To strengthen your immune system, the stress hormone, cortisol, needs to be in perfect balance. If it is too high, it will suppress your immune system making it more difficult for your body to fight off invaders.
When you get sick, your immune system causes most of the symptoms, not the pathogen. If cortisol is too low, inflammation in you body, which is a normal part of the immune response, may become too high. As a result, your white blood cells may overreact causing massive collateral damage.
Sleep
One way to keep your cortisol in balance is to get proper, regular sleep. Proper sleep for an adult is a duration of 7-8 hours every night. Regular sleep means that you are going to bed at night and waking up every morning at the same time.
Your body releases hormones, including cortisol, on a specific rhythm, maintained by a proper sleep/wake cycle.
For more specific information on how to improve sleep click here for another video I made on that topic. The video includes suggested behavioral changes and dietary supplements for sleep.
Stress
Another important way to keep your cortisol in balance is to reduce life stressors and develop the skill of minimizing the physical effects of life stress.
To reduce life stressors, you need to first figure out what they are. Write down everything which causes you stress. It’s easier to see which stressors to avoid once you have it on paper.
By taking the time to think about it and write it down you will discover that there are a lot of things in your life which bring you stress, which is great because having that list will help you avoid being involved in those things which you would have otherwise never thought about.
For example, by making your list, you may find that watching the 24-hour news cycle is stressing you out. Once you discover that, you can come up with a solution. One would be to mindfully limit your daily news consumption.
So, make your list, review it and see which obligations and stressors you can eliminate. And follow through by no longer giving your thoughts and time to those stressors.
There may be things on your list that you just can’t get away from. For example, during the making of this video there is a global pandemic known as Covid-19. Right now, everyone is stressed over this. For something you feel you can’t get away from, you need to develop the skill of mindfulness. This is training your mind, through daily practice, to not focus on the stressor. This can be achieved but it takes much practice. Watch my video called, “How to Stop Worrying About Your Health”, and “How to Balance Your Cortisol | Vitamins, Diet & Lifestyle” for more information on this topic. In those videos I go into more detail and talk about specific dietary supplements you can take to help with stress as well.
And that’s it…
You can strengthen your immune system by balancing the stress hormone, cortisol. Although it takes practice, it could give you a better quality of life and very well save your life.
