3 Lifestyle Stressors That Shape Our Health
Nov 07, 2021
One of the concepts that most people don't understand is that it is the accumulation of different stressors that will often lead to the breakdown.
We think of the 'last straw' as the thing to blame (e.g. shovelling snow and throwing out our back). In reality, it's usually all the small lifestyle stressors that have built up over time and have finally come to the surface.
The same concept rings true for things like pre-diabetes before diabetes... pre-cancer before cancer...
We need to be pro-active with our health instead of waiting for it to become a problem. Let's take a look at what this looks like.
Blueprint for Health
Diagrams and frameworks have always helped me explain these concepts to my patients. We’ve been using this Blueprint for Health framework for the last 18 years to help explain why peoples’ bodies break down and how our lifestyle stressors can hold us back from reaching our full health potential.
While every person is unique, we can apply this blueprint to most of the health issues that we would see in our practice. There are always exceptions to this like rare genetic diseases.
However, 80% of chronic disease is lifestyle-related so if we were to focus on the 4 top things that shorten our lives, they are cancer, heart disease, diabetes and neurodegenerative diseases. ALL of these have very heavy lifestyle influences meaning that we have MORE control of our health than we are led to believe.
What are the 3 lifestyle stressors?
When it comes to lifestyle stressors I’ve classified these into three general categories:
- Physical
- Chemical
- Mental/Emotional
PHYSICAL STRESSORS
Physical stressors are the easiest ones to explain because this is what we see all day long in our practice.
Old injuries, car accidents, sports injuries, chronic postural distortions, sitting all day.
These are all examples of physical stressors that we deal with day-in and day-out. I think most people can relate to these and this is where my “hands-on” job has been very effective at helping people.
CHEMICAL STRESSORS
I think of chemical stressors in terms of deficiencies or toxicity.
For example, if you are deficient in vitamin D or a mineral like magnesium, this creates a stressor on your body as these things are required in many biochemical reactions.
Toxicities are easy to think of because there are so environmental factors that we are exposed to everyday. From what is sprayed on our food, to the water we drink and all of the things that we put on our skin... they all absorb into our bodies and accumulate.
MENTAL/EMOTIONAL STRESSORS
It’s easy to imagine how these will build up as we all have to deal with varying degrees of work stress, financial stress, relationship stress, etc. Not to mention dealing with a pandemic for almost 2 years now.
Every day, patients share with me these mental and emotional stressors in their lives and how they make their physical symptoms worse. I know that gaining control in this category is usually the biggest factor in their recovery but this category is often neglected.
What happens when we exceed our tolerance level?
Imagine all of the potential combinations of these stressors accumulating in your body but you only have a certain amount of tolerance.
Once you exceed the tolerance level, your body begins to break down in some way. It could break down physically such as doing the same job day in and day out. It could break down chemically where a chronic toxicity begins to develop. It could accumulate emotionally where you feel overwhelmed and can’t ever get ahead of your stress levels.
Depending on the person and their genetic blueprint, it would determine what breaks down first. For example if you have a history of heart disease (like I do on my dad’s side) and if you smoked, didn’t exercise, and were overweight then a heart attack would not be a major surprise. The same is true with the other “big 4.” While our bodies are amazing, they can only handle so much!
Genetics vs lifestyle
It’s these types of stressors and environmental factors that will turn on your genes. While it’s important to pay attention to family history, it’s even MORE important to pay attention to your lifestyle stressors and work on minimizing them.
So, where do we start when it comes to figuring this all out? Well this is exactly what I’ve spent the last number of years working on and now we have it organized in our brand new Longevity Academy! This is where we use the Blueprint for Health framework to start to solve the question of “what do I do now?”
If you’re ready to embark on this health journey then join us today over here. For less than $1/day, you can understand what you need to do and get moving in these areas so you can create better health.
Isn’t your health at least worth that?