#50 Stress, Epigenetics & Meditation with Dr. Doni

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.

I wanted to share today about stress and epigenetics and ways that we can help our bodies become resilient to stress, such as meditation. And this is a topic that I've been interested in and studying for decades. Really it's something that started way back.

As long as I can remember. Really I've always been interested in stress. And when I was in naturopathic medical school and becoming a midwife, I in particular studied how stress affects women in labor. And subsequently when I finished my residency and started in practice, it was in 2001, right after 9, 11. And so it was a very stressful time. And it really made me think again about how can I help my patients to recover from stress and become healthy even though or maintain their health even though they're exposed to stress. And sometimes we are exposed to major stresses, other times they are just accumulation of minor stresses throughout our lives and each day. Ultimately, as humans, we both know that our life is going to include some stress. It's not about trying to eliminate all stress. That would be impossible. Also, as humans, we have a built in stress response system. Our bodies are naturally going to be more wanting to protect us from stress. So I like to clarify that from the beginning because sometimes it seems like when we're caught in this stress and never ending stress is one after the next, it can seem like we would want to just somehow eliminate all stress.

Or stop ourselves from responding to stress. And really the thing is that.

Stress is part of life. We are going to have certain stresses that are actually good things, like challenges for us or working on a project or being in a relationship. Sometimes there's going to be things that are going to want to trigger our stress response.

What really our goal is is understanding how our bodies respond to stress and learning how to support our bodies through that so that it doesn't have to cause negative effects on our health. What we know for sure from research is that when different stresses, when we're under different stresses, it does send us into a cascade of responses in our body. Now this is something you want. If there's something you need to respond to and protect yourself from. We need that stress response in case there's some danger. It's going to speed up our heart rate and get our brain helping us to fight or flight to get out of danger or respond to the danger. That's an important response to have for a lot of different situations at the same time, most of the stresses we're exposed to have to do with things that we may not really need. That whole kind of a stress response. Right. We might be having deadlines at work or a long to do list at home, or parenting children can bring stresses with it, or being in a relationship in general. Or even there can be beyond psycho emotional stresses. There can be stresses in certain types of foods, certain ways of eating that can be too stressful for our body. Depends on your could also be lack of sleep, exposure to toxins. There's so many different things that could be triggering a stress response for our bodies. Really anything, any kind of shift or change. Right. Our bodies are always wanting to keep us in balance. That's their goal, is to keep us in this homeostasis. And so anything that shifts us a little bit outside of this homeostasis, our body's going to consider it a stress and it's going to start protecting us from that thing. Even an infection or an injury is considered a stress by our bodies. So you see what I mean is that there's going to be things in our lives that are going to be stresses. The key is whether it causes strain, whether it actually causes negative effects in your health. And so that is where I put a lot of my focus and my research and the books and articles that I write is to really. Because I believe that the more we each understand how our bodies respond under stress and the different kinds of stresses we're exposed to, also the more we understand the things that help our body recover from stress and be resilient to stress. Now you have information you can work with. Now you understand your body better. You can anticipate what might trigger a stress response, and maybe you can avoid some of those. But we don't have control over everything that might be stressful. We also want to know what are the things that can help us recover and get our stress response system to get back to homeostasis instead of being stuck in stress mode. That's what I call it. You see, when our brain, the amygdala, picks up on the stress and it tells the hypothalamus, also in the brain, first to send the signal out to the autonomic nervous system, which triggers the sympathetic fight or flight response, which is adrenaline. Just think of that adrenaline feeling, that racing, you know, got to respond. And sometimes it can create anxiety or heart palpitations, heart racing. And so that adrenaline response is the first response. And then the hypothalamus tells the pituitary to signal to the adrenal glands. And the adrenal glands are above the kidneys, and they make cortisol and adrenaline. So you have now cortisol and adrenaline are the main stress hormones. And cortisol, in addition to creating a stress response that helps our brain work better, keeps our blood sugar up, turns off certain systems in the body that are not necessary when we're trying to deal with danger, and essentially shifts everything into survival mode. The issue is that if we stay in that stress mode or survival mode all the time or a lot of the time, that means that those systems that were turned down because of stress never have a chance to reoptimize again. And so that's where really the health issues come in. Because cortisol affects four major system. It's affecting the digestion. So that's why a lot of people have digestive symptoms when they're having a lot of stress and not enough stress recovery. There might be ulcer, gastric ulcers, or irritable bowel syndrome, or other kind of digestive symptoms. Heartburn. It also affects the immune system. We know that when people are under a lot of stress, they have decreased ability to fend off infections, Also increased allergies and autoimmunity. The immune system gets disrupted. Also the hormones, all the other hormones in the body get disrupted. The thyroid is not going to work as well. The insulin response shifts all the other hormones. So even ovaries and testicular hormones shift because. And really they decrease function when we're under stress. Because the body doesn't make sense for the body to be promoting reproduction when it's trying to survive.

