#83 Optimize Your Cortisol 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.

Hey, everyone, it's Dr. Donnie. And today I wanted to talk through cortisol, all about, well, adrenal glands and cortisol, because this is a really common question that I get from all of you, and I think it's a really important topic. It's actually one that I'm most passionate about. You can tell because I'm constantly writing books about streaming stress and adrenal glands and cortisol, because I'm just so intrigued by this hormone and.

The impact it can have on our health, either in a negative way or a positive way. I think so much of it is about understanding. I really believe that the more we understand what's going on in our bodies, then we have an awareness that we can choose differently from having that knowledge. I really think that much of the time in medicine, it's go to the doctor's office and then the doctor is going to tell you what to do or what to take or what you need. But I really believe that it's going to work out better in the long run for your health and for your wellbeing. If you understand your body and you make choices based on what you feel and what you know to be the right choice for you. I'm. I'm hoping that, you know, hoping that resonates there. I'm interested if that resonates with you, to really get that feeling of being able to choose for yourself. Because what I've seen in my patients, and this is me in my 21st year of practice, is that. And I had this as a theory way back when, but I've since seen it play out with patients where. When I help educate patients about their own bodies, how they work, then we do tests that help us understand exactly what their levels are. Then we talk about what are the possible solutions, and they choose amongst the possibilities what they would like to choose to then implement. I guide them with dosing and along the way to help them get the most out of it. But it's really coming from a place of personal empowerment, from education, that those patients have better outcomes. Those patients are the ones that are more likely to feel better and see positive difference in their health, in their outlook and their well being and really ultimately being able to live a life that you enjoy and that you feel.

Just in love with. I guess it would be something to just be in love with our own lives and in love with what we're doing. Because I think sometimes when we, when we put too much of our own power, we give it to the medical system or we give it to some professional or expert and we just follow what they say without asking questions or without understanding if it fits for us.

We're moving ourselves from ourselves, we're moving outside of ourselves, we're making choices from outside of ourselves and we ultimately end up losing ourselves. And that isn't going to feel good in the end. So this is why I have this podcast and why I write books and blogs. Because I really believe that the more you understand it's not about me, it's just that I love to give the information, hopefully in a way that helps you understand yourselves better and be able to implement and make choices for yourself based on that information. Cortisol is a really good example of that because.

Cortisol is our main stress hormone, yet it's also an essential hormone. We need cortisol to function. It goes high in the morning, not too high, but it goes up a bit in the morning. When we wake up, there's something called the cortisol awakening response. I don't know if you guys can hear by the way. My cat is playing in the other room, so he's meowing. I think he's trying to find someone to play with him.

There's this cortisol awakening response that happens in the half hour to hour after we wake up. And this cortisol that goes up, it wakes us up. It's communicating all throughout our bodies. So it's also a hormone that helps us really remember that our bodies are fully interconnected. We're not pieces and parts functioning separately. We have this hormone cortisol that's sending signals out everywhere to tell our nervous system that it's time to get up and, and start functioning for the day. Is talking to our digestion, it's talking to our immune system, talking to all the other hormones in the body. We need this cortisol to come up in the morning and then it gradually comes down through the day. So it's lowest in the evening and overnight while we're sleeping. So here again, it's signaling throughout our bodies that it's time to sleep. All of the Things that our bodies do while we're sleeping. Our bodies do all kinds of repair and regeneration while we're sleeping, which is why sleep is so important. Sometimes with just all the tasks on our to do list and all of the roles and responsibilities that we take on, we sometimes lose track of, I think these basic functions of a human body. When you think about it, even just in terms of, if you think of their circadian rhythm, what's called the circadian rhythm, which is our wake and sleep cycle, the day and night. Right. And what determines day and night? Well, usually it's determined by when it's light outside or when it's dark outside. Although certain parts of the world there's longer times of darkness and lightness. But there, you know, it's our circuit, it's the amount of time we're awake and doing our day to day functions versus when we're sleeping. And yes, it's determined by the earth and the rotation and with the sun and all of that, it's a light affected, but our bodies are picking up on that. And that's also helping to signal our cortisol levels. That's why say, if a person, even if you travel around the world now, your cortisol is still going to be functioning where you started from. It takes some time, days or weeks for the cortisol to shift to that new time zone or say you worked a night shift. When I work with patients who work the night shift, their cortisol starts to go into a pattern where it sometimes, especially if they're working the night shift often they'll start to have cortisol that matches working the night shift.

This cortisol really tries to match up and create a day and a night for us, a daytime and a sleep time.

Aphrodite, here's a car out there. And so we want to keep in mind that this is an essential hormone if we need to have enough of it, but not too much of it. It's almost like this Goldilocks concept. If we think of Goldilocks and the three bears, where she didn't want too big or too much and she didn't want too small and too little, she wanted just right in the middle. And that's what we're going for with cortisol too. We want just the right amount at the right time of day. We want a higher amount when we wake up in the morning and we want a lower amount by the time we go to sleep at night.

Because this has been an interest of mine for so long, I'VE been measuring patients cortisol levels at different times a day for probably close to 25 years. Because I started this when I was in naturopathic medical school. And I've analyzed it, in fact, and measured what are the different patterns. Because the thing that's so interesting is we're not all the same. One might think, oh, if I'm under stressed, I might have a high cortisol. We might just assume if I'm stressed and we all have stress, we all have high cortisol. Well, actually, that's not the case. It's actually much more varied than that. It's much more individualized. For example, there's a small percentage of people that have high cortisol all day long. Where it's high from the morning, the middle of the day, the night, it just stays high. But that's actually a very small percentage of the population. What's more common is sometimes there's high cortisol, perhaps too high in the morning or too high in the evening, but it's not high all the time, at some point drops down, or maybe it's lower during the day and goes up at night. So these are all patterns with the cortisol. Also, it's very common for cortisol to be too low at certain times of day. Sometimes it's too low in the morning and sometimes it's too low in the middle of the day. So then we start to think, well, can I guess what's going on with my cortisol based on my symptoms? Like, if you're feeling tired, could you guess whether your cortisol is too high or too low or based on symptoms, other symptoms. But actually, what I found.

In my review of all of the tests that I've done is that you can't guess. There's not a clear correlation between symptoms and the level of cortisol. The one that's the most sometimes we can match up is if a person is extremely tired, it's more likely they have very low cortisol. But that's only at the extremes. To really know what's going on with your cortisol, you have to test, you have to measure it. While, yes, you can do a blood test, you could go in to a regular primary care or an endocrinologist, and under your health insurance, you could convince the doctors potentially to run a cortisol level. The thing is that usually only at the time, one time a day, because it has to be when you have your blood drawn, say you have your blood drawn in the morning. You're going to find out your cortisol levels at that morning. The thing is, is that, as we just talked about, cortisol varies at different times of day. So even if we get your cortisol in the morning, we don't know what it is in the middle of the day or the evening or the bedtime. And so we aren't getting the full picture. So it's not really going to help you as much as if we can do a test where we can measure your cortisol when you wake up and then, say, the middle of the day. I usually say before lunch, before dinner, before bed. Now we're going to have a much clearer view of what your cortisol is up to. We want to know what your cortisol is up to because it changes the treatment. If a person's cortisol is high, I'm going to look into research and I'm going to be like, okay, what are the different herbs and nutrients and, and activities that you can do to drop your cortisol if it's too high and if your cortisol is too low, what are the different treatments that are going to help? Because from my point of view, I want to help your body come back to balance. In a conventional medical setting, it's more likely that they are going to just look at the symptoms and then look for a medication to try to fix the symptom. They're not going to be thinking, hey, how can we help your adrenal glands function better? The adrenal glands make cortisol. The cortisol comes from the adrenal glands, which are above the kidneys. If the cortisol is too high or too low, we have to think, well, why are the adrenal glands making too much or too little? What do the adrenal glands need in order to get to a better level of functioning? How do we get the adrenal glands to respond better, produce better, stay on track better? Because they should be able to. That's what adrenal glands are meant to do. They should be able to make enough and not too much and not too little. But in conventional medicine, they're not thinking about, how do we get your adrenal glands functioning better? They're just thinking, hey, if your adrenal glands completely stop working, we can give you some cortisone. We can fill in with a prescription. But that's rare, very rare that a person has where the adrenals completely fail. It does happen. In that case, we do need some external source of hydrocortisone to fill in. But I would say the majority of cases I see, it's not that the adrenal glands completely stop working. It's that the adrenal glands, because of our stress exposure and our environment and everything else that goes on in our lives, the adrenal glands are not functioning optimally. Just like what happens when other glands stop working optimally, if the thyroid gland is not giving out enough thyroid hormone, or if the digestion is not digesting food as well as it could be, or these things. We're humans, we're not machines.

