EPISODE 8.1: STOP SAYING YOU'RE OKAY! How stress affects dis-ease Pt.1

During the break, I found myself constantly reflecting on the importance of addressing stress. It's a challenging and often uncomfortable topic, one that doesn't exactly spark excitement. I know it’s not the most glamorous subject, but the act of decluttering, reducing stress, and creating a clearer, more organized environment are truly foundational steps in our journey toward genuine wellness.

And that’s exactly the path I want to guide you all on—toward a place of true well-being. I wholeheartedly believe that this episode could very well be one of the most pivotal I’ll ever create.

“Don’t believe every worried thought you have. Worried thoughts are notoriously inaccurate.”
—Renee Jain

#MultipleSclerosisSymptoms #AutoimmuneDiseaseTreatments #ChronicInflammation #Remedies #MSDiagnosis #FlareUps #MSAndExercise #InflammationAndDiet #HealingAutoimmuneDisease #InflammationAndStress #MSAndLifestyle #ChronicInflammation #PainManagement #MSAndMeditation #ImprovingAutoimmune #Recovery #Fatigue #RestorativeSleep #SleepHygiene #ChronicIllness #AutoimmuneDiet #Anti-InflammatoryFoods #EliminationDiet #GutHealth #PaleoDiet #LeakyGut #HealingDiet #HealingFoods #Supplements #StressManagement #AutoimmuneHealing #MSAndStress #AutoimmuneDiseaseAndStress #MentalHealth #MindfulnessAndHealing #MS #ChronicFatigue #Autoimmune #Inflammation #HealingAndStress #ReducingAnxiety #InflammationSuperhighway  #Love #SelfLove

Transcript

Stop saying you're OKAY - Stress and its effects - Pt.1

Good morning, and welcome to Inflammation Superhighway, recorded in Yarraville, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. I would like to begin by honoring the original custodians of this saltwater-encircled country, who lived in harmony with the land and sea. I would like to thank the traditional owners of the land where I am recording today. I honor the elders, past, present, and recognize that this is, was, and always will be Aboriginal land.

 This is Inflammation Superhighway. I'm your host, Claire Tierney. Today, I'm recording the first of my 2025 episodes. I’m so very excited about this year, and I have a ton of things coming up—not only in this podcast but also in my life. There’s some great, exciting travel planned for the end of the year, which I’ll probably mention at some point. But I wanted to start this year with a very powerful message about taking control of your health.

Over the break, I kept coming back to the need to talk about stress. It’s a difficult subject. It's not particularly exciting to spend time on, in some ways. I know it's not the "sexy" topic, but decluttering, de-stressing, and generally clearing up your stuff are really important steps to moving forward toward wellness.

And that's where I want to take you all—toward wellness. I firmly believe that this is probably the most important episode I’ll do. I’m going to break it into two parts because it could get a bit heavy—not really, but I think stress has the largest effect on our health.

It may very well be the area where you will see the best results in your life when you take control of your stress and your environment. So, I’ll try to keep it light, but I believe that this impact on our health is more significant than anything we’ve discussed so far, and probably anything we’ll discuss in the future—unless I come across something really amazing to bump it off its perch.

But we’re talking about both the biological and emotional effects of stress. So, the feeling of stress in your body—we’ll address that. And we’ll also dive into the short-term versus the long-term effects of stress. We’ll definitely be discussing epigenetics—not too scientifically, but it is very important, very current, and very new.

So, sit back, because we’re traveling down the Inflammation Superhighway. Do you have a cup of tea or a drink? Are you sitting in a comfy chair? I hope so, because this conversation is really important. For one, it’s hard to define stress, as what might be stressful for you might not be stressful for me or someone else. I’m absolutely, vitally passionate about this topic. I don’t think it’s talked about enough, highlighted enough, or prioritized enough. But in the future, I believe we will have a more targeted approach and a different attitude toward stress and disease. But for now, it’s something I’ll continue to talk about because I don’t think there’s anything else in our world that’s as important for us to understand. 

There are short-term and long-term effects of stress, and not every level of stress is dangerous or detrimental to our bodies. So, we need to look at the long-term effects of stress. We’ll focus on that, particularly the effects on your DNA. We have what’s called the “fight or flight” response in our bodies, and this stress response is actually helpful in certain situations. If there’s a moment of danger, we need to respond quickly. During these stressful moments, our body undergoes several psychological and physiological changes.

