Anxiety and Your Immune System
Many people don't realize how much stress and anxiety affect our immune system. While exercise in moderate doses increases, our immunity, long or hard training, can actually negatively affect your immune system. During particularly taxing workouts or races, your body is flooded with hormones such as cortisol (aka the stress hormone). Cortisol is the primary hormone in our body's fight or flight response. The fight or flight response is what helps keep you alive in the face of danger, such as when you are being chased by a tiger. It helps you through catastrophic circumstances. Even though you probably aren't being chased by a tiger (if you are, we need to talk), that doesn't mean your fight or flight response remains inactive. Psychological and mental stress can activate this stress response. Your brain perceives psychological stress, such as giving presentations at work or going into a hard competition, the same as it does being chased by a jungle cat. It doesn't matter that only one of these things is indeed a matter of life or death- our brains perceive them to be equally dangerous.
Before we get more into why all of this matters and what you can do about it, I want to give you a little more science to really understand what I'm talking about. So… Your sympathetic nervous system is responsible for the fight or flight response. Most of you have probably heard of the fight or flight response. Some of this state's common indicators include elevated heart rate, butterflies in your stomach, rapid breathing, increased sweating, needing to go to the bathroom, and/or feeling jittery. But did you know that there is a counter-response that is responsible for maintaining homeostasis in your body? This is called rest and digest and is controlled by your parasympathetic nervous system. Together, the sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system work to keep you alive and healthy. The key here is that they have to work together. Suppose you are noticing your body constantly reacting to everyday stress. In that case, this could indicate that your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system are out of sync.
So why does this matter? Elevated cortisol levels caused by being in a state of fight or flight can lead to physiological changes. For example, cortisol increases your appetite to want to eat more to have more energy. It all comes back to trying to keep you alive. When your appetite grows, you want to eat more, and more food will give you more energy to run away from that tiger. Cortisol is also responsible for regulating blood sugar and electrolytes and controls inflammation in our bodies. When we train hard, we stress our bodies. Hard training is not a bad thing, not even close to it. When we train too hard and don't allow enough recovery to lower our cortisol levels, we train too hard. You can think of hard training or racing as activating the fight or flight response and easy workouts such as active recovery sleeping, triggering the rest, and digesting response.
Understanding how cortisol affects your body is an integral part of training and competing. Still, I would argue that it is absolutely essential right now. Most of us are experiencing higher levels of anxiety and stress than usual due to all of the uncertainty brought about by the Coronavirus. Schools are closed, athletic seasons are canceled, people are out of work, our country is seemingly shut down. Nobody really knows when "normal" life will resume. All of this uncertainty is raising our cortisol levels. Remember earlier when we established that hard workouts also elevate our cortisol levels? Now we are getting cortisol from hard workouts and worrying about the state of the world.
So here's the deal: the point of this article is in no way to discourage you from doing hard workouts. Taking extra measures to recover will help lower your cortisol levels post-workout, which in turn helps keep your immune system functioning correctly. Most of us know that we need to balance hard training with easier sessions to recover. That is a big part of this puzzle. If you work with a coach, stick with the plan they are giving you and communicate regularly about how you are feeling.
However, something important to note is that activating the parasympathetic (rest and digest) nervous system takes longer than the sympathetic (fight or flight) nervous system. Also of note is that healing and resting cannot take place when survival hormones are coursing through your body. What this means is that you have to work extra hard at relaxing. You have to make a conscious effort to slow down.
Need some ideas for how to "rest and digest"?
Practice gratitude
Sleep, sleep, sleep!
Slow, deep breaths
Nourish your body through food and water
Yoga
Spending time in nature
Meditation
Recognizing both thoughts and actions that cause stress and work on eliminating as many as possible