Mind Body Strategies toThrive with Chronic Illness or Addiction

You. I'd like to welcome everybody to today's presentation on mind body strategies for living with chronic illness or addiction. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. Today we're going to discuss how sleep, circadian rhythms, hormones, anti inflammatory diets, improving the microbiome, getting movement, pain and pain management all can help people improve their quality of life. When living with chronic illness or addiction, we may not be able to or doctors may not be able to cure the chronic illness and people who are in recovery from addiction may have be enduring ongoing pause. And in addition, if you've are in recovery from addiction, if you are stable in your recovery, that's wonderful. But if you start experiencing stress in one or more pieces of life, that can be a relapse trap. So recognizing hey, I have an addiction or I had an addiction and it's in remission right now, but I certainly don't want to come back is really important. I'm going to talk a lot today about focusing on the acceptance and commitment therapy concept of living in the and saying to yourself I can have fill in the blank this chronic illness and move toward a rich and meaningful life. Just because I have a chronic illness doesn't mean I cannot do anything now. Some things may have to be modified. True. However, we can use our energy to move toward that rich and meaningful life instead of feeling like the symptoms or the issues or the diagnosis is in control and telling us what we can and cannot do. The physical impact of chronic illness or addiction is significant. And, and let's talk about why. Physically, when we have chronic illness, it's stressful. And it can be stressful because something's going on in our body that's keeping the machinery under the hood, if you will, miscalibrated. So we're not as efficient in what we do. It can be stressful because we're not sleeping as well because of pa. When we have stress more often than we have relaxation, our stress response, our sympathetic nervous system can get too strong and our relaxation response, our parasympathetic nervous system can get too weak. So we have difficulty turning off our stress. We have difficulty down regulating relaxing whatever word you want to use. When we have difficulty relaxing and we stay in a stressed state state, even if it's, you know, only a minimally stressed state, but we're in a stressed state, our autonomic nervous system alters its balance and we start to see that cortisol, our stress hormone, loses its ability to suppress inflammation. We start to see changes, not good ones in our gonadal hormones, our thyroid hormones in our sleep, quality in our neurotransmitters. So definitely we want to look at how can we reduce stress in each piece of our life, Physical, interpersonal, emotional, cognitive and environmental. How can we reduce stress, unnecessary stress in each area of my life, and how can I mitigate or deal with inevitable stress? Because, you know, crop's going to happen and we want to be able to recognize that I can have a chronic condition, I can be faced with a stressor, and I can effectively use my energy to handle it in a way that helps me move toward my rich and meaningful life. So ans balance our autonomic nervous system. Balance is kind of the umbrella for most of this, because when our autonomic nervous system gets out of whack, everything gets out of whack. We see inflammation. Inflammation may be caused by stress. It may be caused by the disorder itself. If somebody has an autoimmune condition, then stress can cause their immune system to go kind of haywire and they start having more inflammation, more pain, and, and we need to recognize the bi directional impact stress triggers. The stress response increases inflammation, inflammation. The body says, hey, that's a stressor. Guess what? That triggers the stress response and increases inflammation. Now, that system doesn't really seem to work very well, but that's the way we're wired physically. When we have chronic illnesses, it impacts our circadian rhythms. It often impacts what we do, how long we can do it. We have some days that are good days, some days that are bad days. We have some days where we're wide awake and some days where we feel like we can barely get through the day and we need multiple naps. Unfortunately, when our circadian rhythms get dysregulated, it negatively impacts the autonomic nervous system because some of the hormones that are regulated by the circadian rhythms also help regulate the autonomic nervous system sleep quality. Well, if circadian rhythms are out of whack and we're stressed out, we ain't going to sleep well. Plus, if we've got pain, not going to sleep well. Hormones and neurotransmitters, and I'm just going to lump these two together because they work as a team, they get out of balance. And whether it's because of the condition, like polycystic ovarian syndrome, or it's because of stress, as our hormones get out of balance, it generally worsens the chronic illness. PCOS is highly, highly, highly correlated with chronic stress and trauma. People who have a disregulated autonomic nervous system often have imbalanced gonadal hormones which affect their reproductive system gut health. When we get stressed, our body calls in a whole different group of microbes. To produce what it needs to produce in order to help us prepare for and sustain that flight or fight or flight reaction. When this happens, then we start seeing the relaxation