What is stress fundamentally? Is it getting your kids ready for school? Long commutes to and from work in heavy traffic? Managing your finances? Household chores?
To me, these are not stressors. Stress is simply a challenge to our cells to react and adapt to an altered environment. For example, a rise or fall in ambient temperatures is a stress. Strong, bright light from the sun shining on us in morning is a stress. Being chased by a hungry, wild animal is a stress, etc.
Now let’s explore a common environment. Most people work 8 hour days, in a high-rise office building disconnected from the earth’s magnetic field, bathing in bright fluorescent lighting, starring into blue-lit LED screens, surrounded by WIFI and cellphone radiation and away from natural, full spectrum sunlight. When we get home, we turn on all the lights and heat up our food in the microwave as it is quick and convenient at the cost of completely irradiating the entire kitchen. Then, we watch TV, play on our phones, or continue to work at home on our laptops until bed. And when we go to bed, we sleep in a room surrounded by radio/microwave frequencies emitted from cordless phones, cell phones, WIFI routers and baby monitors.
Why might this be a problem? Well first of all, the human body has its own electromagnetic field (EMF) that facilitates the electrical circuits in our body which run all of our biological processes. When a human is exposed to external EMFs, we get interference and alterations in these biological processes that are essential for gene expression. Basically, our signalling is disrupted, similar to that when you put a cell phone near a speaker or radio and can literally hear the interference when a text or call comes through. The only difference is that we cannot hear or sense the interference within our body.
EMF and blue light are the chronic stressors of today, and the reason most of us are feeling burnt out and overwhelmed. This is because blue light from LED technology (in the absence of full spectrum light) causes massive increases in free radical production in the eye http://www.jbc.org/content/280/22/21061.full. EMF exposure also seems to increase free radical production and oxidative stress https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4758783 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26788099.
The chronic stress from blue light and EMF triggers an inflammatory immune response which leads to chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation is the core of autoimmune diseases, neurodegeneration, heart disease, metabolic syndrome/obesity, type 2 diabetes and cancer. Do you still think it’s your hectic lifestyle that’s burning you out and making you sick, or might it be your environment?
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