Stress and Parkinson’s: How Stress Worsens Symptoms and What You Can Do About It

You know, we're not talking about the vague, "Well, I'm kinda busy," but the real biological stress that makes your tremors increase.

It's gonna slow your movement, and sometimes it makes your brain feel like it's running through mud because you have trouble thinking.

So if you've ever, ever had a moment where life gets overwhelming, maybe you've had a tough conversation with somebody, you had a deadline that you had to meet, or maybe you're just sitting in traffic stuck somewhere, and then suddenly your tremor spikes and/or your feet freeze to the floor, you're really not imagining it.

Stress has a measurable biological impact on our Parkinson's symptoms.

So today, we're gonna break down exactly why stress has such a big effect on Parkinson's, and we're gonna use some of the strongest research that we have.

Then we'll talk about what you can do.

So I'm gonna give you some practical science-backed tools that you can start using today to protect your dopamine, calm your nervous system, and feel more in control.

Okay, so what is stress? Well, stress isn't just an emotion.

It's a full-body alarm system.

So when your brain senses a threat, physical, whether someone's coming after you, emotional, maybe you're worried about something, you're stressed over something that's coming up, or even social, maybe you have to stand up and give a presentation in front of people, it activates the HPA axis.

And you're saying, "Well, what is the HPA axis?" Well, the HPA axis stands for hippocampus-pituitary-adrenal axis, and what that does is it releases cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine.

And you might have heard of some of those as the fight or flight system where your body wants to flee.

Now, in most people, once the stress passes, the system is gonna reset itself.

But in Parkinson's, the brain's already working with a limited amount of dopamine, as we all know, so stress is gonna drain that dopamine even faster.

There's a study that it's-- that says that in brain that is already struggling with dopamine deficiency, the activation of this HPA axis can actually squeeze out and rapidly deplete the last remaining drops of your available dopamine.

And that comes from a major review that was titled An Integrated Review of Psychological Stress in Parkinson's Disease: Biological Mechanisms and Symptoms and Health Outcomes.

Now, that's a big mouthful.

And it was published in the Journal of Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry by Dr. Elizabeth Hemerell and colleagues back in 2016.

And what the, the review did is it pulled together decades of research on stress and Parkinson's, and what it showed was that stress rapidly depletes dopamine.

It activates microglia, that's your brain's immune cells, which can cause neuroinflammation and increase oxidative stress as well.

And it also places extra strain on your substantia nigra, and that's the very region that produces dopamine in our brain and w- which is already affected by Parkinson's.

So in other words, stress doesn't just feel bad.

It's gonna create a biological storm that directly impacts our Parkinson's symptoms.

And then there was another big study that was done, and it's some of the strongest clinical evidence that we have that stress has a big effect on Parkinson's.