#112 Get Your Cortisol To Optimal

The information provided in this podcast is educational and not intended to diagnose or treat medical conditions. Dr. Donnie Wilson struggled for decades to solve her numerous health issues and heal her body. But with focused determination, she healed herself and in doing so, she discovered the Dr. Donnie stress recovery Protocol. On this show, you're going to hear from doctors, nutritionists and Experts along with Dr. Donnie who will give practical advice and wisdom to help heal your body. This is how humans heal.

Hi, I'm Dr. Donnie Wilson and welcome to How Humans Heal Today. I want to cover with you some of the common misconceptions when it comes to adrenal health and cortisol levels. These are things that I get questions about day in and day out over the years that I've been helping people to optimize their adrenal function and cortisol levels. So I want you to have the health accurate and correct information because I feel like it's going to make the difference in your success with improving your health. And I don't want you to be out there with making the wrong decisions or not knowing this information when the information is available. And of course, it's what I cover in my book, Master your Stress, Reset your Health. So if any of you don't already have the book, I encourage you to get the book you see here next to me. Master your stress, Reset your Health so that yout you can read about it or listen and learn all about how stress affects you and how important it is for your health. So here's one of the first things I want to make really clear is that I believe that one of the most important and essential things we can do for our health is to optimize our cortisol levels and our adrenaline levels. This is not something you're going to find on your standard annual blood work. It's not something that you're even going to hear from your endocrinologist who specialize in helping you to balance your hormone levels, including should be the adrenal glands. But this is not what you're going to hear from that doctor's office. It's likely not even what you're going to hear from a functional doctor or a naturopathic doctor, because I'm trained as a functional naturopathic doctor over 22 years ago. And I know what I was taught, which yes, had to do some with helping the adrenal glands and addressing the adrenal glands. But what I've since discovered from my health experience and from helping thousands of patients is that optimizing cortisol and adrenaline levels is way more important and essential than I was ever taught and ever realized. So I really want you to know that so you can put it at the top of your health priority list. So the first thing that I really want you to know is how important it is to optimize your cortisol and adrenaline levels. And the second misconception that I want to make sure you understand is that these are not tested in your regular standard blood work or physical exam. So. So even if you go into your standard doctor and you ask for cortisol levels to be measured in your blood work, they can measure cortisol in the blood, but it's gonna be only at the time you have your blood drawn, which might also be a stressful experience. So it could change your levels. Plus, cortisol is a hormone that naturally should change throughout the day. It should be higher in the morning and gradually decreasing through the day. When we're exposed to stress, which we all are as humans, right, we're all going to have stress exposure. What is likely to happen is it's going to shift your cortisol higher or lower at different times of day, depending on your body and your predispositions and your pattern, your stress pattern. We each have a unique response to stress. So if we only measure your cortisol in your blood in the morning, we're not going to get a good sense of how stress is affecting your cortisol levels. We need to measure your cortisol at least four different times of your day. So I recommend measuring it in the morning when you first wake up in the middle of the day, like before lunch, in the evening, like before dinner and then before bed, so that we can see your cortisol at different times of day and what it's up to. It might be too high at certain times of day or too low at certain times of day. The only way we're going to know is if we measure it. Now, you don't have to do this as a blood test at different times of day. You could measure it in saliva. We can accurately measure cortisol in saliva. So that would be spitting in a tube at different times a day. If you are currently taking a steroid of any type, then that is not going to be accurate in the saliva. So then we need to do it in urine. Or really, anyone could accurately measure their cortisol and cortisol metabolites in the urine. In that case, you would do a urine sample in the morning, in the middle of the day, in the Evening and the bedtime. And these are specialty labs that run these panels. At this point in time, I hope that someone listening will contact me and have the idea to make it possible to measure our cortisol much easier and faster. We need to be able to measure our cortisol and four different times a day and have results much faster than we can now. Right now, we need to pay a specialty lab, usually a few hundred dollars, I would say, to measure just your cortisol levels might be 2 or $250. And then if you want to also measure your adrenaline levels, which I recommend doing, we can measure adrenaline levels in the urine. It's called norepinephrine and epinephrine. And there's specific labs that will measure norepinephrine and epinephrine in the urine. If you measure your cortisol, norepinephrine and epinephrine, and your other neurotransmitters at the same time, that currently is a $350 test and you collect it at home. So you do the urine and saliva collection at home, and then you mail it in, and the results take a couple weeks to come back. And then usually I