How Chronic Stress Shapes Cancer Risk And Recovery

Stress isn’t just a feeling you push past. It’s a biological signal that can suppress immune surveillance, push inflammation higher, and quietly set the stage for cancer risk and recurrence. 

In today's episode we're digging into the science of how cortisol, adrenaline, and pro-inflammatory cytokines change the terrain of the body, from natural killer cell activity to blood sugar, sleep, & metabolism. Plus why calming the nervous system often needs to come before diet, fasting, supplements, or anything else.

Here's some of what we're covering:

• links between chronic stress and immune suppression
• differences between acute hormetic stress and chronic overload
• early life stress shaping sensitivity and reactivity
• suppressed emotions as epigenetic drivers of risk
• research connecting anger repression and grief to cancer
• common “cancer personality” traits and why they matter
• & more

Pulling these threads together, we outline a practical three-part plan to reduce load, regulate the nervous system, and build resilience while addressing suppressed emotions and key personality patterns.

If this resonates, hit play, subscribe for weekly episodes, and share it with someone who needs the nudge to put stress work first. Your feedback matters—leave a review and tell us which stressor you’re ready to drop next.

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Transcript

Framing Stress As The Top Risk

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome back to the Ground in Root Podcast, where we are exploring the world of holistic and functional strategies to enhance healing and help you stay cancer free. I am your host and holistic cancer dietitian, Dionne Detraz. I am so excited to hop into a brand new month with you. We are at the beginning of February. And each month I like to pick a theme for us to dive deeper into. And with February Valentine's Day coming up, the month of love, we might say, it felt like the perfect time to dive into the number one cause of disease and some surprising ways you can help address this cause and lower your risk for cancer. One of the ways being by surrounding yourself with more love, having more joy and fun and pleasure. And we're going to get into that more as we go. Now, this cause also happens to be the least likely thing that is being addressed when you meet with your doctor or your oncologist or sometimes even your functional provider. It's just not part of the assessment. It's not part of the initial intake and the initial game plan. And I believe that's really at a loss, at a fault when we're trying to piece together a truly holistic plan. So without further ado, what is this number one cause of disease? Stress. Before we talk about food or fasting or supplements or anything else that we could be doing to help our bodies heal and recover, we have to look at stress and how that stress is impacting your health. And if you're currently moving through a cancer journey, just hearing the words you have cancer is a huge stressor. And so that alone needs to be looked at in order to enhance our healing. And I'm going to explain more of why that is in just a minute. But the reason being is that we when we are in a stressed state, we are in fight or flight response, we are in survival mode. This is not healing, repair, recovery mode, right? So we need to learn to shift the stress response so that we can help our bodies heal. Now, in today's episode, we're going to break it into parts. Okay. So in today's episode, we're going to be looking more specifically at the links between stress and disease, specifically cancer, as well as the primary sources of stress that seem to have the biggest impact on this sequence of events, on this process. And then we're also going to dive into something deeper known as the cancer personality, which you may or may not have heard of before. I think it's really fascinating. And again, when we're trying to look at the underlying reasons why cancer grows in the body, we have to look at all the pieces that play a role. And stress plays a huge role. So let's dive in. The first thing I want us to do, in case you don't already know this, I always like to start at the foundation, right? Make sure we're all at the same understanding of what's happening in the body, and then we can go from there. So let's just talk about the physiology of stress. What happens when we are confronted with a stressor? First and foremost, I have to clarify that susceptibility to stress is going to vary a lot from person to person. Okay. We don't all have an automatic same stress response to the same stressor. We all approach it differently, right? And part of what influences how we respond to a stress could be everything from some genetic components, some genetic vulnerability to different coping styles, different personality traits, whether or not we have social support. So many pieces. There's so many pieces. So I want to first just caveat it with that, you know, we can, you and I could both be facing the exact same stressor and it may be having a different response in each of our bodies. Okay. But it's still helpful to understand what is the general response, especially when stress is chronic, when it's eating away at us, when it's not going away, eventually over time, it's going to have a very similar effect. So I want to break it down into a few systems of what systems in the body are being impacted. And then also to remind you that not all stress has a negative effect, right? Our goal, I shouldn't even say our goal because it's also just not even realistic to think that we're going to have no stress in our life, right? That's just not going to happen, nor is it necessary. Our bodies are wired to manage acute expressions of stress, right? The problem is when it becomes long-term, chronic, unrelenting, day in and day out stress, that wears us down. That's different, right? But when we talk about short bursts of stress, especially like the topic we had last month in January, where we were talking about intentional hormesis or hormetic stressors that actually build resilience, right? Build