Understand the bucket analogy, if it needs to be full or empty, and why it’s important to care for it to handle a healthy and active lifestyle.
Think of your bucket as a place where your body stores all kinds of stress: metabolic, environmental, physical, and mental. If the load is greater than what the bucket can take, the stress starts overflowing and manifesting in different ways.
Examples of stress:
- persistent or repeated disease and illness
- physical stress due to injury, diet, surgery, addiction, abuse
- emotional stress from a challenging marriage, divorce, death of a loved one, strained work relationships, a new baby, financial insecurity or any number of hardships
- chemical pollution of air, water, food, drugs
Our daily life is filled with stressors. From simply driving to dealing with a stressful day at work. Eating and exercising are also forms of stress to our bodies that place demands met by our nervous and endocrine systems. Exercising is an example of controlled stress, something you do on purpose and intending to create resilience, get stronger, and reach a goal. Stress isn’t a bad thing, but the way how we deal with it, recover from it and how it accumulates is what makes the difference. The response to stress is different for everyone, also called allostasis: the ability to deal with stress.
I recently had a consultation with my functional medicine nutritionist, as part of my school curriculum, and we talked about my stress load, also known as allostatic load. I do not have a “stressful” life, I enjoy my every day, but that’s not what the stress load is all about. After looking at some signs and symptoms I’ve been managing over the past 3 or 4 years, like digestive and skin issues, we came to the conclusion that my bucket might be full and I should support my body to help it do its job.
What is stress?
Stress is anything your body needs to turn on, like a mechanism, to make you deal with the situation. Running, for example, is a stressor that turns on a stress response, a series of nervous and endocrine activities that keep you going. Your endocrine and nervous systems work together to respond to the situation. Eventually, you get better at dealing with this whole process, until it’s not AS stressful anymore, like driving on a highway or running a 10k, for example, and the resilience you’ve developed can easily manage the situations. But if we constantly put ourselves where the stress is much greater than the body’s capability to deal with it, like heavy traffic every day or overtraining, we start storing the “extra” stress in the bucket, until it overflows, and signs and symptoms may start manifesting.
Example of symptoms:
Fatigue, sleep disruptions, weight changes, salt and/or sugar cravings, allergies, anxiousness, headaches, brain fog, skin issues, hair loss, nervousness, low blood pressure, and a number of other symptoms.
Stress coping strategies and lifestyle changes help to empty the bucket, as much as nutrition strategies. After all, what the physical body needs to work its way to a balanced state is NUTRIENTS… aka food. Food will nourish the cells, the workforce that keeps us going.
How can you support your body and manage stress?
In my case, we added more vitamins, minerals, and adaptogens to my diet to give my body a boost to be more resilient and deal with the allostatic load, as I care to manage the stressors. Managing the stressors comes down to being aware of physiological and cognitive activities and the demands they place on the body’s systems. For example, a hard workout session needs recovery time, which means sleep and food, so we look at sleep hygiene and digestion. Long bouts of cognitive work require concentration, so we look at the health of brain cells. In a way, everything that takes energy from the body to get done is a stressor, but certain activities trigger more stress than others. But there’s a special element here: the hormone CORTISOL, especially when we are in HYPERarousal.
This hormone produced by the adrenal gland is involved in pretty much everything. It is a key element in a stress response of any kind. While endorphins are present when we are in HYPOarousal.
Another important factor that we talked about in my consultation is our circadian cycle, where cortisol is naturally higher earlier in the day and goes down as bedtime approaches, then starts to go back up. So ideally we want to work with our 24hrs cycle and not stimulate cortisol release later in the day with activities that trigger stress and disrupt the cycle. It can be a hard lifestyle habit to prioritize, especially when it comes to the type of job you do and your schedule. In my case, working part-time in the food industry, I have to be up and awake late at night. That’s where supportive strategies come to play, like good nutrition and other lifestyle habits that help to keep this essential hormone, cortisol, in check.
See how you can support digestion as a tool to manage stress here “Simple ways to improve digestion”.
If your bucket is full, symptoms might signal it’s time to care for your health. Everybody’s bucket size is different, that’s why it’s important to learn how to tune in to your body and how it communicates with you.
What can you do?
1 – First and foremost: tune in to your body.
2 – Slow down. You can keep going only as fast as you recover.
3 – Journal your symptoms. It can be very useful if you need to see a healthcare professional. Check out my Food Journal. It’s a tool to track diet and other factors that can offer clues about your health.
4 – Improve your diet. It’s actually something simple you can do right at home.
I’m here to help! Schedule a 15-minute call and let’s find out if we are a good fit to work together.
