Welcome back to another episode of health hacks as I continue talking about stress and how it affects your health and your life. And one of the things that stress does is it impacts your mood, and you can feel more irritable. You can be much more short tempered and with prolonged stress, it can actually contribute towards the development of anxiety and depression, affecting mental health, and part of that can be triggered by what stress is doing to the health of your gut, which is causing an imbalance in the health of your gut as it breaks down the good bacteria, and it leaves this imbalance, which then impacts your body's ability to produce serotonin, and which is your feel good hormone. And 90% of serotonin is made in the gut. And if the gut isn't healthy and your body can't produce enough serotonin, then that can be one of the triggers of anxiety, feelings of anxiety and depression. So I realized stress isn't the only cause of anxiety, depression and mental health issues, however, it is one of them, and when we lower our stress, we can actually start to mitigate some of those symptoms. So as I've been doing throughout this series, I talk about what stress is doing or causing in terms of your health, and give you a suggestion as to how you can mitigate the stress in your life. And in relation to this, it's staying connected with loved ones. And that doesn't just mean family. That means friends as well. The family you get to choose very often, those are the ones that you need in the time of really high stress. Sometimes it's our very own family members that can trigger high stress, and so you need the other chosen family to support you, and so, spending time with them, sharing what you're going through with them, having them, you know, listen and just be there for you and you being able to simply receive support can go a really long way in helping to mitigate the stress that You are under, and helping, therefore, you to be able to stay in a place of a happier, feel good mood, you know, as when we can share our burdens, when we can unburden ourselves, even if we're not sharing them with others, we're simply going through the process of unburdening them ourselves. We can stand taller, stand prouder, and sometimes that's all it takes, is just talking with another human being. That connection is so important. So I hope this is helpful to you, if you're in that place and you're needing more support with your mental health, and absolutely reach out to the myriad of services that are available through government bodies, etc. If you're in a place where you would just like to understand where your cortisol levels are at, how it's impacting your energy, impacting your health, then please reach out. I would be happy to have a conversation with you, talk about the various lab testing that we can do and support you in rebalancing your cortisol levels and bringing you to a place of a happier life with less stress.