strength, that build health in the body. That could be a good source of stress. That could make us stronger, that could make us healthier. It enhances performance, right? It keeps ourselves younger. So I want to make sure you're not hearing. I don't want the take-home message to be that we have to avoid stress at all costs, because that's not what I'm saying. What we need to do is to be really intentional around the stressors that we are exposed to, to know how much we can handle individually, right? And then more importantly, how do we help our bodies expand our capacity to manage stressors, to be more resilient to stressors? Okay. And we'll go into each of that, each of those pieces in a lot more detail. So, first, the physiology. We are exposed to stress. What happens? First, let's talk about the immune system. Okay. This is very important, particularly when it comes to cancer, because even though a lot of different systems influence the immune system is your primary defense, right? Those are the soldiers that are seeking out the things that are not supposed to be there, including cancerous cells. So we want a really primed, healthy, responsive immune system to help us stay cancer free. So what happens when we're exposed to stress? A short-term stress, like the hormetic stressors we talked about last month, could actually help boost the immune system. It could give it a little kick in the pants, if you will, and help it work more effectively. But chronic long-term stress does the opposite. It can either dysregulate the immune function or suppress the immune system, and sometimes both, but it varies for each of us. Why does this happen? When stress is unrelenting, a few pieces are happening. One is it's raising pro-inflammatory cytokines and cortisol, which is one of our like stress response hormones, adrenaline, et cetera. This is increasing inflammation in the body. Okay. A chronically inflamed is not a body that is fighting off cancer. If anything, it's making it more adaptable to cancer growing. So part of it, part of the issue is inflammation is staying up. The other is it's decreasing our immune cells. Specifically, it's decreasing natural killer cell act, it's decreasing T cell function. These cells are really important when it comes to recognizing and removing cancerous cells or even infected cells, right? So if both of those cells, if we now have decreased production, decreased function of those cells, it is decreasing our immune surveillance. Again, our soldiers that are helping us stay healthy and cancer free, right? That are fighting off infections, fighting off cancer cells. This is very important when it comes to cancer prevention and especially recurrence prevention, right? This is why we focus so much on the immune system and restoring immune balance after a cancer journey to make sure we get your surveillance system back online to help you stay cancer free. So stress is going to work against that. It is also decreasing your body's lymphocytes, which are the white blood cells. That's something we can monitor. A lot of this we can monitor with blood work, which is why we use blood work in our coaching programs to make sure we really know what's happening inside your body. But these white bloods, these white blood cells also help us fight off infection. So the lower your lymphocyte level, the more at risk you now are for viruses and other infections. And again, you're having an overall weakened immune response. Okay, so stress in the immune system is huge. And this is why, again, inside of our coaching programs, one of our very first goals, like right out of the gate, is to calm the stress response. We have to shift you out of survival mode into healing repair mode so we can help the immune system get back online and help you begin to recover and heal your body. Now, the other, some other things that are happening too, which are gonna, which is going to impact your longevity, your health, your risk for disease, insulin and blood sugar go up. It alters your metabolic health. This can cause weight gain as well as elevated blood sugar levels, metabolic syndrome, right? This is going to increase cancer risk as well. It's gonna influence your sleep, typically creating poor sleep cycles, not as deep and restorative sleep. When we sleep is when our body repairs, right? It's when we detox, it's when we heal. So if we now are compromising our sleep cycles, that is also gonna have an impact on our risk for disease. It's gonna affect our digestion. And that is maybe something you typically already feel. You already know that when you're stressed out, right? Maybe your stomach hurts, maybe you lose your appetite, maybe you get heartburn or reflux, right? Maybe your bowel movements change. Perhaps you get constipated or you have really loose stools. Like again, everybody's reaction is a little bit different. But as stress hormones rise, your gut is impacted and that shifts your microbiome. And remember, your microbiome also plays a role in your immune function, right? None of this is happening in isolation. All of these systems are impacting each other. And then, of course, just your mental health, your emotional wellness, your mood, right? The more stressed we are, the more susceptible we are to depression, anxiety, and other mental health challenges. Okay, so obviously there's a lot of physiological side effects, if you will, from chronic long-term stress. Now, I mentioned though, at the very beginning, like the caveat is that we're not all going to respond to stress in the same way. And that is more about like our stress response. Like, how are we wired to respond to stress? And that is a bigger influencer when it comes to prediction of disease or health, is how do you respond to stress? And this genetically can play a role. Like some of our genetic components do influence how we respond to stress. Also, the stressors we're exposed to in childhood can create, can influence our stress response, how we manage stress later in life. It has been documented that exposure to stress in early life can alter the normal development and physiology of your stress response, making you more