#90 Stress Reset 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. Donni and I just want to say happy New Year and I'm so glad you're joining me here at How Humans Heal podcast to help you out with your health and wellness goals for 2022 and beyond. Hopefully we'll be listening to this for years to come. Today, I want to take this chance to at the New Year's and for New Year's resolutions to really help you think about what your health goals are this year and how to get started in a realistic, strategic way to work toward your health goals. So I am so glad you are here to listen in with me and I am going to give you some also some resources for more support along this path. So the thing is that so much of the time we come into New Year's, of course, just having come through the holidays, which can be stressful, right? Whether you might have been traveling, sometimes eating foods you don't usually eat, having long to do lists. I hope, I'm hoping that some of you maybe had a few days of rest and recovery over the holidays because I know that a lot of people take time off work and then you get a break from your emails and your messages and your to do list. Hopefully. Hopefully. But there's many of you where you know the holidays is not such a break. You actually come into the new year feeling like you need some stress recovery. I'm curious how many of you feeling on either side of that, like, how many of you felt like you've got rest and recovery for the holidays? And some of you, how, how many of you feel like you still need rest and recovery after coming through the holidays? And more than anything, I think the new year gives us a chance to reflect. Here we are at a new year of our lives. We start to even though it's not our birthday, or for some people it is your birthday, but in general it's not our birthday. But somehow the change of the year causes us to reflect on what are we doing with our lives. Here is another year going by. What are we doing with our health? What are we hoping to accomplish this year? I am curious for all of you, what is on your mind? What are you hoping for? What are you feeling right now that you are hoping to share shifts in the new year? And first of all, just to acknowledge and congratulate you on that. Because sometimes we just feel hopeless and helpless. Like what could I possibly do to change my health issue? I am stuck, right? And that is.

I always like to try to help people to just know that it is possible to heal. Our bodies have an inherent healing capability and it is possible to recover from stress. We just need to give our body the right support and we can recover from stress. We can detoxify from toxins, we can rebalance our hormones, we can rebalance our neurotransmitters and neurochemicals for that matter. There's so many things we can do to help. Even if you have a current health issue, there's things you can do to help your body get through the day, day by day. That's why I am here. That's why I have this How Humans Heal podcast is because I'm hoping to give you hope for your health and for your future. So the new year is a perfect time for this conversation of hope, of that it's possible to heal that. Now, how do you get the right information to do that? I really believe it starts with some self reflection. I'm just reflecting on your current situation and I do that by looking at usually five areas. We look at your energy levels, so I encourage you to join in with me here. How has your energy level been? Do you feel like you have good energy when you wake up? Do you have good energy through the day? Or do you feel like you end up needing to take a nap or you need to? Sometimes a nap is a good thing, by the way, but just noticing, hey, am I running out of energy or am I feeling like I need sugar or caffeine in order to keep going? Just no judgment, no criticism, just a simple gentle reflection on yourself. You can see where you're starting from. How can we know where we're trying to go if we don't know where we're starting from? This is an exercise of saying, hey, where are you starting from? How's your energy level lately? How's your mood? Are you feeling motivated and excited and enthusiastic? Sometimes, of course, it's normal to feel sad or angry, depending on the situation of what's going on in your life. But in general, how's your mood? Are you feeling anxious or depressed or sort of hopeless like we talked about or what's happening with your mood. Do a check in. Also check in about your sleep.

When you try to go to sleep, is it easy to fall asleep or are you waking up? Is it hard to get back to sleep? What's happening with your sleep? And then check in on your focus. You know, can you complete tasks the way you would like? Are you able to, you know, remember things you're wanting to remember and accomplish the things you want to accomplish? So I think of it as focus and then also just check in with your whole body. How is your digestion? How's your skin? You know, are there symptoms anywhere in your body that feel like they need attention? That's another. The fifth area to check in is in your body. How's everything feeling? And so now we know like, okay, here's where you're starting. Starting from here on this day, the beginning of the year. And now you can again, not in a perfectionist way or stressful way. Right. I really believe that there are ways for us to heal without stressing ourselves out more. It is the stress that created the health issues to begin with. So we don't want to create more stress around this. We want to be able to just calmly and lovingly say to ourselves, hey, where do I want to be? Like, in my case, I have had.

Arthritis in my sternum. I know you can't see it when you look if some of you are on the video, but I actually have arthritis of my sternum and my clavicle. That's a chronic inflammation that's developed over years. It's not something where I'm expecting it to go away tomorrow. At the same time, I don't want to be reliant on, on medications that are going to help. Anti inflammatory or anti pain medication. If that's what's needed, then that's what I'm going to do. I'm sure for you too. Sometimes we need a medication, sometimes you need a surgery. I had to have a surgery related to this arthritis, but it didn't take away the underlying inflammation and condition.

