Month: November 2021

Do you find yourself regularly forgetting where you put the keys? Or do you often walk into a room only to forget what you were going in there for? When we’re experiencing stress, our memory can suffer and it might feel a bit like a cloud is hovering over your brain—you can’t quite think clearly or retrieve information from your memory as efficiently.

This is because when we’re experiencing stress, our body is geared towards survival. In response to worries or perceptions of pressure and urgency, stress hormones are released and these travel throughout the body, including to the brain, to communicate a ‘danger’ signal. To your body, all stress equals danger and so it directs more resources to the essential processes necessary for survival—and less towards the ‘nice to have, but not essential’ functions. Remember, your body always has your back and is doing its best to help you stay alive, based on the messages it is receiving. 

So what can you do?

Breathe

We can’t always change our circumstances, but we can alter how our body is responding to them through the way that we breathe. Breathing diaphragmatically is a powerful way to activate the calm arm of your nervous system. Commit to 20 long, slow breaths at a certain time (or several times) each day. Linking it to another activity or task that you do every day can help to make it a habit so you might like to do it when you are boiling the kettle, for example. You might also like to practice diaphragmatic breathing any time you notice you are feeling stressed. Be kind and patient with yourself if this way of breathing doesn’t come naturally at first—you may not have breathed in this way for a long time and so it may take some practice, just like any skill.

Increase your nourishment

It is not only psychological stress that can impact our memory and brain function. The stress of poor nutrition can also play a role, and it’s often when people are under a lot of stress that their food choices tend to be less than ideal. This is problematic because the body requires even more nutrients when we’re churning out stress hormones. Focus on including more real, whole foods in your day but be mindful that you aren’t creating more overwhelm by trying to overhaul everything at once. It can be more sustainable to start with one or two small changes and building from there. A good aim can be to add an extra serve of green leafy vegetables each day. Or, perhaps you decide to swap biscuits at morning tea to some fruit, such as some berries.

Prioritise sleep

When we’re highly stressed, our sleep quality can often suffer—and along with it, our memory and mood. Adults require 7-9 hours of sleep each night and if we’re not well rested, we cannot expect to function at our best. Try to listen to your body—is it telling you that you need more rest than usual? While it can be tempting to stay up late to get more things done (particularly if you are stressed because you perceive there isn’t enough time), prioritising your sleep can help you to be more productive in the long run. If you’re having trouble sleeping restoratively, check out my tips here.

Focus on things that are in your control

Focusing on the things that you can control, rather than those that are outside of your control, can help you to better manage your stress. Bring awareness to how you are responding to stressful situations, and whether your actions are really supporting you or not. Are they helping to buffer the stress or are they adding to it? Routine can also be quite helpful, particularly if your stress is related to situations that involve some uncertainty or overwhelm. It doesn’t have to be big—some people even find that making their bed every day after they get up provides a sense of normality and a little bit of momentum for a productive day.

When I talk to people about stress, there are those who tell me outright they are stressed and those who tell me that they’re not.  

For those who say they’re not, there will, of course, be some who genuinely do not feel stress. There are those who connect more with the experience of “worry” than “stress”. And there are also those who may think they’re not stressed and yet their bodies are showing numerous signs that they are.

How can this be?

While stress is often psychological, it can also be nutritional and biochemical. For example, you may have a great mental resilience to cope with anything life throws your way and be eating in a way that does not provide your body with the nourishment it needs to function optimally. Nutrients are what drives all of the vital biochemical processes that create health in your body. And without enough of nutrients, you’re going to be inadvertently adding to your body’s stress load.

It is possible too, to consciously think you’re not stressed and unconsciously be driving stress hormone production. This is because we have two thought systems—I like to call them Old Brain and New Brain. The problem is, they don’t talk to each other. Old brain is rapid, emotional and intuitive (with ‘intuitive’ in this instance meaning a reactive, instantaneous processing that occurs based on prior patterns, associations and experiences we’ve unconsciously concocted about what kept us safe), while New Brain is much slower, and able to calculate and rationalise. The New Brain doesn’t automatically examine the Old Brain and understand why it does what it does. New Brain doesn’t usually even know that Old Brain has made a decision and led you to feel a certain way!

Image Credit: The Invisible Load / Stephanie Antill

And this is where a significant amount of our stress comes from today. Even if your New Brain thinks you are managing just fine, your Old Brain may be busy creating meanings from the situations you are involved with in an attempt to keep you safe—and you may not even realise it.

This is why it’s always a wonderful idea to tune into your body’s messages and learn to decipher what it is trying to communicate to you.

How does stress show up in the body?

Well, this is where it gets tricky. It can be anything from digestive disruptions to poor sleep, hormonal challenges to blood pressure problems.

Regardless of whether you ‘feel stressed’ or not, your body may be reacting as if some things are stressful and trying to send you a signal if you are experiencing:

• Low progesterone
• Problems with your periods which might look like heavy, clotty periods, irregular periods, PMS, or debilitating menopausal symptoms
• Conditions related to your menstrual cycle such as polycystic ovarian syndrome
• Sugar cravings
• Poor short-term memory
• Thyroid challenges
• Regularly disturbed sleep or waking up feeling tired
• Digestive system problems such as IBS or bloating
• Pervading fatigue or bone-deep exhaustion
• Mental fuzziness
• Regular anxious thoughts/feelings
• High blood pressure or low blood pressure
• Inflammation

If any of these symptoms are familiar to you and, no matter what you have tried, you can’t seem to get to the bottom of them, it may be related to the constant, relentless production of stress hormones. Or an intake of nutrients that is not high enough to meet your body’s biochemical needs.

What can you do about it?

First of all, you’ll need to figure out whether there are factors such as biochemical or nutritional stress that your body is dealing with, and whether this is contributing to elevated stress levels, even if you feel ‘fine’. You may like to start by focussing on increasing your intake of whole, real foods, and minimising processed foods, as this will help you either way. If increasing your nutrient intake doesn’t alleviate the symptom/s, you may like to start exploring ways to reduce stress hormone production in your body. You can find a list of suggestions in this article here.