sensitive to stress, making you more reactive and more highly having a more highly sensitive stress response. So that could also influence, right, later on in life how you're responding to stress. There's even been documentation of stressors of a fetus being exposed to, of the mother being exposed, but the fetus in the womb can also influence your sensitivity to stress later on in life. So that is a whole interesting conversation. And obviously, as an adult, you know, you're you can't go back and change what happened in your childhood. But next week, we're gonna have a very special guest, an integrative psychiatrist, Tracy Peng, come on the show with us. And we're gonna dive into this piece a little bit more deeper. What do we do with these either emotional traumas or things that we're bringing from our past? How do we move through that, move forward in a way that's going to keep us healthy and help manage our stress response going forward? So we're gonna tackle that one together next week. Okay, but just to know that all of these pieces are gonna influence how you react to a bad day versus how I react to a bad day. Now, what are some different causes of stress? Again, knowing we might react differently, but there are some generalized like stressors, right? Causes of stress. As I mentioned, cancer is a huge stressor. And it has to, even if you had no other stress in your life before that, which I doubt, because you know, we're all living in this world together and there is a lot of stress. But even if you didn't have any stress except the diagnosis, the diagnosis itself can be categorized, excuse me, as a trauma, an emotional shock, an emotional trauma in and of itself that needs to be addressed. Because if we don't help support the stress response to the diagnosis itself, this can create a stage that's going to make it harder for your body to heal, harder to recover, and then increase the risk of recurrence, right? So just that alone is an important piece. But knowing again that we're human in this modern day world, we're probably coming to the table already with a lot of stressors. And this could include anything from just like daily hassles, frustration of traffic jams, you know, work overload, too many things on the to-do list, family problem issues, financial difficulties, so many pieces here, right? So all of us are gonna have a different load of chronic stressors. And really, your action item from this episode is gonna be first just identify what are your stressors currently in your life, right? What is the load that you're currently taking on? And can any of those be shifted? Can some of them be removed? Can you offload them to somebody else? You know, can there can we make some shifts in your schedule that might decrease your daily stressor? So that really would be step one is to just remove or modify what we have some control over. But then there's deeper layers here. Okay. So those are kind of like the obvious chronic stressors, but the deeper layers are going to look more at our emotional health, our emotional well. So again, some of that could have been early childhood events that we were exposed to, or even just various emotional traumas or shocks or conflicts that we've had over the course of our life. It could also be something around how we express our emotions. There's actually been quite a bit of research around suppressed emotions being an instigator of chronic stress and an increased risk for cancer in particular. So let's dive into that in a little bit more detail because again, I don't think that's something that's talked about enough. Certainly not in the traditional medical model, but even in the integrative functional space. I don't know if we're if we're really talking enough about emotional health, emotional wellness. So, first for you to understand, right? I know I've said this before that our genetics are not our destiny, that we have control, right? We do have some influence over how our genetics are expressed. Your thoughts, your beliefs, your emotions, second only to food, is one of our primary epigenetic modifiers. So this means that what you're thinking, how you're feeling, actually changes the way your genes are expressed. It can turn genes on or off. That's powerful. That's influencing our DNA in addition to that stress cascade that I just outlined to you, right? Like in addition to the physiological impacts of emotional burdens in our body. Now, we talked about especially the influence on the immune system, but I want to really dial in what are we talking about when we come to when we speak of emotions? Because the emotions themselves are not the problem. Okay. We are emotional beings. We are meant to feel. We're meant, and that means the full spectrum. That means we're not always going to be joyful and happy and in love, right? Sometimes there's going to be really difficult, hard emotions to process, negative emotions. The emotion itself is not the problem. The problem is when we don't allow ourselves to feel it, when we don't allow ourselves to move through it, when it's for whatever reason, you know, it could be just because it's too much to deal with. It's too hard, it's too challenging, we don't want to, it's easier to suppress it or to say, you know, I'll deal with it later. I just have to get this done now. I can't really take the time to process it, whatever the reason is, when it's not resolved, when it's not expressed, it creates an emotional stress loop that just keeps going. Even if it's in the background, even if you don't realize it, it's happening and it's influencing your body, especially your immune system. So when we don't allow ourselves to feel they get stuck, and that is what we're seeing in the research, is that the biggest culprits are the unresolved, the suppressed emotions, especially emotions like anger and resentment and deep hurt, right? As well as grief and loss, like we shared even in last week's episode with Dean, right? And the grief of his wife passing. Also feelings of powerlessness, feelings of despair. Okay. These are some of the emotions we're talking about that when they get stuck, when they're not