Today is not about nutrition; instead we’re doing a mini dive into the world of stress and immune function.
Reason being, I frequently get asked about different XYZ nutrition strategies to combat illness. By all means, this is brilliant as there’s a lot nutrition can do! However, immunosupression is a multi factorial issue and sometimes there’s other things we need to focus on first.
Of which, stress is a major player in your health and immunity.
As an athlete, you’re probably aware that psychological stress can be the origin of so many things;
1) Competition.
2) Injury.
3) Team selection.
4) Travel.
5) Sleep disruption.
6) Jet lag.
7) Personal life.
8) Relationship difficulties.
9) Financial hardship.
10) Bereavement.
There’s now emerging evidence to suggest that your level of state-anxiety and perceived stress before exercise alters immune function (Edwards et al, 2018). I.e. the more stressed out and anxious you are before exercise, the less robust your immune function is.
If we combine this outcome with the immune suppressing impact of hard training or competitions plus the additional psychological strain during events, it could be a recipe for disaster.
Drew et al (2017) has also shown that aspects of mental health including psychological stress, anxiety and depression are important risk factors that raise the incidence of illness in Olympic athletes.
There’s even evidence suggesting that we could be hard-wired into becoming ill more frequently (Bibbey et al, 2013). For example, low immune reactivity to psychological stress may be more prominent in people with negative personality traits (i.e. bad for illness), where a person with more positive personality traits has higher immune reactivity to stress (i.e. good for illness).
This can even link back to your past and upbringing – it was found that adults who’s parents lived apart during childhood, were more than 3x more likely to develop a cold (Murphy et al, 2017).
To combat such issues, the prevention is always the best cure.
Even simple techniques such as practising mindfulness via meditation have been shown to increase antibody production to fight against influenza (Davidson et al, 2003).
Whatever your way of dealing with stress, this should be a high priority.
The main take home here…
Psychological stress is a very potent underlying factor that impacts immunity.
Work on your mental health, and you’ll start fixing your physical health.