Living A Full Life
Welcome to the podcast designed to empower individuals and families on their journey to better health. True wellness isn’t a mystery—it’s built through consistent daily habits that fuel vitality, energy, and longevity.
Each week, we break down the latest health research, debunk myths, and provide practical, science-backed strategies to help you thrive. Whether you're seeking answers to improve your own well-being or support your family’s health, this podcast is your trusted resource for living a full, vibrant life.
Living A Full Life
Understanding Stress and Its Health Impacts
Can we really control our stress response, or is it hardwired into our DNA? Join us on Living a Full Life as we uncover the age-old battle between the "fight or flight" instincts and modern stressors. Our bodies are wired to respond to threats, whether they come in the form of a saber-toothed tiger or an overflowing email inbox. This episode provides listeners with strategies to manage both short-term bursts of stress and the chronic stressors that linger, by understanding the delicate dance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems of our autonomic nervous system.
Stress doesn't just affect how we feel—it can wreak havoc on our health. In this episode, we explore how chronic stress can disturb hormone balance, disrupt sleep, and even lead to weight gain. By delving into the physiological effects, listeners will gain insight into how stress exacerbates inflammation and immune dysfunction. We talk about heart rate variability as a tool to assess stress and distinguish between controllable and uncontrollable stressors, empowering listeners to recognize and manage their stressors more effectively.
Finally, we offer a vivid analogy of inflammation as a fire, illustrating how stress can fan the flames and lead to severe health conditions. We explore how lifestyle factors such as diet, smoking, and alcohol consumption can add fuel to this fire. Fortunately, there are natural remedies like mindfulness and breathing exercises that can help cool things down. We also highlight the convenience of virtual holistic health consultations offered by Full Life Chiropractic, inviting listeners to seek personalized support from the comfort of their homes. If you're ready to take control of your stress and its impacts, this episode is your guide to a balanced, healthier life.
Contact us at info@fulllifetampa.com if you are intersted in diving into stress and issues that are effecting you.
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Welcome to another episode of Living a Full Life. I'm Dr Enrico Dolcecori, and this week we're tackling stress. Stress is not going to be tackled in one podcast. It's a perpetual thing that comes at us from all different angles. But understanding what stress is and the effects it has on our body hopefully keeps you motivated to keep doing all the right things that you do every day to stay healthy. That's the whole point of this.
Speaker 1:Stress is the body's natural response to demands or threats. It's a natural thing. It's there for a reason. It's a wonderful system to keep us protected. The threats can be physical, they can be emotional, they can be mental, they can also be chemical. But these threats can come physical, they can be emotional, they can be mental, they can also be chemical. But these threats can come to us from all different directions and it's almost like they do on a daily basis.
Speaker 1:And stress can be short-term or it can be chronic. Short-term is something that just currently happened you got hit in the arm and you got a bruise. That's stress, that is inflammation, that is pain, that's everything going on right, thereises, and then it will go away in a couple weeks. That's short term. Chronic stress can develop and perpetuate over time and that's what we're going to dissect in this podcast today is what's the difference? How do we mitigate it and how do we defend ourselves against the responses from stress, because we need to. And how do we deal with stress? How do we prepare ourselves to handle situations that are stressful? They're going to happen. There's stress that's unthinkable, that can happen to us in our life. There's stress that happens, it seems like all the time. And then there's stresses that happen every few hours of every day because of the choices that we make or because of the environment that we're in. These things can happen. So how the body responds to stress is a real important understanding and then we can build our way up from that.
Speaker 1:Stress you may have heard from high school biology is a fight or flight reaction. It's a sympathetic reaction to the response of whatever's happening Immediately. What happens in a sympathetic response or a fight or flight is that heart rate increases, muscle tenses and your breath speeds up to just help with that flow. So if the heart rate increases, it means it's going to pump more blood. If it pumps more blood, it needs more oxygen. If it needs more oxygen, you've got to breathe more. So you breathe more and your muscles get tense to get ready to do some kung fu, fighting or whatever it is that we need to do to get through that situation. That's why it's called fight or flight. Are we going to fight to defend ourselves or are we going to take flight and get out of here because those leopards are going to eat us if we don't?
