What is stress?
Stress is basically a biological reaction. We are pre-programmed to survive, so actually, it's a great survival mechanism. Let me give you an example. If you were going to put your foot down on a zebra crossing and suddenly a car came, in that instant, your brain will suddenly perceive a threat and what it will do is, it will push out a whole load of stress hormones. The idea being that you're on red alert, and therefore you can either run or you can fight, it's called "fight or flight", in a way which is most helpful to you. So get your foot on the zebra crossing, you want to get out of the situation as quickly as possible. So your body produces stress hormones. These are things like adrenaline, which is associated with the part of you that wants to run. Or noradrenalin which tends to make you more stroppy; you want to stay and you want to fight in those situations. You also produce other hormones, like cortizol. Now cortizol is a fabulous hormone, because it's something that is associated with a survival mechanism. But the problem is, too much of it, and it starts to turn in on itself. So for example, cortizol can affect your blood sugar levels. It can also affect, for example, your eating patterns. So you have these stress hormones, now the body also then says, having been shot up with these, "Hey, I want to close down all the non-essential items. I don't need, for example, blood in the extremities of my body." So you'll often find this is why people feel that their hands are cold, because it drains the blood away from the extremities and keeps them to the vital organs that you need. So you have that kind of a reaction. Your whole body is pumping itself, trying to cope. Another thing that happens to you, you will produce a lot of what we call fatty acids. Fundamentally, it's cholesterol. And one of the dangers about being stressed for too long is that if your body, which naturally produces cholesterol and the reason we do that in the stress response, is we need the energy. If it's naturally doing that and you're in a stressed state for a long period of time, you will actually find that 75 per cent of your cholesterol comes from stress, and only 25 per cent comes from what you eat.
