Today, I’m going to talk a little bit about why stress feeds Candida. In fact, this is going to be a series of a few different videos explaining about the connection with stress, your immune system, and the promotion of yeast infection.
So a big thing that you need to bear in mind is one of the main hormones that influence stress is called cortisol. Cortisol can increase or decrease in the presence of stress, and what you’re going to find is that in the alarm phase or in the initial phases of stress, which happen to people all the time. For example, if your mobile phone rings or if you’ve got an appointment or if you’ve got something to do. If there’s any demand placed on your body, cortisol will increase.
With severe stress, cortisol can increase at an alarmingly high rate. If you’ve had a car accident or if you’ve fallen down the stairs, if you’ve had any kind of injury, cortisol is going to go up. Even a sporting injury. If you’ve got prolonged pain or emotional stress, if you’ve got problems with your boss, with your employee, with your mother-in-law, anything like that, if there’s a prolonged duration of stress, you can be in an alarm phase on and off for quite a while. These alarms can occur and then you can back off and get down into what we call the “resistance” or “adaptation” phase of stress. I’ll explain a little bit more about this general adaptation syndrome in another video, but you can probably see some videos online explaining the three stages of stress. You may want to know a little bit about this.
With the alarm phase or basically the initial stages of stress, cortisol gets elevated. And what we find is the white blood cells, particularly the most important white blood cells, or lymphocytes, can, in fact, disappear with very high levels of cortisol.
Now the body will do this because if you’re running away from a threat or if there’s a problem that you need to escape from, the immune system is not initially important. What is important is that you have a good amount of blood flowing to the muscles and to the brain, to the larger muscles and the brain, so you can escape from this threat, so immunity is not really a critical issue.
The point I’m making here is if you’ve got high anxiety or you suffer a lot from stress, if you have a lot of demands placed on you, you feel recurrently ill; this is going to be a problem because you’re going to have a low state of immunity. And what does that mean for Candida? A perpetuation of Candida. So this is how stress can feed a yeast infection, can allow it to keep going.
We all talk about, we’ve got to stop the sugars, we can’t have Mars bars or Coca-Cola or we can’t go to McDonalds and have their nice sundaes, we can’t have the sugar, but we don’t talk about the reduction in the immune system that occurs with stress.
You can read a lot more about this in Candida Crusher, but I really want you to understand the principle that with poor immunity will be perpetuation of Candida. I’ll explain a little bit more in-depth about other kinds of cellular responses with the immune system in subsequent videos on stress and Candida.
Thanks for tuning in.