The adrenal glands release hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. I’ll talk more about the long-term effects of cortisol later, but the short-term effect of this stress response is really positive. Adrenaline rises, cortisol rises, our heart rate increases, pumping more oxygen through our blood, which allows our muscles to respond faster. Our breathing also quickens, and our senses become sharper. This is a helpful reaction to the stressor at hand.

But prolonged stress can have negative effects. This is what we call chronic stress. Prolonged stress suppresses the immune system, making us more susceptible to illness. It can also raise blood sugar levels and contribute to anxiety, irritability, and other issues. Cortisol, in particular, plays a significant role in these long-term effects.

While this reactive system is crucial in times of immediate danger, chronic stress can lead to serious health issues. Suppressing our immune system is never a great thing. So when we’re talking about stress, particularly long-term stress, we’re looking at elevated cortisol levels and increased inflammation in the body. This can negatively affect our bodies and chronically affect our immune system, which leads to inflammation.

And that’s the focus of this particular podcast. I want to talk stress, in relation to multiple sclerosis, because that’s my personal experience. But I’m talking about all chronic autoimmune diseases, really. When stress impacts your immune system, it exacerbates immune dysfunction, increases disease activity, and negatively affects us emotionally and cognitively. Our overall well-being suffers.

We’re learning more every day, especially with the growing conversation around epigenetics and how stress affects our DNA, our hormones, and how this plays out in our bodies. So let’s go into that a little bit. I’m going to get a bit scientific, but not too much.

Stress activates various proteins, as I mentioned earlier. Stress impacts gene expression, which is particularly relevant in the context of multiple sclerosis, but it's relevant in all gene expression. From your DNA's coding, you have susceptibility to certain illnesses. For me, it's a susceptibility to developing MS, and there are many factors I’ve mentioned in my last few podcasts of 2024 that contribute to stress being one part of many factors.

But the effect we’re focusing on with MS is demyelination. Myelination is a complicated process, and I’m not going to get into it, but essentially it refers to how inflammation and the stress response affect our bodies. In MS, we talk about the body attacking itself, which results in the loss of myelin—the protective coating around our central nervous system. This myelin sheath helps ensure that the information traveling from the brain to the rest of the body doesn't get lost as it bounces along the central nervous system.

So, myelin is really important, and demyelination means we lose some of that myelin, causing information not to reach where it’s supposed to go. Chronic stress increases cortisol, which over time impairs our immune system and its ability to regulate itself. This is why we need to pay attention to stress in our lives and try to reduce immune system dysregulation.

Oh my god, I couldn’t even say that. Dysregulation—I don’t know! I know it’s a word I love to use, but it needs no real explanation other than it means we’re not bloody working properly. So, specifically with MS, stress-induced immune dysregulation can cause what we refer to as attacks, which primarily target the myelin.

But these attacks are not limited to that inflammation marker. The immune system becomes overactive and amplifies our immune response—inflammatory responses, I should say—which ultimately worsens the disease. When you’re having an attack, every symptom you may have experienced in the past can come back all at once, and it can be very debilitating.

But this pattern isn’t exclusive to MS. Many inflammatory diseases, though they may present differently externally, are internally similar. They involve the overproduction of immune cells and the disruption of the immune system’s balance. We really have to remain aware of this because epigenetics and the influence of gene expression are now much better understood than when I was studying genetics back in the '80s when the human genome was being mapped.

At that time, we believed that by mapping the genome, we would understand our genetic makeup and could predict how our body would function in the future and which diseases we would develop. In a small way, we were right. However, we now know that genetically based diseases, especially those expressed at birth, account for really only 2-5% of all diseases. Many, or most, diseases develop over time, influenced by our environment, hormonal changes, lifestyle choices, and stress. These mechanisms affect our gene expression in ways we didn’t fully understand back when I was studying genetics.

But in autoimmune disease, the immune system mistakenly attacks the body’s own tissues, and stress can trigger or exacerbate this autoimmune response by disrupting immune system regulation, causing immune system dysregulation. Chronic stress leads to an increased production of these inflammatory cytokines. But, let’s face it, stress is part of life. You know? And when you’re battling an autoimmune disease, it’s incredibly challenging because you can’t really live in a bubble. You can’t sit in your bedroom and listen to calming music or enjoy nature’s beauty while hoping the stresses will disappear.

Although, that might also be nice and could help. We can’t eliminate stress from our lives completely. It’s a natural part of our system and can have a positive effect in certain situations. The real challenge is reducing the long-term stress—the chronic stress. Sometimes it can take a long time to get your head around what the chronic, long-term stresses are in your life.

