Welcome to Healthy Ish. Thank you for tuning into this daily podcast from Body and Soul. I am Felicity Halle. Tell me how conscious are you of your quarter soul levels throughout the day? Are you tapped into them? Do you need a bit of a hand? I'm joined today by Sheena Shuey. She's a therapist and business mentor specializing in burnout and anxiety, and she's going to discuss why everyone is obsessed with quarter sol levels right now and how you can tap into yours and in turn lower
them to reduce your overall stress. Now. I also recommend you listen to our sister pod, Extra Healthy Issue, where Sena talks about the difference between burnout versus anxiety and what to do if you fall into either of those camps. You can grab that wherever you get your podcasts. Shena, thank you for joining us on the podcast us today. Oh so happy to be here now. Codasol, I feel like this is such a buzzword at the moment. I mean,
I mean on social media, everyone's talking about it. I feel like we used to talk about stress and now it's about what are your cortisol levels doing?
What?
I mean, why are we so obsessed with this.
Yeah, I've seen it. Two cortisol diets, the TikTok trends, you know, all of that. I think the real reason, to be honest, is that cortisole. You know, a lot of us have known about it for such a long time. But I think you know as well, this gurus start to discover the word, they try to legitimize what they do by using the proper words and all of that. So I think that that's part of why it's so in the mainstream of like, oh, my cortisol levels is so high. But also I think it actually is an
important issue. So cortisol is that stress chemical that is released when we've got high levels of stress, high levels of anxiety. But what we have discovered from neuroscience over the last ten to twenty years that corterzole actually does damage the brain, and it actually does damage the nervous system.
Oh interesting, So too much of it can damage that in the long term. Is that is that over a period of time. I mean, obviously we need corterzole. I mean we need our stress response to trigger. I mean, that's how I've evolved, isn't it. So over time this can happen.
Yeah. So an example that we often give is going back to the hunter gatherer days. You know, we needed that corterzole to fight the tiger, to run away from a predator, to run away from maybe another tribe who's coming in for attack. We needed sort of short bursts of lots of energy adrenaline, you know, that really kind of high anxiety feeling. We needed that to survive. So
obviously we needed those short bursts. Now we're having that same cortisole reaction over an email from your boss being like, hey, I need to talk to you later this afternoon. We're not reacting to the tiger. We're reacting to that. But I think it's also as well. You know, a really interesting statistic I share from Stolen Focus, the book by Johann Hari. It's amazing, but well, one of the stats I love from it is that he shares that in two thousand and seven, so this is still quite a
while ago, it would have increased by them. But back in two thousand and seven, we were getting one hundred and seventy four newspaper's worth of information in a day a day, and so obviously it would have gone up by now and I think that's what we need to understand too, is that not long ago, literally a generation ago, we didn't know what was happening in every single country in the world, every single country's problems, conflicts, And you know, it's hard because on the one hand, we want to
be educated, we want to be informed on world matters, but what can we do as individuals. It's that balance between being informed but reducing how much news and media we intake because it really does affect our quartersole levels. You know, those things, those little things stress us out.
I mean, I mean, I think that's a really important point. I mean the environment that we're in, I mean, in two thousand and seven, that is not long ago. I mean I met my husband in that year. I think it was two thousand and six. That wasn't long ago. And the environment was so different back then to what it is now. How and sometimes I think I feel like I'm just running on this high quartersole stress state
the whole time. Between everything that I'm doing. How can we better recognize in we're both our body and mind, because that's your specialty. Whether we're running on this quartersole high all of the time, or you know, where are we dipping or whether it's becoming concern.
Yeah. Absolutely so. I often tell my clients there's two states that we're in when we are feeling stress. There's a high per around state, which is really cortisole fueled, adrenaline fueled, and then there's a high po around state. So this is when you're so done, you're over it, you're shutting down. This is where the burnout depression, that kind of stuff starts to come in. But that adrenaline fueled state, it's when you're not cool, calm, collected, or connected.
That's what we try to say. So everyone has stress in their day, but let's say something. You've got a stressful text message right now. If you're not fueled by quartersole, like it's literally just normal stress, you'll be able to go, Okay, I've got a situation here, but that's okay, I'll respond to it. You're not reacting to it, you're responding to it. You're still able to go Okay, that's still stressful, but I can manage it. It's also you feel like connecting
with people. So often when we're we might be stressed, but we still feel like going to lunch with our colleagues or catching up with people after work. If we are hyper around, we tend to want to connect less. We're like, nah, I'm done with people today, Like I'm too a way too make Netflix. Yeah, that's and that's where you've been in high per state adrenaline fueled for so long that you end up dipping into the other state.
I talked about hypo where you're like, I'm done, And this is where we start to see a drenal fatigue burnout. It's where you've lived in that state for so long that your body almost can't produce it anymore. Your nervous system is literally frying, and it's like I can't keep going like this.
So what do we do? We feel like we are living in that state? I mean, what's is it just if we're living in that state? We feel like we're in that permanent state for a long period of time. What can we do to recognize the state and reduce in turn, reduce our cortisol levels bring us down to karmas of mind.
A lot of people forget what it's actually like to slow down and be calm, like their base level is already up at a ten. If you go, what's your normal state? They're like, I'm just I'm just high strung. I'm just like that, I'm type A all the time. But actually, when you do work with a therapist, not a life coach, not a mindset coach, a therapist, Right, So I'm talking psychologists, social worker, counselor what we look at is why do you feel the need to be
on all the time? What is driving that you know, because often the reason that we can't turn off shut down is often a worthiness thing. There might be attachment thing, there might be achievement as my self worth, maybe your identity is through work, Like you don't know who you are outside of doing things for other people at work, doing things as a mum, doing things as a whe whatever that might be. It's like, who are you outside
of all of that? And if you don't know the answer to that, you're probably trying to get your worth by serving others rather than serving yourself.
Yeah, some great questions there, very very point and I was like, yeah, yep, yep, Sheina, thank you for coming on healthy ish.
No worries it all.
Thanks listening to this chat with that Sheena. I hope it's shed some light on well cor asol levels and how They're showing up for you every day. Where are they at, How are you feeling right now? Questions to ask yourself, if you did enjoy it, if you've got something out of it, tell us, rate and review this podcast, Subscribe as well. Make sure you are so following Body and Soul on social media. Grow a print edition which
is out in your local Sunday paper. Body Andsoul dot com dot you is the place to go for more info. Have a great day and stay healthy ish