Speaker 1:So that's the primitive response to stress and it's ingrained in our DNA, the programming that's in there. It can't be changed. It's the fundamental programming to any computer on earth. There's just hardware that needs to be there a screen, a chip, power, a motherboard. All that stuff needs to be there to make the computer work. And it was the same in the 90s with the first computers as well your IBM Aptiva, whatever it was. It had the same in the 90s with the first computers as well. Your IBM Aptiva, whatever it was, it had the same parts to it. It just all looks slicker and slicker and smaller and smaller as technology improves, but the same thing is there.
Speaker 1:The structure, the DNA, the programming that's there is there. We are programmed for flight or flight, and you need to understand that. So think of yourself as like prehistoric caveman or woman, and that's the DNA that's created in you. So you hear a weird screech in the middle of the night. You don't know if that's an animal, somebody breaking into your cave, a pterodactyl I don't know what the heck the screech would be, but that's the response. You need to have an increase in heart rate, an increase in breathing, a tense in muscle to defend and protect yourself. That's what we do and up to today, in 2025, that's the response humans will have. That's the response all mammals will have. It comes from the hindbrain that all mammals share together, just around the amygdala that protects us from fear, or it's the fear center. It's how we respond. So we all have that primitive part of the brain in all mammals. It's what keeps us protected, to run from the hunter right. So that makes sense.
Speaker 1:The autonomic nervous system is made up of both of those, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic, and that's what makes up our autonomic nervous system. We want to stay in balance between those two. We can kind of shuffle left or right. Let's say we choose to go do a HIIT exercise at the gym. We're choosing to put ourselves in a sympathetic state there for the benefits that come with that the cardiovascular response, the blood flow, the endorphin release, the hormone balancing. There's a lot of great stuff that comes from exercise. Great. So we put ourselves and then, once we're done the exercise, as we rest, we go back to normal vitals, which brings us back to balance. We may actually eat a post-workout meal. We may go home have some protein shake and a banana or something who knows, and that will put us into parasympathetic, so we'll swing a little bit there as we digest the food and go back to balance. So it's a beautiful dance that the autonomic nervous system has between sympathetic and parasympathetic, but it's trying to stay balanced between the two.
Speaker 1:We use heart rate variability and we monitor every single patient that comes to our office. We don't tell them we're doing this for stress response, but that's exactly what we're doing. We don't want to tell a mother of a three-year-old that we're going to do heart rate variability for their stress response. We're doing it to see how their nervous system's working and that's a great barrier there. But we check everyone. We know who's super stressed and who's not, and we've had discussions about this. Do you feel like it's coming from emotional, physical, chemical or mental? Where is this coming from? And it can open up a great discussion with patients, which is true healthcare, which is fantastic.
Speaker 1:So that's the balance between the two and our autonomic nervous system and that's how we adapt to stress. It's a healthy way, it's a normal way, it's a programmed way to do it. We cannot change it. But that's how it works, which is great and it's actually a wonderful thing. But there's some things that happen with it. We talked about, you know, some vitals that can change, but there's chemical and hormonal changes that can happen when we are perpetually in stress. So either short-term stress or long-term stress, either way, there's going to be an immediate chemical and hormonal change. That happens from stress Immediately.
Speaker 1:Cortisol changes in the body, the stress hormone hormone, and it affects. That's what gets everything pumping. Then adrenaline and norepinephrine gets the body ready for action. This is the tensing, this is the increased heart rate, like everything, like that endorphin release that you get to get you ready to fight or flight. That's adrenaline can happen on a roller coaster too. Those are incidental stresses that we choose. We consider these things fun and we call them adrenaline junkies right, those people that are looking for skydiving, roller coasters going fast, all these things. It's that adrenaline rush that they get addicted to and they're stunt devils. They just want to do that. Nothing wrong with that, but you're choosing to put yourself into a stressful position which is controllable because you can control the outcomes. Hopefully your parachute works and all that great stuff, so you can control the outcome of everything.