And I’ve said "stress" a lot, so maybe this could be making you feel stressed just hearing me say it over and over. I apologize for that. But we do have to face this head-on. We need to look in the mirror and acknowledge that our environment can trigger our disease. We have to get really real about that.

It was a life changer for me when I became bodily aware that we have a big influence on our disease progression. We have to ask, what can we adjust? What can you adjust? What do you think you can remove or reduce in your environment to minimize stress and stop the release of these inflammatory proteins in your body?

It can take a big mindset shift.

So, I’ll give you a bit of my own personal mindset shift on my journey of discovery to find the hidden pieces of what had gone wrong, you know? What changed in my body to allow for this inflammation or disease condition to be so prominent? I came across a book called Stop Saying You're Fine by Mel Robbins.

Stop Saying You're Fine—such a strange thing for me to think about at the time, because I was so independent and, well, bloody-minded, really, I guess. But Mel Robbins is an author and expert on mindset, motivation, and behavioral changer, and the book I read really stopped me in my tracks. It encouraged change related to procrastination and all sorts of other things, and she also talks about the five-second rule, which is a great idea. But I was challenged by the concept that maybe my stubborn abstinence and bloody-mindedness—my overriding determination to be independent and self-sufficient—could have been part of my undoing, you know?

It really made me take stock, and it definitely shifted my direction. I had to stop pretending that everything was okay. And eventually, I had to learn to ask for help. So, I’ll come back to the help thing because that was really freaking difficult for me. But around the same time, I discovered and read a book called You Are the Placebo by Dr. Joe Dispenza, and this book just really hit home and backed up Mel Robbins' research and her book.

This book was really helpful because it empowered me to understand the times of change required in life to remove some of the stresses and take charge—to really own that you are, or I was, responsible for change. The title says it: You Are the Placebo. You are the placebo for change. And you’re really powerful.

I’m going to say that again: You are really powerful. Changing and setting up your life for less stress is not always easy, but it really is possible. Now, I’m going to put all the references to these books in the show notes, but I think it’s really important to give you some understanding that I didn’t come to all of these conclusions on my own.

There is information out there on the internet, and there are fabulous books to read that help shift and change your approach to your life. So, where was I? Oh yes, battling an autoimmune disease and the challenge of it. Some of the obvious stresses include, when I looked at my life, relationships, finances, neighbors, climate change, the nightly news, for goodness' sake, and world politics. Excuse me, but that's just mind-bogglingly stressful if you get too involved in it.

I could break all of this down individually, but the approach remains the same: reduce or remove the things that cause chronic stress, especially the things you can’t do anything about. But it's important to remove or reduce the things that you can control.

We don’t always control the stress in our lives, but we do control some aspects. And it’s easier to make these changes than you might think. When you look in the mirror and take ownership of your future, you’ll realize that you’re not alone. Your destiny is in your hands. If you want to overcome these challenges, you’ll need to ask yourself some tough questions and make some really difficult decisions.

Some changes might be major life adjustments, but not all of them. Some will be easy—especially because we are intertwined with other people and situations, triggers, and so on. If one of your major stresses is your job, look, it’s easy for me to say just quit. Just quit your job, and you’ll be better off.

And look, I believe that’s ultimately the right advice, but if your job’s causing you stress, I want to say just find another one. Again, making these changes is far from simple. Removing the source of stress in our lives isn’t always easy. But as the saying goes, no one ever said life would be easy. If you have created a list of things that you are very aware of causing stress in your life, it’s time to take bold action.

Now, obviously, if your list includes stress from a relationship, that might require a bit more thought and, long-term, if the stress is coming from your children, you’re not going to leave them behind. But it’s really time to sit down and have those hard conversations with people who are your triggers.

You know, try to negotiate or maneuver a way to reduce or eliminate these stresses, okay? Especially in the case of a family, because you spend so much time there. Your job is another area, and your job will require a different approach. It may mean you recognize that you need a longer-term plan because we all need the income that our jobs provide.

So maybe that’s something that’s a long-term goal: to remove yourself from this stress. If you look at your finances and feel you can leave straight away, go for it! It’s so good for you. But, you know, we have mortgages, school fees, bills, rent to pay... so I am honoring the fact that it could take a much longer time to make such a shift.

There are issues of priority—what is the priority? Are you the priority? Are you truly looking into removing this disease from your life? Are you capable of imagining a life without it? If you’ve just been diagnosed and have very few symptoms, and you're in the early stages, it’s time to address the little stresses and see which ones you can change. Some of these could become big stresses and ultimately trigger the disease.

