The central nervous system is made up of the brain and spinal cord.
• It is the source of our thoughts, emotions and memories.
• Most of the nerves that work our muscles and glands start in the central nervous system.
☼ The reason that I talk about the central nervous system is that it can become over sensitized, and this is where problems can arise. So, my aim is to calm the central nervous system down so that it stops causing problems or dysfunction, such as pain.

There are a multitude of ways that stress can impact the body. I will highlight a couple of them:
• Stress affects your gut health - stress changes how your gut functions in so much that it increases the permeability of the lining. What does this mean, it means that larger size particles can enter your digestive system and create upset, also known as ‘leaky gut’.
• Stress affects your sleep - some people will have trouble falling asleep and other will have trouble staying asleep due to the various stress hormones, in particular cortisol.
• Stress can cause weight gain - some people will have noticed this over the last couple of years. Again, the main culprits are the stress hormones that create a desire for more fat, sugar and salt for a variety of reasons.
• Stress affects your ability to focus - this is due to the frontal lobe of your brain shutting down when in fight, flight, fawn, and freeze mode. This makes it harder to concentrate and make good decisions.
• What you may note from the above is that they could all be interlinked - often one aspect of your stress response will lead to another, such as poor sleep leading to a desire for more calorie dense foods.

Let's look at sleep - if you are stressed it can make it harder to get to sleep and if you do happen to wake up during the night, there is a real possibility that you will struggle to get back to sleep.
• Then let’s follow this further so you have had a bad night’s sleep, you wake up feeling tired, so what do you reach for in the morning - coffee to get you going.
• Then your surprised that not long after breakfast you are feeling hungry again and highly likely you are now wanting something that has high amounts of fat, sugar, and salt to pick you up again.
• Further to this you generally find yourself hungrier than usual.
• This is a consequence of needing to seek energy to get yourself through the day because you feel tired - you seek that energy from your food. • Not surprisingly you have the potential to gain weight if this routine continues.
☼ I have spoken to many people who have tried a lot of solutions to their problems, with not a great return on their efforts. I then suggest that stress could be a primary driver behind it.

It is interesting discussing stress with clients and other practitioners. Some people are so quick to discount the stress response as part of their problem.
• We as a society have ‘normalised’ stress so much that people often don't consider it to be a potential cause to their problems.
• Long term stress exposure is not normal it can wreak havoc on the body and can have many negative flow on affects, such as emotion and feelings of well-being.
• It is important to recognise that the stress response is important. But our bodies were never designed to experience stress as an ongoing response.
• It is meant to come and then you deal with the stress and then the stress response calms down. However these days the stress response is not switched off in a lot of people. Thus, it becomes an ongoing reaction to life's events, often causing a chronic feelings in the body, reinforcing a lack of safety and ability to handle events effectively when they arise.

Some of the most common drivers of chronic stress include:
• Work
• Family
• Health
• and Money

☼ My suggestion for helping you with stress, is first and foremost you need to recognise the role it is playing in your life.
☼ You can look to doing some journaling around what causes you to stress out.
☼ Get really clear about it, it may be more than one area of your life that is causing you stress, because without awareness you can’t take action to change your response.
☼ Second once you are clear on what is causing your stress then look at it as objectively as you can - is there anything that you can do to change the situation. ☼ If the answer is yes - great go about making needed changes.
☼ If the answer is no, then you are going to need to change your mindset around the stress. ☼ This could include some counselling sessions to help with this, other helpful options may include meditation, more journaling, and finding some stress reduction techniques that you enjoy so that you can shift your body from fight and flight to rest and relax.
☼ Any time spent out of the stress response will be helpful to your body.