The Balance Code for High Achievers
Welcome to the Balance Code for High Achievers Podcast! A place where you have permission to step outside the hamster wheel of day to day life and learn tools to create more balance.
The Balance Code for High Achievers
How Stress Impacts Your Body with Stephanie Pazniokas
Are you feeling the weight of stress impacting your health and well-being? In today's fast-paced world, it's easy to overlook the toll stress takes on our bodies. We push through fatigue, ignore aches and pains, and dismiss the subtle signs our bodies are sending us. But what if there's a deeper connection between stress and our physical health?
In this episode, I sit down with Stephanie Pazniokas, a trained psychobiologist and biochemistry expert. We dive into the hidden impact of stress on our bodies. Stephanie shares her personal journey of overcoming stress-induced health challenges and how she now empowers others to become the "CEO" of their own health.
In this insightful conversation, Sptehanie highlights the critical role of understanding inflammation as our body’s response to threats and imbalances, how chronic stress, unhealthy food choices, and environmental factors can contribute to a state of chronic inflammation and lead to disease. We delve into practical strategies for reducing stress and promoting healing, including mindful eating, oxytocin-boosting activities, and gentle movement. This episode is packed with valuable takeaways to help you understand the profound connection between stress and inflammation.
In this Episode:
- How stress triggers inflammation at a cellular level, affecting everything from your energy levels to your risk of chronic disease.
- Why common health advice often fails, and the importance of a personalized approach to wellness.
- What are the practical strategies for reducing stress and supporting your body’s natural healing mechanisms.
- Discover the role of the liver and the parasympathetic nervous system in stress recovery.
- How to become the "CEO" of your health and make empowered choices.
Connect with Stephanie:
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/sjphealthwell
FB Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/bethebossbewell
Free Offer 1: https://sjphealthandwellness.myflodesk.com/findyourenergyleak
Free Offer 2: https://sjphealthandwellness.myflodesk.com/top20tipsforsleep
Resources:
Couples Goal Setting Workbook
Complimentary Relationship Assessment
Couples Goal Setting Workbook
Complimentary Relationship Assessment
Follow Katie Rössler on Instagram
Check out the podcast website
Katie Rossler: Welcome back to the podcast. Today, we’re gonna be talking about stress, and not only stress, but how stress is impacting your body in the form of inflammation. Today, I have brought Stephanie Pazniokas, and we’re gonna be talking about all of these things that we know are going on in our body and we feel it. We see it, but we’re not talking about it in the detail that we need to, and how we can start making changes in our lives. Welcome to the Balance Code Podcast, a place for high achievers to step outside the hamster wheel of day-to-day life and start learning tools for more balance. I’m your host, Katie Rossler, and I will be guiding you on this journey of discovering your balance code.
Katie Rossler: So, Stephanie, thank you for being here. I am excited to hear what you have to teach us about this topic that we kinda like know is there, but we don’t wanna address it because it means we have to look at the food we’re eating and how we’re treating our bodies and the stress we’re putting ourselves under. But it’s time, right? We’re hitting burnout at high rates. It’s time to have these discussions. Welcome to the podcast.
Stephanie Pazniokas: Thank you, thank you so much. I am actually super happy to be here. I could talk about this for a week straight, so hahaha perfect. You’re at the right place then. I like to ask good questions that get us going, like chewing on these things to learn it. So, sure, that’s a little bit more about yourself. Um, where you are, who you serve, and what you do.
Stephanie Pazniokas: Yeah, so, um, my name is again, it’s Stephanie Pazniokas. I’m, uh, trained up in psychobiology and biochemistry. Um, and undergraduate did some graduate work, um, my master’s in neuroscience. I came to this place through a very stressful and disease-ridden period of my life, where everything seemed to fall apart. Disease was creeping in, weight was creeping up, stress was sky-high, my sleep was horrible. I was traveling all the time for work, so basically just going through all of that and a number of things happening in my life, I ended up here in the health coaching world because it took a lot of work and application of my knowledge in a new way, not the conventional wisdom way, to realize what was really going on and to connect everything that I knew about my body with what I was doing in real life. And a lot of times we do that; we have this knowledge, but yet there are things that we think about health from our childhood that we don’t really realize are completely impacting the decisions we make.