expressed, when they're not resolved, they can increase cancer risk. I want to share a few studies with you just to really, in case this is brand new information to you and you're like, what? There's no way this could be true. We are, we do have research to help support this. So here's one particular study from King's College Hospital where they found women with cancerous breast lumps, okay, so women with breast cancer, characteristically, so not across the board, but more often than not, exhibited extreme suppression of anger and other kind of icky negative feelings compared to a control. Okay. Another study in the Cancer Nursing Journal found a correlation between anger repression and cancer in general, not any specific type of cancer, just cancer in general. Another study in Lancet oncology, even, so this is not like alternative, you know, art hernals, you know, it's a prestigious journal. Increased rates of cancer of the blood, the bone marrow, the lymph, the skin, and the lungs all were found in association with unprocessed grief. A Harvard study found suppressed emotions led to a 70% increased risk of cancer. 70%. That's huge. That's more than even like smoking causes. Another study found that a study of, excuse me, a study of men with prostate cancer showed an association between anger suppression and lower natural killer cell activity. Remember, I mentioned that earlier. That's one of our really important immune cells that's like on surveillance for cancer cells. So this is a real thing. Okay. When we're looking at the bigger picture of why it does cancer grow, and more importantly, what can we do about it? We have to look at your stressors, including your emotions and any unprocessed, suppressed, unresolved emotions that you might be hanging on to. There's one other piece here that I want to mention to you that I think is fascinating. This was work done by a couple of different physicians. So I'm going to share their names in case you're interested and you want to dive deeper. But this is around the cancer personality. Okay. And this is research done by Dr. W. Douglas Brody, where after 30 years of working with cancer patients, he observed certain personality traits that all of them had in common. So in addition to suppressed emotions, especially around anger or resentment, okay, because those kind of come up the most often, cancer patients also often had one or more of the following traits. And there are four main categories. So one is the people pleaser, the caretaker, worried for everybody else before themselves, right? Putting everybody else's needs before their own needs. Another trait, avoiding conflict, you know, not necessarily speaking your truth because you don't want the consequence of conflict that might come up from it. This could also stem from maybe fear of rejection, right? If you really expressed how you felt about something from your friends, from your family, et cetera, from your community. Another trait, perfectionist tendencies, right? We're trying everything has to be perfect. It's not quite good enough. We're always like pushing ourselves to do the impossible, a really high need for approval from others, which kind of often piggybacks off of those perfectionist tendencies. And the fourth trait or category is really having a hard time coping with stress, which can compound over time. So just like notoriously knowing that about yourself that I don't handle stress well. And like stressors add up until I feel overwhelmed and like I just can't handle it anymore. Now, here's what's really interesting, okay, to piggyback off of this work is that then we look at Another physician, a German physician, Dr. Reich Geardhamer, who found that people at the highest risk for cancer not only had many of those traits I just outlined, but then they also experienced an especially damaging event. So this canon moment in their life that created an emotional shock, an emotional trauma, a conflict, something they were mentally unprepared for. And what is really curious, which I guess makes sense if you think about the physiological cascade and how long it might take for something to grow. But what he found, and he looked at over 20,000 people with cancer, it's like a pretty good sample size, you know? And what he found is that this event typically happened about two years or so prior to their diagnosis. So it pushed them into this cascade, you know, this inflammatory immune, poor sleep, hormonal dysregulation, et cetera, you know, this cascade that we already described. And it, if at any point it was resolved, the cascade stopped. But if it was left unresolved to just continue on its own path, then for at least for the people he was studying, about two years or so after that event, they found cancer in their body. And, you know, we're talking about like a very big event, obviously to something typically negative, that left a scar, you know, that left some trauma in the body. So here's another thing he found, though. So in addition to seeing that they all had this trigger, this like emotional event trigger, he then proposed and then tested it on his patients that once that emotional shock occurred, the body would go through that sequence of events if it wasn't interrupted. So then his thinking was could we interrupt that sequence of events? Could we resolve the emotional conflict, if you will? And what he found was yes. If he did that, if he was able to help his patient resolve the emotional conflict, the cancer immediately stopped growing at a cellular level. And eventually the body was able to manage it on its own and eliminate it. Disease tissue would disappear, normal tissue would reappear. Incredible. So we have to consider, you know, that this is a piece to the puzzle. Like I've said before, it's never gonna be just like one thing that causes cancer in our life typically. It could be if you had a really high dose exposure to a carcinogen or radiation or something, you know. But for most people, it's not. It's gonna be a combination of events. And a lot of it is gonna have to do with the terrain, the environment of the body being more or less susceptible to cancer growing. So, where