We’re all familiar with how stress can make us feel at times. Demanding bosses, growing to-do lists and chaotic households may conjure feelings of overwhelm, anxiety, doom, and/or fatigue.

But are you ignoring lesser-known symptoms of stress?

Our bodies have a stress threshold. Similar to a bucket, our stress threshold is the amount of stress we have space to carry or experience at any given time. As we experience stress, the bucket starts to fill. If the bucket continues to fill to the point it overflows, there’s nowhere left for it to go and our bodies must shift to accommodate the new-found stress level.

When this happens, you may notice subtle (or not-so-subtle) changes to your physical and emotional health. These can changes include:

● Increased blood pressure
● Menstrual changes - including skipped periods, shorter cycles, or longer cycles
● Sleep disturbances - difficulties falling asleep, staying asleep or both
● Increased hair loss or increased acne
● Irritability and fatigue
● Further stress intolerance - all of a sudden little things that never used to be an issue seem stressful

All of this can be your body’s way of telling you that there’s more stress in your bucket than there’s room for. This is where the 'Stress Less' activity can be really helpful:

Is your bucket full or overflowing?

You don’t have to count on just symptoms to know. You can actually measure how well your body is handling its stress burden! Salivary cortisol testing is a simple, accurate, cost-effective and non-invasive way to monitor how well your body has been
managing stress.

Salivary cortisol testing measures your baseline saliva curve. When there’s more stress than your body can handle, your healthy baseline shifts, causing changes to the shape or slope of your curve. These changes are an indication that your body is spending more time in the stress state than it likes to - and tells us it’s time to work on emptying the bucket!

Testing your salivary cortisol levels is not only a great way to see how well your body is handling stress, but it can help direct targeted supplementation to relieve your symptoms and monitor how effective you are at emptying your bucket.

Watch us explore this more, here: