#2 How to Balance, not Boost, Your Immunity

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.

Hey, guys.

This episode is from one of Dr. Donnie's live Facebook streams where she answered listeners questions live on Facebook.

Again, I'm Dr. Donni Wilson. I'm a naturopathic doctor. I graduated from Bastyr University, and one of my main interests is in helping people understand stress and how stress affects us. And in particular today, I want to talk about how stress affects our immune system. And of course, it's very unique to each of us. Over the years, what I found for myself and for others is that the more we understand about how our body works and what helps and doesn't help in a general way, but also for each of us individually, the better that is for your health. Because then you can make decisions, informed decisions about your body and your health, versus just guessing or versus depending on.

Making decisions without having information.

So let's see. So let's just dive in a bit about the immune system. So the immune system, I think sometimes we almost take it for granted because we can't really see it. It's not sort of part of our body that we can point to. It's everywhere in our body. And actually a huge percentage of our immune system is in our gut. And actually there's a lot of lymph tissue and white blood cells and immunity that happens in our digestion hangs out there. I mean, of course, we also have lymph nodes and our white blood cells start in our bone marrow, right? Like our red blood cells and white blood cells start out growing. They're born in our bone marrow, basically. But then they go to the T cells, go to the thymus gland. Especially the thymus gland is more active earlier in life. But there's all different kinds of cells in the immune system. So sometimes that gets confusing, right? Sometimes it's like we just not even thinking about the immune system because we're like, I don't know, it sounds so complex. And it is complex. I actually believe that it's an area where researchers are learning something new about our immune system every day, every month, every year that goes by. And so it's not something that we already have figured out we know a lot about it. We certainly know more than when I was in naturopathic medical school, you know, 25, 20 years ago. And so thank goodness we keep learning. But it's a complex system and it's everywhere in our body. So there's different cells. Like when you do a blood test and you see, you do a CBC and you're gonna see red blood cells and you're gonna see white blood cells. And a lot of times patients will ask me, what are those different white blood cells? On my results, like there's lymphocytes and eosinophils. And so it's going to list out all these different, they look like very strange names if you're not used to looking at them. And then it actually shows you a percentage and it measures these white blood cells. All these different white blood cells, they just look a little different. Like if you looked under a microscope, they look a little different. They're different sizes, different colors based on the staining and they do a little bit different job in our bodies. Some of them can directly go after a bacteria or it can go after, like say a virus has taken over one of our cells. These white blood cells can go and attack that infected cell and destroy it. So it's getting rid of not only the virus, but the cells that have been affected by the virus. Some of the cells, like the B cells, make our antibodies. And you hear me talk a lot about antibodies related to food sensitivities. Especially I think that's when you hear me talk about it most. Because.

We have these antibodies in the food sensitivities. We mostly refer to IgA and IgG antibodies because these are the delayed response antibodies. And of course, this is all happening in our gut, right? We have leaky gut where the intestinal cells are not as healthy as they could be. It's allowing undigested food to leak through the intestinal lining. And that triggers that immune system that's hanging out down there. It's sees this undigested food and it thinks, oh my gosh, that could be a virus, that could be something dangerous. So our immune system make antibodies to attack those foods. And that's what causes food allergies and food sensitivities. A food allergy is usually an IgE antibody. And IgE antibodies act fast and immediate. That's why when someone has an IgE antibody, let's say to shrimp or peanuts, they have to go to the emergency room because it's a fast acting antibody, whereas IgA is maybe over a few days and igg is even over a couple weeks. So it's these antibodies, even each one does a slightly different role. And what the reason I'm explaining this is because I really want you to honor and be aware of how our body, how our immune system is actually like, brilliantly complex. There's different cells for different purposes. There's different antibodies for different purposes. There's antibodies that respond immediately to a virus or another pathogen. And there's viruses, there's antibodies that respond over time as our memory, right? That's how, that's why if you're exposed to certain viruses, then your immune system remembers and you're not going to get that same viral infection again later. Like if you think of, say, you know, chickenpox or mono virus, right, you can be exposed to that virus, your immune system has a response to it, and it learns how to protect you from that virus. Now, some viruses hang out in our body long term. Like for some, you know, some people, Epstein Barr virus can become active again later in life and cause symptoms again. HPV virus is one you hear me talk a lot about. An HPV virus can be dormant and it can become active again. And it can. And if someone's susceptible, then it starts to cause abnormal cells, whether that's abnormal cells on a pap smear or abnormal cells anywhere else in the body.

