 Happiness Isn't Brain Surgery with Doc Snipes. This podcast was created to provide you the information and tools Doc Snipes gives her clients so that you too can start living happier. Our website docsknipes.com has even more resources, videos and handouts and even interactive sessions with Doc Snipes to help you apply what you learn. Go to docsknipes.com to learn more. Hi, I'd like to welcome everybody to today's episode of Happiness Isn't Brain Surgery with Doc Snipes. We're going to be briefly reviewing the HPA axis, which is your threat response system. Over the course of the next 20 to 30 minutes, we're going to define and explain the HPA axis, identify the impact of chronic stress or cumulative trauma on this threat response system, look at some symptoms of dysfunction so you know when things are starting to go wonky, and identify interventions that might be useful to help you regulate or restore your threat response system or HPA axis functioning. So what is it? What does HPA axis stand for? It stands for hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, which is a really long, hard to say thing for your stress response system. It controls reactions to stress and regulates many body processes, including digestion, the immune system, mood, emotion, sexuality, energy, storage, and expenditure, inflammation, you name it, the HPA axis kind of has a finger in it. So that's why it's so important in recovery and just living healthfully and happy to make sure that this system is functioning. The ultimate result of HPA axis activation is to increase levels of cortisol in the blood during times of stress. Now you may have heard of cortisol before, people refer to this as our stress hormone, and cortisol in the short term has uses and it has benefits in the long term and extended exposures when it starts to cause problems. Its main role is to release glucose, which is blood sugar, into the bloodstream in order to facilitate fight or flight. So it gives you the energy for fight or flight. It also suppresses and modulates the immune system because it's an antihistamine, the digestive system and reproductive system because when you're under stress, the body says, you know, now's not really the time to be digesting food or having sex. We need to fight or flee in order to survive. So I mean, think about how our parents, you always used to say, don't go swimming for two hours after you've had a meal. Same sort of thing when you get into the water, the water's cold. It kind of shocks your body and when you're exercising, you're providing a sort of stress on your body. So your body devotes energy to keeping you afloat, helping you swim, and it diverts it from digesting that food. So what happens? Well, first there has to be a stressor and the big million dollar question is what is a stressor? And the short answer is everything, anything that requires energy. But what we're really going to look at here is two main groups, biological environmental stressors. And I couldn't really separate those because when you're hot, your body is going to try to cool itself off when you're cold, because the environment is too cold, your body is going to try to warm itself up. So that can contribute to, you know, pain and discomfort in the environment, but also physical pain. If you've got, you know, I chronically have neck problems and shoulder problems. So on the days that that's acting up, I know that I am probably going to be activating that stress response system a little bit more. This system is sort of primitive. You want to think back to when you're trying to assess how much impact a stressor is going to have, is this going to make you the weak link in the pack so you could be devoured by a hungry lion? And if the answer is yes, if it's going to make you the more vulnerable one, then it's probably going to have a greater activation of the HPA axis. So things like pain, that makes it harder for you to be performed at 100%. It makes it harder for you to escape from a predator. And, you know, for most of us when we're in pain, it makes us harder, makes it harder for us to just deal with stress in general. So pain is a stressor. Lack of sleep. If you have somebody who's lagging along behind the group because they're tired, they're going to be the first one to be picked off. Again, it's a primitive system, but when you don't have enough sleep, your body says you're under stress. So we need to be more alert. We need to have this threat response system activated so we can protect you. Lack of adequate nourishment. Now you've heard me say over and over again, that you need the building blocks in order to build the neurotransmitters that help you feel happy, help you get excited, yada yada. But also, interestingly, a lack of adequate nourishment, not enough calories. They found when people fast that after a period of fasting, their base metabolism actually goes up briefly because the body's trying to get you to go out and find more food. So that HPA axis is dumping blood glucose. It's finding those stores and going, all right, dude, you got to get out and restock the shelves. And then generally an unsafe environment. If you're always walking on pins and needles, if you feel stress out all the time, if you don't feel safe in your own house, it's going to add a layer of stress. Now it may not be like super