Also, the fourth area that gets affected is the nervous system. These are all the neurotransmitters, serotonin and dopamine and gaba. These all go into trying to help us survive the stress. They often get depleted by stress. In the process, you have digestive symptoms, immune system, hormones, and nervous system all potentially being affected by.

The stress response.

Maybe this helps you to recognize some of your symptoms.

Are you noticing symptoms in one or more of those areas?

If so, then you have a sense, oh, my gosh, my body might be stuck in a stress response. And we want to. We can do things to help your body get out of stress mode and get back to homeostasis, where you can be digesting your food well and supporting your healthy gut bacteria and balancing your immune system and your hormones and your nervous system. We need that recovery time in order to feel good, in order to absorb our nutrients and do all the things that our hormones and those other systems do for us. So that's why it's so important to help your body get out of stress mode and have recovery time. And to some degree also, we want to use techniques that just help us to prevent getting stuck in stress mode to begin with. You see what I mean? So when I look at the research on stress, this is what I'm looking for. And as much as we know that when we're under stress, cortisol and adrenaline increases, when the stress is gone, they should decrease again. It's just that when we're under constant stress, then the cortisol and adrenaline can go out of balance. And it varies person to person. I've researched this, and there's a lot of different possibilities, because cortisol could go too high or too low at different times of day. Adrenaline could go too high or too low. And so you have a lot of different possibilities of whether your cortisol might be too high, too low certain times of day, and whether your adrenaline might be too high or too low. So we can test these things. We can measure cortisol and adrenaline. Well, in regular blood work, it's not the best way to do it. You want to measure cortisol with urine or saliva so that you can see your cortisol at different times a day. You can do spitting in a tube or a urine sample, say, when you wake up in the morning and a little bit after you wake up, and maybe midday and evening at bedtime. Until we can see what your cortisol curve is, it should be higher in the morning and gradually decreasing through the day. Then we can do a urine sample to measure adrenaline, also known as norepinephrine and epinephrine. Now we can really see where is your body at this point in time based on your stress exposure, but it's also based on your genetics, because here's the thing, we have genes related to our cortisol and our adrenaline response and how we process them. We have genetic influence, but really mostly it's based on your stress exposure currently. And stress exposure in the past is going to influence what happens in your case. A lot of times it's tempting to guess what your cortisol and adrenaline level is. I develop different assessments to help you get a sense of it. But really when we do the testing, then we can get very specific about what's happening and how your stress response system is doing at this moment in time. Time, which is what we really want to know, because then we can even use specific herbs and nutrients to help get it back on track again. That's the thing is it's possible, you know, it's possible to help your body. We can use even nutrients and herbs to shift the levels back to where they optimally would be. And what's going to help them stay there is the things you can do in your day to day life that help you manage stress and recover from stress. Because the more you can do these things on a day to day basis, then you're going to help prevent it from going catawampus again, getting off track again.

