So, you’re stressed. You’re not alone. People have been stressed since the beginning of time. In fact, we’re naturally wired for stress.
Understanding stress and basic brain chemistry is a sure way to own your brain health. A healthy brain is a calm, focused brain and a calm, focused you. Let’s start with how stress works and why it matters.
We are naturally wired for two stress states: Fight or Flight, and Rest and Digest.
FIGHT OR FLIGHT
When your brain perceives stress, it sends a signal to your adrenal glands to release the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline, which prepares your muscles to fight or flee.
This is a stress spike.
REST AND DIGEST
When the perceived stress subsides, your brain releases GABA. This counters brain adrenaline, relaxes your muscles, decreases your anxiety, and returns you to normal.
Stress Spikes are super intense—and normal. Evolutionarily, they’re what amped us up to fight or flee in the face of life-threatening events.
Stress Addiction is not normal.
Just like athletes develop a positive addiction to endorphins, we can also develop a harmful addiction to cortisol and adrenaline.
Adrenaline and cortisol are healthy in small doses, but in excess are neurotoxins
and lead to stress addiction and Chronic Stress Brain.
A Chronic Stress Brain is foggy, forgetful, and frazzled. It's a cluster and you may find it hard to deal with just about anything.
Enter a Healthy Brain
This is your healthy, juicy brain in a calm, focused brain state.
To get a brain as beautiful as this one, you need to take care of it every day. When you do, you transform your relationship to yourself and your life. Flashes of irritation in traffic, gone. Obsessively checking your phone, not important. Picking fights with people you love, no way.
With a healthy, unclustered brain you move through the world a calm, cool, connected superhuman, the kind of person others love to be around, the high performer at work, a passionate person who has control of their destiny. Don’t we all want that?