HH343: Stress-How It Impacts Your Cognitive Finctions
Today, I want to talk about how stress impairs your memory and your concentration, your cognitive function.
About the Host:
Melissa is an Integrative Health Practitioner and Master Practitioner in NLP and Timeline Therapy and a Board Designated Hypnotherapy Teacher Trainer, helping people get to the root cause of their health issues and then get lasting results. Melissa neither diagnoses nor cures but helps bring your body back into balance by helping discover your “toxic load” and then removing the toxins. Melissa offers functional medicine lab testing that helps you “see inside” to know exactly what is going on, and then provides a personalized wellness protocol using natural herbs and supplements. Melissa’s business is 100% virtual – the lab tests are mailed directly to your home and she specializes in holding your hand and guiding the way to healing so that you don’t have to figure it all out on your own.
Melissa is the winner of the 2021 & 2022 Quality Care Award by Business From The Heart and is also the recipient of the Alignable “Local Business Person of the Year “Award 2022 for Whistler.
Melissa has been featured at a number of Health & Wellness Summits, such as the Health, Wealth & Wisdom Summit, The Power To Profit Summit, The Feel Fan-freaking-tas-tic Summit, the Aim Higher Summit and many more! She has also guested on over 60 different podcasts teaching people about the importance of prioritizing our health and how to get started.
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/yourguidedhealthjourney
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Transcript
Welcome back to another episode of health hacks as I continue talking about stress and how it impacts various aspects of your life, health and ability to function at optimal levels. And today, I want to talk about how it impairs your memory and your concentration, your cognitive function. Overall, chronic stress can affect your brain function, and you intuitively already know this, because when you're stressed out, you're feeling like there's that ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, going on in your brain, and you can't actually land on one thing. And as a result, you struggle to remember things. You struggle to focus. You struggle in your decision making abilities, and in that moment, recognize that, ah, it's stress that's causing this. What can I do in order to calm my nervous system? And so, as with all of these episodes I've been doing, I love to give you some tips of different things that you can implement in your life to help calm your nervous system. And some of them you're going to hear me saying, you're going to be like, yep, not doing that. It's not for me, and that's okay. Keep tuning in, because every session, I am giving you another tip, and in at least one of them out of the 12 that I'm running this month, you will find something that you enjoy, that helps you calm your nervous system each and every day, so that you don't get into this place of chronic stress where you can't focus, can't make decisions, and can't sleep, etc, etc. So my tip for today is to find a hobby that you love. What is it that brings you joy that you can lose time in when you do it? Is it something such as reading, taking some time to read every day, lose yourself in the story in a book. Is it gardening, losing yourself in nature outside and feeling the soil in your on your hands and fingers, which is actually great, because then you're getting some of the microbes in the soil into your body that support your gut health as well. Is it painting? Is it some other kind of craft that you enjoy doing that allows you to just relax into that activity and push everything else that's going on in your world outside of it, while you take that time to lose yourself in pure joy. And sometimes we feel like I don't have a right to do that. I'm too busy. I have all of these things that I need to get done. I don't have time. And the reality is is that in that stressed out state where you can't focus, where you can't make decisions, where you're struggling to remember things, you are not productive anyway, so everything is taking longer, and that's frustrating, and that adds to your stress. If you instead take half an hour out of your day to calm your mind, you can come back to whatever else it is that you're trying to get done from a place of being able to focus, being able to remember things, being able to make decisions, and therefore you are much more productive. I know it sounds counterintuitive, however, it truly works. So what have you got to lose? Give it a try and see if that helps you get out of chronic stress and into a place of being more productive. And as you do that, and you get yourself out of chronic stress, you're also supporting all of your other factors in your health that I've been talking about thus far in terms of stress will not be negatively impacting them anymore, because you're getting yourself out of that Chronic stress state. If stress is something that you struggle with and you feel like you need some more support with in the interim, as you make some of these lifestyle changes, please reach out to me, Melissa, at your guided health journey.com. Because there are some natural supplements that can help your body calm. There's also some lab testing that we can do to see what your cortisol levels are, what time of day they're out of balance, so that we can really tune in and create a customized plan for you to help you get out of your chronic stress state and into a healthy state of moving between your parasympathetic and your sympathetic nervous systems as you should, As opposed to being stuck in your chronic stress, sympathetic nervous system all day long.