The function of our body can be insufficient or suboptimal. And it's based on what I call stress exposure. Because to me, it's easier to just think of it that way. When we're exposed to various stresses, whether that's major traumas, even trauma from childhood, whether that's exposure to toxins that are a stress, or foods that are a stress, or lack of sleep, or any number of different things that are a stress on our system, it's really our exposure in the world, it's our exposure in the environment.

It's just part of being human. It's not like we're going to try to eliminate being human. We are human. We're going to have some stress exposure. Our adrenal glands are going to get affected by that. Our cortisol levels are going to get affected by that. It's not about escaping this whole scenario. It's about embracing it. Embrace that you're human. Embrace that you're going to be exposed to stress. Embrace that your adrenal glands are going to get affected by it. And then start to go, well, how have my adrenals been affected by stress? What's happening in my body? Is the cortisol too high at certain times a day? Is the cortisol too low at certain times a day? What about adrenaline? Because the adrenal glands also make adrenaline, and we know adrenaline in terms of fight or flight. It's what, when we're under stress, it's what gets your heart racing and gets your mind going. So you can respond to the stress with adrenaline. But if your adrenal glands are getting thrown off by stress exposure, it can throw off the adrenaline production, too. You might go into too high adrenaline production, too low adrenaline production. Then also what can happen is the way your body metabolizes adrenaline, because adrenaline goes through some of the same metabolic pathways as estrogen, and it requires nutrients like B vitamins. If we're under a lot of stress, we don't metabolize adrenaline as well, which sounds counterintuitive. You would think that when we're under more stress, our bodies would get better at processing adrenaline. We would hope so. But actually in most people it's not everybody. But in a lot of people, when we're under more stress, we become less efficient at metabolizing adrenaline, which means that we run a higher likelihood of having either too high or too low adrenaline. The more stress you're under, the more likely it's going to go out of balance. How would you know it's not going to show up on your regular physical exam and blood work that you do under your health insurance? They don't test that. It's just not going to show up. So you're going to have to know you're going to have to pay out of pocket for a urine test. It's a urine test you can do at home. You send it in. Yes, it's a couple hundred dollars depending on how we do the testing. It's going to be a couple hundred dollars along with the cortisol test, another hundred dollars or so and then we can see what's going on with your adrenaline. Is it too high, too low? What's going on with your cortisol at different times of day?

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, which 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.

So.

Now you know for your body what stress. How has stress affected you? Because so many people say to me, well I know I am stressed, I know I probably have imbalanced cortisol or adrenaline.

