OPTIMIZE YOUR HEALTH
Change Your Mind, Heal Your Body

Mind-Body Connection: Chronic Stress Adds to Waistline and Impairs Memory
By Sue Kim-Saechao, RN, MSN, CRNP, and Jannet Huang, MD, FRCPC, FACE, ABHM

With the weather starting to warm up and with spring peeking around the corner, many are reaffirming their New Year’s resolution to get in shape, physically, emotionally and financially. Unfortunately, although the days are getting longer, it seems there still isn’t enough time to fit everything in a 24 hour day. We feel it is important to remind our readers at this time that stress and sleep deprivation play a large role in the depletion of our health.

Limiting or depriving ourselves of sleep to accomplish tasks is common in our society. As the old adage goes, “the early bird gets the worm” and now the “birds” are needing to get up even earlier to beat early morning traffic, take the kids to school, go to appointments, school or work on time, and then staying up later to finish things that we feel must be accomplished. Even when time is available for sleep, many don’t feel their sleep quality is restorative or restful. Insomnia, restless leg syndrome and sleep apnea are often the culprit.

Statistically, Americans sleep about 2 hours less now than in 1960, from 8.0-8.9 hours to 6.9-7.0 hours. This is significant because studies have shown that sleep deprivation, especially below 6 hours, or unrestful/unrestorative sleep can have significant negative outcomes on our hormones and metabolism.

Poor sleep and high stress can add inches to your waistline partly because it raises the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol declines rapidly to its lowest levels just before habitual bedtime, but with sleep restriction or high stress, this rate of decline becomes significantly slower, leading to unusually elevated evening cortisol levels. These high cortisol levels can increase insulin resistance and add inches in our “danger zone”, our waistline, and increase the incidence of obesity and diabetes. One study showed that just 6 days of sleep deprivation (4 hours in bed) in young healthy subjects, increased blood sugars after breakfast.

Apart from cortisol, appetite-regulating hormones are also profoundly influenced by the duration of sleep, as well as chronic stress. Leptin, an appetite suppressing hormone secreted by our fat cells to signal the feeling of fullness/satiety, and ghrelin, a stomach hormone stimulating appetite, go out of balance with poor sleep. Sleep deprivation and chronic stress leads to reduced leptin levels while ghrelin goes up, resulting in increased hunger, especially at night for high carbohydrate foods.

In addition to expanding our waistline, chronic stress also leads to impaired memory. A recent study shows that chronic stress leads to atrophy (in other words, shrinking) of areas of the brain such as the hippocampus, which is crucial in memory function.

So don’t underestimate the negative impact of stress on your body! Our team members here at the Center are ready to help you achieve optimal health, both body and mind.

—March 2006

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