Why Can’t I Get Better? The 3 Foundations That May Be Keeping You Stuck — Gut, Stress & Sleep | E173

If you have trauma, working on it, not just doing a therapist, which can be helpful, but I find out a lot of my patients, their therapist that talks through their past actually becomes their trigger. I've had patients come in my clinic after seeing their psychologist, psychiatrist. They come in shaking, their eyes are wide open. They're just like totally in a wreck because they were triggered by the thing that was supposed to help them. Why am I not getting better? I'm doing everything I'm supposed to do. I'm still stuck. I'm still having my symptoms. What are we missing, Doc? What can we do better? This is something I encounter in my clinic on a daily basis, working with people over time through the health issues, and they just get stuck. They're just not getting better. They might get 20, 30, 40, 60% better, but there becomes a place in their healing process where they just get stuck. And that's what I want to talk about over the next several of these Friday 10-minute quick podcasts. Why do patients get stuck? Why do individuals in their healing process get stuck? I'm doing this for my patients mainly, for our patients in our clinic, but there's a lot of people who listen to this who aren't patients in our clinic. And people ask the same questions online that they ask in person. What's going on with my body? And that's what I want to discuss. A couple of basic concepts I want to talk about first. The first thing is that you being stuck in your healing system, whatever's going on, maybe you're autoimmune, maybe your gut, maybe your brain fog, long COVID, Lyme, mold, maybe you're Post cancer therapy, you're doing and your nerve damage isn't getting better. It comes down the basic thing I find out that gets people stuck the most are the foundational things. As we go through this, we'll talk about different things like is the mast cell really being addressed? Is the detox really being addressed? Have we really got figured out the Lyme mold thing? But the foundations are the foundations, and one of the things I talk about with patients is you need to perfect the basics. Just like a professional soccer player or whatever sport is, they perfect the basics: kicking, passing, shooting—the basics—and that's what you want to do in. with your health journey. Other things to think about: this is not your fault. It's not because you've missed something, you haven't done the right thing, you're doing the wrong thing. Many times it's something that's right in front of you, that's staring you in the eyes, that you've looked at but not quite the right way. You've seen a lot of different providers, doctors, specialists, but not someone to help you through that. And that's where all the educational things we put out online are meant to help individuals. I want to lay the groundwork, set the table, just so that you— a lot of people will blame themselves or blame the provider. And ultimately, it's not a lack of the right care, it's a lack of focusing on the right things. And that, I think, is a very interesting topic because a lot of times we focus on the most recent thing we read on social media, the most famous person, what worked for them. You know, keto worked for me, carnivore worked for me, you know, pescatarian worked for me, vegan worked for me. I think a lot of times people get distracted from their core issues by the noise out there. And that is a very common thing I encounter with my patients in the clinic, which is one of the many reasons we do all the educational things we do. That's the first thing. Second thing, it's not your fault. It's again, issue with division, figuring those things out. The third thing, there are answers. You can figure it out. Never give up, never lose hope. That's one of the things, um, if you've read my book, you've looked at a lot of things we talk about myself, Dr. Jinsky, the specialists we have on, on this podcast is to never give up hope. Never give up on yourself and never give up that there are answers to be found. I think the mental game, feeling like there's no hope, giving up, that's probably the one of the bigger cruxes that Get people stuck in the ruts they're in because you have to keep on trying things and doing things. Um, the other thing is just not focusing on the basics. And finally, just having your team, your whole stuff put together so you can kind of figure things out. Every fall, the schedule tightens and most of our attention goes to getting the kids ready. Almost none of it goes to the person holding the whole thing together. So I put together these 3 things just for that: a daily multivitamin in the active forms your body can actually use, Quercetin and nettles to support your immune and respiratory health without the drowsiness, and NAC and acetylcysteine to help your body rebuild its own antioxidant reserve. This is what I take every fall. That's aaronhartmanmd.com/backtoschool. So as we keep on going, I want to talk about major things that get people stuck in the healing process, and I want to talk about first about the terrain, the foundational things. Gut, stress, sleep. You know, a lot of times, you know, these are the things that I— the phrase I use is, you know, when you get stuck in your healing process, what you need to do is find the things that are blocking your body's healing and you give your body what's lacking and your body will do what it's made to do, which is self-heal and self-repair. And so a lot of times it's the gut part. Now the gut is kind of complicated. You've got your microbiome, you've got nutrition behind there, you've got food reactivities and sensitivities. You have to realize everything you Breathe and swallow. But everything you breathe, you actually eventually gets in your GI tract. Part of what your respiratory tract does with the little cilia, if you breathe dust, toxins, whatever, particles, bacteria, whatever, the filtration cells, cilia in your lungs will actually get that up and you'll swallow it. That's one thing. The other thing is that you really have to really focus on the toxins in food as well. Real food, how you eat, how you interact with it. But not just that, you're actually feeding an army in your gut called the microbiome. You are mostly bacteria. You have maybe 20,000, 23,000 DNA in your body that are you, yet you have over a million DNA of bacteria in and on your body, and 99% of those are actually found in your GI tract. So all of a sudden, the interaction with food is not just you eating real food that's nutrient-dense, that's important. Are you not eating fake food that's processed with rancid fats, etc.? That's important. Are you not eating foods that inflame you? You might be eating healthy Whatever raw milk, real bread, real cheese, real blueberries, real strawberries, you know, unfettered