BITESIZE | The Truth About Stress: How to Reduce Overwhelm & Feel Calmer Every Day | Dr Rangan Chatterjee #682

Dr Rangan Chatterjee (0:01)

Welcome to Feel Better, Live More, Bitesize, your weekly dose of inspiration, insights, and practical ideas to help you live well and thrive. Today's Bitesize is from episode 607 of the podcast, which was a solo episode that I recorded, all about stress. While some stress, of course, is a natural part of life, if it starts to accumulate, it can have negative consequences for our health and happiness.

I share why what I call micro stress doses, or MSDs, can build up and impact our lives, and I also share some simple strategies that can help you de-stress and reset your day.

Now, here's the big problem in the modern world. Today, for many of us, dare I say, most of us, our stressed response is not being activated by wild predators. It's being activated by the state of our daily lives. Email inboxes, to-do lists, elderly parents we're trying to care for at the same time as looking after our own young children. And the list goes on. 80 to 90% of what a doctor sees in any given day these days is in some way related to stress.

And when I explain to you what the stress response is, I think you will very clearly see how chronic stress impacts every single organ system of the body. OK, so what is stress? Well, the best way to think about this is that stress is literally there to keep you safe. The stress response gets activated when it thinks you're in danger. So let's go back in time, maybe 50,000 or 100,000 years ago, and let's imagine we're just getting on with our day. We're hunter gatherers, we're in a small tribe, and then let's say you notice out of the corner of your eye a predator approaching the camp.

In an instant, your stress response gets activated and all kinds of things start to happen in your body to help keep you safe. Let me give you a few examples. Your blood glucose starts to go up so that more sugar can get delivered to your brain. Your blood pressure starts to go up, which helps more oxygen get delivered to your brain, which again is going to help you in an emergency situation. Your amygdala, the emotional part of your brain goes on to high alert, so you're suddenly hypervigilant. This is really, really helpful if you're trying to detect other threats that might be coming at that same time. Your blood becomes more prone to clotting. So if you were to get attacked by a predator, instead of bleeding to death, the fact that your blood is going to clot quickly, is something that could potentially save your life. Okay, so I've just mentioned four things there. Now, here's the big problem. For many of us, it's the state of our daily lives that is causing our stress response system to get activated. And so those things that help you in the short term start to become harmful in the long term. So let's just go through those four things that I mentioned and see how that plays out. Well, blood glucose going up for a short period of time to help you run away from a tiger, super useful. If that's happening day in, day out of the state of your life, well, that causes fatigue, it causes belly fat to accumulate, and ultimately is going to cause things like type 2 diabetes. Your blood pressure going up delivers more oxygen to the brain. Great if a predator is attacking you. Also fantastic if that's happening in response to your spinning class temporarily. In the short term, it's fine. In the long term, if that's happening to the state of your daily life, that persistently elevated blood pressure is going to increase your risk of heart attacks and strokes.

Your amygdala, that emotional part of your brain going into high alert in an emergency situation, no problem. You want to be hypervigilant and hear any pinprick sound around you. But if that's happening in response to the state of your daily life, well, that's kind of what we call anxiety.

Your blood being prone to clotting is fine in a short-term situation. Day in, day out, that increases your risk of things like heart attacks and strokes.

Stress is not a bad thing. A little bit of stress helps us. It's too much of it that remains unmanaged over a prolonged period of time that causes us the problems. And we now know clearly from the scientific research that chronic unmanaged stress can cause type 2 diabetes. We know that chronic stress is a causative factor in the development of Alzheimer's disease, not just associated with, but causative. And frankly, you can find evidence that chronic unrelenting stress is implicated in the development of pretty much every single chronic disease that we have. So I'm not saying that to scare you, I'm actually saying that to empower you. Just because it's normal in modern society for many of us to feel stressed, doesn't mean it's optimal. And it doesn't mean it's not having a serious impact on the state of your life. But here's the thing, it's not actually as hard as you think it is to start managing this. So this episode really is, to hopefully inspire you to take stress seriously. I mean, think about it, in the modern world, if stress does not take a day off, can we really afford to take a day off from managing stress?