would meet with you one on one or in one of my group programs to teach you what are your results mean and how. What do you do about it? How do you get your cortisol and adrenaline back to optimal levels? Because again, that's the main goal. If you can get your cortisol and adrenaline to optimal levels now you are resetting your health. You are completely shifting the signaling that's happening on the inside. And that's the key, you know, so much of the time. And here's another misconception I see a lot on social media and other places. People will often say, well, if you're feeling stressed, just change your mindset. Now, I want to clarify that mindset is definitely important. I encourage and help people with mindset all the time. And mindfulness, for that matter, is very helpful for us mastering our stress. The thing is that I want to point out is that if you're feeling stressed, let's say you're feeling tired, anxious, depressed, down, overwhelmed, irritable, and someone just says to you, oh, just change your mindset, right? Like, oh, just change your mind. As if it's just. Just change your mindset. The thing is, is if you have imbalanced cortisol, imbalanced adrenaline, imbalanced neurotransmitters, they're going to continue to send you more signals that they're out of balance, they're going to continue to make you feel anxious, irritable, tired, not sleep well. Those signals are going to keep happening because there's imbalance inside your body signaling pathways. And so you might be trying, oh, I'm just going to change my mindset. I'm just going to pretend like there's nothing wrong, but actually your body sending you mini signals that there is something wrong. Stress has caused imbalance in your cortisol and adrenaline and many other, potentially many other hormones and neurotransmitters. And they are trying to tell you that they're out of balance and they need help get back in balance. So I'm trying to say don't just ignore these signals from your body. These signals from your body are important and that's what's going to help you reset your health and change the future of your health. So I really want to emphasize that it's so important to not ignore these signals from our bodies. And it's so important to know that these levels are not going to get measured. They're not part of standard medical care, they're not covered by insurance. It's not going to happen there. If you really, truly want to be optimizing your health, reversing health issues, increasing the longevity and length of your life, then you have to take this into your own hands. You have to decide, I want optimal cortisol and adrenaline levels. I want. I'm going to pay for the test with a practitioner who's able to order it for me. I'm going to do whatever it takes to get my levels to optimal because I want to be healthy and feel good and enjoy my life and my loved ones and live my purpose for as long as I'm here to live it right. So that's your choice, to lean into that and choose that and it's available. It's possible, I can tell you, because that's what I do all day, is help patients one on one and in programs to do exactly this. It's so exciting. I think it's so cool. What I get to do is to help people to look at how stress has affected them. How has stress affected their sometimes blood sugar levels, sometimes thyroid hormone levels, sometimes nutrient levels. Has that stress caused leaky gut? Yes. Leaky gut is a real thing I've been helping people with for 20 some years. And when we. The thing is, is stress that we're all exposed to can cause leaky gut. It can cause nutrient deficiencies, it can cause hormone imbalances, it can cause Neurotransmitter, or what we call chemical imbalances. These are not just, this doesn't mean you're broken. This is the other thing. A lot of times I hear people say, oh, I'm broken, or I have a chemical imbalance, as if it's stuck, like it's set in stone, like there's nothing you can do about it. As if your only solution is to take a min. Medication. Sometimes we need a medication. I'm not against medications when they're necessary. I'm not against medications if they're helping you. So don't. If you're already taking a medication, don't just stop taking the medication. Definitely keep taking it. You got to do. You got to stick with it until your body's ready for you to not need it anymore. But the key is to understand that medications are really just filling in or shifting a receptor that function. They're not actually helping to resolve an imbalance. And the only way to actually resolve an imbalance is to use nutrients. If you have a nutrient deficiency, or nutrients and herbs. If you have a deficiency of a neurotransmitter, say you have low serotonin, which we can measure in urine, then we can use the precursor nutrient called tryptophan or 5 HTP to help your body make more serotonin. So now you're actually making more of this neurotransmitter from the precursor nutrient that your body naturally knows how to make it from. This is actually the way our bodies work in our biochemistry. We just need to give our bodies what they need to do, what they know how to do. They know how to make neurotransmitters, and our body knows how to heal leaky gut. We just need to stop causing leaky gut. We're bombarding our gut with stress and pesticides and medications and toxins that cause leaky gut. If we can decrease the exposures that cause leaky gut and then give ourselves the nutrients and herbs that help our intestinal cells recover, then we can get ahead of it. We can heal the leaky gut. We can rebalance our gut bacteria, we can rebalance our hormones and our neurotransmitters, and then it's all about maintaining them over time. Believe me, I only figured this out because I feel like I had to. I felt like I was pushed to my limit. I was getting migraines and all kinds of symptoms all the time, every day. And I wouldn't have been able to take care of my daughter or my patients or run my or my