Moment 156: Your Stress Is Making you Fat & Sick... Here's How To Fix It!

In this moment, neuroscientist and bestselling author, Dr Tara Swart discusses the brain-body impacts of stress and the dangers of being around stressful people. While people think of stress as being solely a mental health problem, it can physical health impacts, the most obvious being an increase in belly fat. This fat is a result of the stress hormone cortisol, which because of evolution, tells your body to hold onto fat as a survival mechanism. Because of this, you can’t shift this belly weight with either diet or exercise, the only thing that will change it is addressing the stress that is causing the release of cortisol. Dr Swart also says that leaders who cannot handle their stress, who she calls, ‘leaky cortisol people’, can cause a trickle down effect in an organisation, causing stress and negative health impacts on the people below them. Listen to the full episode here Apple - https://g2ul0.app.link/BIZuIuDPwIb Spotify - https://g2ul0.app.link/NGE9aaHPwIb Watch the Episodes On Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Tara: Instagram: https://bit.ly/48hJ1k2 Twitter: https://bit.ly/46gqYZI Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Steven Bartlett?

  So stress causes belly fat?

• 0:05Dr. Tara Swart?

  As a survival mechanism, it will help you to store fat around your abdomen. So, you know, again, in the cave, if you were potentially going to like not find food for a month, then if you had extra fat around your abdomen, you could digest that and survive till you could find food. So with my clients in financial services, it got to a point where as soon as I walked into the room, they just lift their t-shirt up and say, now you know how I've been in the last month. And then I had a really, really funny incident when I was speaking at a bank and the CEO's PA was there in the audience. And I was explaining that, you know, leadership stress leaks down, that that stress can lead to abdominal fat

• 0:49Dr. Tara Swart?

  that you can't shift. And she shouted out, so he's the reason that I'm fat.

• 0:57Dr. Tara Swart?

  But Steve, no one laughed.

• 0:59Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 1:00Dr. Tara Swart?

  Yeah. And that's when I knew that, okay, he obviously is like really stressing everyone out.

• 1:07Steven Bartlett?

  Oh gosh, no one laughed?

• 1:08Dr. Tara Swart?

  No.

• 1:10Steven Bartlett?

  Through fear or something, or just because they all just thought it was true?

• 1:14Dr. Tara Swart?

  It wasn't funny, it was true.

• 1:16Steven Bartlett?

  Jesus.

• 1:17Dr. Tara Swart?

  Again, what I would see with people is that they would say, oh, I've put on a bit of weight around the middle, you know, had to loosen the belt a bit. So I've started eating less, I've started like exercising more and I still can't shift it. And again, that's when I would explain, this is the impact of cortisol. As long as you're still leaking out extra cortisol, nothing's going to change. So, and like I said, even exercising more or eating better, less or differently, whatever it is, wouldn't shift that fat. You had to get to the root cause. You had to reduce the cortisol.

• 1:49Steven Bartlett?

  It also made me think about when you consider promoting someone in your organisation, you have to be very careful that if you put a particularly stressed Cortisol leaking individual high in the organisation, there's going to be a significant impact for everyone below them.

• 2:05Dr. Tara Swart?

  Yeah.

• 2:06Steven Bartlett?

  Is that accurate? Is that an accurate observation?

• 2:07Dr. Tara Swart?

  Yeah, no, that's a really good way of putting it. I mean, I always think of that phrase, what got you here won't get you there, which is more about the fact that people get promoted because they're good at what they do, but they don't really get taught all the, you know, best management and leadership skills. But that's a really pertinent point. If there are a person who is stressed, particularly who suppresses stress, which some of these, you know, successful people do, then it would have an impact down the organisation.

• 2:33Steven Bartlett?

  It begs the question then, so if if someone's listening to this and they go, do you know what, I'm a leaky cortisol person, I'm highly stressed and it's probably getting to people around me. What can I do about that?

• 2:44Dr. Tara Swart?

  So first of all, if someone's saying that, half the battle is won. The problem is when people are not aware of that. But let's say you are. So let's say that I give you that list of signs and symptoms that you've got high levels of cortisol, which include things like sleep disruption because cortisol is part of the 24 hour clock. Melatonin helps us to wake up, cortisol helps. Melatonin helps us to fall asleep, cortisol helps us to wake up. Maybe you've noticed the belly fat. Because of the really strong connection between the brain and the gut, any sort of reflux or indigestion symptoms are often signs that you've got high levels of cortisol too. And of course, things like irritability and mood changes.

• 3:24Dr. Tara Swart?

  What I mostly would hear people say is that I can just about keep it together when I'm at work, but when I get home, if my kids are, you know, annoying or my partner's asking for too much, I just snap. So that means you're like one step away from snapping at work if somebody like pushes you too far. So that's not good. Because cortisol is pro-inflammatory, it's very drying of the system as well. So you might notice that your skin's really dry or you've got skin problems. Your skin isn't just the physical border of your body, it's the psychological boundary of your body too. So often, stress shows up in the skin. Then there are two main things that you can do.

