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This post is an installment in our 52 Health Hinges series. Remember, “Small hinges swing big doors.”

[Partially adapted from an article by Dr. John Douillard]

Lately, I’ve recognized that stress affects me more than I once realized.

I used to shrug off such an accusation; I was so accustomed to the high level of stress that I was willing to plow through anything that was thrown at me. Even when my health was impacted, it was just one more problem that I put on my plate to manage.

I could do it all! Except that I couldn’t.

It took me a long time to get to the point where I can keep my stress in check. Now that I’ve got a handle on it, I can clearly see how important it is to overall health.

As Jill G. said in her Huffington Post article, “Chronic, overwhelming stress, including historic stress, is thought to be the most significant plague of modern life.”

Dr. Mark Hyman states that 95 percent of all illness is caused or worsened by stress.

Have you been doing “all of the right things” but are having a hard time meeting your health goals? Well, maybe it’s time to dig deeper, to uncover your root cause.

Today, let’s dig into stress, and how stress may be impacting your health (including your weight).

A few months ago, I introduced you to cortisol, the “stress hormone,” in regard to eating (or not eating) breakfast.

As a reminder, cortisol is a hormone produced in the adrenal glands, and it triggers a stress response, also known as “fight or flight.” If you were being chased by a lion, the adrenals would produce the right amount of cortisol to give you the instant energy you’d need to save your life – hopefully!

Cortisol also does a few other things that made great sense for ancient humans, but poses problems for humans today.

It causes the liver and fats cells (mostly around the belly) to release sugar or glucose into the bloodstream, raise heart rate, raise blood pressure, make you hungry, and interrupt sleep.

In discussing blood sugar, heart health, sleep, and cravings, you’re describing the majority of health concerns we see in the United States today – all related to cortisol production.

Fortunately for ancient humans, being chased by a lion wasn’t a daily occurrence, or at least we presume that it wasn’t. Today, with overcommmited lifestyles being the norm, stressors are steady, chronic, and constant, which can keep cortisol levels elevated for weeks and months at a time.

Cortisol triggers cravings for comfort foods and releases extra glucose (sugar) into the bloodstream. This in turn triggers the release of excess insulin. While insulin is trying to drive glucose into the cells, chronic stress delivers way more glucose than we need.

The result: the excess glucose gets stored in its favorites spots: hip and belly fat (visceral fat), which is four times more sensitive to cortisol than the fat under the skin (subcutaneous fat).

As if this weren’t bad enough, chronically high insulin levels tell the brain not to release another hormone called leptin, which tells the body to stop eating. Without leptin, the brain gets a starvation message that drives us to crave quick-energy comfort foods that overshoot the energy runway and end up being stored as fat.

This starvation response in turn sends a message to spare any reserve energy by being less active, which is also linked to fat storing.

Chronically high cortisol levels are also related to poor sleep quality. Lack of sleep triggers the release of the “hunger hormone” called ghrelin. In the absence of regular sleep, the stomach and pancreas produce ghrelin to stimulate appetite, often resulting in weight gain.

Bottom line: We aren’t wired to thrive on long term, constant, and chronic stress.

Give yourself a break. I’ll share some tips to unwind in future Health Hinges, but I’ll start here:

Say no. Don’t overcommit. Release yourself from unnecessarily obligations that don’t serve you. You don’t have to do it all.