So basically to say that our immune system can learn to protect us from these viruses. But when we're susceptible, and this is the key piece, when we're susceptible, then viruses that might be hanging out in our body all the time can become active again. This is when people get a herpes outbreak or shingles, when they're stressed and susceptible, right? So that's what we want to understand is what's making us susceptible. Why does that happen? Why is it that sometimes we get run down and we become more susceptible not only to viruses that might be hanging out in our body already, but viruses in our environment. You know, like.

Colds, flu, and other viruses. You know, what's making us susceptible. And what I like to bring this back to is to really keep in mind that just like the rest of our body, our immune system is partially determined by our genetics. So genetics play a role here. It's not 100%, right? So genetics aren't 100% of what we see with our immune response, but, but it's a certain percentage of what we see. So if you're. You could look back in your family, maybe some of you can relate to this. If you have a family history of allergies, for example, maybe you have relatives that have allergies, or asthma or eczema, other allergic type health issues. There's probably a genetic tendency going on there. Same with autoimmunity, which is in the immune system. It's autoimmunity is when the immune system gets confused. This is how I think about it. The immune system gets confused and starts attacking your own cells. So normally our immune system is there to protect us from something foreign. It's trying to protect us from viruses, bacteria, parasites. In the case of allergies, it's trying to protect us from pollen or dust. In autoimmunity, it starts protecting us from our own self. And so that's definitely a confused immune system. It, it's not identifying correctly and it's so much in protection mode that it doesn't care anymore. It's just gonna attack whatever's nearby, even if it's your own tissue. And so that's what autoimmunity is. But nothing about the immune system, from my experience, nothing about it is stuck. You know, like, even if you have a genetic tendency toward allergies or genetic tendency toward.

Autoimmunity and say you start to have those health issues develop, that doesn't mean it has to stay that way. And you're not going to hear that from very many other places in medicine. So I'm really hoping to help share with you what I've learned from my body, from patients, and from research over the years, which is to say, I think we could look differently at this. Like if we know that, yes, we have genetic tendencies, but we also know that what's the thing that turns it on? What is it that turns on the allergies or turns on the autoimmunity or turns on your susceptibility to viruses? It's stress. Stress in various forms. You know, stress from life. Of course, we can't. We're human, we're going to be stressed. So the point is not to be mad at stress or try to avoid stress or those are not going to solve it. It's just more about having awareness for it. So an awareness for, yes, I'm human, yes, I have stress. Yes, stress is going to turn on my genetic tendencies. That's just what being human is about.

And so knowing that, then we can be proactive, right? We can go, okay, if stress turns on my genetic predispositions, especially related to the immune system, what can I do to help my body recover from stress? How can I understand the effect stress is having on me. You know, there's emotional stress, there's financial stress, there's stress from, you know, relationship stress. There's, there's, you can name all kinds of different stresses. Even infections are a type of stress. Lack of sleep, certain dietary choices are stress.

You know, stress comes at us from all directions. Basically anything that I. Our body then has to.

