mitigate them. Replay and listen back to those last few things that I named that are an important aspect of helping support ourselves in stress. Which of those are you doing well? Which of those are you not doing at all? And where can you continue to show up in your life? And I look forward to seeing you very soon. B.