But we don't know specifically so we don't know the specific treatment. You see what I mean? And it's to Me, it's so significant because I've seen the difference for myself and for my patients. If I try to help a person just based on guessing, okay, a person's like, okay, I've been under stress, probably my cortisol is high, so I'm just going to guess and take a product, a supplement that lowers cortisol. But what if their cortisol was already too low and now they're dropping it more? That's not a good thing to me. I feel so strongly like I really want to know what the levels are so that I know I'm giving the right suggestion to help your body get back on track. And it's not just masking it. Some people will say to me, well, is this just masking or covering over the situation? No, it's not. When we use nutrients and herbs and other approaches to help your adrenal glands recover from stress, we are actually helping your adrenal glands recover from stress. We're actually helping the adrenal glands function better, respond better, recover better. That's way different than. And I know we're kind of used to a medical model where we just take a pill and it kind of is a band aid. If we stop taking the pill, the problem is still there. But that's not the case with this approach that I'm describing. When we actually see the issue and we give the nutrients and herbs to help your adrenal glands heal and recover, which they can do now, we're restoring healthy adrenal function. And once you restore healthy function, then it just becomes your focus to maintain that over time. How do you maintain healthy adrenal function going forward into your life? Going forward into whatever stress exposure. I kind of think of like a movie or something, like you're going to be going forward into living your life as a human who's going to be stressed. So what do you need to do to maintain healthy adrenal function? And we don't learn this in childhood, we don't learn this in school. We don't learn this from the conventional doctor's office. And so it seems like, oh, well, is this really going to make a difference? Yes, it definitely makes a difference. And it's, I think, the main thing that's missing from health care that could be preventing all kinds of different health issues, from fatigue and anxiety.

To cancer, heart disease, dementia. If we start paying attention to how our bodies are depleted by stress or thrown out of balance by stress, and we give our bodies what they need to be healthy, even though we're still stressed. Even though we're still working, we're still parents. We're still have parents. We still have things we got to do. So we can't just go to a deserted island. Even that would be stressful. Well, because we still need to find food and shelter. So we're going to have stress. It's not about escaping the stress. It's about recognizing, and this is why I started at the beginning, understanding how your body works, understanding that a human body is both exposed to stress and it's going to respond to stress. It's going to try to protect you from stress. That's just what human bodies do. Our brain picks up on stress, stress, and it sends a signal, well, first of all to what's called the sympathetic nervous system, which also makes adrenaline in the nervous system. And so it's going to give you that fight or flight response and then it's going to send a signal, what we call the HPA axis, which is the hypothalamic pituitary, both in the brain. Adrenal access adrenal glands and they make the cortisol. Now what should happen is when we make enough cortisol to handle the stress and the stress goes away, theoretically, then the cortisol turns off that stress response. But more often what happens is the stress is just coming at us like, it's like a baseball.

Hitting range where it keeps throwing the balls at us. Like you keep, the baseballs keep coming and you're like, wait a minute, when do I actually get a break from the stress? And that's what your adrenal glands are likely thinking too. And the receptors in your brain, they're like, the stress just keeps coming and so it stops turning it off. The stress response stays on. And what I call being stuck in stress mode. And sometimes we're so stuck in stress mode we don't even realize it. It becomes normal to us. It feels so familiar and common that it's like we don't know anything else. It just feels normal to be stuck in stress mode. But, you know, here's the ways you know you're stuck in stress mode is if you're having, if you don't feel good in any way, any shape or form, because it looks different for everybody. It could be fatigue, it could be can't sleep, it could be any form of waking up in the night or not being able to fall asleep, or it could be anxiety, depression. Depression, by the way, is associated with both high and low cortisol. So again, even with depression, we can't assume that the person has low cortisol, it might be high cortisol. And once we know, then we can address it appropriately. We can give the nutrients and herbs that are shown to help turn off that stress mode, get the cortisol to calm back down, and get the adrenals and the HPA axis functioning optimally again. That can actually happen. We can actually do that. And it actually can maintain. You can then know for yourself once you're in a balance point, then it's about maintaining it. What do I need to do on a daily basis? What choices do I need to make? How do I need to feed myself? When do I need to make sure I go to sleep? What activities do I need to do? What vitamins might I need more of in order to maintain that optimal state? And sometimes then we might have a stressful situation come along that throws us a little bit one way, way or the other. But then we know how to get back on track again. We know, oh, for my body, when I'm under a lot of stress, I tend to go shift into this pattern. So then I know what I need to do to shift myself back again. And another person, it could be a slightly different cortisol and adrenaline pattern that they need to shift themselves back from again. But this is all possible. And then you have the tools for yourself. You kind of have the instruction manual, manual for yourself to know how to help your body going forward to maintain optimal cortisol and adrenaline levels and optimal adrenal function. This is what, when it gets thrown out of balance, it's a lot of times what people call adrenal fatigue, or sometimes they call it burnout or adrenal exhaustion. You'll hear a lot of different terminology about it, but to me, those terms are all very vague because they don't tell us exactly what's going on. Is the cortisol too high, too low? Certain times a day? So what I do is I write about how to understand it more specifically for yourself and how to.