It really becomes a matter of what we can do to take care of ourselves on a health and daily basis, ourselves on a daily basis in order to help with this. This is true for women, for men and for children. All of us experience stress. All of us can experience imbalanced cortisol adrenaline levels. Along with that, it can cause imbalance neurotransmitters and hormones and gut bacteria and immune system and so on. And so sometimes we want to do tests for those things too, to really understand exactly how stress has affected us when it comes to our genetics. It's really interesting because we can look at our different genes, especially gene variations related to metabolism of nutrients, for example. And the thing is, it's important to remember that you can have a certain gene variation and it may or may not actually be expressing, it may actually not be affecting your health at this point in time. Except the thing that causes a gene variation to affect your health is the stress exposure. So that's again why it's so important. We call that epigenetics, meaning our environment, our stress exposure, and how we recover from stress influences how our genes determine our health or what influence they have on our health, which is called epigenetics. If we use different tools to help our bodies recover from stress, we can actually turn off or turn on in a positive way, in a beneficial way, our genetic expression, what we call genetic expression. Or we can shift the genes that are influencing our health by taking care of ourselves better, by doing things that help our bodies recover from stress. Which is so amazing because we used to think that, first of all, our health was completely determined by our genes. And we also used to think that once something happened to us that it was permanent, right? Like if some injury or stress happened, that it was permanent. But actually we know now that's not true, that even if we experience something stressful and it turns on certain genetic expression, let's say autoimmunity, for example, or for allergies or for other conditions, even though that stress turned on that genetic expression doesn't mean it has to stay that way. If we can help your body recover from stress, we can get that genetic expression to shift again and to turn off that disease process, which really says that we have our health in our hands and we can be very empowered about what kind of influence we can have on our health. And so I look at all the research on ways that we can influence our stress response, our stress exposure and our stress recovery. There's so much I have to share on this topic, but especially today, I want to focus on mindfulness and meditation.

This would be a lot of the studies, even they study also dietary changes. So I want to also emphasize that, that when you make dietary changes by choosing foods that are healthier for you and eating them in a way that fits with your physiology in terms of eating a quantity of food that you can digest and types of food that are going to give you the nutrients you need and not over consume certain things that the body doesn't really need when you can eat in that way, the studies show that helps with stress recovery and beneficial effects of epigenetics. Also, exercise is another big one. There's so much research in terms of how various kinds of exercise can help, as well as getting enough sleep. Some of these basic things, like what we eat, how we sleep and how we exercise can influence our stress recovery and be an epigenetic influence, positive influence on our health. The thing is that always keep in mind that it is possible to overdo anything, even the good things. So it is possible to go too extreme with your diet, or too extreme with your exercise, or I suppose even too extreme with your sleep. And if you go too extreme with anything, it becomes a stress, even if it's a natural, you know, even if you think, oh, this is a good food for me, you know, like, okay, avocados are good, but if you overeat, if you eat too much of something that's good for you, or if you exercise too much, it becomes a stress on the body. This is also true with things like intermittent fasting. You know, it's. We naturally would fast while we're sleeping. That's already an overnight fast. An intermittent fast for the length of time that you're sleeping. And it's become popular and also established in the research that if we fast a little bit longer than that, so say you sleep eight hours, but then maybe you don't eat breakfast for a couple more hours. Now that's a 10 hour fast. So the research has shown that if we have a bit of a fasting time like that, that that can be beneficial to our health. The thing is, is that it's very individualized. So depending on the person and their state of stress and cortisol and adrenaline levels, if they f.

Now they're triggering a stress response again. And so it's very important, again, why I like for you to really become aware of where is your cortisol, where's your adrenaline? And if you're wanting to fine tune and really take, you know, to take advantage or access some of these things, that can be beneficial. You also want to keep in mind how to fine tune it for your body at this point in time and make sure that you're not pushing it too hard. It's tempting, right? We, we get tempted to do more and push ourselves more and, you know, take it to the extreme and we can be willful enough and dedicated enough to do that. But it's also possible to sometimes if we push our bodies and ourselves too hard, it becomes a stress. So you always want to keep in mind, like, you know what, really, I always just encourage you to, you know, be connecting with your body and how you feel. Is what you are doing making you feel better or worse, you know, and again, also regularly checking your cortisol and adrenaline levels so you can see how your body's responding.

Then what I call stress recovery activities I include in this everything from journaling and gardening and talking to a friend or some form of mindfulness or meditation. There's research on all these different activities. And so it doesn't mean that there's one size fits all. There's not one that fits for everyone. I really encourage you to find what works best for you and what you enjoy because a lot of it is you want it to be something you enjoy. If you're choosing a stress recovery activity that feels stressful to you, it's counteracting the benefit. You want to choose different activities that you really enjoy. Spending time in nature is another good example. If you're in nature, we know that helps with stress recovery. So you want to choose a way of being in nature, even if it's looking at nature, spending time taking care of your plants at home. Because this is going to work for you as a way to experience nature and recover from stress at the same time.

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 and 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@drdonni.com.

So mindfulness is more of a general term meaning being mindful in the moment, you know, and.