• 4:05Dr. Tara Swart?

  One is physical exercise because you can literally sweat cortisol out of your bodies. You can sweat excess cortisol out of your body by doing aerobic exercise. The other one is journaling, so writing out what's on your mind rather than just let it be in there and keep going round and round. Or if you've got a therapist or a trusted friend speaking it out loud. So it's all about getting cortisol and/or the negative thoughts that are associated with your stress out of your brain body system.

• 4:37Steven Bartlett?

  I've had a real revelation in my life over the last, um, hmm, maybe six months about sleep. Again, it's why I said, I think before we started recording that I don't have any meetings scheduled before 11am and I sleep with my eye mask on and I just wake up when I wake up.

• 4:53Dr. Tara Swart?

  Yeah, me too.

• 4:54Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, really?

• 4:54Dr. Tara Swart?

  Yeah.

• 4:55Steven Bartlett?

  Never really met anybody that has that. It is a privilege, I have to acknowledge that, that not everyone can do because of work circumstances, whatever else, but the importance of sleep. You're a neuroscientist.

• 5:07Dr. Tara Swart?

  Yeah.

• 5:08Steven Bartlett?

  There's a lot of people who have dysfunctional sleep. We live in a world where I feel like it's increasingly difficult to have, you know, great sleep. How important is that for the brain? And also, you know, we were talking about stress there, but for

• 5:21Dr. Tara Swart?

  Yeah.

• 5:22Steven Bartlett?

  containing our stress levels.

• 5:24Dr. Tara Swart?

  It's so important, I can't stop going on about it. And I do understand that for some people, it's not a choice, that they just don't sleep well, or their sleep gets interrupted because they've got young kids, or they do shift work. So I'm not particularly talking about the people where there's a reason that you can't sleep in this way. I'm mostly directing this out, if you have a choice, this is the way that you need to sleep and this is why. If you don't have a choice, there are some things that you can do to mitigate it as well. I mean, obviously I have done shift work as a junior doctor in the NHS and I travel a lot, so I'm like jet lagged half the time. But I try to do everything I can to make that as good as possible.

• 6:08Dr. Tara Swart?

  And the reason is, we've always known that when you sleep, you lay down your memories and new learning, you process your emotions, the cells in the body regenerate themselves. We've known that for a long time. That's never really been enough for These very driven CE level people to want to give up eight hours a night to sleep. You know, it's if they feel they can get by on four or five, then they'll rather do that because they've got so much to do. The ideal is eight hours and fifteen minutes in population norm studies. So that doesn't mean it's for everyone, but for most people, that's the ideal. Actually, sleeping more than that can be depressogenic, so it can start to lower your mood. So you don't want to really be sleeping for nine plus hours, but you ideally need to

• 6:50Dr. Tara Swart?

  be in bed for nine hours to get that amount of sleep. And so there was some award winning research around 2012 to 2014, when we were beginning to understand how important the cleaning of the brain is overnight. So this entirely new system that we didn't know existed, which is called the glymphatic system, it's like the lymphatic system in your body, but it's to do with glial cells. So it was named the glymphatic system. That system is a very active, kind of waterway channel cleansing system of the brain. We used to think that the fluid around the brain and there's ventricles, which are like lakes, and then there's just like trickling areas that that sort of passively dripped

• 7:35Dr. Tara Swart?

  through the brain overnight. We did not expect to see like jets of fluid flushing out toxins from the brain. So the exact things that we see in the pathology of dementing diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, like tau proteins and amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles.

• 7:57Steven Bartlett?

  How do you say that in English?

• 7:59Dr. Tara Swart?

  Those things are being flushed out of the brain very actively overnight. And that process takes seven to eight hours to complete the cleaning. That's why you need to be in bed for eight to nine hours.

• 8:12Steven Bartlett?

  So it takes seven or eight hours to of restorative sleep or just being in bed?

• 8:16Dr. Tara Swart?

  Just sleep, not in bed. If you're in bed awake, you're not asleep, you know, you have to be asleep, but you'll go through the different sleep cycles every 90 minutes. This isn't in time with that. This is just taking seven or eight hours to flush this stuff out of your brain. So one of the things I do say to people who who don't sleep well is if you find yourself awake at night and you're not lying on your side, turn yourself onto your side because that's the best position for this cleansing process. I actually have a special pillow that makes me sleep on my side. Because I wasn't naturally a side sleeper. So it doesn't matter if it's the left or the right, but that is a better position in terms of the veins in your neck

• 8:54Dr. Tara Swart?

  than sleeping on your back or your front. So that's one thing you can do. Oh, you woke up, you know, your sleep was disturbed. At least turn yourself onto your side.