Name it in a way that really makes sense for you. So when it's all out of balance, I call that adrenal distress. The adrenals are distressed. They are all out of balance and all out of whack. And it's creating all different symptoms, even brain fog. And sometimes it's creating weight gain, and sometimes it's disrupting menstrual cycles. Sometimes it's making you susceptible to infections. It can show up in a lot of different ways. It's important, no matter what health issues going on for you that you check this out. Because really, if we just address your digestion or we just address your ovaries and your menstrual cycle, but if we don't pay attention to the adrenal glands, it's going to recreate the problem again. You see, that's how central this is. Because cortisol communicates with all these other systems. If you have imbalanced adrenal function over here, if you have distress in your adrenals, even if you try to fix your digestion, this issue over here is going to keep disrupting it. Again, you're like, why does my digestive issue keep coming back? Why can't I maintain a regular menstrual cycle, even though I keep taking all this stuff to help with my menstrual cycle, or how come my mood is constantly changing, but I can't figure it out? Well, it's because if we haven't addressed the stress system, if we haven't gotten your stress system back on track so that you know how to maintain it in an optimal way, it's no wonder why everything else keeps getting thrown off. Because this imbalanced system is going to be a cascade, a ripple effect throughout your body, disrupting everything all over again. And so sometimes we get frustrated with our body, with our health, with our symptoms, with healthcare providers. We get frustrated. We're like, why? Why is no one helping me? Why can't I feel better? I'm sorry. We know we should feel better. We know we deserve to feel better. I believe you deserve to feel better. But it's not going to happen. If we don't look at and understand our bodies and give them what they need to get this central system optimized and signaling correctly, then you can solve health issues and maintain in a healthier state. That's what I've seen again, for myself and for my patients. And I just feel so passionate about sharing it with everyone, because I want that for you, too. I so often see patients who come to me after seeing other practitioners, and they feel like they've maybe been helped a little bit, but they still can't quite figure out how to get themselves feeling the way they know they'd like to feel. They're like saying to me, why? When I review their case, there's been some good testing that's been done oftentimes, but a lot of important things have been missed. If we are not checking cortisol at different times of day, that's the kind of test you're going to have to Pay out of pocket for it's not going to be covered by insurance, not the really good ones. You're going to have to pay out of pocket. You do the test at home, you mail it in, you get the results and then go over it with someone like me to understand what does it mean. The thing is that I also see that a lot of practitioners, even if they do the test, they don't know how to address it. I would say most efficiently. Sometimes practitioners will do that test and then give like a quick fix or they're kind of give a most easy prescribed product.