Speaker 1:Chronic stress, however, is not controllable. Hormone imbalances immediately start to happen, it disrupts sleep and we gain weight. Those are the three biggest things that people notice from chronic stress. They just don't relay it to chronic stress. Not everyone does. Not everyone sees that, but they get it. They're like I've been working long hours, I haven't been going to the gym, it's my fault. They get it and that's their way of saying I've been stressed. It's true, and it's absolutely the side effect of stress. So stress in itself leads to inflammation.
Speaker 1:Constant stress keeps the immune system on high alert. That high alert produces a lot of. It requires a lot of hormone production for that which is inflammatory, because we need fats and proteins to do that. So we're cycling fats and proteins quickly, we're breaking them down and that process over time. It's like keeping the oven on for too long with it slightly open. Eventually the home's going to start to heat up. That's how we used to heat our homes, the wood-burning ovens. Remember that. But if you did that with your electric or gas, you'd waste a lot of energy, but slowly. What would happen is the temperature in the home would increase. If you kept that oven on at 400 degrees Fahrenheit, it would slowly heat the entire house. You'd feel it. That's the chronic stress of what's happening with that and that's what happens with hormone imbalances. That constant stress keeps the immune system on high alert.
Speaker 1:We have excess cortisol which can trigger immune dysfunction. This is where we start to get sick, often because of being stressed. See this even in young kids. They're going through final exams in high school and college. Right when they're done they are sick the next day. It's a crash of their immune system. They excess cortisol from studying and being worried about this exam which make, make or break their grade for the semester or for their year. You know some of these exams have a 50% way. I remember those classes. They're like hey, the statistics exam at the end of the year is worth 50% of your grade. I'm like holy smokes. You'd study like crazy for it to try and get an A because if you didn't you would not get an A in the class right, so those were stressful. I remember that. And that's what triggers the immune dysfunction.
Speaker 1:Is that chronic stress over weeks of studying or that week before, whatever it is, and even deadlines at work that have to be made tax year end, all these stuff, month end. I mean we deal with stresses all the time and stress-induced poor diet just doesn't help. When we have just choices that we make with hydrogenated oils, processed foods, we put this into our system and we're just inducing more stress through our diet. It leads to lack of sleep and then all the unhealthy habits we do fuel inflammation Smoking, drinking alcohol, all these things can fuel to more inflammation. So it's a stress when we say stress from a physiological perspective, stress is inflammation and that's what we're trying to mitigate, because stress in itself is a normal thing. It's a natural thing.
Speaker 1:Gravity is stress. It keeps our feet on the ground. That's a good stress. But it is a stress on the body. It's pulling us down, hence why our skin starts to sag right as we get older. That gravity distortion, right, but it's a good one. I don't want to be floating all over the place right, that's weird, but it's a good one. I don't want to be floating all over the place, right, that's weird. So there's good stresses, there's bad stress. Going to the gym lifting weights, putting pressure on our tendons, that's a stress, but it's a good stress. The result from that leads to stronger tendons and stronger muscles, right? So the ones that we choose that are going to lead to bad are always coming through diet, right. Always through diet. Every time we're like, oh, I just want one of those things, a scoop of ice cream. We're fueling inflammation with that. It doesn't mean we can never have it. We just have to be in a state that will be good to have that stuff. It just depends on how much fire, how big is the forest fire in the body. That's how I always that's my analogy for stress.
Speaker 1:For most people there's always a little pilot inside of us. There's always a little flame going on. It has to be there. It always has to be ready to fight. It's that flame. If you grew up in the North, you got natural gas furnaces. There's a pilot that stays on 365 days a year. It's just there in case the heat needs to kick on. That pilot is there. It can light the flame and heat the air that comes through it to heat up the house but it stays on all the time because if it goes out, you have to physically go in there, check the gas line and make sure you turn it back on. You have to, otherwise when winter comes along, it's not going to heat up your house. And that's the analogy.