microbes, if you will, the positive microbes. I don't know what you want to call them. They start getting lazy, they start disappearing. The environment becomes inhospitable to them. They don't want to be around all that stress. And when our gut is unhealthy, then it sends signals via the vagus nerve to the brain, saying, danger, Will Robinson, There's a problem. We're under stress. We're under attack. Which again, triggers that stress response. Increases inflammation, yada, yada, blood sugar regulation. When we're stressed, because we're not getting enough sleep, because our microbiome's out of whack, because we've got inflammation, it causes spikes in our blood sugar. Likewise, spikes in blood sugar cause stress. And we need to regulate these things. The more we can regulate our stress, the more we'll be able to retrain our autonomic nervous system. The more we'll be able to help our body effectively suppress unnecessary inflammation, the more we'll be able to regulate our circadian rhythms. And energy and pain levels are also impacted by all of these things. If you're not sleeping well, if you're in pain, if your hormones are out of whack. If your neurotransmitters like dopamine and glutamate are out of whack, then you're not going to have as much energy. Norepinephrine is our focus neurochemical. If that is deficient, then we're not going to be able to focus as much. And I've said in many other classes, when any one of those neurotransmitters or thyroid hormone or gor. Gonadal hormone gets out of balance, all of its buddies go in tandem with it. So there's a different balance of neurotransmitters when we're under stress than when we're not under stress. I didn't mention addiction as we went through this. Because I wanted to try to make it as concise as possible. But let's go back through that. When people are in active addiction, they are often very unhappy. When they're using. They may be numb, they may be happy. But when they are not using, when they're in withdrawal, then that's a big stressor when they use. There are a lot of times they're ingesting a toxin. That's a stressor when they are using, like behavioral addictions. We'll take porn addiction, for example. When people are engaging in compulsive pornography use, it alters the balance of the stress hormones and the gonadal hormones like testosterone, and causes the brain to go into a stressed state. We need to recognize that addiction, both using and withdrawing, is stressful. So every time the person uses or withdraws, they're triggering that stress response, which, as I mentioned earlier, will lead to the body's inability to suppress inflammation. And because of especially substances, you may see increased inflammation in the gut, you know, in various tissues. Circadian rhythms are often messed up because we go to sleep partly based on our circadian rhythms. Cortisol's highest in the morning, gets us out of bed. Supposed to decrease throughout the day. If it doesn't decrease because we're stressed, then melatonin doesn't get secreted. And if melatonin doesn't get effectively secreted, we're not going to have good sleep. A lot of people, not all, not all, but a lot of people with addictions don't prioritize sleep either. And so they may stay up gambling into the wee hours of the night or whatever, playing video games until 2, 3, 4 in the morning, and then, oh, crap, I gotta go to work at 6. We see as a result of. Of the stress on the body and the imbalance in the autonomic nervous system, people with addictions very often have imbalances in their gonadal hormones. Testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, and to a certain extent, oxytocin. We see imbalances in neurotransmitters because their dopaminergic system has been going in overdrive, which means all of the other neurochemicals are kind of out of balance because one of their components is basically for. For lack of a better explanation, basically used up. So there's this gap. You know, it's trying. Like trying to make chocolate chip cookies and not having any eggs. You know, it just. There's a gap there. What are you going to use to hold everything together? Gut health? Well, if you're ingesting stuff, then certainly your gut health is going to be impacted. But remember that a lot of substances are not ingested orally. They can be smoked, they can be injected, they can be taken in many, many different ways. So it won't necessarily always directly contact the gut. Microbiome but the stress caused by use directly impacts the gut microbiome, which directly impacts the stress response, blood sugar regulation. When people are getting their rush, when they're getting their high, their buzz, whatever they're calling it, that's a stressor. It's exhilaration, but it's a stressor. And so they're going to have a spike in blood sugar. And when they detox, when that substance leaves their system, their body recognizes it as a stressor. So they're going to have another spike in blood sugar. All of these spikes in blood sugar, poor energy or poor sleep, et cetera, is going to impact energy. And we, as dopamine becomes imbalanced, the body's ability to and stress becomes prominent. The body's ability to manage pain actually goes down. When we get stressed, we actually have a lower pain tolerance. And I have other videos that talk about why that is. My point is our body, if what's going on under the hood ain't healthy, then it's going to worsen the addiction. It's going to potentially trigger a relapse in the addiction and or it's going to potentially worsen.