stressful, but that low chronic underlying stress grates on you after a while and wears you out. It keeps your stress response system activated. So you're constantly burning energy and being on high alert, which is exhausting. And we'll talk about some of the effects later. But it's important to recognize what you can do in these situations. You can go online and you can Google feng shui and stress reduction. There are a lot of things like not having your back to the window, not having your back to a door, being able to see so you're never surprised by people coming up. Again, think about it from a predatory standpoint. You don't want to be that bunny rabbit out in the middle of the field. So what makes an environment safe for you? Now that'll be different for different people based on your experiences. If you've had trauma in your past, or if you've had a highly conflictual household where people have been slamming doors and slamming cabinets, then when you hear those sorts of things, it may trigger your HPA access. So in your environment, you also might need to be cognizant of loud noises and things that would startle you. But any of those things are going to activate this threat response system. Psychological stressors, fear and anxiety come to the top of the list. And again, we've talked about this before rejection as humans and as part of a pack. We need to not be rejected. We want to be part of a group. We want to be part of the pack. We want to have some protection, some sense of belonging. So a fear of rejection activates the threat response system. Isolation is the same way. Fear of failure. Failure can lead to rejection. Failure can lead to inability to provide for yourself. It can have a lot of far reaching potential consequences. Now most of the time failure just means, well, that didn't go as planned. However, if when you fail at something or when you don't succeed at something, you interpret it catastrophically, then your brain is going to set off a stronger stress reaction. Loss of control is the same way. Some people can fly by to the seat of their pants. They can drop back and punt whenever it's not a big deal. Others of us are kind of, you know, control freaks. So when things get out of our control, when things start to get a little wonky, we may get more stressed. I like to be able to plan, plan, prepare and predict. Those are my three P's. Now life doesn't happen that way. So when I get thrown a curveball, it's a little more stressful for me than for someone who is a little more spontaneous. Being aware of your tendencies, we all react differently to different things. And the unknown, again, not a big deal for some people. I know people who thrive on going to work every day, you know, law enforcement officers are a perfect example. They go to work every day and they really get frustrated if it's the same stuff day after day it's just like, oh, this is so boring. They thrive on the unknown. They thrive on surprises and spontaneity. Not me. I like to know that I'm going to come in at 830. I'm going to make my coffee. I'm going to check my email. And I'm really predictable. But that's the way I like it. If I'm going into a situation where I have no clue how the day is going to go, it's more stressful for me. Can I handle it? Sure. But I know ahead of time that that's going to be a somewhat anxiety-provoking situation. So, and as we'll talk about in a few minutes, I need to reduce stresses in other areas so my body can devote energy to that and I'm not just overtaxing the system. Another psychological stressor, if you will, is poor time management or just stress. If you're one of those people who says yes to everything and then you end up overbooked, never have time to relax, maybe you're double-booked, feeling like you're pulled in both two directions all the time, can't get enough sleep, it's definitely going to take its toll because you've got constant anxiety, you've got constant must-dos, and you've got a voice in the back of your head, if you will, telling you you can't rest, relax, and recuperate. You need to keep going. Keep going like the Energizer Bunny. We're not Energizer Bunnies. We need rest. Anger is your response, you know, fight or flee. Anger is your response to any of those fears that you think you can dominate or need to dominate because there's no option. So, your psychological stressors are really your dysphoric, if you will, your unpleasant emotions. Does it mean they're bad? No, not at all. We all have them. They're natural reactions. What we do with them is what can cause us the problem. If we get stuck in them, it causes the problem. If we address them, then it's just the body sending off the all-hands-on-deck alert and then us going through. I took my son to take a final exam at one of the local colleges yesterday, and while he was in the middle of his exam, sounded like there was a bomb threat in one of the in one of the other buildings, and they cleared all the buildings, and it's final exam week there. And you know, I remember back to that time, and everybody clears the building because the threat response system is going off. Fire department comes, they walk through, they go, eh, false alarm. It's all good. Everybody went back to class. This is what your brain needs to do. Sometimes it's going to have false alarms because it's basing it