Adapt and respond to get back to optimal. You know, with our bodies it's all about this, kind of like keeping this balance. And that's the same with the immune system. Our immune system is about finding a balance point. You want to have an immune system that is ready to respond when you need it, but not over respond. And you don't want it to be under responding either. Because if our immune system's under responding, we're more susceptible to infections or even cancer. Right? Because part of our immune system is to protect us from cancer cells too. So if our immune system is not, is under functioning, we're susceptible. And if it's overprotective, then we're more likely to have overreactive allergies. Autoimmunity over inflammation sometimes. Maybe some of you have heard of what's called a cytokine storm, which is cytokines are some of the messengers in the immune system. So say an infection is present or some sort of immune response has been triggered. The immune system and all these different types of cells. We were talking about antibodies, but the immune cells also make something called cytokines. Cytokines is kind of a cool word, but it's really just messengers. Think of them as little messengers that are sending out signals throughout your body saying inflammation, danger, danger. And it's just trying to activate all the immune response. Right? So these cytokines are just little danger messengers and they tell all the rest of the immune system to get busy attacking, attacking. And so you need some of that, you know, you want, we want some cytokine activity to protect us when we were exposed to something foreign. But if our, what can happen is if the immune system is bend stressed, the genetic tendencies turn on. Then when we're exposed to something, then the immune system can be a little out of balance and overdo the cytokines. And if cytokines go overdone now they're triggering so much inflammation and damage to the tissue the, that it's harder for our bodies to recover, you see. So it's this how to find that balance. And I know that's kind of scary to think about, you know, scary to think what if the immune system is either over or under or, you know, because we tend to want to have control over everything in our lives. And, you know, it's scary to think that something inside of us could be making these decisions. And, you know, we're hoping it's making the right decision for us. And so what we want to do is really just step back and go, okay, what can we do to help our immune system to be responding the way we're hoping it would and protecting us in a good way.