I've taken a lot of courses over the years, including way back in Nature Pathic medical school over 20 years ago. Over the years I'm always looking at new and different ways to practice mindfulness and meditation. I just have loved all the different books and videos and practitioners that I've learned from. So I'm so grateful to all of them.

Really what I say I've learned is that so much of it has to do with helping us learn how to be in the present moment. And when I say that, it can sound odd because sometimes we're like, of course I'm in the present moment, where else would I be? But when you think about it, a lot of times we might be thinking about something that happened in the past, or we might be anticipating something that might happen in the future. And actually, even if we remember the past or we anticipate the future, that can also trigger a stress response. So even if the stress isn't happening right this moment, we are thinking about something stressful or listening to something stressful, say on tv, or even reading about something stressful, our brain doesn't know the difference. So the brain is going to trigger that same cortisol adrenaline response, even if it's not actual stress happening right now. And so that's an important thing to keep in mind. And if you catch yourself. So this is really what mindfulness has to do with is Catching yourself when you might be.

Have your mind focused on something stressful from the past or anticipating something in the future. We might have a fear or an anxiety or worries or nervousness. These are things that we're anticipating something that might happen or we're worried about might happen and ends up sending us into this stress cycle. Once we get into that stress pattern, it can just circle and circle and circle on you, and it can be hard to break that pat. So if some of you can relate, I get it. That's why I'm sharing this with you, so you can really understand and you can be. You can stand back and have greater awareness. You can start to go, wait a minute. If that was going on that I'm stuck in a stress pattern and my body's just trying to protect me. And what can I do as the. As the consciousness in my body, what can I do to choose differently? Because it's really right. When you think about it, we are existing in our bodies so much of the time, it's tempting to think of our as either we are our bodies. That's one common thing, is where we think that everything that happens is we identify with it as ourselves. Like say, something happens that makes you worry. If you feel the worry is overcoming you and you identify with that situation completely now you're kind of identified as yourself with your whole body and your experience. The other possibility is sometimes we forget that our mind and body are connected. We think, oh, the mind and the body are separate, but really our mind and body are completely in communication with each other. Both directions from the brain to the body and the body to the brain. It's so interconnected on every level that we know from even just the example of the gut brain axis, we know our digestion and our gut bacteria are communicating back to our brain and our nervous system. We know that the nerves are communicating the hormones, the immune system, the neurotransmitters. There's so much communication happening between mind and body. To me, they're not separate. Our mind and our body is really so interconnected. And so if we understand those interconnections, then we can use information that is going to help. Because anything we do to help on the body level is going to benefit our mind. Anything we do on our mind level is going to benefit our body. So we can, by understanding that interconnection between the mind and body, we can have a lot of influence on our health. And by understanding that, we can stand back as the consciousness. Right. Like you are the you who lives in this mind body, right? So you're the, you're the consciousness and awareness. And you can kind of stand back then and look at your mind and body and say, hey, what's going on in there? Right? What's going on in this mind body connection? Am I identifying with some feeling or experience that's causing me to have a stress response? Oh, okay. What could I choose differently? So once you created a little separation between your mind body and your consciousness or your awareness, then you can step aside and you can say, hey, is this really what I want to choose in this moment? Is this how? Do I really need a stress response right now? Do I really need to be worried? Or can I say to myself, you know what, we don't need to worry right now. Let's do something to help calm the system. So it's about getting enough understanding and awareness so that you can catch yourself in the moment and say, wait a minute, I actually, I'm thinking of the past or I'm anticipating the future. That's not really going to help me. What's going to help me is to get into this present moment. And