on outdated or incomplete knowledge. That's okay. It lets you know that there's a potential threat. Key is potential. It's up to you to evaluate the current situation, your needs, abilities, skills, status, and decide whether it is a threat or whether it's, you know, not anything that's worth your energy or time. So you've got these stressors that activate the HPA axis or your threat response system. What happens? Okay. So HPA axis activation secretes cortisol. Cortisol is your stress hormone. Then blood sugar is released. Glucose is released in the blood system. It also breaks down dopamine, which is your pleasure chemical to make norepinephrine, which is your focus and motivation chemical. So you're breaking down the happy in order to fight or flee. You can see where there might start to be a problem if this goes on for too long. We don't want to break down the happy that much. It also really releases glutamate, which is another get up and go chemical. It is excitatory, as we say. So you've got norepinephrine, motivation and focus, and glutamate get up and go ebbing through your body right now. So you are ready for that fight or flee. You're like a little chihuahua that's just going, come on. Let's go. I don't know what it is, but let's go and get it. What else happens during this time now? Because it's not just turn up. There's got to be an equal turn down. So what else happens? The body turns down or reduces your sex hormones, estrogen and testosterone. Because now is not the time to procreate. Now is the time to determine if we need to fight or flee. Okay. In the short term, no biggie. In the long term, if you don't have enough estrogen and or testosterone, you may have less availability of serotonin. Why do we care? Serotonin is your calming chemical. And it's typically the one we talk about in terms of antidepressants. The jury's kind of out on that, but we do know serotonin plays a huge role in reducing anxiety. And if somebody's stressed out for too long, eventually they're going to get tired and feel hopeless and helpless and feel depressed, which is one of the reasons they speculate that SSRIs or your typical antidepressants work for some people and not others, because the people that it works for, their depression was caused by being too revved up, too anxious for too long. So anyway, so you have the excitatory neurohorm, excitatory neurochemicals revving you up, getting ready for the fight. You're turning down the sex hormones, which turns down the serotonin, which is your calming hormone, makes sense if we're going to fight or flee. We don't want to calm down right now. Okay. Makes sense. If this goes on for long, though, again, short term, very functional system. Long term, not enough serotonin means we can't make melatonin. We can't make melatonin, which is our sleep chemical, then we're not going to get adequate sleep. And if you remember going back from here, not adequate sleep is one of those primary stressors that tells your brain, you're the weak link in the herd, and you need to activate the HPA axis. So impaired sleep, really bad mojo. When you don't get adequate quality sleep, and I'm not talking about 12 light hours, you know, the kind of sleep that soldiers get when they're in the field, they don't get good sleep. They get sleep. When you don't get good sleep, your hormones that regulate your appetite, Grayland and leptin, they can get out of whack. So you don't know when you're hungry. You don't know when you're supposed to eat. You don't all those cues start getting out of whack because everything is supposed to go in a circadian rhythm, and you're disrupting that rhythm. It also impairs hormonal balancing because when you get your deep quality sleep is when your brain rests and rebalances. So all of those neurochemicals that help you feel happy and the yin and the yang that are supposed to be going on to keep everything in balance starts to go wonky because your brain doesn't have time to refocus and readjust. It's still looking out, keeping you on alert for that stress, which is why you may go to sleep, but you may wake up as soon as you hear a floorboard creak or a leaf rustle or something like that. So your HPA axis just just a kind of review. In short, it's great. You know, if it's not overused, if you get alerted that there's a threat and, you know, your estrogen and your sex hormones are kind of depressed, your serotonin is less available to calm you down. So you stay excited. So you're alert and you're paying attention. You're looking for that threat. If you look for it and you decide, you know what, there ain't nothing to be concerned about. And you can deescalate the situation. You can unhook and go, this is not a big deal. HPA axis goes back to baseline, shuts down, turns off whatever you want to say, no big deal. But for a lot of people with emotional dysregulation, with anxiety, depression, addiction issues, we never get back down to that no big deal situation. We're constantly feeling some sort of anxiety, stress or threat, because we've got so many going on. And we'll go back to this other slide. Maybe you get startled by something and, you know, unsafe environment. And you look at that and you go, you know, totally safe. But you've also got concurrent lack of sleep. You've got pain going on. You're not eating well and you're dealing with