Stress & the Inflammatory Response, What’s Really Happening in Our Body

Stress isn’t just a feeling, it’s a full-body event that hijacks your nervous system and fuels inflammation. In this episode, I share Gloria’s story, a midlife high achiever who looked fine on the outside but was running on empty inside, to show how stress messes with your HPA axis, weakens your vagus nerve and sets off the silent fire of chronic inflammation.

We’ll break down how your brain, gut, and immune system get caught in the crossfire and why that constant ‘I’m just stressed’ isn’t harmless small talk, it’s a warning sign.

Tune in to learn:

• Why stress hormones keep your body stuck in survival mode
• How chronic inflammation damages more than just your mood
• The role of the vagus nerve in calming your system
• What stress-driven inflammation really does to your brain and body

This is the truth about stress that nobody told you, but you need to hear.

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 Website: https://oliviabellco.com

I hope you find some time today for some peace, some plants and some paws!

☮️🌿🐾

Jo

Transcript

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Welcome to Untamed and Unfiltered Wellness, the podcast where we're tearing up the rule book of conventional wellness because one size fits all never fits anyone. I'm your host, Joe Swinson, integrative health coach, herbalist, and the CEO and founder of Olivia Bell, a comprehensive lifestyle wellness company. Let me paint a picture. I had a client. We're gonna call her Gloria. Gloria was a rock star at work, the one who never dropped the ball. She had some teenage kids at home, aging parents she checked on, and a spouse who traveled a lot. From the outside, it looked like Gloria had it all together. But on the inside, yeah, not so much. When Gloria reached out to me, she was exhausted and she was having problems sleeping. But as we started to talk and dive a little bit deeper, it turned out that she was experiencing a lot more than just exhaustion. It turns out she was having some gut issues. She had a rash, almost like hives, and explained that she was starting to experience some joint pain and frequent headaches. So when I asked her what she thought was going on, her response was, it's probably just stress, but you know, once things calm down, I'm sure I'll be fine. Here's what I told Gloria. Stress doesn't just disappear when life gets easier. That's why I always tell people it's really important to downshift your nervous system, to find a way to manage your stress. When we raise our stress level from a normal level to a high level, then it stays at the high level and that becomes our new norm. One of the biggest ways it shows up in our bodies is through inflammation. And that's what we're going to break down today. Inflammation is your body's built-in defense system. It's how your immune system responds to injury, infection, or stress, kind of like a security alarm. When things seem off, your body will send out chemical signals, cytokines, white blood cells, other immune messengers to protect and repair. There's two kinds of inflammation: short-term and long-term. The short term is acute inflammation. That's the helpful stuff. When you get a cut on your finger and the cut will turn red, maybe get a little warm and start to swell, that's your immune system rushing in to heal. Chronic inflammation is the long-term inflammation, and this stuff is quite harmful. When stress, poor sleep, a bad diet, or toxins keep triggering that alarm system, your body never fully shuts off. So instead of repairing, it starts to damage tissues and organs. Chronic inflammation has been linked to heart disease, gut problems, depression, hormone issues, and more. In Gloria's case, she was experiencing the gut inflammation, the skin rashes, and the headaches. Eventually, when I dove a little bit deeper, she was having a lot of joint pain. That's a common way for inflammation to show up in our bodies. The thing is, all those little things that she brushed off was actually her immune system on overdrive. Our stress response system can be triggered by anything from deadlines to teenage drama, the same way it can be triggered when we are in danger. Our HPA axis is the stress system that floods our bodies with cortisol and adrenaline. That's fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. We think about those modes. Great if you're running from a bear, not so great when you're freaking out because your email box is overflowing. The HPA access wasn't built for the type of world that we're living in. The 24-7 notifications on our phones, emails, alarms, all these extra added responsibilities and technology. Life doesn't just let up. So our HPA axis keeps shifting into gear and flooding our bodies with cortisol and adrenaline. The constant activation is what scientists call allostatic load. That's the wear and tear that our body pays for being on high alert all the time. Here's where things get tricky. When cortisol and adrenaline keep pumping into our bodies, they don't just rub up our heart or our muscles. They start to mess with our immune system. It's like having a dripping faucet in the kitchen. At first it's no big deal, but we let that faucet drip for weeks and months. Over time, that sink is gonna fill up with water and eventually overflow. That's what chronic inflammation is. Our immune system turned on for too long. At first, inflammation is in protective mode. It's gonna heal the cuts, fight infections, but when it becomes chronic, it's like that dripping faucet. It never gets repaired, and finally it starts to overflow and slowly wreck the house. Our nervous system is stuck in the middle of this stress inflammation cycle. What does our body do? It activates the vagus nerve. That's that nerve that runs from our brain to our gut. It's our body's internal firefighter. It's gonna fight with a fire hose full of water and water pressure. The vagus nerve tells the immune system, hey, relax, I got this. But over time, if our stress is continual, that vagus nerve starts to lose something called vagal tone. It's like a fire hose running out of water pressure. What happens is the immune system can't stand down, it has to activate. That's how come it shows up in our bodies as joint pain, gut issues, headaches. Gloria was stuck in go, go, go mode. So the vagus nerve wasn't able to calm things down. Inflammation is not just relegated to our bodies, it actually impacts our brains too, and not just in headaches. Those inflammatory messengers I spoke about earlier, cytokines, alter your mood, focus, and even our brain structure, which is why chronic stress is often linked to depression and brain fog. Our prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that keeps us logical, kind of controls our emotions. If it goes offline because of chronic inflammation, our alarm system starts to blare. That's the amygdala, and we start to feel irritable, scattered, and not ourselves at all. Stress is a full-blown body event that rewires our nervous system. The HPA access, which controls our cortisol and our adrenaline, was built for short-term danger, not 24-7 stress and pressure. If you think about it, stress is gasoline and inflammation is the fire. When we're chronically stressed, we're pouring gasoline on a fire. Our bodies can't fight that fire with an empty fire hose. So it's really, really important that we start to listen to our bodies. When you're saying I'm stressed, your body has been feeling it for much longer than you realize. And what happens is mood, focus, memory, digestion, hormones, pain, all of that has been showing up. We just haven't been paying attention. This week, I want you to start listening to your bodies. Take a minute and start noting if you're feeling any signs of inflammation, whether that's through joint pain, maybe some brain fog. In next week's episode, I'm going to share how to flip the script on the stress inflammation cycle. We'll talk about practical, everyday ways you can calm your nervous system and strengthen your vagal tone. I'll share some herbal recommendations as well as some somatic healing practices. Be sure to visit our website or you can check out our blog and some herbal remedies in our Substack community. I hope you find time today for some peace, some plants, and some paws. Thank you so much for listening to Untamed and Unfiltered Wellness.