apples. But if your immune system has gotten confused and you're reacting with those, you know, you need to remove those, and that's where food sensitivity testing can come into place. But also one big thing your gut does is with detoxification. So what you eat not just feeds you, but also helps your body get stuff out. And that's where your cruciferous vegetables, that's where minerals, that's where adequate protein. One of the big things about protein these days is adequate protein helps you detoxify. And the last thing about the gut I want to say, and we have done a whole series on this, but is that the colorful foods, you know, you have prebiotics are the things that feed your bacteria. Probiotics are the bacteria and postbiotics are the things the bacteria make. And starting this whole process are the polyphenols or the colors in foods you eat and fiber, not just fiber, but the two of those. So your gut is one of the big sticking points. Stress is another one. Now, stress, what is that? I'm starting to change the words and language I use with this. I'm starting to use the word iatrogenic stress, which is basically, it can be stress like trauma, physical, sexual, emotional abuse, but also a lot of the stress people deal with is interacting with the healthcare system. You come with a doctor, you get dismissed, or you get a horrible diagnosis, imaging test, lab testing. This happens all the time in my clinic where I do a fancy new test, I'm starting to do some testing for beta amyloid and P-tau 217, some other things that can help predict your risk for Alzheimer's, which I would think could be helpful with some— for someone. But having people get the testing back and all of a sudden now they're like, oh my gosh, I'm going to get Alzheimer's. And they get derailed by the stuff that we do. And also now I become a source of trauma for that individual because there's information that I want to act on, they want to act on, but they got kind of stuck. So it— and there's also just the trauma of your health condition itself that can over time damage your nervous system. So, dealing with stress and trauma, having a good self-regulation practice. If things dysregulate, you stay away from them. If you have trauma, working on it, not just doing a therapist, which can be helpful, but I find out a lot of my patients, their therapist that talks through their past actually becomes their trigger. I've had patients come in my clinic after seeing their psychologist, psychiatrist. They come in shaking, their eyes are wide open. They're just like, Totally in a wreck because they were triggered by the thing that was supposed to help them. That's where trauma therapy comes in. EMDR tapping, somatic therapy, parts therapy, all these things are ways to work around your consciousness and work in the subconscious to actually change the neural networks. There's a thing called the default mode network, which is kind of like the patterns your brain makes. Sometimes the patterns need to be disrupted and remade, and that's where trauma therapy comes into place. But that stress component, gut stress, if that's off, it blocks your body's healing capability. And finally, sleep. I mean, sleeping is when your body repairs, it's when your body detoxifies. If you're not getting adequate quality sleep, you won't detoxify your brain. You have 2 parts. You have dark deep sleep, the first part of the night, and then your deep sleep, the first part of the REM, the last part of the night. And deep sleep, which is what you usually do between going to bed and midnight, 1-ish, a lot of that is body detoxification and brain, your microglia, the glial lymphatics, fancy words for your brain's system for detoxification, are open and Running, if you go to bed late or you don't get into the deep enough sleep, you won't, that won't happen. Then, then REM, which happens later on, it's the sleep that happens, you know, usually the last 4 versus the first 4 hours of sleeping is the sleep when you actually solidify memories, you regulate your limbic and nervous system. And if you don't get that sleep, it has detrimental effects as well. So gut and all the things involved with that, stress and all the things involved with that and sleep and all the things involved with that. That is like the foundational things that I find my patients get stuck in their healing journey. Every fall, the schedule tightens and most of our attention goes to getting the kids ready. Almost none of it goes to the person holding the whole thing together. So I put together these 3 things just for that: a daily multivitamin in the active forms your body can actually use, quercetin and nettles to support your immune and respiratory health without the drowsiness, and NAC and acetylcysteine to help your body rebuild its own Antioxidant Reserve. This is what I take every fall. That's aaronhartmanmd.com/backtoschool. I know many of y'all are probably expecting something more exciting and fancy. We'll get to that. We'll get to all the weird things like mast cell and mold and Lyme. But I want to set the table first of what are the foundational things that are so commonly overlooked and so commonly not focused on. I've literally put chapters of my book on it. I've literally done whole podcast series on it. I've literally created a whole course online and a stress thing to deal with these because these are the foundational things that people often overlook because they want the new fancy thing, the newest high-tech thing. And the reality is, if 80% of heart disease and 70% of most cancer can be prevented by diet and lifestyle alone, then really the foundational thing for any health issue is the most important thing. It's where you start, not where you end. And so, I want to keep on going through this, laying the table out. Why are you stuck? Why is your body not healing and self-repairing there? And then kind of branch out into all the things that people expect me to talk about, like, I Undiscovered Lyme, mast cell, mold, hormones, whatever. But the reality is you got to start the basics. If you don't start there, it's going to be hard to get your body to self-heal and self-repair. Hope you enjoy this. And as we keep on going forward, we'll talk more and more about this idea and finding for you where your body might be stuck, removing that stuckness, giving your body what's lacking, and then enabling your body to do what it's made to do, which is self-heal and self-repair. Take care. Talk to you soon. You came here for straight answers on your health. No hype and no gimmicks. We work hard to give you that on every single episode. So if you could do me a favor, that would be amazing. Leave a quick review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. It just takes 30 seconds and that'll help other people find the same information you found helpful. Thank you so much.