In this article, we’re going to greatly help those who are going through stress, and I want to make this as simple as possible. You’re just going to be drinking one cup of this tea daily, which I’m going to recommend to you daily to bring down your stress to zero, but first, I want to explain why it works.
I do want to say that reducing your stress to zero is not healthy for a long period of time; in fact, you can’t live without some stress. Stress is actually healthy as long as it’s not sustained; our bodies become stronger when we put our bodies through stress like, say, exercise.
If you sat on the couch and no stress, did anything, you would waste away. The problem is that sustained stress burns out a lot of your organs, and I want to just go through that fairly rapidly.
Number one is the immune system.
Stress and high levels of cortisol This “HPA” stands for hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal.
So when you perceive stress through your brain, it goes through these different levels and then comes out as cortisol, and so now your body can start adapting to stress with the help of cortisol. So cortisol kind of goes through these organs and adjusts the organs to deal with this stress, but with the immune system, it basically turns off, and that makes you very susceptible to viral infections and all sorts of things. I mean, think about what happens when people get stressed out—a lot of times they get sick, right?
As a result, stress suppresses the immune system, which is undesirable. Furthermore, chronic stress can cause lymph node atrophy—in other words, shrink your lymph nodes.
Lymph nodes shrink the spleen and the thymus; that’s your immune system, okay? So stress is very bad for the immune system.
Secondly stomach
You can actually develop an ulcer. You can have the acid start splashing up, causing GERD. There’s more gastric acid in the stomach, which is why you might get gastritis. The entire digestive system is controlled by the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the opposite of this stress mechanism. So stress pretty much turns off the digestive system. Try to digest when you’re under stress; it just doesn’t work.
Now, as a side note, stress also depletes you of vitamin B1, calcium, potassium, and “H+,” which is a hydrogen ion. What does that mean, and how does that relate to anything? Well, when you’re stressed, you lose the hydrogen ions. What is the hydrogen ion? You’ve probably heard the term “PH” before. That is the power of the hydrogen ion, so this is basically an acid, so when you are stressed, you’re jacking up cortisol and losing your acids. and guess what? You become too alkaline.
So you would think that stress makes you acidic, but no, it doesn’t. It makes you excessively alkaline, and the symptoms of alkalosis are
muscle twitching
hyperventilation
cramping
anxiety
number three. Stress affects the heart.
by increasing the blood pressure, the heart rate, and creating a constriction of the coronary artery. Stress affects blood sugars by converting things into sugar: fat in the sugar, protein in the sugar, and ketones in the sugar, which is why chronic stress can lead to diabetes. So even though you’re not eating sugar, your body is producing sugar from other things, by having too much stress. Another name for this is glucocorticoid.
Now all this sugar that’s generated is basically making us fat. So if you have too much cortisol, you start developing fat specifically around your gut because the liver is becoming fatty, and then it spills over into the gut. so you’ll have belly fat.
Now the tone of the muscles becomes very rigid and tight, so you get muscle spasms.
Nember four the lung
The lung has a problem when you have high levels of cortisol because you hyperventilate. You think you’re not getting enough oxygen, but you’re getting too much oxygen. Think about it: If you were to hyperventilate right now, what would happen? You would receive too much oxygen and expel too much oxygen, and a lack of CO2 actually locks up the ability to absorb this oxygen in the tissues, causing you to essentially starve for oxygen. But the point is that stress throws off your lungs and causes an inability to breathe. Consider asthma and panic attacks; people have anxiety; they’re trying to get more oxygen, which is making things worse; you should basically just breathe through your nose, calm your breath down, and then you’ll get more oxygen slowly.
Number five is the brain.
This is the last part of this puzzle. Stress destroys certain parts of the brain, which is why it affects your sleep and your circadian rhythms with sleep, but the perception of stress coming through the brain that’s activating the cortisol is controlled by this neurotransmitter called GABA.
GABA is like a turn-off switch. It’s like the brake pads. About 50% of all the little synapses in your brain are a combination of glutamate and gaba receptors. And only five percent are dopamine and serotonin, so all you need to know for this example is that gaba is very important in relationship to cortisol; it controls this excessive amount of cortisol, so when people go through excessive amounts of stress over a period of time, they don’t necessarily burn out the adrenals; they’re burning out this neurotransmitter.
This remedy inhibits gaba. It blocks the enzyme that slows down the degradation of gaba. thus increasing gaba, which turns off cortisol.
So these little hormones that are coming out of the hypothalamus pituitary down to here are all turned off when you increase gaba. Lemon balm tea is the remedy.
that’s right You wanted to start drinking lemon balm tea on a regular basis; it’s simple: one in the morning. Maybe one in the afternoon, maybe one a little bit later. And it contains phytonutrients that boost gaba.
One of the big effects that lemon balm has on your body is that it increases tranquility. Right, that’s a really cool word, “tranquility.” What does it mean? It means peaceful. Serene, unshaken, unworried.
So it increases your tolerance for stress. It helps you be calm. It has properties of anti-anxiety and anti-depression; it increases and elevates your mood; it does a lot of other things, but it’s really, really good for reducing cortisol.
So in one study, lemon balm, which is in the mint family as a plant, created a full remission of anxiety in 70% of people who took it, and it also showed significant sleep improvements for those who had insomnia and 85% of the people who took it. There are many things you can do for stress reduction, but balm tea is one of my favorites. It’s simple, you’ll feel quick effects right away, it’s very inexpensive, and it has a lot of additional health benefits as well that go way beyond just stress reduction.