Stephanie Pazniokas: And so now, I’m really interested in working with people who are interested in understanding why things that you know. Why did these people online tell me to do this, this, this, and this? They’re just like, “Oh, do all these things and you’ll be fine.” You don’t understand why; it doesn’t really have any weight in your brain. It’s just difficult to make the big changes when the thing you really want is right in front of your face and you don’t understand why you’re doing it. The other aspect of it is really neuroscience—how to create changing your life as lasting, real transformation, sustainable lifestyle changes that support your long-term health. Right? And that is—I absolutely love doing, not just educating people, but actually helping them make the kinds of changes in their way their brain and body can adapt so that it isn’t just a yo-yo, crazy up-and-down, in-and-out, um, no-diet lifestyle. We’re really just all about creating your healthy lifestyle; it is very personalized, very based on where you are. So, I really help people become the boss of their health. And I always use the analogy: we are the CEO of our bodies. We have an executive center in our brain, and we get a chance; we are accountable for all of our decisions. Nobody else is, ultimately. We are making these decisions, and I really wanna empower people in the best way possible to do, um, the best things they can for themselves.
Katie Rossler: I love that you pointed out you really personalized, you know, the work you do with each client. One of my biggest pet peeves is that people get into the “this works for everyone, this is what it is,” you know, and when it comes to inflammation in the body, if we’re not looking at the individual, then we’re missing the whole point. We are looking at—if we go, “Here’s the generic, this works for everyone, eat this, do this,” I think we’re missing a lot. And unfortunately, most of us are in times in our lives where we’re exhausted, we don’t wanna research more, so when they tell us that’s what we’re supposed to do, we give up that food, we drink more of that, we take that supplement, instead of really learning what our body needs.
Katie Rossler: Let’s dive into how do we start to better understand inflammation, what message it’s sending us, and how we can start to personalize our own experience of, um, gaining that information. Right? ‘Cause it’s very easy to just look at information broadly, but when it comes to each of us, what are the things we need to be thinking about?
Stephanie Pazniokas: Okay, yeah. So, I mean, ultimately, today we’re gonna be, uh, really diving in and then focusing on stress. But lots of things can cause inflammation in our body, ‘cause you have to understand, inflammation is our body’s response to a threat or, um, you know, any kind of lack of homeostasis in our body. Homeostasis is balance. Everything in our body is designed to be in a particular balance. We are absolutely perfectly capable of being fully healthy, and when there are external or even from our internal—as we’re going to talk about—um, things that disrupt that homeostasis, our body is gonna respond with stress because it is a survival mechanism, right? That is how we’ve survived for thousands of years, is being able to respond and adapt to our environment. What happens is, when that gets so fully out of balance that we’re in a state of chronic inflammation, and that is actually what is underlying most of the major diseases today. They’re not communicable diseases; they’re not diseases you catch from someone. They’re diseases of chronic inflammation and of metabolic imbalance and various things that are causing our body not to be in balance. And lots of things can impact that, right? Stress is just one of them. There are the types of foods or eating and the kinds of ingredients in them that our bodies have never seen. 1,000 years ago, those didn’t exist. So we don’t have the capability for actually dealing with them, so they are seen as a threat where our body tries to figure out what to do with them.You know, can the liver break them down and get rid of them? No. Um, um, where am I gonna put this? I’m, I’m gonna let it shove it over here in this, this fat cell. But it’s gonna actually disrupt the ability of that fat cell to work appropriately. Um, I’m going to increase, you know, the cytokines and inflammation and all those types of things that are gonna help my body, you know, release macrophages to eat up that cell or to eat up that thing and try to get rid of it. It’s just doing it fast to keep us healthy, but when we have things coming in all over the place, all of the time, we’re really keeping our body in a place where it’s just out of balance. And one of those things is stress. And the way I wanna talk about stress today really is broad because it does cover all of those things because there are many causes of stress. Stress in our body is just a matter of how far out of balance we are. And it can be our temperature; it can be, um, or it can be our environment. Are we in a threatening, unsafe environment? Are we in a very stressful work situation? Um, you know, there’s a lot behind it. Um, you know, you could probably think about it. Um, bacterial infections are a type of stress. A viral infection is a type of stress. Um, air pollution is a type of stress. Being exposed to, uh, pesticides and insecticides and flame retardants and aldehydes and things that they’re putting in our clothes. I mean, there are so many different places you could easily get overwhelmed while going, “Oh my gosh, I can’t live in a bubble.” And you can’t, right? So the point is to really get our body where it is being supported enough that it can handle what is coming at it. We just have to balance that out a little bit so it can. So what’s coming in? Is it more than what we can handle?
