Health Goals: Stress Free

In this article, we focus on the science of stress. We look at the scientific definition of stress, the physiology and biology of stress, and the differences between acute and chronic stress. We then look at how to quantify and measure stress so we can better manage stress. Finally, we introduce the 9 habits for lower stress incl. Sleeping 7 hours per day, Meditation Practice, Breathing Exercise, Intermittent Fasting, Cardio Training, and getting at least 10,000 steps each day.

Feeling overwhelmed by work or your life situation? Well, you’re not alone! Stress Free is the most popular goal among Healthzilla users. Use this article and the associated habits and challenge to build up your stress resilience starting right now!

What is Stress?

First things first, stress isn't some abstract unmeasurable quantity. There are three main systems in the body that manage the stress response. All three are defined by a balance, i.e. you want a Goldilocks amount of each. When in balance, that state is called homeostasis. Most importantly, all three are linked together quite tightly.

This is actually an oversimplification of the interactions but goes to show these systems are intimately interconnected.

Stressors: Your brain interprets various sensory inputs, but also thoughts as stressors. This can range from bad dreams, your boss shouting at you, stubbing a toe, to a speeding bus about to hit you. Your brain passes the bad mojo to your nervous system.

Central nervous system: Your nervous system is the wiring from your brain to your organs. It controls things like your autonomous heart-beat and semi-autonomous breathing. It knows you better than you do (or at least thinks it does) and controls a balance between fight or flight and rest and digest modes to your body. External stressors sensed by your nervous system and brain trigger changes in that balance. That change signals your endocrine system and your immune system accordingly to take action using chemicals called neurotransmitters.

Endocrine system: Stress hormones are emitted by the adrenal, pituitary, and hypothalamus. Among other things like waking you up in the morning, keeping you alert and focused, shivering when cold, they trigger your body's immune response. This same system also controls all your other hormones, like testosterone and insulin which manage the growth of your muscle and fat cells for instance. So if you mess around here, you mess up your body head to toe.

Immune system: There are many types of immune cells, that react to stress hormones to either chill or kill. This is how your body knows to build scar tissue, burn out germs with a fever, or induce nausea, or make you sleepy. It's trying to keep you alive in the face of an active threat.

Stress Symptoms: How Do You Get Stressed?

There are some pretty nuanced scientific frameworks to categorize stressors, but honestly, this is perhaps the only intuitive part of stress. You know the causes, cause everybody has them!

Mental: This is your perception of your experience that translates your thoughts, emotions, and moods into physical manifestations through your nervous system and neurotransmitters. Bad vibes lead to bad things in your body.

Behavioral: Things that upset your body's natural balance, called homeostasis, are the usual suspects in sleep, food, and exercise. There are good and bad doses of each.

Environmental: This would cover all sorts of toxins you expose yourself to, which includes the big ones like smoking and drinking, but also more subtle toxins like chemicals, radiation, allergens, molds, and other nasty stuff out there in the world.

Effects of Stress: What Stress Does to The Body

To be clear, we need to consider the good stress responses along with the bad. We absolutely don't want to eliminate all forms of stress. We couldn't live without it. We just need to titrate the amounts and avoid chronic accumulation.

Effects of Acute Stress

Which is a fancy way to say instant or short-term, i.e. hours to days. Good doses cause short-term hormesis, which is a dose of stress the body can recover from, and actually creates an adaption that makes you more resistant to that stress over time. Like bicep curls to blow up your guns. If you overdo it, say like a bottle of Tequila, well let's just say it isn't a good form of stress.

Oxidative stress: When you use tons of oxygen during a workout, aerobic or anaerobic, it creates waste products from your mitochondria like reactive oxygen species. If you do too much, like say run a marathon, your body will struggle to clear everything out and will cause oxidation damage in surrounding tissues.

Cell repair: Exercise actually causes damage in your cells like muscle fibers through oxidative stress, and this triggers a good type of inflammation to repair those and be stronger for the next bout.

Nervous system fatigue: The exact mechanisms of how we feel fatigued aren't well established, but it is clear that the nervous system controls the rise and fall of your heartbeat during and after exercise. By repeating this cycle more often, you increase the nervous system's control over the heart.

Effects of Chronic Stress

Meaning long-term, i.e. months to years. Most chronic stress is bad, with the exception of exercise. At the right levels, of course.

Exercise: Chronic exercise can shift the balance of the nervous system from being sympathetic dominant to parasympathetic. As we learned, that can prevent a whole cascade of bad things from developing in your endocrine and immune systems. Exercise really is the best medicine!

Oxidative stress: The same reaction that helped you recover from your killer ab crunch challenge, can accumulate in your body letting tissue damage and inflammation get out of hand. This could happen due to overtraining, i.e. not allowing for recovery, or even things like toxin buildup in your body.