businesses or my practice. So I said to myself, I have to figure this out. I have to figure out how to keep myself healthy while doing all the stuff that I want to do, like writing books and writing blogs and doing podcasts. How am I going to keep myself having the energy and the creativity and the focus to be able to do that? Well, I had to figure it out. And so this is why I just so happen to learn about these different testing methods, learn how to interpret the results, and learn how to help you to optimize these levels. My background is in nutrition and biochemistry and naturopathic medicine, which is use of nutrients, herbs and other natural therapies to optimize our health. And then I can read the research articles in the book Master your Chefs, Reset yout health. There's over 200 references of research studies that are documenting exactly what I'm teaching you here, which is that it's possible to help optimal get your cortisol and adrenaline back to optimal. Not only that, but get your hormones, your neurotransmitters and your digestion back to optimal so that you can be feeling your best again. So that you can really reset your health and preventing health issues.

Something a lot of people don't know is that too much stress can actually create an abundance of health problems like high blood pressure, high blood sugar, anxiety, migraines, insomnia, even fertility issues. This is because high stress puts your adrenal glands on overload. They release cortisol and adrenaline which controls your digestion, hormones, immune system, energy focus and even your emotional response. So how can you beat stress when you don't know where to start? That's why we have a free 7 day stress reset program. It's designed to help support weight loss, digestive healing and hormone balancing. It includes support for integrating self care. Daily tips come to you by email and video. Gluten free dairy free meal plans as well as grocery shopping lists, journal pages and more. This free program will help you beat stress and put you on the path to wholeness in your body. Get your plan now for free@drdonnie.com.

Another.

Misconception that I want to cover today has to do with how we refer to imbalanced cortisol levels. A lot of times you'll hear this referred to as adrenal fatigue. And I want to caution you because I feel like this is not an accurate or even helpful terminology for describing imbalances in cortisol. When we use the term adrenal fatigue, it makes it seem like everybody has fatigue and they don't. It also may seem like everyone has low cortisol, and that's not true either. And so I want to caution you from using that terminology is much more accurate to say adrenal dysfunction or what I refer to as adrenal distress, because it's really that the adrenal glands are stressed and they are causing an imbalance or they're producing an imbalanced level of cortisol, either too high or too low, as well as adrenaline levels that are a little bit too high or too low. And so the only way we know is to measure, because each person's different, right? So some people, their cortisol goes a little too high from optimal or a little too low from optimal. And it could also be that their adrenaline is a little too high or a little too low from optimal levels. We aren't trying to get to zero cortisol or zero adrenaline. That wouldn't be good either. We want optimal cortisol and adrenaline. And if the levels are not optimal, then this is what we refer to or what I refer to. And I recommend that everyone refer to. To as adrenal distress or adrenal dysfunction. Now, I also want to clarify that, because a lot of people will ask me, hey, is this the same as Addison's disease and Cushing's disease? So I want to be really clear that I am not talking about Addison's or Cushing's disease. These are the diagnosable extreme issues with the adrenal function. So Cushing's syndrome or Cushing's disease was when is when cortisol levels are way too high, usually caused by a. A tumor or a medication. And Addison's disease is when the adrenal glands are really under functioning, so much so that the cortisol is like almost zero or is zero. And so this is Addison's disease. These conditions are more likely diagnosed by endocrinologists. The issue is that there's very little treatment options for them with Cushing's disease. When I see patients who've been diagnosed with Cushing's, oftentimes it's a matter of just adjusting their doses of cortisol to make sure their cortisol is not so high. But sometimes people have cortisol that's stuck high and there isn't a medication really to address it. We need to address it with nutrients and herbs and lifestyle changes. In the case of Addison's disease, we can use a prescription form of hydrocortisone to give the person cortisone to replace what their adrenal glands are not making. And at the same time, when I work with patients with Addison's disease, we also do our best to support their adrenals to recover as much function as possible. And sometimes it is possible to recover some of the function. It really depends on the case. These are extreme examples of adrenal dysfunction, and that's not what most of us experience. Those are the rare scenarios, and they can be identified through blood testing for cortisol, most cases, or some more thorough adrenal testing like measuring acth, which is the hormone for from our brain that talks to our adrenal glands. So that type of testing does exist, and it's important in some cases to find out if that's what's really going on for you. But for most of us, most of the human population, that's not Addison's or Cushing's disease. What's happening for us is some degree of adrenal distress where we have some degree of slightly high cortisol or at some points in time of the day, slightly low cortisol at some points in the time of the day, and slightly high or low adrenaline levels. That's what's called adrenal distress. Now, it's not the same for everyone.