Katie Rossler: Right, well, and I love what you’re sharing is that, okay, let’s look at the external stressors. Let’s look at the stuff we’re putting in our body, but even the emotional, mental, right? Confrontation with someone is almost equal to, “Hey, I ate something my body doesn’t like.” Like, it is all stress, and it is all creating inflammation in the body. So let’s dive in deeper because I feel like—I love that you’re bringing the science into it—help us better understand why does even the mental and emotional stress in our environment cause physical inflammation.
Stephanie Pazniokas: Ah, this is my favorite thing. And because it’s all, because all of it ultimately does. So, um, the definition of stress is literally, um, being out of balance, being out of homeostasis, right? Even at a cellular level. And what happens when stress is present? What happens? So, um, think about what, um, our psychosocial stress or any kind of, you know, stress in the environment. Once upon a time, we had to run from lions and tigers and bears, right? We’ve all heard this analogy. You run from a bear, you know, your body has to now put out cortisol. And this is natural. We always think of cortisol as being the enemy, but it is absolutely critical to our survival because if we get low blood sugar, that’s lack of homeostasis, right? Cortisol has to activate to allow our bodies and our liver to, and our muscles to release sugar into the blood to bring it back up, right? So that’s normal, and it’s important. When we wake up in the morning, we release cortisol to help us get going in the day, right? That is natural. That is the dawn phenomenon. Um, that’s why our blood sugar spikes a little bit higher in the morning. It’s triggered by cortisol.
Stephanie Pazniokas: Now, what ends up happening, though, when we are feeling threatened, when we get into that sympathetic fight-or-flight mode, our, you know, our adrenal glands release the cortisol. Our brain says, “Oh, you know, we’ve got to do all these things.” So your brain, your hypothalamus ends up doing lots of things after that. And one of the things that it does is it starts raising insulin to deal with the glucose that is about to get flooded into the body. That glycogen, which is a glucose storage molecule, so we can have that emergency quick-acting energy on, you know, on call, gets released into our muscles so that we can run, right? And then cortisol is also causing our liver to take our protein and create sugar out of it instead of using it for making enzymes and building blocks for our body and, you know, neurotransmitters—like, whatever it is that we need that protein for muscle building. It’s going to, um, some, and if we don’t have enough in our food, it’s gonna take it from our muscle. That’s gonna take it from our bones, right? And so it’s causing, it’s going to replenish the glycogen in the liver and it’s going to make sure that we have enough glucose going into those cells to keep us running and to keep us going. And then, um, so, so this is, this is that cortisol. But what happens is that, um, that cortisol also causes an increase in free radicals—that’s reactive oxygen species—in our mitochondria, right? So it isn’t, you know, it’s, there’s this glucose, there’s all this stuff that’s happening, but we’re actually getting increased oxidative stress inside of our mitochondria. And if we can’t balance that, then it causes a number of other things to happen, right? So this then triggers activation of pro-inflammatory genes to increase cytokines. Those are, you know, that’s part of our immune response, inflammation response, and other inflammatory factors as well. And, um, additionally, we end up getting DNA damage. We get protein damage. We get lipid damage. So things get oxidized, right? Um, there’s actually ample evidence that shows that people who experience chronic stress show signs of accelerating aging. Um, systemic inflammation is shorter telomere length. That’s at the end of our DNA that’s associated with aging, right? Um, so you can, you can hear people say, “Oh, they look like they were aging before our eyes.” They were, right? They really were. Um, so the damage is done. This is not just in the brain, but throughout the body. So in the end, we can summarize that, say, like the chronic activation of that hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, that’s that stress cycle, you know, the everything involved in our stress response, keeping cortisol levels high, results in oxidative stress inside of our cells, resulting in that cellular imbalance where we don’t have enough antioxidants to clean it up. So think of it like a police or constable force, right? We have a certain amount, and we have too many people looting in the city, doing damage, setting fires, inflammation, right? Throwing rocks through windows, like damaging the nearby molecules, like DNA and protein and lipids. This triggers an inflammatory cascade because our body is now gonna have to protect against all of this damage. And it’s going to try to, try to keep it cleaned up. And basically, we’re just trying to get back into balance. But when it’s chronic, we really can’t, especially if we’re not supporting our body. We’re not giving our body time to be outside of that state. We have a parasympathetic nervous system. We have an ability, a time where we heal. But if we’re always in this, um, chronic stress state, right, we’re never giving our body a chance to get out of it. Right? So there’s actually, um, a great paper in the Journal of Psychoneuroendocrinology. That’s one of my favorite topics, right? ‘Cause everything is related, right? It’s not just in your mind. The psycho, there’s, it’s, it’s your nervous system. It’s your endocrine system. They’re all working together. That’s what we’re talking about. So in 2013, um, Kristen Ashbacher and others wrote this great paper, and they have a fantastic summary of this whole mechanism, and they reference many other, um, papers. And what they say is, “Your psychological stress and distress have been associated with higher levels of oxidative damage.” That’s that free radicals, you know. Then, stress management should be a core component of preventive interventions designed to improve healthy aging and everything else, right? ‘Cause it’s a core about many diseases.