But is it really the most effective product? And so I want to encourage you that if, even if you do this cortisol testing, you need to make sure you're doing adrenaline testing too. Because if you only do cortisol without adrenaline, you only have half of the information. We need both pieces of information. And then when you start addressing it, you need to be assessing and retesting to see is it working? Is what you're doing working? Is it actually getting your cortisone adrenaline to a better place? If not, then the treatment wasn't right either. The product, the dose, the timing, something wasn't the right fit. And I think a lot of practitioners just aren't taking the time to be that detailed to figure that out. And so I really want to warn you to say, hey, yes, great, test your cortisol, also test your adrenaline. A lot of practitioners don't know they need to do that in a urine test. And it's also out of pocket, but it's important and then follow to make sure you actually feel better, that it's actually effectively addressing your adrenal function. And then know that it's, that it's actually helping to have a positive influence on your whole health. And so you're going to be doing that, but you'd probably be doing that alongside healing leaky gut. Because also if you have, say, leaky gut happening in your digestive tract, it's going to perpetuate the imbalance of your cortisol. The leaky gut becomes a stress, imbalanced gut bacteria become a stress. They start sending stress signals that shift your cortisol levels. Now the leaky gut and the imbalanced gut bacteria are working against your ability to solve your adrenals. We have to do both. We have to solve the adrenals while we solve the leaky gut and imbalanced gut bacteria so that they can both be working together again. Same thing with other or if thyroid's out of balance or nutrients are out of balance, we need to solve them together so that they can become a cohesive system that's working together for you. And I just want you to know that that's possible, that it. But it does mean you need to work with someone who's going to be working with you. Listening to your body, it's not a one size fits all, it's individualized. And I feel it's important for you to know your body and to look at the treatment options individually and say, what's the right dose for you, what's the right timing for you and what's going to be effective. For one person it might be a homeopathic remedy. Another person, it might be an herbal formula. Another person, it might be that maybe they need a whole different type of formula to be effective to help their adrenals and cortisol and adrenaline to get back on track. Sometimes we even need to look at genetics. We can look at the genetics related to metabolism of adrenaline and help us understand what does your body need.

We just get as detailed as we need to help get these levels back on track and help your body then be able to function. From a place where your adrenals are balanced and, and all the systems are aligned, it's much easier to maintain balance. Then we can create what I call a resiliency plan where you just know what to do ongoing. I can check in with you every so often to make sure that it's maintaining.

I just wanted to share with you that whole perspective of how important cortisol is to your health, how important it is to get the right testing, the right follow up, ensure that you're getting the treatment that's really customized to your body and how everything is so interconnected, but it's still possible to get it balanced. Actually, we can use that interconnectedness to help us. There's ways where if we start to get one system working better and we start to get the other system working better, then we actually see people get better faster. It's like there's a synchronization, a synergy that happens and we can take advantage of the interconnections in our body versus having those interconnections drag us down. So if you guys have any questions about this, please reach out to me. I love to answer your questions and share more. And you'll hear throughout the interviews on the podcast, you'll hear me get to connect with other guests about this topic and and really helping you understand how it relates to various different topics.

To me this is one of the most important ways that humans heal is by again understanding ourselves, accepting that we're human, accepting ourselves, acknowledging that we're worthy of feeling good, and then just solving from there. I call it reverse engineering. How do we reverse engineer health? By understanding what our bodies need and what they need to function optimally. So I wanted to mention to you all that I'm writing a new book and it includes this topic about adrenal health, cortisol, and how to effectively help your body recover from adrenal distress, get out of stress mode, get your body out of burnout and fatigue, and get back to healing and feeling good. The book is called Master your Stress, Reset yout Health and it is going to be out in May 2022 and I am so excited. It is like something I have been working on for so many years. These are concepts, as I mentioned, that I have been researching for a couple decades and now I have been writing this book over the past couple years to really help you understand your bodies and customize your approach to stress recovery. And so you're going to find it in this book. So I definitely encourage you to get on my mailing list so that you're going to hear more about it and you're going to know when the book is out. And so I'm going to put a link down below where you can get onto my mailing list where I'll also be sending you newsletters each week so you can hear my latest podcast episodes and blog posts and hear from my guests. But you will also hear when the Master your Stress Reset yout Health book is ready and available because I would love for you to be able to pre order it and really get the most out of it. Where I am going to really explain, even more than I did today, all the details of how stress affects us and what you can do to help really reset your adrenal glands, help your adrenal glands recover from stress and maintain resiliency into the future. All right, well thanks again for joining me and I'm excited for you to be able to have that book in your hands. So I'm going to go work on it, finish it, talk to you soon.

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