3 Reasons You Need Magnesium when Dealing with Stress

Whether you are in your 20s, 30s, 40s, or 50s, stress can come from all sorts of things like starting a new job, buying a house, going through a breakup, or starting a family. While our bodies are built to handle stress in short bursts, long-term stress can take its toll on the body's nutritional resources. This can leave us feeling drained and exhausted, especially during stressful periods.

Here's the kicker: stress puts a higher demand on the nutrients that help us cope, like magnesium, vitamin B6, and vitamin C. These three nutrients have fast-acting effects, which can help to balance your stress response when you feel less-than-resilient.

In this article, we share three reasons you need magnesium, vitamin B6, and vitamin C when dealing with stress. Click here to skip straight to the three reasons, keep reading on to understand how chronic stress impacts your magnesium levels.

How Does Stress Impact My Magnesium Levels?

• When we feel stressed, our brain starts a chain reaction of hormones, which activates the production of cortisol.
• Cortisol activates our stress response, putting us in "fight or flight" mode to prepare us for a challenge. 

Acute stress helps us spring into action with a short-term spike in cortisol. However, elevated cortisol can deplete the body’s resources when stress becomes chronic, impacting our nutritional balance and ability to cope with stress.

For example, chronic stress can deplete magnesium levels, which is one of the most important nutrients for managing stress. Low levels of magnesium can lead to feeling irritable and snappy when stress levels rise.¹ 

Low magnesium levels cause the body to release even more cortisol, creating a cycle where high stress and low magnesium make each other worse.

Outside of stress, other factors can also impact magnesium levels, including drinking lots of coffee or letting off steam with a few wines on a weeknight.¹

3 Reasons You Need Magnesium When Feeling Stressed

All of that considered, here are the 3 reasons why you need a boost of magnesium during times of stress:

1. Feeling stressed increases cortisol, which raises magnesium requirements. 
2. Constantly high cortisol eventually depletes magnesium levels,
3. Low magnesium levels limit your ability to cope with stress.

All of this shows how important it is to get enough magnesium—but there’s even more to this story.

Stress doesn’t just make you feel bad, it also affects how your brain works, explained in this article. Too much stress can lower magnesium levels, which then makes it harder to think clearly, stay calm, and make good decisions.²

Low magnesium also makes it harder for your brain to cope. In fact, studies show that magnesium can work as well as some mood medications in helping with stress.² That doesn’t mean you should stop any medicine, but it does mean that magnesium is a powerful way to support your brain and feel more balanced.

With all of that in mind, supporting magnesium levels can help enable healthy stress response alongside other nutrients, like vitamin B6, and vitamin C to help you get on top of stress.

High-Dose Nutrients for a Healthier Stress Response

Nutrients like magnesium, vitamin B6, and vitamin C found in formulations like FemmeX designed for women, MetaRelax designed for mood support, and MagActive Muscle for muscle health are crucial for a healthy stress response. Let me explain why these nutrients matter.

How magnesium and vitamin B6 support stress levels and mood balance

These nutrients help control the release of stress hormones. Magnesium also enhances sleep to help you cope with stress. Magnesium also prevents damage to your nervous system in response to stress linked with low moods.¹⸴³ In action, a high-dose combination of magnesium and vitamin B6 has been shown to reduce stress and overwhelm scores by 24% after eight weeks (p<0.02).⁴

How vitamin C helps support a healthy stress response

This vitamin helps reduce the body's stress response by lowering cortisol levels. It also helps decrease the activity of the sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for the "fight or flight" response. When taken for at least 7 days, 500mg daily of vitamin C can help people feel calmer and more relaxed in stressful situations.⁵

To explore our magnesium range and how it can help you, click here.

Support Your Body so it can Support You:

Managing stress effectively is crucial for maintaining overall well-being. By understanding how Practitioner-formulated supplements like FemmeX or MetaRelax and MagActive Muscle can help support the body, you can support yourself to manage stress. If you are experiencing persistently high stress, it might be beneficial to consult with a Healthcare Practitioner to guide you towards building a more resilient you.

References

1. Pickering G, Mazur A, Trousselard M, et al. Magnesium status and stress: the vicious circle concept revisited. Nutrients. 2020;12(12):3672. doi:10.3390/nu12123672
2. Botturi A, Ciappolino V, Delvecchio G, Boscutti A, Viscardi B, Brambilla P. The Role and the Effect of Magnesium in Mental Disorders: A Systematic Review. Nutrients. 2020;12(6):1661.&nbsp; doi:10.3390/nu12061661
3. Shindo Y, Yamanaka R, Hotta K, Oka K. Inhibition of Mg2+ extrusion attenuates glutamate excitotoxicity in cultured rat hippocampal neurons. Nutrients. 2020 Sep 10;12(9):2768. doi:10.3390/nu12092768
4. Pouteau E, Kabir-Ahmadi M, Noah L, et al. Superiority of magnesium and vitamin B6 over magnesium alone on severe stress in healthy adults with low magnesemia: A randomized, single-blind clinical trial. PLoS One. 2018 Dec 18;13(12):e0208454. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0208454
5. Al-fahham AA. Effect of low dose vitamin C on public speaking stress during group presentation. J of Phys: Conference Series 2019 Sep; 1294(6).