Stress... it's personal yet universally understood.
What is stress? What does that mean for your body?
Why at the thought of something stressful my body has an immediate reaction?
Why are there some things that stress me out and not the person next to me?
Stress will always be around 🙋♀️ so it’s important to learn ways you can support your body because it will make a world (your internal world) of difference.
First, it’s good to understand what actually happens in the body when we’re stressed.
Here’s what’s involved to create the stress response:
1️⃣ When the body senses an immediate threat (whatever you perceive as a threat), the nervous system goes into fight-or-flight-or-freeze response.
2️⃣ This triggers the brain to release the hormones adrenaline and cortisol which speed up heart rate, breathing, reaction time and muscle contractions so the body has the resources needed to handle, outrun or escape the stressor.
3️⃣ As the stressor ends or dissipates, the body then slowly returns to normal, breathing and heartbeat slow and muscles slowly relax.
There are many things we can focuses on here, but for today i want to touch upon the importance of magnesium in the stress response. Super (detailed) long-story short, when you’re stressed (many) reactions occurs but one of them being that calcium enters the cell and magnesium is needed to push the calcium back out of the cell when it comes time.
You can think of calcium and magnesium as this duo. One get’s the party started and the other just wants to chilaxxxx . They both work well together. When calcium enters your heart muscle cells, it stimulates the muscle fibers to contract. Magnesium counters this effect, helping these cells relax.
So one way to help your body with the stress response is to make sure you have adequate amounts of magnesium to chilax afterwards 😎
I put together a Magnesium Evaluation (link in bio) for you to downlaod and see if you’re getting enough!
So this is your calling card to check out foods that are high in magnesium and see if you’re getting enough of these in your diet.
Which is your least favourite food on those lists?
REFERENCES:
doi: 10.1155/2010/546163