And so that's why it's so important to measure yours. Or in the book Master your Stress, Reset yout Health, I developed a quiz or questionnaire so you can start to get a sense of your stress pattern, your cortisol adrenaline pattern, or what I refer to as your stress type, based on the questionnaire in the book. That quiz is also available on my website@drdonnie.com stressquiz I'll put the link down below so you can do the stress quiz online. It's 15 questions that should take you under five minutes and you can know likely what your stress type. In other words, what your pattern of cortisol and adrenaline is, based on the questionnaire that I developed through my research and clinical experience. This helps you to identify your stress pattern so that you can treat it specifically. So here's another misconception. So often people come in to see me and they say I had my cortisol tested at four different times during the day. And here's what my practitioner told me to take. And I can tell you 9 out of 10 times they're taking the incorrect treatment for their imbalance. So that's again why I feel it's so important for us to have access to measuring our cortisol at four different times a Day measuring our adrenaline and knowing what your stress pattern is or your stress type is so that you can give the appropriate treatment. And so when you do my stress quiz or when you read the book you're going to, I guide you through how to address it. And if you would like to have more help, I'm available for one on one appointments and in my stress warrior and self care programs to help guide you to get your cortisol and adrenaline to optimal levels. Because again, when cortisol and adrenaline are optimal, they are signaling in a balanced, non stressed way to your digestion, to all the other hormones in your body, to your nervous system and neurotransmitters and to your immune system. When everything is signaling balanced cortisol and adrenaline. Now your digestion works better, you digest your food, you, you don't continually have more leaky gut. You keep your gut bacteria balanced and healthy. That helps with signaling to your nervous system and your immune system and your other hormones. Your thyroid is more likely to be optimal. You're less likely to have autoimmunity, heart disease, diabetes, dementia, cancer, all of these things. Risks go down when you have optimal cortisol and adrenaline levels. And it's possible, it's completely possible using nutrients and herbs. So I guide you. If you have cortisol that's too high at certain times of day, day, you're going to use specific nutrients and herbs that research has shown help bring them to optimum. If your cortisol is too low at certain times of day, we're going to use different nutrients and herbs that bring them up. Now we're using nutrients, herbs, diet, lifestyle. It's no wonder this is not available in conventional medical care because they don't, they're not, this is not what they're trained in. They're not trained in the use of nutrients, herbs and lifestyle to help your body recover from stress. This is not what conventional medical practitioners are trained in. This is also not what functional medicine practitioners are trained in fully. They are trained in it partially. But here's the thing. As I was implementing this over years for myself and for my patients and what I saw is if we don't implement it in a strategic, sequential fashion, we're less likely to be successful. Now, yes, you could try on your own to do a different sequence, that's fine. Of course it's up to you. But what I want you to know is after all of my work I've figured out, here's the sequence that works for the most people to get there most efficiently with the least setbacks, because here's the thing, when you're affected by stress and you're feeling tired and sometimes your digestion feels off and you feel anxious and you're not sleeping well, you don't feel good. And so you're like, what am I supposed to do? How am I going to feel better? Plus, you've probably been to a lot of practitioners and didn't feel better. So you might be feeling frustrated and you're like, is this ever going to work? You start to feel hopeless. And this is the patients that I help the most. Because I'm here to say there's a solution. We need to use a strategy. We first need the right information. We need to know your stress type, we need to know your cortisol, adrenaline, and we need to know what's out of balance because of stress. Then we can create a plan that's very strategic and guide you step by step through my stress recovery protocol. That's a three, three phase protocol. We need to first help get your body out of stress mode. We need to help calm down the cortisol and adrenaline. If it's too high, we need to support