Speaker 1:I keep with the stress that flame's always there. When we stress ourselves out and we put more kerosene onto that, the flame can get out of control. It can get very big. It can turn into a fire where your entire boiler room's on fire or the whole house catches fire. Now we're in trouble, right? So, depending on that, when the flame is small and the pilot's there and you throw some ice cream on it not a big deal Nothing's going to really happen. Going to eat some Oreos, going to eat some processed food, have some pizza, whatever it's not going to hurt. But when there's a forest fire going on and our joints hurt and our knees hurt and we're in pain or we're overweight or whatever's happening, there's already chronic inflammation and we add more to it, we turn this into a whole house fire. That's what inflammation is.
Speaker 1:Inflammation is the body's natural defense mechanism. For acute, like we talked about getting hit in the arm and having a bruise, it's for short-term healing. So immediately, plasma, red blood cells, white blood cells, the immune system goes straight to the injury. The immune system is warned off because it's like, listen, nothing's ruptured, we didn't break the skin, there's no bacteria that's in here, there's no viruses, there's nothing that we need to fight off. So the killer cells are held off and immediately the plasma and red blood cells and white blood cells do their thing to repair the damage Skin tissue, muscle tissue, tendon, whatever's there, fat cells that were ruptured, whatever happened. They go in there and start to repair through blood flow. That's short-term healing. So that is a natural defense mechanism. That is a natural healing process. That is a great thing.
Speaker 1:Chronic inflammation no bueno, it's long-term. It's harmful to have that type of a response. A military response happens when this happens. So you get a bruise on your arm or you get hit in the arm with a softball. Your body puts out the Navy, seals, the military, the Air Force, the Navy, everyone's going out to be like what happened? There was a bomb went off on our forearm. It was actually a softball. They go and check it out immediately. It happens within seconds, minutes. The Navy is fed off, the Air Force is fed off, the Marines are fed off, but the military stays. They're like, hey, let's help clean up a little bit and they help rebuild. That's what's going on there. So the troops or the army, whatever is there and they do their thing. This is how I got through medical school, by the way, all these cartoons in my head and that's how I figured out everything. But hopefully they help you too.
Speaker 1:Chronic, long-term is where we start to have inflammation around the heart, inflammation around the liver, inflammation around the kidneys, and the organs start to get bogged down. Now we're going to exhaust the military, they're going to be tired of constantly trying to rebuild, we're going to get fatigued and now we have this inflammation which is going to change physiological effects. So inflammation around the kidneys or in the kidneys is going to start to create vasoconstriction within the kidneys, which means bad blood flow, bad circulation, bad waste removal from the body. That increases uric acid, increases your pH, increases your renal pressure, which increases your blood pressure. And I can go through analogies for every single organ in the body and what happens when it starts to get inflamed. Typically, that's where the pathology is going to take place. But that's what chronic inflammation does. It's long-term disruption of the military and it's going to exhaust the resources right. It can only print so much money.
Speaker 1:Where inflammation occurs is due to the stress. So if we got the kidneys, for example, can be from poor diet, a high increase of alcohol in the diet and smoking. Let's say we do the poor diet, we smoke and we drink alcohol. Kidneys, liver, they hate it. They're the ones that are going to get it. If it starts to get inflammation around the brain, we may notice memory loss, brain fog, mood disorders. If we get inflammation around the heart and arteries, we can increase our risk of heart disease, stroke, heart attack. These are things that can happen there.
Speaker 1:Gut, this is a very common one. The gut takes up a lot of space. You may have seen these things. If you outstretch the small intestine and large intestine, it can wrap around the world or something like that. How long it is? I should probably look that up. That's how much. How long our digestive tract is. It's huge. So when you bundle that all up it's like a ball of yarn. So you take that and then you put it into this ball of yarn and you stick it in someone's abdomen. You're like here, that's your digestive tract. It's a lot of surface area, a lot of space, so the gut is the most common organs to have inflammation buildup and this leads to digestive issues, leaky gut, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcers, polyps, ulcerative colitis, diverticulitis I mean the gut issues can just keep going.
