Moment 156: Your Stress Is Making you Fat & Sick... Here's How To Fix It!

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0:33So stress causes belly fat? As a survival mechanism, it will help you to store fat around your abdomen. So, again, in the cave, if you were potentially going to not find food for a month, then if you had extra fat around your abdomen, you could digest that and survive till you could find food. So, with my clients and financial services, it got to a point where as soon as I walked into the room, they just lift their t -shirt up and say, now you know how I've been in the last month. And then I had a really, really funny incident when I was speaking at a bank and the CEO's PA was there in the audience.

1:12And I was explaining that leadership stress leaks down, that that stress can lead to abdominal fat that you can't shift. Because she shouted out, so he's the reason that I'm fat. But Steve, no one laughed. Really? Yeah. And that's when I knew that, okay, he obviously is like really stressing everyone out. Oh gosh, no one laughed. No. Through fear or something or just because they was put it was true. It wasn't funny. It was true. Jesus. Again, what I would see with people is that they would say, oh, we're put on a bit of weight around the middle, you know, had to loosen the belt a bit. So I've started eating less.

1:54I've started like exercising more and I still can't shift it. And again, that's when I would explain this is the impact of cortisol. As long as you're still leaking out extra cortisol, nothing's going to change. So, like I said, even exercising more or eating better, less or differently, whatever it is, wouldn't shift that fat. You had to get to the root cause. You had to reduce the cortisol. It also made me think about when you consider promoting someone in your organization. You have to be very careful that if you put a particularly stressed, cortisol leaking individual high in the organization, there's going to be a significant impact for everyone below them.

2:35Yeah. Is that accurate? Is that an accurate expression? Yeah, yeah, no, that's a really good way of putting it. I mean, I always think of that phrase, what got you here won't get you there, which is more about the fact that people get promoted because they're good at what they do, but they don't really get taught to all the best management and leadership skills. But that's a really pertinent point. If there are a person who is stressed, particularly who suppresses stress, which some of these successful people do, then it would have an impact down the organization. It begs the question then. So, if someone's listening to this and they go, do you know what, I'm a leaky cortisol person, I'm highly stressed, and it's probably getting to people around me, what can I do about that?

3:14So, first of all, if someone's saying that half the battle is one, the problem is when people are not aware of that. But let's say you are. So, let's say that I give you that list of signs and symptoms that you've got high levels of cortisol, which include things like sleep disruption because cortisol is part of the 24 -hour clock. Melatonin helps us to wake up. Cortisol helps. Melatonin helps us to fall asleep. Cortisol helps us to wake up. Maybe you've noticed the belly fat. Because of the really strong connection between the brain and the gut, any sort of reflux or indigestion symptoms are often signs that you've got high levels of cortisol too, and of course, things like irritability and mood changes.

3:55What I mostly would hear people say is that I can just about keep it together when I'm at work, but when I get home, if my kids are annoying or my partner's asking for too much, I just snap. So, that means you're like one step away from snapping at work if somebody pushes you too far. So, that's not good. Because cortisol is pro -inflammatory, it's very drying of the system as well. So, you might notice that your skin's really dry or you've got skin problems. Your skin isn't just the physical border of your body. It's the psychological boundary of your body too, so often stress shows up in the skin.

4:30Then there are two main things that you can do. One is physical exercise because you can literally sweat cortisol out of your body. You can sweat excess cortisol out of your body by doing a roboxercise. The other one is journaling, so writing out what's on your mind rather than just said it, be in there and keep going round and round. Or if you've got a therapist or a trusted friend speaking it out loud, so it's all about getting cortisol and or the negative thoughts that are associated with your stress out of your brain body system. I felt a real revelation in my life over the last, maybe six months about sleep.

5:14Again, it's why I said, I think before we start recording that, I don't have any meetings scheduled before 11am and I sleep with my eye mask on and I just wake up when I wake up. Yeah, me too. Oh, really? Yeah. Never really met anybody that has that. It is a privilege, I have to acknowledge that. Not everyone can do because of work circumstances, whatever else. The importance of sleep, you're a neuroscientist. There's a lot of people who have dysfunctional sleep. We live in a world where I feel like it's increasingly difficult to have a great sleep. How important is that for the brain and also you know, we were talking about stress there, but for containing our stress levels?

5:54It's so important I can't stop going on about it and I do understand that for some people it's not a choice that they just don't sleep well or they get interrupted because they've got young kids or they do shift work. So I'm not particularly talking about the people where there's a reason that you can't sleep in this way. I'm mostly directing this out if you have a choice. This is the way that you need to sleep and this is why. If you don't have a choice, there are some things that you can do to mitigate it as well. Obviously I have done shift work as a junior doctor in the NHS and I travel a lot.

6:30So I'm jet lagged off the time. But I try to do everything I can to make that as good as possible. The reason is we've always known that when you sleep, you lay down your memories and you're learning, you process your emotions, the cells in the body regenerate themselves. We've known that for a long time. That's never really been enough for these very driven CE level people to want to give up eight hours a night to sleep. If they feel they can get by on four or five then they'll rather do that because they've got so much to do. The ideal is eight hours and fifteen minutes in population norm studies.

7:08So that doesn't mean it's for everyone but for most people that's the ideal. Actually sleeping more than that can be depressogenic so it can start to lower your mood. You don't want to really be sleeping for nine plus hours. But you ideally need to be in bed for nine hours to get that amount of sleep. So there was some award -winning research around 2012 to 2014 when we were beginning to understand how important the cleaning of the brain is overnight. So this entirely new system that we didn't know existed, which is called the glimphatic system. It's like the lymphatic system in your body, but it's to do with glial cells.

7:43So it was named the glimphatic system. That system is a very active kind of waterway channel cleansing system of the brain. We used to think that the fluid around the brain and there's ventricles which are like lakes and then there's just like trickling areas that that sort of passively dripped through the brain overnight. We did not expect to see like jets of fluid flushing out toxins from the brain. So the exact things that we see in the pathology of dimenting diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, like towel proteins and amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. How do you say that in English?

8:29Those things are being flushed out of the brain very actively overnight. And that process takes seven to eight hours to complete the cleaning. That's why you need to be in bed for eight to nine hours. So it takes seven or eight hours to a restorative sleep or just being in bed? Just sleep. Not in bed if you're in bed awake. You're not asleep. You have to be asleep. But you'll go through the different sleep cycles every 90 minutes. This isn't in time with that. This is just taking seven or eight hours to flush this stuff out of your brain. So one of the things I do say to people who don't sleep well is if you find yourself awake at night and you're not lying on your side, turn yourself onto your side because that's the best position for this cleansing process.

9:11I actually have a special pillow that makes me sleep on my side because I wasn't naturally a side sleeper. So it doesn't matter if it's the left or the right, but that is a better position in terms of the veins in your neck than sleeping on your back or your front. So that's one thing you can do. Oh, you woke up. You know, your sleep was disturbed at least turn yourself onto your side.

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