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Katie Rossler: There are two things that I want to highlight as important: 1) You didn’t say it, but liver health, because it’s filtering, it’s detoxing, you know, it’s helping with this thing. And 2) How crucial it is that we learn how to activate our parasympathetic nervous system. Those two things are, like, out of all the amazing pieces you had, I’m like, hey listener, those two things: we need a healthy liver, and we need to learn how to activate our brains to say, “I am safe, I’m okay, everything’s okay.”
I like to always throw in with my clients, because they think, you know, “Oh, that’s just deep breathing and meditation or journaling.” I’m like, you might need to go for a run. You might need to run from that bear, even though it wasn’t a bear and it was just your mother-in-law. Whatever it might be, right? Like, sometimes you actually need to physically get out to process those chemicals through your body.
So, as you talk about this—how it’s activating this inflammation in us—can we get a little into what it looks like to start to shift this so that we’re not in this chronic stress state so often, and really start allowing our bodies to do the bounce back it used to be able to do before we started putting in all the other stuff that was making it worse?
Stephanie Pazniokas: So, I’m gonna kind of answer the first part first. You suggested liver health a little bit and sort of coming at it a little bit from the sideways because our bodies are gonna be trying to set things back to baseline after the release of cortisol, okay? As I said, it causes the liver and muscles to make glucose immediately available, right? So, you know, right now we’re really not—we’re getting this danger response to run, and we’re not running; we’re sitting, we’re whatever. So, what has to happen, right?
Stephanie Pazniokas: Cuddling your babies, cuddling your loved ones, holding hands with someone, looking at someone in the eyes, and having a meaningful conversation with them, volunteering, being in gratitude, being a Leo thinking about what you love, thinking on good things— you know, all of that stuff enhances our oxytocin relationships. Singing with other people on karaoke, board game night, going for a hike—right? All of that stuff increases oxytocin. And what’s important about that is oxytocin actually shuts down the production of cortisol. So when you can get into a place where you’re stimulating oxytocin, the cortisol production line, you know, the headhunter of the manufacturing floor in your brain, your hypothalamus goes up and shuts that down. You know, there’s no more orders for cortisol. We’re good. Oxytocin—we’re safe, we’re loved, we’re not running from a bear.
Okay, so that’s really important. That is one aspect of all of this. Right? So yeah, you can meditate, you can do all those things, you can go for a run. Why? Because that is going to, you know, whether it’s running or hiking or, you know, anything—it doesn’t have to be hugely strenuous exercise either. You could do calf raises, you know, just to get your calf muscles to start using and soaking up that glucose in your blood, right? You just want to use it because otherwise, you’re just going to store it, right? That insulin’s going to be high, you’re going to be storing, and that’s why stress is so related to weight gain.
There’s a lot of things there. I mean, especially as women get older and their insulin suppresses estrogen and testosterone, right? It’s worse when you get older and your hormone levels are naturally going down. And then you have stress on top of it—cortisol blocks progesterone. Again, think about what you’re not gonna do if you’re in a dangerous situation. Having sex and procreating is probably not something your body is, you know, prioritizing. So those are lower on that hierarchy. So you’ve got oxytocin, you’ve got cortisol, and then you’ve got your sex hormones.
So again, our bodies want to be in balance. They want to feel safe in order to have good hormonal balance. So, you know, hopefully I answered your question. But sometimes, we’re in stress situations where our hierarchy of needs—Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—is based on things that are not getting met. And so, we don’t feel safe. We don’t have food security, we don’t have shelter security, we might not have physical security. And this is why it’s really important to get help, right? We really need to get help sometimes. And it may be that you find somebody who can help with tapping, EFT, EMDR, or cognitive behavioral therapy, or something to help you get your mind thinking differently so that you can say, “This thing that’s causing me stress, is it real?” Is it real? Because I might have—there might have been a door slamming and my glucose just spiked, and it happens. You can see that on continuous glucose monitors. Weird things that happen. So, are you super reactive and, you know, are you a hyper-stress responder? Are you easily triggered? You know, you’re going to have to start working on not allowing that to happen.
