Chronic stress makes your body secrete cortisol, which suppresses sleep and muscle-growing hormones.
Excessive stress hormones can overburden melatonin production and wreck sleep. And this problem is more significant today because cell phones and 24-hour emails means work never stops. This forces us to be awake and alert when we should be asleep, and it messes with our natural circadian flow of stress.
Since there's no such thing as a 9-5 work day anymore, we secrete cortisol chronically. This suppresses sleep and muscle-building hormones (GH and testosterone), which promotes inflammation and insulin resistance and raises our risk of metabolic dysfunction.
Stress is supposed to be a short and infrequent reaction, designed to help us run fast, jump high, and be strong when our life is in danger. It's not supposed to linger with us all day as a reaction to bumper-to-bumper traffic, social media trolls, and urgent late-night emails.
This chronic stress and over-stimulation keeps us up at night, and not sleeping properly only exacerbates the problem. We don't produce enough melatonin to inhibit the stress production in the adrenals or enough GABA to turn off the over-stimulated neurons in our brain. This makes us sleep like crap and feel even more stressed the following day.
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