I don’t know what the answer is for you, but there are solutions, and they’re really important. When you put your hand up and say, I’m as important as my family, I am as important as my job, I am important, and I really matter, you shift. You shift your attitude and take baby steps, action, big steps, bold movements, subtle changes—all these things will help you see massive change.

They’re all about de-stressing. Some of us find it really hard to stand up for ourselves or say what we want because we think people won’t like us or will ignore us or leave us. But I just have to say, no one travels with you from the start to the end completely.

From birth to death, you are the key, the consistent part of this story. You are the most vital character in this story, and you are freaking important. So it’s really, really okay for you to say, It’s my time, and I need to make a shift.

One thing I’ve talked about before is the importance of asking for help. This is where change can happen quite remarkably when you seek support—it can make a huge difference. Some of the support is external, but some of it comes from within. Ask yourself: What do I need? What do I need to get through the day? Where do I see myself in 10 years' time? Do I like what I see?

Changes... And look, some of these things for support require finances, and I know I’ve been in times where I’ve had zero finances for seeking outside support, counseling, or considering going. But in Australia, and that’s where I’m recording, I know there’ll be people listening from outside of Australia, and you may very well have a similar setup or version of the same setup. But you can, in Australia, go to your GP and say, Look, I’m really not coping, and get six sessions of counseling through your GP, which can be extended to 12 if you have a good relationship with your GP. And it’s free.

But you need to ask for it. That goes back to asking for help. And don't be afraid to ask for help. I mean, I was terrible at it. I won’t lie to you—I was absolutely awful at putting my hand up and saying, I’m not coping. I think it was part of my persona, part of my job, part of my status in my family.

I was afraid, really, to ask for help, but asking for help doesn't mean you're less capable. It’s a strange thing to say, but it doesn’t. In fact, it’s much more sensible than stubbornly trying to do everything on your own. You know, the old stiff-upper-lip, she’ll be right, mate attitude? That’s just not ultimately the best approach for the individual, and those mindsets often lead to ignoring real issues.

So if stress is overwhelming, start with some small steps, but begin with something simple. You know, simple things like movement and breathwork—I’ve mentioned them before.

Keep it simple. I can’t stress enough how freeing it is to just go for a walk. I mean, don’t always put a podcast or music in your ears. Sometimes just walk in silence and appreciate the moment. But if you live somewhere really noisy and walking outside is more stressful than calming, sure, put some calming music in your ears.

And if that drives you stir-crazy, put something more energetic on. I don’t know, whatever keeps you calm, whatever makes you happy, whatever releases the stress. Just do it! That’s what I can say. Whatever helps you calm your farm, just do it. And don’t put it off. Don’t put it off until tomorrow, because every day has got a tomorrow. Don’t put it off until tomorrow—do it now. Just a simple, simple thing for yourself. Do it now and start with the free things: walking, breathing exercises, or mindfulness. You know, breathwork and meditation—you can find breathing techniques and mindfulness resources online easily.

Here’s a little segue: Back in the day, before we were all glued to our phones, mindfulness was just something we did naturally. Think of it like this—when you made a date to meet a friend at a café or on a street corner, and they weren’t exactly on time, you didn’t have the option to call them. You didn’t constantly check your phone. You might have checked your watch a bit, and sure, sometimes they were 15, 20, or 30 minutes late, and you might have been a bit impatient or frustrated. Sometimes, they didn’t show up at all, but that was unusual because we were all very committed to the fact that we didn’t have these immediate communications. So we made plans, and we stuck to them.

But in that moment where you were waiting for your friend, you had to be in the moment. You were mindful. Mindfulness came naturally. Many years ago, and I’m in my 50s, so for me, it feels like mindfulness was just a part of my life because I grew up through the invention of computers, the internet, and mobile phones—all this stuff that makes us a bit edgy when things don’t go our way immediately.

When you were waiting for that person, you had to stay in the moment—look around, breathe, maybe just take a lap wherever you were waiting. And maybe you did pace, but you were still in the moment. And that’s the essence of mindfulness. Breathing, walking in nature, and exercising are all excellent ways to lower stress. 

We all know exercise is great for relieving stress. When you’re part of a team or doing that thing you choose to do for an hour or half an hour, you have to focus on the exercise. If you’re lifting weights, you’ve got to focus on not dropping them on your toes. Or if you're in a team, you’ve got to be really focused because you could let everyone down. In that moment of focus, you’re not thinking about your job, your children, your relationships, or your neighbors.

You’re in the moment!

