Hey guys, Dr. Jon Dandridge here with Beyond Bones. I want to give you three of my favorite ways that we can test our stress levels, it’s really important to have an awareness of this and know where we’re at in terms of our stress levels, because chronic stress over time is extremely detrimental to our health.
So it’s really important to just have an awareness of these things, and is there there’s some very simple ways that we can do that. Number one, heart rate variability, this is a very simple thing that we can use even just there’s probably many phone apps that you can have typically involves, with some type of light that you can look at applied to your finger where it measures your heart rate. This is a very simple thing that we can use to test how well or how well we’re adapting in our levels of stress.
Number two is cortisol. So cortisol is a hormone of stress. And if we are overly stressed, then we won’t be producing cortisol in the way that we should, there’s a natural rhythm to how we shouldn’t be producing cortisol throughout any given day. And so we can, through testing our saliva, we can test that throughout a number of days to see, hey, how are we producing cortisol normally, if not, and it’s really elevated, and hey, there’s something that we should look at, maybe we’re overly stressed, let’s take a look deeper into that. So really simple.
Number three, perhaps my favorite is because we actually teach a course on this very, very powerful is our breathing. So our breathing habits, how we breathe, the amount of air we breathe, the volume of air, this is a very good indicator into our physiology and it how stressed we may or may not be. So some of the the key components of somebody who breathes dysfunctionally, or breathes from a place of stress would be breathing through your mouth. So if you do not breathe through your nose, whether you it’s just during your waking hours or during sleep, this is going to create stress in your body, right. So if you wake up in the morning and your mouth is completely dry, that’s a good indicator that hey, you’ve been breathing through your mouth all night. This is a problem. Upper chest area, so for breathing, and we’re just breathing in our up through enter into our upper chest, instead of deep into our lungs and using our diaphragm to allow the air to travel deep into our lungs. This is the problem too, when someone breathes, you should not be able to really hear it, you should not be able to notice it. Their chest should not be you know, pumping up and down in and out. Breathing should be very, very calm, quiet and almost unnoticeable. So there’s there’s other characteristics, but those are two of the big ones. So if you notice your breathing in that way, it’s a good chance that this is creating stress in your body or and that you may already be very stressed out.
If you have any questions about any of these, let us know we’d love to talk to you about it and we hope to see you soon!