does this leave us, at least at the end of this episode? Like I said, we're gonna keep going on this conversation as we move through the month of February. But where does that leave us now? In my mind, it leaves us with three points. So, first, as I already mentioned, I think first we need to identify what are the current sources of stress in our life? Are any of them modifiable? Could we drop some of them? Could we pass them on? Could we shift them? You know, could we reduce the load on our body? Much like we would do with a toxic burden, right? And try to remove toxins from our life. Can we remove some of the stressors from our life? Could we do less? Could we take away things on our to-do list so we're not like overwhelmed every day? If we're always running late and stuck in traffic, you know, could we shift our routine so we're leaving earlier so that doesn't happen? Those are just examples. What are the things that are causing us stress currently that we could actually do something about? That would be certainly be step number one. Step number two would then be to calm the stress response. And this is where we look at nervous system support and enhancing our overall emotional wellness. And we're gonna talk a lot more about nervous system support later in the month. And I'm gonna give you many tools of how you can calm the stress response and help regulate the nervous system, expand capacity so that you can actually handle more stress without it creating those physiological side effects. But in order to do that, we do need to understand the nervous system, at least in a very basic form. And the basics of the nervous system is we have two primary expressions of the nervous system. There's the sympathetic or the fight or flight response. That's like the stress response. And then there's the parasympathetic, the rest, digest, heal, repair state of the nervous system. When we are running in constant chronic stress, we are constantly in sympathetic. We are in fight or flight survival mode, right? Adrenaline, cortisol, these are like coursing through our bodies, trying to help us manage the stress, but you know, unfortunately also creating inflammation and immune issues, as we already talked about. It can be very helpful to have all this happen in an acute stress situation, right? Particularly when we need to get away from danger. We want all that to happen, right? It can heighten our response time in a fight. It pumps blood to our extremity so we can run, so we can flee, so we have energy. All of that is very helpful in an acute situation, not in a chronic situation. Okay. Parasympathetic, the rest, digest, heal, repair. This is when your heart rate slows down. We digest, we sleep better. We can heal in that state. So by calming the stress response, we're putting ourselves more into a parasympathetic place where our bodies can begin to recover and repair, right? It doesn't mean we can't handle some sympathetic stimulation. Of course we can, but we need it to be balanced. There needs to be like the sympathetic response when it's needed, when it's important. And then the rest of the time, like, how quickly can we shift back into parasympathetic? Hopefully that makes sense. And like I said, we're gonna talk about that more over the month and especially around like tools and ideas to help you do that. And then the third piece of this is building resilience to stressors, right? So as we expand nervous system capacity, we build our resilience to stress. Our food helps with this, our lifestyle, our sleep, right? All of these things are gonna help us handle stress better. So it's really a three-part strategy. And like I said, over the course of the month, we're gonna dive into each of those and share different ways you can begin to shift this stress response in your body and expand your capacity to heal, really. And I hope, you know, just to wrap it up, I hope what makes sense to you at this point is that yes, I think we all fundamentally know stress is not good for us, chronic stress is not good for us, but understanding a little bit more of the why behind it, like what's actually happening in the physiology, especially when it comes to cancer prevention, right? Some of those systems like the immune system that's so important for that task, as well as some of the causes, some of the stressors that could be playing a role. This is really why inside of our coaching program, we start with this piece. Before we talk about diet, we talk about stress and emotions and calming the stress response so we can get out of survival mode and help your body begin to heal. Then when you're in that parasympathetic place, then we can nourish it with food, with sleep, with supplements, with other things that are gonna help the body heal in a deeper way. I hope that makes sense to you. I hope you found that interesting. And I really hope you hang out with us for the rest of the month so you can learn more around how the tools. Like I said, next week we're gonna have integrative psychiatrist Tracy Ping on the show to share more about how to deal with some of the emotional wounds and traumas and some therapy and techniques that can help us move through those unresolved emotional traumas. And then we'll talk more tools around nervous system support, enhancing emotional wellness, all the like feel good. This is where love and joy and hope and fun and all these things are gonna play a role. Thank you so much for joining me for today's episode. If you are enjoying the content we're covering here, please help us spread the word. Share, subscribe, leave a review, let your friends and family know. We really appreciate your support and helping this information get into the ears of as many people as possible. And don't forget to subscribe because we do release an episode every week. You'll be the first to know if you've subscribed to the podcast. Typically it's on Wednesdays, so that you can gobble up these episodes as they come out. I wish you such a beautiful day. I hope you find some ways you can decrease the stressors in your life. And I look forward to connecting with you again on next week's episode. Bye for now.