So exercise is not just a nice-to-have or something nice to do—it’s vital. It’s vital to help us remove stress, but it’s also vital for the other movement pathways in your body.

Now, I’ll go back to MS. They might tell you it’s chronic, incurable, and progressive. While it’s true that it can be this and it can be unpredictable (well, in fact, it is unpredictable), it’s not true that you have no control over your prognosis. It’s not true that you have no input into the future path of these illnesses. Yes, being diagnosed with MS was really tough. It’s a rollercoaster. I’ve had so many cycles—ups and downs, fear and anger, and all sorts of emotions. But if you step back and look at it, you can control the progression of the disease.

You can influence where you’ll be in two years, five years—that’s your choice. That is your choice. If the environment affects the expression of this illness from your DNA, then you can also affect it in a positive way. Consciously, it wasn’t your choice to get this disease—and I’m not going to get too esoteric here—but your subconscious choices still play a part. It’s vital that we look at your conscious choices. You didn’t wake up one day and think, ‘Oh, I’m a bit bored. Let me get an autoimmune disease’. Or ‘I want my life to go in a completely different direction’, but it is here, and it is yours. And no one can take it from you but you. You don’t need to engage in self-flagellation or say to yourself, Why did I deserve this?

This disease is here. And it’s really important moving forward to reduce stress where you can. And I’m going to say it—forgive yourself. Please forgive yourself. Not just for the disease expression, but for everything. You know, life is a learning journey. We don’t get born with all the answers, but you can turn the tide and gain greater control in the future. Absolutely!. Will it be easy? I’m not going to say it will be easy. I’ve had to make some pretty radical shifts in my life over the past 30 years. But it is possible, and it’s the only choice you can make to improve your future, because if you continue to do today what you did in the past, your future will likely play out in the same predictable way. Now, that’s said in many philosophies about taking control of your life, but it’s very true. Life can’t change if you do today the same thing you’ll do tomorrow. The stress we place on ourselves—more than the stress that others place on us—is something we need to address. We need to make changes.

Can we make baby steps to reduce the stress outside, the forces that we put on our mental stability? Can we? Could we do it together? Yes. And if one of your stresses is something like world politics or whatever you see on the news every night, do you know what your control of that is? You can’t control the murders, the wars, the sadness, or the accidents. You can’t control that, but do you know what you can control? Don’t watch it. Turn your television off. And really, really—you're still going to stay in the knowledge of what's happening around you. There’s no way you won’t know about some big political event or natural disaster. These days, we get messages on our phones when there’s a fire, a flood, or something like that.

We’ve just come out of a global pandemic. A ton of stress was put on us then, and I was really fortunate during the pandemic to be living in far north Queensland. Our situation up there was ridiculously easy, although it stressed a lot of people. Relatively, it was hard, but most of my family were in Melbourne, and through Zoom calls and telephone calls with my friends who live down there, I knew how stressful it was. I just didn’t watch the news.

In fact, I’ll tell you a secret—I haven’t had a television for at least, oh gosh, 30 years. I’ve sometimes lived in places where the television was there, but it’s just not my go-to. So, apart from anything else, the constant noise that television creates and all the advertising—that is another story I’ll share with you about the fun parts of raising my child without television. But that’s one simple thing you can control—don’t listen to the horribleness. Don’t watch those horrendous, horrible movies that put your unconscious mind into a horrible state of sadness. Turn it off!

In fact, in my house, I banned talking about COVID. I had a little note on the door that said, This is a COVID-free talk zone. I stayed proactive, stayed physically active, and, from a young age, I’ve been quite aware that I’m responsible for my health and well-being. Even though I had a lifestyle that allowed this disease to be expressed, now I’m living with it and trying to reverse it. But I’m probably fitter and healthier now than a lot of people my age, and I know some people in a very similar situation who aren’t doing as well. Oh my goodness, lucky me!

I’ve just seen the time. I think I’d better wrap it up now. Is this a bad place to leave you? It could be that we haven’t tied up all the loose ends, but part two is coming in a very short period of time. I think it’s a really important topic.

This is the last time I’ll say the word stress, but stress and how it affects your body. In the second part, I’m going to give you more ways to cope and share some examples and helpful hints. So for now, thank you very much for listening.

As always, I’m really proud of you for coming on this journey with me. Thank you for traveling down the Inflammation Superhighway. And until we meet again, stay safe, stay strong, and try not to stress too much. Take some baby steps, love yourself, be kind to yourself a little bit more, and I’ll see you soon.

In the meantime, enjoy the ride!