Friends, many of you already know how much better plunking yourself into a hot epsom salt bath can make your muscles feel, but I’m here today to talk to you about another reason to sit in warm salt water. How many of you lovelies experience emotional stress? Let’s take a moment to consider what scenarios might bring it about:
- You feel an intense desire to scissor-shank a colleague after reading a snarky email he’s signed with an intentionally-punctuated “Thanks.”
- An ache in your jaw makes you realize you’ve been clenching your teeth in a blood-rage death-bite because an entitled douche nozzle blew past 30 turn-waiting citizens in the merge lane and screamed in front of you right as you dutifully zippered onto the crawling 405
- You feel a particularly delightful surge of white hot joy when, at the end of your 5th week of diligent practice of an exciting new skill, your first attempt and your 96th attempt are precisely identical
Believe it or not, each one of these scenarios may cause emotional stress! Assume that you have just experienced one of the above stressors: choose your favorite! Now, let’s see what happens in the body as a result. I wonder how the adrenals are doing!
Maybe not so good…
Is emotional stress not so bad?
Christ on a cracker, it’s a pea soup river of catecholamines and corticosteroids!!!
The corticosteroids are dispatched to address the situation quickly and calmly.
Oh god, there are fatty acids EVERYWHERE
NMDA receptors is sluts for magnesium.
SLUTS
They’re not cold, they’re just real dumb.
…which is unfortunate, because if they let TOO much calcium in without enough magnesium around to cock block, the neuronal mitochondria stop functioning and it makes the neuron super die.
Don’t worry friends, it doesn’t have to be this way. Enter a delightfully relaxing, super magnesiummy, and totally legit excuse for extended bathroom me-time: epsom salts!
Magiiiiiiic!!!
Btw, if you’re wondering how much you should add to the bathwater and/or how much your body will absorb, here’s some things about that from some dudes who studied pee. If you don’t feel like reading their report, the main take away is that a 1% solution works fairly well: in a standard sized bathtub that’s about 2 1/2 cups of epsom salts. Buy them in a giant bag or box in the grocery store aisle with rubbing alcohol and hydrogen peroxide; don’t spend $10 for a little jar of scented ones!
Also, here’s a bunch of other stuff I read that goes into way more detail than my snarky cartoons:
Magnesium in the Central Nervous System
Handbook of Neuroscience for the Behavioral Sciences
Rapid Recovery from Depression Using Magnesium Treatment
Nitric Oxide Induces Oxidative Stress and Apoptosis in Neuronal Cells
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