And so this is perfect because I want to dive into what are some things you can do. And I always like to start with what I refer to as self care. So we work with the word care. C is for clean eating. So let's talk about diet and foods and what you can eat and the way you eat that can help your immune system. The rest of care, by the way, is adequate sleep, stress reduction, and exercise. So we can talk through those as well. But in terms of food, I mean, because sometimes it's like, can food really make that much of a difference? I mean, sometimes we go through life just wondering, hey, is it that really that big a deal if I eat a donut or have this cake or whatever? And you know, every once in a while it's not that big a deal. But what we want to do is look at the big picture view of what are you eating consistently over time? And so we know, we know this from studying nutrition and from looking at the research that there are certain foods that either will actually decrease our immune response. Like we know sugar. Like thinking of a spoon of sugar, I'm not so much referring to fruit, so don't be afraid of an apple for this, but a spoonful of sugar can decrease your immune, your white blood cell function for hours. So, yeah, if you're trying to have a healthy immune response to protect you from viruses, for example, better to stay away from sugar, white sugar or whatever kind of sugar, because it's going to decrease your immune response a little bit. But, but so does feeling stressed decrease your immune response? And so does not getting enough sleep. So that's why we want to look at all of this self care, right? And go, okay, how can I choose as wisely as I can about the foods I'm eating? And stay away from things like sugar, if possible. The other foods I would say would be the food allergens like dairy and gluten are two really common food allergens that tend to cause inflammation in the body. So what happens is we eat these foods when we already have a Little higher inflammation happening. And so when we need our immune system to protect us, it's already overwhelmed with inflammation, and so it's already thrown your immune system off a little bit. We don't want your immune system thrown off by foods. We want it ready to respond to the things you need to protect you from, not from your food. So that's where following either an elimination diet, which is when you just purposely choose to eliminate certain foods from your diet for a period of time and then observe how you feel. And if you feel better, when you're worse, when you introduce, reintroduce those foods. We do that with my stress remedy program. You can also do a food sensitivity panel. Find out exactly which foods you're reacting to, and then avoid them on purpose. Also, we can choose foods that help us. Now, when you're thinking of which foods to eat to help your immune system, there's so many really. But I guess I would start by thinking about it as foods that are colorful fruits and vegetables. Because the thing about colorful fruits and vegetables is they're very likely to have antioxidants in there like vitamin C, zinc, selenium, beta carotene. And the colorful fruits and vegetables are going to have, you know, these vitamins in there. And flavonoids. Flavonoids are. Make food colorful, but flavonoids also help our immune system work better. So think about, like each day or when you go to the grocery store or you order your food to be delivered. Pick foods that are colorful because the color tells you there's some good nutrients in there for you. So have. Whether it's. It's not like you have to overdo it either, you know, because now we do need you to be able to digest the food, and we don't want you getting bloated. But have a small serving of something colorful. Maybe it's a quarter cup of frozen blueberries, or maybe it's a half a cup of sweet potato or broccoli at your dinner, you know, so just have nice servings of a variety of different fruits and vegetables, and including root vegetables and leafy greens, you're going to get good nutrients then. It also depends on how they're prepared or how they're cooked. Because if we overcook the. The food, then it loses some of the nutrients in the cooking process. But at the same time, for some people, if you eat your food raw, you might not digest it well. And if you don't digest it well, you're not going to get the nutrients very well. So if you're having digestive issues. That's another thing we need to, we need to help your digestion to make sure you can eat these healthy foods, digest them and actually get the nutrients from them. And certainly, as we've talked about in other conversations, you have to modify. Like if you're having histamine responses, which by the way, histamine is another part of the immune system, right? Histamine comes from mast cells and it's another messenger, just like cytokines, that sends inflammatory signals out into the body. And so if you have, you might have a genetic tendency or you might have leaky gut, that's kind of making it. So the mast cells are very reactive and, and throwing out a bunch of histamine. So you may need to avoid certain foods that you normally would eat. Like a strawberry has lots of vitamin C in it, but if you're having histamine reactions, and citrus fruits do too, of course, lots of vitamin C. But if you're having histamine reactions, strawberries and citrus fruits may actually make you feel worse. So if you get heartburn or flushing or itching, then you got to stay away from those foods until we get your histamine to calm down. And that's just a signal that, that your immune system needs some help to recalibrate. And once we get it recalibrated, then you're probably gonna be able to come back to those foods again. But anyway, in general, for clean eating, it's all about avoiding even, I would say, pesticides and, you know, because they're gonna negatively affect our immune response also. So choose organic foods as much as possible. Choose real food instead of packaged foods. And balance, I would say, with protein. Because sometimes, as much as we want to include plants in our diet, it can be challenging to get enough protein in a fully plant based diet. So you can do it. You can use nuts and seeds, and you can use plant based proteins. Even pea protein is one of my favorites for a protein shake. But you want to make sure you're getting enough protein for the immune system too. We need amino acids, which is proteins broken down into amino acids. And we need amino acids for our immune system, just like we need the other vitamins, vitamin C and antioxidants for our immune system to function well. So yes, you can get these nutrients from your diet. It's important to make sure your gut health is there. So this is a. When you. By the way, I wrote a blog post about this. So if you're a person who likes to read, check out the blog post too about this, but I think that whenever we're talking about food related to immunity, I automatically start thinking about digestion for immunity because I want to make sure that whatever you're eating, you can digest and get the nutrients and not have the digestion preventing you from getting that benefit. And we don't want to be eating foods that might actually kind of distract our immune system in some ways, making our immune system protect us from our food and, and maybe imbalanced gut bacteria. It can keep an immune system very busy in there when we really want our immune system to be focusing on things that are more important, like exposure in our environment. So we really want to take this chance to. If there may be an imbalance of gut bacteria, let's address that. If you have leaky gut, let's address that.

So that you can help use that to really get your immune system back on track.

