Welcome back to another episode of health hacks as I start a whole new theme now for the rest of this month, focused on stress. Did you know that 90% of all doctors visits are due to stress, and 65% of all disease are caused by stress, and as a result, I just want to take you through a myriad of different ways that stress is impacting your health, and steps that you can take to do something about that. When it comes to stress, we have different types of stress in our life. We've got work stress, we've got family stress, we've got, you know, children's stress, we've got stress coming at us from what seems like all directions. And there are some things where we can impact and reduce our stress, and then there's some areas where we don't have as much control. And so it's all about focusing on the areas where you do have control in order to be reducing the stress in your life. And the body is all interconnected. And so when I said earlier that 90% of all doctors visits are due to stress, and 65% of all disease are caused by stress, I also want to know is what is causing that stress, so that we can then address the areas that we have control over in order to lower that stress. So let's start off with stress weakens your immune system, and I know you don't want that because, of course, you want a strong immune system to be able to fight off illness and infections, and yet, when we are living in a place of chronic stress, it is suppressing our immune system, and that's because our immune system takes a lot of energy to operate. And when we are in that place of chronic stress, all our brain can think about is that we are in fight or flight. We have to get away from the lion or the tiger. So we need energy in order to run and get to safety. And so all of the body systems are going towards producing more cortisol, more adrenaline in order to allow you to do that, and it will shut down other systems that take energy, such as your immune system, your digestive system, etc. And so this is why, when we are under high stress, our immune system gets shut down and suppressed, and then that can make you more susceptible to illness and infection. So what can you do? Well? You can practice deep breathing. And I know that might sound too simple, too easy, we have our breath with us all the time. We absolutely take it for granted, and yet we shouldn't, however we do, right? And so one of the things that I want to share here is the fact that we can absolutely use our breath in order to just calm ourselves in the moment, in the here and now as we feel our stress level rise. And my favorite way of doing this is something called 557, breathing. And I have done a whole health hack on this in the past, and I will link it up in the show notes below, so that you can also check out that episode. And basically, what you're doing is you're inhaling for a count of five, holding your breath for a count of five, and then exhaling for a count of seven. And you do that for 10 cycles, it takes you less than three minutes. And it is incredible how when you do that, it just calms your entire nervous system and you feel the difference. You truly feel the difference. And as a result, that is one way that you can very easily, anytime, anywhere, and it doesn't cost you anything. Just calm your nervous system when you feel your stress level going up, so that you can control what you can control, and that is your breath and bring your stress levels down to get back into a place of more calm in order to protect your immune system. And over the course of the rest of this month, I'm going to continue sharing ways that you can mitigate your stress as well as how stress is impacting your health, so that you have an understanding of that correlation between your stress today and your ongoing stress that you live in every single day, and how that is impacting your long term health, along with the tools in order to be able to take small, simple action steps to mitigate that stress and calm yourself so that you don't end up with a. Diagnosis of disease at some point later in life. So keep tuning in throughout this month as I share all of these tips with you.