The Link Between Stress & Nutrition
Think back to a time when you felt stressed or overwhelmed. What did you feel? You may recall experiencing a faster heartbeat, dizziness, and difficulty focusing. While stressful situations every now and then are a regular part of life, chronic or prolonged stress can have a profound impact on our overall health. Let’s dive into defining stress, understanding how exactly it affects the body, and some helpful stress-reducing nutrients you can load up on.
Understanding stress
Although stress can look and feel different for everyone, it’s typically a state of worry or tension triggered in response to a difficult situation. The stress response is our body’s natural way of helping us deal with the perceived threat in front of us.
When we first encounter a stressful event, our bodies get a signal to respond to the threat. This increases the release of hormones called adrenaline and cortisol. Next, you’ll feel the symptoms we mentioned earlier: an increased heart rate, heavy breathing, shortness of breath, and high blood pressure. You may also start sweating, feel dizzy, and experience headaches or stomach cramps and pains.
Why do we feel these symptoms? These are ways the body is helping us prepare to face the stressful situation at hand and fight or flee the situation. The stress response is your body’s way of protecting you by limiting its resources to the threat in front of you as opposed to using them for important functions like digestion or immunity. That’s why it’s common to get sick faster when you’ve been stressed for long periods of time.
Stress-relieving nutrients to prioritize
While physical activities such as working out, taking a walk out in nature, meditation, yoga, and journaling are all great methods to help reduce stress, taking a nutritional approach can make a huge difference in reducing stress levels as well. This is because certain nutrients have been known to help the body calm down and promote relaxation, helping you feel like yourself again. This includes nutrients like ashwagandha, L-theanine, B vitamins and magnesium, just to name a few.
Prioritizing these nutrients in your daily life can be easier with one of our soothing formulas.
Adrenal Chill
CanPrev’s Adrenal Chill features a nourishing combination of ashwagandha and L-theanine that will increase resistance to stress and anxiety and improve overall quality of life. Ashwagandha has been used for over 4,000 years for its ability to restore balance within the body, specifically in the endocrine, immune, and nervous systems.
Additionally, L-theanine is an amino acid found in green and black tea, commonly used as a natural stress reliever. This formula offers 600mg of KSM-66® Ashwagandha, the highest concentration of full-spectrum extract of Ashwagandha, and 200mg of L-theanine.
Adrenal-Pro
Chronic stress puts a high demand on the adrenal glands, which are two triangular-shaped glands that sit at the top of your kidneys and secrete hormones in your body. Prolonged stress makes your adrenals run out of energy and resources to meet your body’s needs. This can lead to symptoms like low energy, body aches, low blood pressure, unexplained weight loss, lightheadedness, and skin discoloration or hyperpigmentation.
CanPrev’s Adrenal-Pro
It is designed to increase energy levels and reduce stress and fatigue. This formula is specially formulated to provide an improved sense of well-being and help improve mental and physical performance after periods of exertion. It features a blend of adaptogenic herbs and nutrients used in herbal medicine, including Siberian ginseng, ashwagandha, schisandra, rhodiola, astragalus, and B vitamins.
CanPrev’s L-Theanine
CanPrev’s L-Theanine provides an impressive 250mg of pure L-theanine along with 20mg of magnesium bisglycinate to promote a state of relaxation so that you can stay focused and productive. L-theanine is known to promote a restful, relaxed state without diminishing alertness. It can help improve concentration and focus and is especially beneficial for anxiety sufferers because it increases dopamine and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) receptors in the brain.
GABA is a chemical receptor that reduces the activity of neurons that it binds to. In other words, it helps slow down the feelings of fear and stress when neurons become overexcited. With the added magnesium to help you get good-quality sleep, this formula is a great option to soothe an anxious mind and stay productive at the same time.
While chronic stress can take a toll on your body, there are ways to manage stress in your life, including by prioritizing nutrients that are proven to soothe your mind and body. Here’s to reclaiming your calm!