Speaker 1:Dysbiosis all the stuff that can happen in the gut is because of chronic inflammation. Then it can go to joints and muscles. We see all of this all the time the joint and muscles, chronic pain, stiffness, and that's an autoimmune response. Now your body's starting to attack itself because the hormone imbalance has been for too long. We've attacked our hormone system. Oof stress, no bueno and not cool at all. But how do we reduce it and what can we do to decrease inflammation? Naturally, that's what we should be focusing on.
Speaker 1:Breathing exercises and mindfulness can go such a long way. Most of our stress comes from knowledge, which means our work. So we're sitting there and we're exerting mental energy to do our work. So if you're a lawyer, an accountant, a bookkeeper, an attendant documents, receptionist, manager, any of these things, which covers a lot of the workforce we're using our brains and numbers and tasks and Excel sheets and Word documents and reading a lot and emails and communication. We're in that. It, whatever it may be computer code, it's using our brain and being mindful and breathing can relax the brain the fastest, better than exercise, better than anything else. Stepping away, closing your eyes and focusing on your breath, even for 20 seconds, and being mindful of your body, putting yourself in a better ergonomic state standing up, whatever it may be, leaning properly in your chair can be one of the best things you do. For that 20 seconds to take the stress off your mind, which reduces inflammation instantaneously. For those 20 seconds to take the stress off your mind, which reduces inflammation instantaneously. For those 20 seconds. Now, is 20 seconds enough for the 12 hours that you're going to work that day? No, so maybe we should practice this more and more regularly. That's probably the biggest one.
Speaker 1:An anti-inflammatory diet is the absolute best thing you can do. Breathing exercises is the smartest thing you can do. Anti-inflammatory diet is the best thing you can do. Whole foods, omega-3s, adding some turmeric in your diet, whatever it may be, cleaning it up, reducing processed foods, reducing inflammation from chemicals, from the diet can drastically reduce the inflammation in the body the fastest possible. So our diet plays the biggest role in an anti-inflammatory diet, in an anti-inflammatory state whatsoever.
Speaker 1:Quality sleep and movement. We talk about this, and movement in this case for stress is simple. Things like stretching, yoga, walkings, you know, mild strength training simple things that move your body. It helps pump circulation through so that inflammation can continue to be processed. Sitting for long hours and not exercising just leaves us with a stagnant circulation, and a stagnant circulation is hard on the lungs and the cardiovascular system. There's been studies showing that people who sit and don't exercise full-time 40 hours a week have a three-time greater risk for heart attack and lung issues than a chronic smoker. Unbelievable, crazy right, just that. Circulatory movement. And then, of course, managing emotional stress. Gratitude, social support and mental therapy play a huge role in that as well. That's how we get the emotional, the chemical, the physical and the mind balanced to offset the stresses that we're attacked with.
Speaker 1:You can do it all little by little, just like how you do it every day to beat yourself down. You can do the little things every day to build yourself up. If you need support, we're here for you. I challenge you to reach out to info at fulllifetampacom with any questions you have. Just say I need help. Let's open a discussion through email. You can be anywhere in the country.
Speaker 1:A lot of this stuff with inflammation can be done virtually on Zoom, which is super cool, and the doctors at Full Life Chiropractic are well-versed and trained on doing this holistically and naturally. So if you need help and this podcast was like wait, hang on a second I do. Glad I listened to this. It's probably why you listened to it right to the end. Info at fulllifetampacom. Send an email, say listen to your podcast. I could use some help. Well, I'll know exactly what you're talking about and we'll hook you up with a virtual consult for free to talk and go through what it is that's going on, and maybe we can dive deeper and help you out or refer you to someone locally or someone else that can help you out as well. Stay well, stay healthy. Thanks for tuning in this week Like, share, comment on the podcast, so more listeners get to it, of course, and see you next week.
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