How does stress affect my body?

Stress can take a toll on your entire body, says integrative medicine specialist Dr. Tasneem Bhatia. To learn about the various ways that stress can affect your body, watch this video.

Transcript

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But it is a really big deal, and we've kind of dumped it into this large term, but stress has some biological

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and physiological properties that really change the body, that really alter how healthy we all are and can affect our long-term health.

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So stress is the number one cause of something we in integrative medicine call inflammation.

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What happens with stress is that the body goes into a fighting mode constantly. It always feels like it's fighting a war, waging a battle, rather than having time to relax.

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So a lot of different things happen. Your cortisol levels go way up, which affects all your other hormone levels. You deplete the body of essential nutrients, especially

00:45

the B vitamins, which are responsible for almost every function of the body. And you really will have altered sleep cycles, altered energy

00:52

levels because of this play between cortisol levels going up, nutrient depletion, and overall inflammation in the body.

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So stress, the reason stress gets overplayed, I feel like people talk about, oh, I'm stressed, I'm stressed, it's not healthy for me, but it is a really big deal.

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And we've kind of dumped it into this large term, but stress has some biological and physiological properties

01:13

that really change the body, that really alter how healthy we all are and can affect our long-term health. I mean, there's a lot of thought that not only anxiety

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but also a lot of the chronic diseases we're dealing with in this country, obesity, heart disease, all of them are linked back to inflammation caused by excessive stress.