that's what we mean in mindfulness. When we say get into the present moment is when we can let go in the past and the future and say, what's true right now? Is there really a stress going on right now? Can I choose something different? Do I need to respond to the stress? Or can I take a couple minutes and figure out how I want to respond? That's a lot of times the case. If we just take a minute, even just taking a couple breaths can make a difference because when we take breaths, it actually helps trigger the vagal nerve and the calming part of the nervous system, the parasympathetic nervous system. Nervous system with a couple deep breaths. And so it's amazing how even just taking a couple deep breaths can help you to kind of gain awareness for what's going on and start to shift that stress response. And then you might try different techniques. There's so many out there. There's everything from, you know, maybe having an affirmation to thinking of some. Something positive. A lot of times if you think of something that you love or you enjoy, you can really shift yourself. So if you, you know, if you. What we know about the heart is the heart makes a hormone called oxytocin. And oxytocin completely shifts. That completely shifts us out of a stress mode. So if you can take a minute and even sometimes think of, say, your pet or your child or your loved One that you automatically feel some loving feelings about already. You're going to have an experience of love and those hormones are going to start to help you shift out of that stress mode. And then you can go, okay, what's really going on here? What, what, what needs my attention and how do I want to respond? And then you can be more the guide of your body. Instead of constantly having your body responding to stresses and you feel like you don't know who's running the show, right? The stress response is running the show instead of you. So this is so amazing when you can start to really gain awareness for how you can be more the one determining how you respond in each moment. Of course it's a practice. That's why a lot of times you'll hear people say they practice mindfulness, so they practice meditation. It's something that we don't always do perfectly. In fact, feeling like you have to do something perfectly is more stress. You want to set aside the perfection and you want to really put yourself into a frame of learning and curiosity and each moment seeing, hey, how did that go? What worked? What didn't work? What would I like to do better? The different and differently the next time? And so you can be in this learning and compassion for yourself, acceptance and self love. That's where it comes from, is by recognizing that you're human and we're all in this life together just learning how to be present in the moment with our human stress response potentially getting triggered and being able to learn, hey, what can I do to help my body to have a healthy stress response when we need it? And also to help your body recover from stress and kind of step back and be able to shift the way you might respond to stresses in the moment. Meditation is. There's different kinds of meditation, by the way, and lots of different ways of meditating. You know, I like to emphasize that because a lot of times people think of meditation as just sitting with your legs folded and your eyes closed. And that certainly is one way to meditate that people like. And meditation is ancient, right? It's been used in cultures for, I don't even know, hundreds of thousands of years. And there's different forms too. Like there can be yoga, tai chi, these are different forms of movement with meditation. There can also be walking meditation, there can be standing meditation, there can be meditation laying down. So you can really meditate doing a lot of different things. Even just doing the dishes or doing the laundry. It doesn't have to be just sitting with your eyes closed. Although one thing that can happen. The more time that I've spent doing meditation, where that's the only thing I'm doing, is that it really helps us to get in the moment and experience ourselves. Right? We realize that so much of the time we're trying to do many things at once, and we're distracted and we're pulled in many different directions. And how often do you just sit and just sit with yourself and just see what comes up for you? Like, just. We're always trying to control our thoughts and keep our brain focused. But what if you just are able to be for a period of time, whether that's five minutes or 15 minutes or two hours, you know what happens, what comes up? It might be that you have feelings come up, or thoughts or memories, and that's okay. It's a chance for your mind and body to remind you of these things that maybe have been waiting for your attention. And maybe then you can have the. In that moment, be able to choose how you want to think about it or let it go. Something from the past, or connect to love and be able to.