Anxiety, depression, burnout: The traditionally more well-known link between stress and health is that of mental health. Once your neurotransmitters get out of whack, they stay out of whack until you change something and wreak havoc on your endocrine and immune systems like it was drunk texting. Sadly, the usual cycle involves mediation and then counter-medication, which removes the symptoms but doesn't solve the root cause.

Inflammation: In the presence of physiological or psychological stressors, your body upregulates proinflammatory cytokines, and they stick around since the stress isn't going away. Like you refuse to heal. The bad news is the cytokines start to cause problems themselves. Chronic inflammation is linked to premature aging, cardiovascular disease, and metabolic disorders like diabetes, so this stuff will actually kill you.

Weakened immune response: Once you compound these factors over time, you actually significantly weaken your body's natural armor, the immune response. You are suddenly more likely to a) get sick but also b) stay sick due to your body's inability to fight back as it should, or fight back when it really didn't need to.

How do you measure Stress?

We have to establish measures, preferably non-invasive, to see what kind of acute stressors and symptoms of chronic stress are present in your system. That includes not just physiological measures, but behavioral and psychological.

Heart Rate Variability: In terms of clinical validation and mechanistic explanation, the number one measure for stress across the board is heart rate variability (“HRV”). It’s a measure of your nervous system balance, which is the trigger for stress management through your body. HRV measures the time between heart beats, which is small but meaningful, and is a proxy for your nervous system balance. Low HRV means high sympathetic bias, i.e. fight or flight, a state of stress. Useful to evade predators, less useful to relax after a day at the office. High HRV means high parasympathetic bias, i.e. rest and digest. Dangerous in the presence of saber tooth tigers, but useful pretty much most of the time. So if this one number encapsulates physiological and even psychological stress, how do we measure it?

Wearables: The miniaturization of sensors and electronics have led to wrist computers like the Apple Watch. They come in many forms now, including rings like Oura. Simple cheap devices usually just measure activity, but top end devices provide tons of valuable data like resting heart rate, heart rate variability, and sleep cycles. Non-invasive glucose monitoring is coming.

No wearable? To make these tools available to everyone, we had to find another solution to simply waiting for everyone to get expensive wearables for Christmas. Santa, come on?! What everyone does have though, is a smartphone. Smartphones have cameras and flashes. In a neat bit of technological coincidence, if you put your fingertip on the lens of a smartphone camera with the flash on, the camera can pick up the subtle pulsation of your blood vessels. Which means we can calculate your heart rate, and more importantly, your heart rate variability, with a free app. Pretty cool, right? Read all about it here on our blog.

Blood: There are some established biomarkers for chronic stress you can test for, but the downsides are cost and needles. If you did do a test recently, you might look out for elevated cortisol, alpha-amylase, and pro-inflammatory cytokines.

Questionnaires: If you’ve ever done an “HR survey”, you know what I’m talking about. From 1–5 how emotionally satisfying do you find your boss? Truthfully, and sadly, these kinds of questionnaires are how most of the burnout prevention is handled (or mishandled). It doesn’t take much to assume most employees might be hesitant to a) disclose they’re going bananas b) disclose they hate their bosses guts. The simple subjectivity and low frequency make this the worst kind of data. Not worthless, in the absence of literally any other option.

How do you track Stress?

So if we just have that HRV number, aren’t we done here? Low bad, high good. Right? Well, that’s kind of true, if you know what’s low and high for you, and are putting those into a spreadsheet to see trends from days to weeks to months. And factor in all the workouts you do. And sleep. And meditation. And food. So yeah, we’re done if you do the math. But we’d prefer to do the math for you if you don’t mind.

Baseline: To find out what’s low and high, we’ve turned to research studies conducted on healthy individuals, controlling for age and gender and using standard deviations above and below the mean. So over a chronic period of 3 months, we can just tell you where you stand compared to the average healthy human like you. Just for brownie points, we also did this for resting heart rate, VO2Max, body fat percentage, sleep, and mindfulness.

Trend analysis: To identify when things are good, and when things are bad, we took all those physiological and behavioral data points we get from wearable devices and combined them with findings from research studies on good and bad scenarios. Then we trained a machine learning algorithm to find those patterns in your own data. That way, instead of crunching numbers on a spreadsheet each morning to figure out if you’re getting sick or should hit the gym, you just get a simple plain English score from Great, Good, Easy, Rest, or Sick.

How do you manage Stress?

Knowing your stress status is one thing, but what do you do about it? If HRV is the joystick for stress, then we have to point it in the right direction.

Habits: When your data is good, you can do what you want pretty much since it’s working for you. The question is more so what to do when the data sucks. Then it starts to matter more what you’re doing in terms of sleep, food, breathing, and meditation. You can certainly turn around a bad day with increased emphasis on those, and most of all avoid going from a bad day to a bad week. That’s exactly the pattern you need to get out of.

