Magnesium for Stress Reduction

25 Jan Magnesium for Stress Reduction

If I told you that being stressed out was depleting your stores of magnesium within the body, you probably wouldn’t care. Honestly, magnesium doesn’t get enough attention considering how important it is and how critical it is to managing stress within our lives!

Before I dive in to exactly what magnesium does in your body and why it’s so important for you to take magnesium or eat foods that are rich in magnesium, I want to explain how depleted in magnesium we are.

Over 80% of the world’s population is deficient in magnesium.

The fact is that in our paleolithic eras and ancient times, we didn’t really have to deal with a deficiency of magnesium because we were getting it from all different angles. We were eating foods that were naturally rich in magnesium, we were eating all cuts of meat including the organs which had a lot of magnesium. We were swimming in the ocean and fishing in the ocean where we were absorbing magnesium from the sea salt and from the other minerals in the ocean.

We were also eating fruits and vegetables that were grown in nutrient-rich soil that really isn’t nutrient-rich these days. Flat out, we have a magnesium issue in today’s culture to begin with.

If you start looking at a correlation between chronic stress and magnesium, it’s a little bit earth-shattering.

There’s one study that was done by a man named George Eby out of Austin, Texas. He took a group of people that were chronically anxious and depressed. They also had issues with alcohol, smoking ann problems with cocaine. They were also suffering from sleeplessness that was likely a result of their anxiety.

He provided these subjects with 200 to 500 milligrams of magnesium with each meal. He found within just a few days that they had restored blood levels from all of these different conditions.

They were less stressed out, their cortisol levels were lower and they were sleeping better. They also found that they were able to fight their addictions much easier. It just  goes to show that just a little bit of magnesium is critical to our stress-free function in our day to day lives.

Now let’s take a look at how magnesium works in your body and how the supplementation of magnesium can actually help you fight that stress.

Within your body, the way magnesium works is it sits in between two neurons in what’s called the synapse, which is the gap between two neurons within your body. Magnesium sits on a receptor that is called the NMDA receptor. I’m not going to go into grave detail about what the NMDA receptor is right now but I will explain why it is critical when it comes to stress.

If that NMDA receptor is triggered, it can catapult your body into the stressed out mode. Basically, we don’t want that receptor to get triggered over just anything.

So magnesium sits on that receptor, and it ultimately guards it. It guards that receptor from receiving all kinds of things that will trigger it or enter the synapse. Without magnesium that receptor can get triggered by so much more (there’s no gatekeeper). This can send you catapulting into that stressed out mode.

Without magnesium, we simply get stressed out easier.

Once you are stressed out your body produces cortisol. Like I’ve talked about in other videos and articles, cortisol is not exactly what we want right now. Cortisol is going to increase the amount of fat that you store in your body and it is going to affect your decision making because it’s going to force you to stay in that fight or flight mode.

Cortisol over a long period of time is also going to affect a portion of your brain called the hippocampus. Enough cortisol over a long period of time can actually render that hippocampus less effective. That means it can actually make it so that the hippocampus can no longer regulate stress well.

Now you’ve got the depletion of magnesium leading the NMDA ready to be triggered and cause a stress response. On top of that, you’ve got an increase in cortisol that is going to render the hippocampus less effective. All of this means that your body can’t regulate stress and you are going to continue to deplete what little stores of magnesium you already have because you’re stressed out.

Ahhhh!

It turns into a vicious circle because you don’t have the magnesium to protect that NMDA receptor again. You’re in this horrible cycle where you’re constantly stressed out. That right there is exactly how one becomes chronically stressed out and isn’t able to make the good decisions that they know they need to make.

How do you stop this right in its tracks?

The answer is actually simple. You start eating magnesium. Whether it’s dietary magnesium or you’re supplementing magnesium, you can stop this cycle right in its tracks.

If you look back again at paleolithic and ancient times, you realize that they were getting enough magnesium. Sure, they were stressed out because they were running from saber-toothed tigers, they had all kinds of environmental factors that they had to worry about. but the fact that they were constantly replenishing their magnesium stores with nutrient rich soil, with the ocean, with eating the right foods, eating the right cuts of meat, they never had to worry about it because their body could react and recover from stress the way that it’s supposed to.

We are not recovering from stress like we were hundreds and thousands of years ago. The best thing that you can do is take a magnesium supplement or eat the right foods. Stop it right in its tracks, take a couple hundred milligrams of magnesium and see how you feel. That’s all you really have to do to start. See if it balances your body out a little bit. See if you feel a little less stressed out. See if your sleep patterns start to re-establish, and all and all, see if you start to feel motivated.

If supplements aren’t really your thing, you can always get your magnesium from the diet. The problem is, is it’s getting harder and harder to find the right magnesium sources within the right food sources.

Grains used to be the best way that you could get magnesium but now with all the phylates in grains and all the phylates in wheat, you can’t really absorb the magnesium anymore.

The best suggestion that I can give you is to get vegetables that are grown from local organic soil that you know is controlled and has the right mineral content in it. That way you’re not getting vegetables from these mass production facilities that basically have bland soil with practically no nutrients or minerals.

Just like I talked about in one of my previous videos, if you can get yourself in that optimized state of a good action, you can start changing the pattern of things that are happening.

Instead of being in this chronically stressed out pattern, get some magnesium in your diet and start feeling better by combating the stress and then optimizing that good action.

If you’re feeling less stressed, you can take that one step forward and start eating better. This will put you on the track to start feeling better, making better decisions in business, increase your bottom line, and live a happier life.