all kinds of emotional issues. Well, okay, you dealt with that one stressor, but you've got 17 others that are keeping that threat response system activated. In order for it to rest, it has to be relatively stress-free. Now, is any of us ever 100% totally stress-free? No. You know, I don't think that is really a realistic goal. But we do want to be able to get to a place where we're content and calm, whatever that feels like for you, where we're happy. Oh my gosh. So going back or forward, we want to be able to have adequate levels of serotonin. We want the estrogen and testosterone levels to balance out. We want to feel good, energetic, able to concentrate all those things that you probably put in your definition of happy. How do we do that? Well, the first thing is to figure out what your stressors are. And I've given some examples here. You may have dozens more, but let's get it out all on paper. Are you sleeping well? Are you getting adequate quality sleep? If not, take a look at your sleep hygiene. You need to be getting a fair amount and it differs based on your age and your individual temperament. For me, I need three and a half hours of what my garment says is deep sleep every night in order to not feel fatigued or start feeling really flat after lunchtime. Each person will be a little bit different, but it's important to realize that. It's important to recognize that naps will probably interfere with your circadian rhythms, especially naps that are longer than 40 minutes long. So be aware of some of these things. If your sleep habits have changed recently, that may be some place to intervene because that's one biggie that can cause a lot of your other symptoms of depression and anxiety is deprivation of quality sleep. Nutrition, are you eating relatively healthfully? Are you keeping your blood sugar stable? Do you have any diabetes issues? Do you have any thyroid issues? Do you have any pain going on right now? What can you do about it? Talk to your doctor. Talk to your physical therapist. Go online. Do some exploration for yourself. Have you started taking or are you taking any medications that would keep you revved up, such as stimulants? If you're taking in caffeine or any sort of stimulant medication, decongestants, it will keep that HPA axis more activated. Now, the interesting thing, though, is with opiates. Opiates tend to, when they're coming out of your system, there's a rebound anxiety effect. So it's important to recognize that if you are using opiates or abusing opiates, when you're detoxing or when you're coming off of the opiate medication, there could be a rebound stress response. It'll go away as your body adjusts, but it is important to be aware of that. Low self-esteem and fear of abandonment, if that's kind of how you feel constantly, day in, day out, you're looking for other people to tell you you're okay, you're afraid that nobody will ever love you. That's a pretty big stressor. That's kind of rejection, isolation, and failure are all rolled up into one. So it's probably going to cause you to have high levels of underlying anxiety. Might be a good one to start looking at and working on, figuring out where that came from and why you're all that in a bag of chips. Relationships, people themselves can be stressors. They can be the greatest buffer against stress, but they can also be stressors. So being aware of which relationships are healthy and which relationships are not is important. Time management, figuring out how to effectively and healthfully set and maintain, not just set, but maintain boundaries so you don't feel like you're burning the candle at both ends. You're always committed and running from here to there and hither and yon constantly. If your job is your stressor and you know there are days where your job can be your stressor, but if your job is your stressor 24, 7, 365, you may need to look at how to address that and financial stressors are another big one for people. So like I said, this is not a comprehensive list by any means, but first you need to get all of your stressors, anything that might be activating that stress response system and making you feel anxious, stressed, hopeless, helpless, angry, get all that stuff out on paper. And then you can start looking at which ones are just not worth worrying about. Which ones have pretty easy interventions, like for example, nutrition might be an easier one to start to address, talk to your doctor, talk to nutritionist, or just go back to your old eating habits if you've started eating like crap lately, and see if that makes a difference. For pain, there are a lot of ways to address pain, non-narcotic ways, and some non-medicinal ways that you can address that through stretching, tens units, hot tubs, hot and cold presses, there are a variety of things. It's amazing how much more energy you have, and how much less irritable and stressed you feel if you're not in excruciating pain. So figure out what has worked to help address these stressors in the past and make a plan. How can you start doing those more? This isn't going to solve everything, but it's kind of like a rolling brownout where you've only got this much energy coming from the power plant, and it's got to power every single emotion, every single body function, every single everything. So you're going to have to borrow from