the calming neurotransmitters. If they're too low, then we can work on rebalancing whatever got out of balance. Balance blood sugar, heal leaky gut, balance bacteria, balance hormones. Do all the balancing work in phase two. And then we move on to phase three where we can build your resilience and maintain your resilience to whatever stress comes along. Because stress is going to happen. Life is going to happen. We're going to. That's part of being human. We actually want to have a healthy stress response. We don't want zero stress response. Right? This is another common misconception. People feel like, oh, I'm supposed to have zero stress. I'm supposed to be stress free. I'm like, no, I don't want you to aim for stress free. That would be an illusion. It would be more stressful to aim for stress free because it's impossible. As humans, we're not going to be stress free. We are going to have stress. In fact, I hope for you to be choosing stresses that you are excited about. Maybe you're excited to have a child. Being a parent involves some stress. That's just part of it. There's also a lot of joy and love and beauty, but there's going to be some stressful moments involved. Being in a relationship with any human, having a job, running a business, having a project of any sort, planning an event, for that matter, getting married, all of these things, they involve some amount of stress. And so I want you to know that it's about you being able to choose to do the things in your life that you're passionate about and you're excited about. But it doesn't have to mean that it ends up wearing you down, draining you out, burning you out, and crashing your adrenal function. It doesn't have to be that way. If we can learn how to take better care of ourselves based on our unique need for stress recovery. What you need for stress recovery is different than me and different than the other person. And I believe that you deserve to know what your body needs to help you maintain optimal cortisol and adrenaline and to be resilient, to help maintain optimal levels in your body. Even if stress comes along, even if you're choosing stress in your life, you don't have to stop living your life. This is another common misconception. People think, well, I have to go live on an island and quit, walk away from my life in order to heal. And that's not true. You don't need to walk away from your life in order to heal. You can heal while living your life. I did it. And I'm proof. I healed from adrenal distress while living my life, while seeing my patients, while raising my daughter, while taking care of my pet rescue sanctuary. I healed my adrenals and became resilient to stress while doing those things. So I can tell you it's possible, but it does require waking up each day with a self care routine that's going to help you through it, and a specific nutrient and herbal protocol that's going to help optimize your cortisol and adrenaline as well as all your other hormones and neurotransmitters. And I have that information for you and I'm happy to guide you. And I know you can do it yourself by reading my book. You can do it yourself by reading all of my blogs and listening to my podcasts. And you don't have to do it yourself. You can also do it with my help through my Stress Warrior program, which is a group and one on one program or just by working with me one on one in one of my other programs. So I encourage you to dive in, learn more, and to most of all know that it's possible that it's possible that your body responds to your environment, your body. Our bodies respond to what we feed ourselves. Our bodies respond to nutrients, herbs and other substances that we expose ourselves to and so we just need to know. We just need to get smart and learn and know what our bodies need at certain times of day so that we can give our bodies what they need to stay optimal even when we're exposed to stress. And so, more than anything, that's the misconception that I want to solve today is that it's possible to have optimal cortisol even while you're a stressed human being. And that I'm here to help you do that. And thank you so much for joining me on How Humans Heal today. I can't wait to see your comments and reviews. If you haven't already, please leave a review wherever you're preferring to listen on YouTube or through iTunes or on my website. I'd love to hear from you and please subscribe so that you get subsequent episodes of How Humans Heal. I love to hear from you and love to get your comments and requests for any other topics. And I hope that this really solved some misconceptions for you today and help you feel inspired about what's possible for your life and your health. All right, talk to you soon.

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