Feel love for a situation that's been lingering in your mind. So it gives you a chance to really process. I find a lot of times when you hear people talk about meditation, you hear about them talking about noticing thoughts and letting them go, which is true. That's a really good place to start. I also find that I like to pay attention to the thoughts that come up when I'm meditating. Like, sometimes there'll be a thought or a memory that comes up where I realize, oh, that's something that I kind of hadn't realized was still there needing my attention. And one that comes up in meditation, then I can process it and. And let it go. So then it's. Now it's cleared out, now it's. It's been.

Addressed, and now it's not constantly stressing me in the background. You know what I mean? Like, do you ever realize that we can have a whole list of things stressing us, just waiting for a chance for us to pay attention to them? When you actually create time to be in the moment, doing a meditation, for example, or mindfulness, then you can kind of let your mind process these things and let them go and to shift your awareness to more of a state of love and compassion and gratitude when you do that. Amazingly, the studies show what a difference it can make. There's a ton of studies on meditation and mindfulness. Everything from helping with stress, the experience of stress in general, to helping with sleep, to Helping with memory. There are studies in particular showing that meditation helps prevent cognitive decline or neurodegenerative diseases, also can help with immune system function and glucose and insulin function and oh my gosh, so many other things. Depression, anxiety, you name it. There's been studies on meditation and all different health issues. And I think that's again, because if meditation helps our bodies recover from stress, and we know that stress is associated with all these health issues, then by helping manage your body recover from stress, of course all these health issues are going to get better. And so that's why it can be such a benefit. And I like to really remind you because sometimes it's easy to kind of overlook it and be like, oh yeah, that meditation, I'll get around to it. But actually when people meditate on a regular basis is when we, when they get these benefits. It's also been shown that meditation allows for what's called neuroplasticity, which is essentially building new neural pathways. Sometimes you're like, oh my gosh, I just feel like I'm in a rut with my thinking or my response. You can use meditation to create new pathways in your nervous system, which is pretty awesome. It's also shown to not only decrease the loss of gray matter, which is. Is what our brain is made of, but it can actually increase gray matter in the brain, which is like totally mind blowing. Right? And let's see. I was going to see if there's a couple other things I wanted to share with you from the research. Oh, back to the cortisol. Here's what I wanted to tell you. So remember how I was saying that when we're under stress, some people the cortisol goes too high, sometimes the cortisol goes too low. It's different times a day. Well, the studies, they actually studied this and they found that both people who had too high cortisol and too low cortisol both had a benefit that that meditation brings the cortisol back to optimal. This is the thing, is it doesn't matter whether your cortisol is too high or too low. Meditation is going to help. It also has been shown to help specifically with what we call them, waking cortisol, which means that cortisol should go up when you wake up in the morning. And that can either go too high or too low when you're under stress, but meditation brings it back to optimal. Either way, that's pretty amazing to have a tool that helps us recalibrate our stress response back to optimal. Then you don't even have to know exactly where your cortisol and adrenaline are if you're going to use meditation. Now, the time it really becomes important to know is when you're going to use herbs and nutrients, because different herbs and different nutrients will help shift cortisol up or down. You see what I mean? So that's when we really want to know whether what your levels are.

Let's see, blood pressure. They've also studied with meditation that if you have high blood pressure, meditation helps bring blood pressure back to optimal. If you have normal blood pressure, it doesn't change it. Some people will say to me, well, if I have normal blood pressure, I don't want it to go too low. But that doesn't happen. Meditation won't take it too low. So there again, it shows us that it's. Our bodies have an innate wisdom of where is optimal. And we can use certain tools like meditation to help us bring it back to optimal. It's not going to shift it out of range like before. I was saying that certain things like, say, extreme exercise could shift us too far one way or the other. But it seems like meditation really doesn't have that. It just is going to bring it it to optimal from the studies that we have so far. So that's pretty amazing. And it just makes me remember how important it is to make time in your schedule for meditation. And again, it can be short. They've shown benefits even with five minutes of meditation or five minutes of mindfulness, which you can quickly pull up on a video online or an app. There's a lot of different apps to help with meditation. There's a lot of different videos on YouTube and there's a lot of different practitioners and books about meditation that you can find to really help you find a form in a way that works for you. Because it takes a little time and practice to really find. Hey, this actually feels like a really useful meditation tool for you. For me, right? So you want to practice and don't give up. Just know that it's something that we keep practicing and keep learning and keep experiencing. And more than anything, know that it's a tool to help you set aside all of the past and future stresses and get you into this moment, into your body, right into your world, and to gain your awareness of your experience in life. How often do we get that? So much of the time we're racing through the day and next thing we know, it's the next day. We don't even know what's going on in our life or what's Next, it starts to feel like a repetitive round and round and round, same thing over and over again. And when you get to have time to meditate, it gives you a chance to just stand back and go, oh, what is. What do I really want in my life? Am I creating that? What are some things I can do to help create the experience I'm wanting in my life? And so it can be, in that way, very inspirational and motivational to have time to just be with yourself. And again, sometimes when you're at first starting, you might have various things come up in your mind and you could jot them down. You might then need to follow up, whether that's with a therapist or with a friend or with yourself and journaling and just process what comes up for you. And eventually then you're going to work through those things and you're going to be like, okay, now what do I want to create? What am I really wanting in my life? And what do I want to put my attention on during my meditation? Because then it's going to be more likely that that's what you're going to be bringing into your life going forward. You know, it's what we, when we get some clarity for ourselves, that we can give really clear messages to our brain. And then your brain will actually help you find what you're looking for, help you create what it is you want to create, and makes life so much more exciting when that's true, versus just a constant overwhelm with stresses. So I am hoping this is really helpful to all of you and inspiring to help you to understand being human, understanding our stress response, understanding what you can do on a daily basis, including meditation or mindfulness, to help you gain perspective on being human and what you can do to be healthy and resilient to stress. Thanks for joining me. I look forward to talking with you again soon.

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