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And so, let's see. So that's clean eating, adequate sleep, huge. We talked about sleep another day as well, and how important it is how much happens when we sleep. So there's some of you I'm speaking to in terms of just encouraging you to like, maybe set an alarm to go to bed so that you get seven and a half hours of sleep at least before you have to wake up. But there's others of you that are struggling with sleep and you wish you could fall asleep, right? Like you're like, if I could sleep, I will be so celebrating. And so if that's the case, there's so much we can do to help figure out why you're not sleeping. Well, I'm going to look right back at Your diet. And I'm going to look right back at your stress because those are the two main places I find solve sleep issues is we've got to look at your diet, look at your digestion and I've got to look at how stress is affecting your cortisol and adrenaline. Because cortisol and adrenaline, if they're up high at night, you're not going to sleep well. So let's figure that out so you can get sleep. Because sleep, our melatonin goes up, which is very active in the immune system. We get all. While you're asleep, your immune system is busy recalibrating and protecting you. So sleep is super essential for the immune system and then stress reduction in general. Because we know that when they study people who are super stressed, like usually when they study super stressed people, it's students because students have lots of deadlines and to do lists and they're not getting enough sleep and they're probably not eating that healthy. And what they show is students immune system is very much affected by the stress. But I think that you don't just have to be a student to be having your immune system affected by stress. We all have that, right? We all have deadlines to too much to do, too little time, probably not enough sleep. You know, we're human and so we're going to have stress and so we need some stress recovery. So now sometimes just talking about stress recovery is stressful because you're like, well, how am I supposed to do that when I can't get everything else done? So we just need to, I think of it like sprinkle it in, you know, find little bits of time where you can sprinkle in some stress recovery. Maybe that's, you know, being able to do one minute or 15 minutes of meditation. Just look on YouTube, you can easily find lots of different meditation options. Or maybe it's going for a walk or pet your animal or turn on some music. There's a lot of things you can do to help give your brain.

Basically an anti stress signal is what we want. We want anti stress, but our brain is constantly picking up on stress. So we need to give it a different signal and start to know for yourself what that looks like. You know, it's going to be different for everybody what that might look like. Turn off any kind of shows or anything you're listening to that makes you feel stressed. Put on something that or call a friend who makes you feel not stressed. So these are really important because it actually makes a difference for the immune system. And then exercise or movement in some way is also helpful for the immune system because it's going to help you with stress. But be careful because overdoing exercise can be inflammatory, can raise cortisol and can actually have an opposite response on your immune system. So don't overdo it. Listen to your body and if it's the right amount for you, it's going to feel good. If it's too much, you're going to feel tired and sore and inflamed and it could be throwing off your weight. You know, some people are like, I'm exercising like crazy but I can't lose weight. Well, it's probably because it's raising the cortisol, which will decrease your immune response. So be careful with exercise anyway. Okay, you got that? So the other things you can do, because this is key, right? We have to have our foundational self care happening because if we just run out and grab a bunch of supplements to take while we still are eating whatever and not taking care of ourselves, that's not going to work. That's just going to be a temporary. It's just going to be, it's not what you want. You want to be doing your foundational self care and then we can add in supplements. Yeah. If we're like, hey, we need to, we want to have some extra immune support or we want to help our immune system be optimized, then we can start with some simple nutrients that sometimes we even kind of forget about. They're so simple. Like vitamin C. Yes. You can get some from your food, but if you feel like you need a little extra, doesn't even take that much. You could take oral 500-1000mg. I probably wouldn't at one single time. I wouldn't swallow more than a thousand milligrams at a time because our bodies really can't even take in that much. It processes, our kidneys process about 500 milligrams at a time. So you want to space it out. That's one thing I would say with vitamin C is you want to do like possible even 500 or 1000mg and wait four to six hours and do another dose. Your body needs to have a chance to process it. If you put in too much vitamin C at once, you're probably just going to have loose stool or diarrhea because it's going to just go straight through. You better to space it out over time. And you can do IV vitamin C. There are those are available depending on the state where you live and different practitioners offer them. A lot of my colleagues as nature bathic doctors offer IV vitamin C and that can be a great way to get your levels up. And we use that for patients who are really needing extra immune help. But you can also get a lot out of just dietary and supplemental liquid or capsule vitamin C. Another great one is zinc course with zinc. You know, just like any nutrient, some is good and too much is a problem. You know, you, so you want to know what's that right amount. And zinc, you know, usually you'll see between 10, maybe 15, maybe 30 milligrams a day. I would still divide it. I would do 10 or 15 milligrams now and 10 or 15 milligrams later. It's important to know that zinc and copper, you want to keep a good balance of them. So if you end up taking, you know, more zinc many days in a row, you're going to want to make sure you get a teeny bit of copper to counterbalance in. Copper sometimes isn't a multivitamin. So it's not like you have to work very hard to get the copper. But you just don't want to forget about copper.