certain places to keep other things going, and what do we want to keep going? We want to help keep you going. So where can we decide, you know what, we can shut down this power station. This is not worth my energy right now, don't have the time for it. Where can you set boundaries in order to protect yourself, preserve the energy to help you be happy? The long-term consequences, if you don't do this and your HPA axis starts to dysfunctionalize, it's a problem. Your body says at a certain point, I can't run this hot for this long. I'm going to shut down, kind of like a good car does, if it starts running up into that red zone. At a certain point, hopefully it shuts off before the engine block cracks. We don't want your engine block to crack, but we also don't want your car to shut off. We don't want your engine to shut down, which is what happens when you're too stressed for too long. Your body says, you know what, I'm going to take that cortisol back and I'm going to hold it down or I'm going to hold it back in all those excitatory chemicals. I'm going to hold that back too, except for really extreme emergencies, because right now we're running too hot and there is no sense continuing to fight this fight that I ain't never going to win, which leads people to start feeling depressed, exhausted. You have abnormal immune system activation. A lot of this is because cortisol suppresses the inflammatory response, which eventually affects the immune system. You may have increased inflammation and allergic reactions. The IBS symptoms, such as constipation and diarrhea, so you have a lot of stuff going on that pertains to your immune system and inflammation as cortisol starts to kind of disappear, because cortisol is an anti-inflammatory. When your body's holding it back, then things start to flare up. Reduce tolerance to physical and mental stresses, including pain. Something that three months ago may have been irritating, but whatever. Today may seem like I just can't deal with one more thing. I'm done. It's that proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. You're not able to tolerate life on life terms anymore. You'll have altered levels of sex hormones. Now, I know men don't go through menopause, but to give you an example, think about menopause. When hormones are kind of all over the place, you have altered levels, so your reactions, your emotions are going to be different, your body sensations are going to be different. There's going to be a lot of stuff that's impacted when your hormones go wonky. Depression, because of lack of access or lack of availability of serotonin and alterations in estrogen and testosterone and potentially progesterone can lead to feelings of depression. Weight gain, especially in the abdomen. And as we've said, impaired sleep. So none of these sound like a place that I really want to be, but I can read through this and go, yeah, actually, that sounds like a place that I have been before. So it's important to be able to recognize if you see yourself in this description. Your body's already probably started to hold on to that cortisol because it's going, you've been running too hot for too long, baby doll. You need to figure out what to do because right now we are in emergency conservation mode. A variety of stressors activate your threat response system. Several consequences like reduced sex hormones and impaired sleep actually activate the threat response system. So it's a cyclical thing or it feeds back in on itself and is a downward spiral. The more stressed you are, the worse you sleep, the worse you sleep, the more stressed you are and you see where we go from here. Extended activation leads to exhaustion, depression, burnout, lots of bad mojo. While many stressors may take time to address like low self-esteem, anxiety issues, trauma issues, etc., it's vital to eliminate and minimize any other stressors. And the best way to do this is to look at what's worked for you to address those in the past. Figure out where your strengths are, figure out what works for you, not what works for Sam or your neighbor down the street, what works for you. And continue to think of it kind of as a rolling brown out. Will you have to not be the soccer mom toting everybody around forever? No, but you may need to take a month off from toting in order to have enough energy to deal with your stuff. So just think of energy conservation as a temporary state because eventually you'll be able to figure out what needs your energy and what you have the energy and ability to do. Anything that reduces stress will likely help you improve your sleep and the functioning of your HPA axis. So you don't have to change the world. You don't have to change everything all at once. Pick, you know, two or three things that require minor changes that might help you start feeling a little bit better. Start there and then start adding to it after those changes take effect and you'll feel a cumulative positive improvement. If you like this podcast, you can subscribe on iTunes, Google Play Music, Stitcher, or any other podcast app. You can join our Facebook group at docsnipes.com slash Facebook. Subscribe to our YouTube channel on youtube.com slash all CEU's education or join our community and access additional resources at docsnipes.com. 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