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.