Stress and your immune system

Let’s talk about your immune system and understanding the relationship between stress and your immune system. Now a lot of people are going to feel more stressed at the moment including myself, at times I’ve definitely felt more stressed and anxious, and even a feeling of overwhelm. Because we don’t know what’s going to happen, right? We don’t know when things are going to change and I don’t think things are potentially they’re not even going to change back to how they were, hopefully things will be better. And that’s what change is actually supposed to do right? We’re supposed to hopefully change into a better situation or a better self, if we’re doing change work on ourselves.

I’m hoping that we can use this time to actually boost our immune system rather than letting stress overwhelm us and overtake our bodies and basically what it does is it can weaken the immune system. Now there are…stress is not all bad. I want to make sure that that’s clear as well because the body actually can get stronger as a result of stress but not when the stress is always there and not when the stress is much higher than say ah what I call your stress threshold. Okay or your sweet spot of stress.

Like everyone has a different level of stress that their body will actually thrive in but I think that a lot of people are going to be really struggling at the moment with this and the reason this is important is obviously you want your immune system to be strong right. In case you do get even just a cold or something like this at the moment or you get an injury or something like that if you get sick in some way not coronavirus related but you want to be able to recover as quickly as possible so that you’re in the best health. And you know we obviously, I obviously don’t want anyone to get sick but the reality is people are going to continue to get coronavirus.

And we want to make sure that if we do on the off chance that we are as healthy as possible so that our body can fight the virus and fight it the best it possibly can. So just understanding as well though just to tell people not to be stressed and just to stay calm and not be anxious I think is actually so unhelpful so I won’t be saying that to you. Because I don’t really feel like it helps what I feel like helps though is to understand how to cope with our stress better. And also the impact that it has on our immune system.

So one of the things if we just talk about one area of stress and the immune system is if you’re stressed and you’re not sleeping well then your immune system can become compromised. Because during sleep is when we have a lot of repairing of the body and healing of the body the conscious mind switches off and the unconscious mind starts to go to work and starts to process things in the body so healing and repairing the body systems.

Now if you’re not sleeping well because you’re stressed then that can obviously have that negative impact on your immune system. So making sure that you do everything possible to try and sleep the best you can. And there are many many different things and a lot of the time it can be managing your stress levels during the day that will actually help you to sleep at nighttime as well. So it’s not just that whatever you do in the hour before sleep but also what you’re doing during the day.

So here’s one thing that you can do is just doing some quiet not quite, quiet breathing just before bed so lying down in bed ten minutes and you’re just focusing on breathing and just feeling the breath going in and out of your body and trying to really just quieten the breathing down focusing on slowing the breathing as well so just doing this for 10 minutes set a timer on your phone and just really focusing on this and understanding that when you are stressed or anyone that does this anyone that tries to focus all of their attention on the breath.

What you’re doing there is you’re trying to basically take the focus off this mental chatter or whatever’s going on in your mind and focusing on the breathing. And that can help to really disconnect you know so you’re connecting to your body but more sort of disconnecting from that mental chatter that’s going on. And this can be really valuable understanding that it’s you might not be able to do it really well straight away but practice makes better it doesn’t make perfect but it definitely makes better.

So just consistently practicing this and understanding that your mind wandering during this ten minutes of breathing is completely normal and knowing that just by bringing the focus back that you’re doing it well. Okay doesn’t matter how many times your mind wanders just continuing to be gentle on yourself and just bring the focus back to your breath. And this is going to help you to keep that immune system strong.

Okay I will talk to you very soon hope this was helpful, if you did enjoy it please share, like, comment on the video and I will talk to you very soon bye.