Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes introduces a podcast/video episode focused on practical self-assessment strategies to improve mood and quality of life. She outlines helping viewers complete a self-assessment worksheet (available on docsnipes.com), emphasizing identifying the main presenting issue and current maintaining stressors. The chunk explains how perceived stress activates the HPA axis, raising cortisol and lowering sex hormones, serotonin, and melatonin, which worsens sleep and mood; the goal is to reduce cortisol, improve sleep, and rebalance the body.
Chapters
It's. Welcome everybody, to happiness. Isn't Brain surgery with Doc Snipes practical tools to improve your mood and quality of life? Today we're going to be going back to basics and looking at the self assessment. I've had some people contact me and they wanted a little bit more information on how to do the self assessment and wanted me to break it down a little bit more. So when we actually launch or start the podcast today on Facebook Live at 10am Central Standard Time, we are going to be going over the self assessment and kind of in nitty gritty detail. The goal is to help people complete the worksheet that's on docsknifes.com or just get enough from the web, sorry, from the podcast that they can complete a self assessment and really start addressing some of the symptoms that are bothering them. Some of the things we're going to go through today are identifying the main presenting issue. So if you were going to go into a therapist and say, you know, hey Doc, I'm depressed, I'm anxious, I'm, you know, whatever, usually those are the top two angry might come in there. You know, what is it that, how does that look for you? Depression looks different for just about every single person. And we've talked a lot in other presentations and we'll continue to talk a lot about the HPA axis and how once the body perceives a stressor, no matter what the stressor is, when the body perceives a stressor, it puts out the all hands on deck. Once that is activated, cortisol levels go up. When cortisol levels go up, testosterone, estrogen, available serotonin and melatonin, your sleep hormone, all go down. So you start having problems sleeping, you start having mood issues because you're not, you don't have enough accessible serotonin. You may be making enough, but it's not accessible in the right areas. And when your sex hormones go down, that has a lot of other impacts on your life and your relationships, etc. So we really want to look at what's going on that is causing this stress. It doesn't matter if you started not sleeping, you know, you were staying up, playing video games or doing whatever, which caused you just start not getting enough sleep, which caused your body to think there was a stress which created this whole cascade of hormones, or if something else triggered the HPA axis and your body perceived the stress, which triggered the cascade of symptoms and hormones, it doesn't really matter. What matters is you've got these symptoms right now and we need to figure out what is maintaining it? What is the current threshold stressor or stressors? And how can we help you improve your sleep and reduce your cortisol and get to a place where your body can rest and rebalance so you can feel happier? If you want to join our podcast, we'll be going live on Facebook in about three minutes. Go to happiness I'm sorry docsnipes.com Facebook and you can join the group and have access to the webinar.