And we don't really think about it because we always thought it was just a feeling, that it’s just in our head. But once you start understanding that all of these things are having a physiological impact on you down into your mitochondria, where you’re supposed to be creating energy but you’re not when you’re in stress, you know, you’re in self-protection mode. It’s throwing out more reactive oxygen species to stimulate the immune system to deal with a threat. I mean, this is going down, right, all the way to the tiniest parts of our body.
So really learning how to deal with your stress can have a huge impact on your overall health, and it’s really important. So what is in my control? What’s in my sphere of control? Am I worried and stressed about something that I can do nothing about? Because it’s even possible, you know, it just might have a 40% chance of happening. Okay, can I make that 30% chance? Is that the best I can do? Okay, letting it know, not gonna deal with it till it gets here because it's not going to help; it’s only gonna hurt me.
Katie Rossler: I love how you kept bringing back our body is just finding its balance. Our body is just finding its balance. And here on the Balance Code, we’re just trying to find our balance and the different facets of it, which is again subjective and unique to us. But how cool that our body is constantly trying to discover its balance code and get it, you know, let me—oh wait, hold on, let’s shift this, let’s shift this. And in a way, by trying to protect us and help by balancing, sometimes the consequence can be negative if our body’s not able, like you said, to function correctly, to filter correctly, or we’re not releasing these things.
So I love that you said even the calf raises, like do something to get the glucose out. Like, it’s sometimes small, right? It’s simple things, but the education around it, understanding like this is impacting your DNA. We’re all talking about how we live longer and do this and that, but we’re not talking about like, yes, we know stress is this killer. Let’s talk about then start to shift that, right? Not just talk about it but start to do the things. You gave some practical advice, like hey, recognize these things are happening and here’s some ways to get that oxytocin going, right? And go like, okay, I’m safe now, cortisol’s all turned off, you’re good and being aware. And I know you have a well of resources that these listeners can come to.
Where can they connect with you to start to learn more? Because, like, you are just the scientist mind that is so fascinating—the stuff you spit out like, I wanna know. Where can people get more information from you?
Stephanie Pazniokas: Absolutely. I mean, the best place really is in my Facebook group. It’s called Be the Boss Be Well, right? So it’s very easy to find: Be the Boss Be Well. And that is my Facebook group. In there, I have many, many training videos. All my videos are on there. I have so many posts, educational posts and guides. You can go into the group, you can search for almost anything, and you’ll probably find something about it.
I’m also a culinary nutrition expert, so I actually do help people connect food with health, and I do a lot of education around that. I create recipes, and that’s sort of like a thing that I do because I had to do it for myself. I have almost 2,000 recipes in my phone that I just—my husband, every time he has a new one, he’s like, “I really like this because it’s going to be three years before we have it again.” But you don’t have to be a master chef; a lot of things are very easy because I have, you know, three kids, I have a grandchild—there’s a lot going on, and so I don’t have time to spend hours in the kitchen either. So I don’t expect you to. But there’s a lot of things in that Facebook group. I also offer quarterly master classes that really go into some fun things and help give you some really practical ways of shifting your health. So I do that on a regular basis, of course. And you’ll always, if you’re in the Facebook group, know when it’s happening so you won’t miss it, yes.
Katie Rossler: So the link to that Facebook group will be in the show notes, but go join it. Do the search function. Often we forget, like in these Facebook groups, when we join it, we’re like cool, and in it—go immediately start searching. Search for the topics you’re interested in. Stephanie’s gonna have a ton of resources on different things. So you can be putting in stress, you can be putting in liver, you can be putting in recipe or whatever, and you’re gonna find all sorts of things.
Katie Rossler: Thank you, Stephanie. Thank you, thank you, thank you for giving us more education around the topic of how our stress—mental, emotional, and physical—is creating the inflammation in our body, which is just creating a cycle of more stress, but giving us the tools of what we can start to do to be the boss again of that. And I do hope that those who are listening will go and join your group so that they’re in the know when your next master class is, when your resources are coming out, because it sounds like you’re gonna have a lot of tools to help us in creating balance in our lives.
Thank you so much for being here.
Stephanie Pazniokas: Thank you so much for having me, Katie. This has been really wonderful. And dear listener here’s to finding our balance code.
Katie Rossler: Thank you for listening to today’s episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Take a moment to leave a rating and a review on your favorite podcast platform. That helps other listeners just like you to find this podcast too.
Want to connect and learn how we can work together? Check out the links in the show notes below. Discovering your balance code doesn’t have to be a one-person journey. You can have a team, and I’d love to support you. So here’s to finding our balance code.