Exercise: Well, since we already did exercise, we’ve trained yet another machine learning algorithm to recommend specific types of workouts based on your stress scores each morning. Some days, the most you’ll want to aim for is stretching or walking. It’s not even limited to our own workouts, we also read everything you do in other apps like Strava and Nike, to help you train and rest just right according to your body’s data.

To make this easy for you, we’ve designed a specific program called Stress Free in the Healthzilla app. It comes with all of the right habits built in, and connected to the Stress Scan to measure your Stress Score so you get recommendations every day.

The right Healthy Habits for Lower Stress

Now, the list below might seem rather daunting. But it does reflect the current state of research around what helps manage stress. As there will be individual differences to what works best, it makes sense to try everything! From there, you can learn your own most effective habits to manage your stress.

NOTE: If you start the 100-Day Challenge in Healthzilla, you will get the exact weekly targets for each of these healthy habits!

Measure your Heart Rate Variability, 7-days a week

Targets: stress, heart rate variability

You can only manage what you measure. For a long life, we have to keep stress in check. We need to recover from acute stress from our many workouts during the week. We need to keep chronic stress down. Heart Rate Variability (“HRV”) is how we measure stress! The good news is that it’s easy these days. Several wearable devices like Apple Watch and the Oura Ring measure it automatically. If not, Healthzilla has a free Stress Scan that measures HRV from your fingertip using your smartphone camera. More so, Healthzilla helps you interpret the data into a daily Stress Score, to guide your choice of habits to work on each day.

Sleep 7 Hours, 7-days a week

Targets: hormones, stress, brain matter, deep & rem sleep

Newsflash. We were designed, by evolution, to sleep 8 hours. Why? Our planet just happens to rotate every 24 hours, creating alternating phases of light and dark. Evolution, if anything, is sparing. It doesn’t do luxury. So if nature insists on 8 hours, why do we fight it? There is no reason. Sleep deprivation in animal studies is just a horror show, and many studies have been reproduced in humans.

Why EVERY night though? Well, science says that the average quantity isn’t enough. Sleeping 12 hours on Sunday morning doesn’t cut it. Consistency is half the battle. If you don’t allow sleep deprivation to accumulate, there’s no need to sleep in!

Meditation Practice, 7-days a week

Targets: stress, hormones, heart rate variability, sleep quality

Many longevity studies find characteristics like social relationships and spirituality to correlate with living long and healthy. While the hard data attitude of western science often looks down upon these aspects, the research on meditation is adding up. It helps to keep our emotions in check, and manage our stress levels. Chronic stress in particular can lead to disastrous health situations incl. depression and heart disease, so meditation is a universal shield for a wide range of health risks. Feel free to make it a daily practice, but let’s at least cover the working week with a morning 10-minute meditation. You DO have the time!

Breathing, 7-days a week

Targets: stress, hormones, heart rate variability, sleep quality

Breathing is a vital part of human life. It is the only bodily function under both autonomous and voluntary control. This means the process of inhaling air into our lungs and exhaling it is controlled by your body’s autonomic nervous system and therefore does not require active thinking or conscious effort from you – yet you are able to step in and control your breathing whenever you like.

Walk 10,000 Steps, 5-days a week

Targets: metabolism, stress, heart rate variability, deep & rem sleep

Stillness and sitting are not good for you, that much is known. Physical inactivity is on the rise, and correlates with increases in lifestyle and metabolic disease. While more isn’t necessarily better, 10,000 steps seems to have become an acceptable number and corresponds to a decent amount of daily activity. While you would ideally incorporate this into every day of the week, other forms of exercise complement a total weekly routine.

Intermittent Fasting, 5-days a week

Targets: metabolism, hormones

Fasting is an ancient art, that has become increasingly popular in the last decade. Trendy, even, if not eating can be a dietary trend. The benefits are wide-ranging, from better metabolic health to appetite and calorie control, in addition to potential cellular level prevention against many cancers. The easiest way to start is simply to skip breakfast before working days, and even save some money doing it. We’ll allow you to keep brunch for weekends. You’re welcome!

Cardio Training, 3-days a week

Targets: metabolism, vo2max, brain matter, stress

While basic cardio training isn’t all the rage these days, research shows that longer bouts of slow cardio training is the best way to stimulate the mitochondria. Why does that matter? Well, that’s the powerhouse of all your cells, so you want more and better mitochondria. The sweet spot is Zone 2, which many wearable devices and fitness apps can track automatically for you. Up to 60 minutes twice a week is the recommended dose. One low-impact modality is uphill walking on a treadmill. Just put on a good podcast or Netflix, and the miles will breeze by.

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Join the 100-Day Stress Free challenge?

If you want to start measuring all these habits now, and working towards the levels cited in this article, then just download the app, set your goal as Stress Free, and navigate to the 100-Day Challenge. Once you start, the app will start from your current level of activity for each existing habit, and gradually introduce new habits. From there, each week you’ll be prompted to do a little bit more each week, until you reach the target levels. That’s an easy way to kickstart the right habits for stress!