hi my name's rob i'm from active health clinic and in this video i'm going to talk about stress um allostasis and allostatic load i appreciate these words might not make any sense to you right now but they will so um stress stress is something that we all experience um and i suppose that word is a little bit loose but basically it's something that um is in every day and it's not always a bad thing it's something that we basically need to survive in small doses but it can get out of hand and i'll just explain how that can lead to chronic health conditions so in our bodies we've all got like a set point about how things function so things about things like our heart rate our breathing rate our digestive rate our metabolic rate uh what have i not mentioned our blood pressure so all of these things have kind of like a set point okay and that's what we call homeostasis so when our body is operating at that set point nothing's really pushing it around then we're said to be in our homeostatic zone now things that can alter our homeostasis are challenges or stresses in life so if we've got i'm just going to draw this if we've got some stresses that just temporarily alters our homeostasis so let's just say for example we need to stand up and walk somewhere that's going to nudge our heart rate and our blood pressure up a little bit to enable us to do that now i'm just going to throw and introduce a new word called allostasis that is our body's ability to actually move from homeostasis into um a bit more of a to rise to a challenge basically so whenever we have something that stresses or challenges our body allostasis is taking place now that's completely fine as long as we have a period of recovery afterwards to return to homeostasis here and here but where things can go wrong is if we actually don't have enough ability to recover or if our recovery is inadequate okay what happens there is that stress can start to accumulate and you can see that happening here so we've got our homeostatic set point along this line but certain stresses in our lives might be accumulating and preventing us from totally resting so our body is always looking out for ways to adapt and become more in tune with the world around us and rise to needs and challenges so it will upregulate our homeostasis if it if our body detects that our life is just constantly full of stress and we're not really recovering properly so this might mean a chronic state of increased heart rate or increased blood pressure or an increase just stress arousal basically and this can lead to our body learning a new set point and this is called the difference between that set point and the original one is called allostatic load so that build up of stress in our lives now what does this actually have to do with chronic illnesses well we've actually got a very finite amount of or ability to have stress in our lives so once we reach that that the end of our capacity our body is likely to end up in dysfunction and that can show up as chronic fatigue or it can show up as chronic pain or pots and all mental health conditions as well so i hope that that has provided some explanation as to you know why or what stress has to do with these sorts of conditions and if you have found this useful please have a look at our other videos there are a couple of other videos around this sort of theme on our youtube