Stressed Out? Take This

Today we are going to talk about the most powerful adaptogen in the world.

An adaptogen is something that helps you cope with stress. It helps you stabilize homeostasis for when your body is adjusting to its environment. For example, If you stood up really fast and you get dizzy, that’s not adjusting to your environment properly. Your body should be able to quickly shift your blood pressure, and shift the blood up to your brain, so you don’t pass out.

Therefore, if there is a problem with your ability to adapt to stress, then an adaptogen can help you. Most adaptogens focus on increasing your resistance to stress, and the most powerful adaptogen that I know of is Ashwagandha.

Ashwagandha does a lot, but in this newsletter we are going to focus primarily on how it can help someone with stress. Ashwagandha’s been around for 3000 years. Many different cultures have used Ashwagandha for all sorts of things, but primarily most people used it to cope with stress.

The main chemical compound in Ashwagandha that is responsible for this stress adaptation, is withanolides. Withanolides are a category of 300 different similar compounds.

What happens when you take Ashwagandha, is you start feeling calm, and you feel like you can cope better.

Why is this?

It helps to modulate or control the HPA access, which is the communication between the Hypothalamus, Pituitary and your Adrenals, hence HPA (Hypothalamus, Pituitary, Adrenals).

Let’s say that you experience stress, and stress is received by the body. The Hypothalamus is like the owner of the football team that sends a message to the coach, which is like the Pituitary. The Pituitary (coach), then sends a message to the quarterback, which is like the Adrenals. The Adrenals (quarterback) then gives the play out to get everyone on the same page.

In other words, these hormonal communications are all about getting the body ready for adapting to a stress response. Then once the hormone does its job, adapting the body to its stress, then a signal is sent back from the adrenals, to the pituitary, to the hypothalamus turning off this mechanism.

The problem is that with chronic stress, that message never comes back to turn things off. So we have this chronic elevation of cortisol.

Now what’s really good about our Ashwagandha, is it can help to turn off or reduce the cortisol and another hormone called DHEA.

Ashwagandha is in over 40 different studies on just stress alone. There are also a bunch of other studies, on a lot of different aspects of what it can do. However, we are just focusing on stress today, and at the clinical study <a href=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6750292/” target=”_blank”>here</a>, it can help reduce cortisol and DHEA.

Cortisol is not a bad thing, it’s there to just adapt your body to stress. It’s doing its job, and the problem is that we are under sustained stress. It’s not very healthy to have your body in this state. For example, when I have chronic stress, I get pimples on my face, I can’t sleep at night (possibly for many nights), my immune system is down, and so much more.

This is due to continual stress, resulting in our bodies pumping out higher levels of cortisol than normal.

Ashwagandha has the potential to counteract the cortisol and DHEA, which has the potential to reduce all of these symptoms that we have from stress.

In addition to not being able to sleep, getting pimples, and a lowered immune system, let’s just take a look at what else higher levels of cortisol does. This is just some of the things that it can do.

Firstly, cortisol responds to stress. It doesn’t cause stress, it’s just adapting your body to a stressed state. The first thing cortisol is going to do is increase your blood sugars. This is called the fight or flight mode. It’s a stress mode.  If there is a lion chasing you, you can either fight them or run away. Therefore, it’s quick energy, and it increases or mobilizes your blood sugars in order go give you this energy.

The problem with chronic stress is that this sugar will trigger insulin and it will convert it into belly fat, along with a lot of other problems, such as high triglycerides, and high cholesterol. In extreme cases it may even burn out the pancreas and possibly cause diabetes, if there is enough of this cortisol being pumped out.

The other thing cortisol will do, is it will turn off certain things in our body that are not necessarily related to this present time threat (Lion chasing you). As I stated earlier, it temporarily turns off your immune system and It just shuts it down. That is why Prednisone is given to Auto Immune patients, to turn off their immune system.

The cortisol from stress may also increase sodium and water retention. This is why when people are stressed, they sometimes look like they are retaining a crazy amount of fluid, especially in their ankles. At the same time the cortisol increases potassium excretion, your body is getting rid of more potassium and retaining more sodium. This is why when you are under stress for a period of time you become even more potassium depleted and you hold a lot more sodium. Potassium is just so important during a stressed state, which you can get if you are eating a lot of vegetables. Additionally, when people are stressed, they tend to eat things like salty potato chips, and that will just increase your blood sugar more and create more salt retention.

When cortisol goes up, you also get a spike in gastric acid. So you may find that your stomach has acid reflux or you may just have heartburn. If stress goes on long enough, that can irritate and create inflammation in your stomach and that’s called gastritis. This is one of the reasons why stress can actually create an ulcer and actually damage your stomach. It’s not just in your stomach, it can also damage your brain. So chronic stress can also cause some major damage to your hippocampus. So then you have the potential to start losing memory, the ability to learn, and your cognitive function.

So, Ashwagandha has the potential to lower cortisol as well as DHEA.

What is DHEA?

It’s kind of like a precursor for cortisol and other hormones. DHEA is elevated during stress, and Ashwagandha can actually help lower it, which is a good indication that your body is less stressed. If you have a lesser amount of DHEA, which is still within the normal range, then you have a lesser amount of cortisol.

So back to that same study <a href=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6750292/” target=”_blank”>here</a>, which is a double blinded placebo test. They found lower AM cortisol, along with lower DHEA in the morning. There was a slight increase in testosterone, because stress does shut down testosterone. So the fact that it raised was a good thing.

Also in this same study, Ashwagandha increased endurance. Therefore, you can go longer when you exercise. It also increased strength, because one of the things that stress does, is it makes you weak and Ashwagandha is really good for someone that feels weak after stress. For example,  let’s say that you’ve been under a lot of stress for many days, and you are not sleeping that well. Ashwagandha can help raise your strength so at least you don’t feel weak. Another example would be, let’s say you had some immune infection and you are trying to recover from that because you feel really weak. Ashwagandha is a really good thing to increase the strength.

Lastly, in this same clinical study, Aswhghanda showed significant improvements in emotions. Therefore, Ashwagandha has the potential to bring you up, so you are not stuck in this stressed state.

The beauty of this adaptogen Ashwagandha, is that it focuses on increasing your resistance to stress, hopefully giving you a higher quality of life.

As usual, our Ashwagandha Extract is extremely potent, with zero fillers. This is a very high quality Ashwagandha, and I truly believe it will work better than anything else out there.