So that's zinc. And you also hear about vitamin A, beta carotene. You know, we talked about beta carotene in our colorful fruits and vegetables and our bodies is converted to vitamin A. But here's part of our genetics is that we don't all convert beta carotene as you know as well to vitamin A. So some of you might actually do better with actual vitamin A. Vitamin A is a fat soluble vitamin. So it's just like I said with other vitamins it's possible to get too much, but it's pretty hard to get too much. You'd have to be basically probably going through.

60 capsules every few days.

To.

Even get to 500,000 IUs a day for a year. I mean you'd have to work pretty hard to get too much vitamin A. But it's good to know that it's possible. And if you ever, with any nutrient, if you ever feel worse, if you start getting a headache or nauseous or anything new, I would stop and definitely check with your practitioner. Any of these, you definitely want to check with your practitioner before you take anything. Please don't take this as my advice. I'm just reviewing these nutrients in general. But vitamin A as a fat soluble vitamin is also very important for our immune system and is antiviral. And so we can, you can get a lot out of a low dose of vitamin a, you know, 5,000 IUs, 10,000 IUs. Sometimes clinically we'll use a little bit higher, but we're not going to get to toxic doses. We just use clinical doses of vitamin A. But what you'll see with like, vitamin C, zinc, vitamin A, what's in common, there's. They're also all antioxidants. And antioxidants are cell protectors. That's what I call them. And we need our cell protectors because we just talked about how when the immune system's in a heightened response and it's sending out cytokines and it's sending out histamine and it's sending out antibodies, and it's got a whole system going on to protect you from whatever it's identified. It's going to kick up a bunch of oxidative stress, what we call oxidation, which is, you know, just a normal, natural part of the process. We normally in our bodies always have some oxidative stress, but we need the antioxidants to quelch it and calm it all back down and protect us from the oxidative stress. So it's another one where it's about the balance. So much in our body is how to have, you know, yes, we're going to go this direction, and we need to bring it this direction so we can get it back to balance again. And so vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc, they're all antioxidants. There's also herbs that are antioxidant, have antioxidant function. So they're protecting our cells, but at the same time, they're helping our immune system. This would be like echinacea astragalus. Maybe you've heard of these. I'm sure you've heard of echinacea, but astragalus is often used in Chinese medicine, too. And both of echinacea and astragalus, as well as andrographis are a lot used as antiviral because they show in the research that they boost the part of our immune system that help us fight off viruses, but they also help prevent this over activation of the cytokines. And so it's how to use substances from nature. Right? Plants, when you think about it, like, okay, here's these plants from nature and our food from nature that contain these substances and that help our human body have a healthy immune response. I mean, it's pretty awesome when you think about it. And we learned this now because we can study these different foods and different herbs and we can see how they function. They teach us about our immune system, they teach us how we can use them together in a synergy to get the benefit. And.

So we want to, you know, want to be able to use these substances from nature to help us. And even vitamin D, which is from sunlight, which hopefully we're able to get a little more sunlight now with the temperatures not too cold when we have vitamin, we are exposed to the sunlight. Of course you have to be careful because you don't want to get burned or have the downside of sun exposure. But 10, 15 minutes sun exposure, you can get your body making vitamin D. And vitamin D is so useful for the immune system and so we need it. Or you can take a supplement of vitamin D, especially if you're not able to get out in the sun or you have medical factors that prevent you from being in the sun or the time of the year, there's not enough sun, then you can take vitamin D, you can have your vitamin D levels measured and blood work easily. Some of these nutrients may or may not be as easy to test in blood, but you can, but vitamin D is much more commonly tested so you can know where your levels are and see if you need more vitamin D. Because it's very common to be too low on vitamin D, especially when you have leaky gut. What they find is when people have this leaky gut situation, very common to be low in iron, vitamin D. And I end up finding that a lot of times we're low on other nutrients too because we know when we have leaky gut we're not absorbing our nutrients better, but it's easiest and most common to check iron and D. And so we know, okay, yep, leaky gut, those nutrients are low. We need to help, you know, get your nutrients back up, but we also need to help heal the leaky gut so we can actually get somewhere here. Get ahead of us. You're not having to constantly.

