As the world slowly re-awakens many of us will find ourselves in more high pressure situations than we had been in for a while. With or without COVID-19 in our lives pressure is unavoidable. It is an everyday part of life that we all have to deal with. Quite often we are experiencing pressure on a daily basis and often multiple times a day. For a long time we have lived lives where pressure comes at you from everywhere. Internal and external pressures placed on us along with being time poor are a recipe for overwhelm and for many people the cracks show in the form of poor mental and physical health outcomes, regardless of age.
From the pressure to meet deadlines, perform and earn that promotion, earn money, parent well and/or meet others expectations placed on us, we find ourselves living in a mental pressure cooker environment that wears us down if we don’t support our bodies to withstand it.
How we deal with pressure is what determines how productive, resilient, capable and ultimately how happy we are. In manageable doses it motivates, inspires and helps us achieve great things. As the Philosopher Thomas Carlyle said, "No pressure, no diamonds”. However, too much pressure for too long breaks us.
By transforming our biochemistry and in turn our mindset we can withstand the demanding pressures life places on us and that we place on ourselves.
How can we truly face high pressure moments and deal with them the best you can when we don’t have the foundations of biochemistry in place? If we are under or over releasing cortisol, our body’s stress hormones are not well placed to deal with high pressure situations. When our nervous system is not pitched at optimal and instead is primed to tip into survival mode at any given moment we are going to struggle when the pressure is on.
If we experience imbalances of neurotransmitters like adrenaline, noradrenaline, serotonin, dopamine, GABA, histamine, NMDA and/or glutamate then we are going to struggle when we are under pressure.
And how can we perform under pressure if we don’t have optimal levels of nutrients like iron, zinc, magnesium, vitamin B2, vitamin B3, vitamin B6, vitamin B12, folate, glutamine, tryptophan and tyrosine to assist in helping our body mount a healthy mental and emotional response? All of these vitamins, minerals and amino acids are involved in the production of neurotransmitters and stress response that help us perform well under pressure.
In order to begin to be pressure proof examining our underlying biochemistry is a fantastic starting point.