STRESS: THE COMMON SYMPTOMS OF STRESS

Don’t expect to have all these symptoms. Different people manifest different stress symptoms. However, the more stressed you are the more symptoms you will have. They are:

• Trouble getting off to sleep.

• Tendency to toss and turn and wake during the night.

• Waking up tired in the morning even after a good night’s sleep.

• Feeling like lying in on waking.

• Grinding of teeth while asleep.

• Waking up with a sudden start just as you are beginning to doze off.

• Sweaty palms.

• Dry mouth.

• Feeling tired and drowsy to the point of nodding off in the middle of the day if you sit down to rest or read. At work this drowsiness can come on when you sit down at lunch or tea break. Truck drivers can experience it while waiting to be loaded.

• Feeling a reduction in the intensity of your allergy symptoms while on the go—working, exercising and/or socialising—and a worsening of your allergy symptoms while resting.

• High cholesterol and triglycerides, especially when dietary intake of both is low.

If you seem to be forever eating on the go and experiencing a bloated abdomen as a result, you are almost certainly stressed. This is perhaps the most common of all symptoms and the one that most often brings hard-charging over-achievers to the doctor or naturopath in the first place. They have invariably read a book on food allergies or Candida albicans and they have recognised digestive tract symptoms. These people, after sticking strictly to the combined Anti-Candida/Anti-Allergy Program, are invariably no better by the end of the treatment program. They are still complaining that food is causing them to feel bloated and uncomfortable. This is because the high levels of adrenalin in their system are preventing the digestion of food. Instead it sits in their intestines and ferments giving rise to wind and distension of the abdomen.

Hard-charging, over-achiever types seldom experience dramatic improvements on any treatment regime—stress can mimic many of the symptoms of allergy and Candida yeast infection. They seldom ever notice appreciable increases in energy as they burn up their new found energy as quickly as they get it by doing more, often without being aware of it. For them, stress is a very insidious thing and they are seldom aware of how much they are stressing themselves. A frequent remark I hear from hard-chargers is: ‘No. I don’t feel any more energetic since my last appointment, but I’ve got a lot more done in the last few weeks.’