Be trying to take more. Alright, so I think you guys got it. You got nutrients, you've got herbs, you've got leaky gut healing, you've got self care. The only thing I didn't talk about as much yet is specifically stress recovery. Because yes, you can do the self care and the stress reduction techniques, but if you know you've been under a lot of stress and I think you would know because you look back over the past year or five years and you would just be like, okay, how's it looking there? And. Or if you have some major health issues going on, lack of Sleep or anxiety or fatigue, then stress has been affecting you. Or if your immune system is not what you think it should be, then we need to do some stress recovery. And yes, there's ways to do it. Just guessing, you know, figure, okay, maybe my cortisol is too high and I need something to help calm it down, or maybe my cortisol is too low and I need something to boost it. I recommend if you can, working with a practitioner to have your levels tested so you know for sure what you're working with. Is your cortisol too low, too high down, different times of day, how's your neurotransmitters, how's your serotonin? And really have a plan of action for stress recovery. So that's what I do with my patients. As we walk through, we get that information and then we walk through the phases of stress recovery which involve helping first to get your body out of stress mode, calm things down, calm the nervous system, calm the stress system, then rebuild whatever got depleted. Because that's what happens when we're under constant stress, is something gets depleted. Either your neurotransmitters will get depleted, your nutrients will get depleted, cortisol and adrenaline can get depleted. So we got to find out what got depleted, build it back up again so you're starting fresh and then it's just about maintenance. But stress recovery is possible. I see it every day, all the time for myself and for patients for over the past 20 years.

And then it's just a matter of then it's so exciting because you can go, okay, now I've learned what it is, what that looks like, what it looks like to be completely depleted by stress and what it looks like when your immune system is affected by stress. And now you've recovered, now it's very motivating to keep it healthy. And I want to just mention peptide therapy in terms of a huge tool for helping us reset from stress. These specific cavenson peptides have been researched by Professor Cavinson for 50 years in Russia. And what he found is that these specific little proteins, basically little peptide proteins that communicate to various parts of our body, including the immune system, to reset the effect of stress. That's huge. That's the whole thing that's like game changing. If we can reset what stress did to us, we can start fresh and we can have a healthy function again. And then it's just a matter of us taking care, good care of ourselves so that as best as we can, so that stress doesn't get to have that negative effect again. But we can always know that if whatever stress comes along because we can't have control over all the stress in our world. When stress comes along, we know what to do. Then we know, okay, back to my self care, back to my leaky gut healing, back to recovering my nutrients and my hormone levels so that my body can have what it needs to function healthfully. And I really think that's the key with the immune system is with all the complexity and confusion that it can seem. And we want to make it seem as if it's just a light switch. You know, either the immune system's on or off, but it's not that simple. It's really like more like a tightrope walk where we're having to keep it on a balance and if it gets a little too far this way or a little too far that way, or a little under reactive or overreactive or, you know, that's when we have more susceptibilities to various immune issues. So I hope that helps to just. I'm hoping you have a little more awareness, but also just trust in your body and trust in, in what you can do to influence your immune system. You know, what can you do day to day? Because it's a new day, you know, even if sometimes I think of it like as if we were playing a game, you know, and you've been playing the game a certain way yesterday, but today you can wake up and play the game with a different strategy and be like, wait a minute, if I did this, this, this, and yesterday it led me that direction. Today I can do a different way and have it lead me a different direction. And so if any of this information can just help you on that journey of learning about your body and what it needs, that's my hope. That's my goal.

Thanks for listening to how humans heal. If you liked this episode, leave a rating and a review and for more resources, visit drdani.com.