That's where I come back to thinking, hey, how do I get at the underlying cause of inflammation? What can I do on a day to day basis to shift this pattern for my body so that it doesn't get worse, so it doesn't create other health issues. I think if you can hear this related to whatever your health issue is, if you have autoimmunity or if you have a viral infection, like a chronic viral infection, maybe like FC Bar or HPV or hsv for that matter. These are viruses that can be, you know, we most all are exposed to them, but what can happen is when we're burned out and depleted, these viruses take it as an opportunity to cause whatever issue it is that they uniquely cause. Right. So Epstein Barr virus is often going to cause fatigue. Okay, well, did you get depleted and then this Epstein Barr virus started causing fatigue or, you know, HSV causes outbreaks. When you get run down and stressed it's going to cause an outbreak. Or hpv, it can cause abnormal Pap smears, abnormal cells on the cervix or other areas of the body. But that's happening because your system is depleted. When we're wanting to get to the underlying cause, then we can. To me, that's how we really accomplish healing, not just a temporary fix. Yes, a temporary fix is a good thing to turn off the outbreak or take away abnormal cells or tissue. But then we need to help your body really heal so that it can have a different experience going forward. That's what I hope for all of you in 2022 is to be able to really create a shift in your health and your reality so that you can be accomplishing what you want to accomplish. I mean, the thing is that we're human and humans have a built in stress response and we're going to be stressed.

It's not like we can run away or avoid all the stress. That would be an impossible task which would probably stress us out trying. It's not about trying to avoid all the stresses. Yes, there's certain stresses we can try to decrease.

We can try to decrease exposure to toxins which are stressful. We can try.

Decrease exposure to certain relationships or situations in our life that might be stressful. We can learn to say no sometimes or yes and other times in a way that ends up creating more of boundaries for feeling healthy and taking better care of ourselves. Those are some decisions we can make and choices we can choose that can shift our experience of stress. But it's not about trying to eliminate all stress. Because ultimately, if you want to be living your purpose and your passion, it's going to include doing some things that might be stressful, like having a project. If you want to be a parent.

If you want to be spending time traveling, Anything that you're wanting to do is going to involve a bit of stress. It's to me, a matter of knowing how to do it while also supporting your body to recover from that stress. Supporting your body to be healthy while stressed, that ends up to be a lot of my main focus in the work that I do.

On the podcast, in my blogs, in my books. You'll hear me talk more and more about this. So if any of you have not already, I encourage you to join me at my website, which is drdonnie.com just you can go d r d o n I dot com and you find the blog. You also find my programs and.

My books, which I have already written a couple books about stress. One is called the Stress Remedy. From about, let's see, that was like eight or nine years ago that that came out. And then there's the Stress Warrior. And I have a new book coming out in a couple months called Master your Stress Reset yout Health. And I'm so excited for all of you to have that book as going to be sharing more and more with you about what you can find in these books and help you to understand how you can really get the most out of this information again. Because if you're here, that means to me you're wanting to heal. You want to help your body heal. So I want you to have the information, the wisdom, the tools that I've learned over the years and I'm continuing to learn from the guests and people that I interact with and learn from so that you have information at your fingertips so you can choose differently, right? It's, it's about realizing, okay, this is the human body I'm living in, right? Sometimes we have to, I think, stop for a minute and realize like, you know, you're not the worry, you're not the anxiety, you're not the whatever the latest emergency is on your to do list. That's, you know, you're not even your title or your, you know, sometimes we get so identified with our title or our role in life that we lose track of who we really are as a human, as the authentic person living this life, the spirit, the essence of you. And you know, sometimes it's a matter of finding ways to rediscover yourself, rediscover who really are you. And I look forward to sharing more ways with you on how to do that. How can you, you know, there's so many ways. There's not one perfect right way. I would say I definitely want you to know, like it's about finding your individual path to discovering yourself and learning to be able to recenter so then you can make decisions from there. You can be making choices day to day, even simple choices about what are you going to eat and when are you going to go to sleep. You can make those Choices from your centered, authentic self versus what somebody else thinks or what somebody else says or what somebody else you're living with is doing. Or because you're just so exhausted that you're finally falling asleep. Right. Those are reasons to go to sleep, but that's not really choosing based on who you are. What time do you really want to go to sleep? And how do you want to feel when you wake up in the morning? Again, I speak from experience. I lost myself many times over the years in studying to be an Asian public doctor and a midwife and before that as a nutritionist. I've been a mom. My daughter is now 19 years old and so I've experienced parenting and how easily we can lose ourselves in that. I'm also a daughter, I have my parents and so experience.

Of that, of having parents who, you know, sometimes they need our attention, our parents do and we can and I speak all the time with patients who sometimes lose themselves in the caretaking.

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 over overload. They release cortisol and adrenaline which controls your digestion, hormones, immune system, energy focus and even your emotional response. So how can you beat stress when you don't know where to start? That's why we have a free 7 day stress reset program. It's designed to help support weight loss, digestive healing and hormone balancing. It includes support for integrating self care daily tips come to you by email and video, Gluten free dairy free meal plans as well as grocery shopping lists, journal pages and more. This free program will help you beat stress and put you on the path to wholeness in your body. Get your plan now for free@drdonnie.com.

And.

So I get it. And I had had health issues. I described this inflammation in my sternum, but I also had migraines for many years. And so I too had to be in those moments of pain and both physical pain, emotional pain, and saying to ourselves, I can't do this anymore. I can't do it the same way anymore. I need to do this a different way. Sometimes it takes us getting to that point where they talk about having a wake up call. Sometimes it's a severe diagnosis like cancer or dementia that gives us that wake up call that says I got to do something different. Sometimes that's when we start to look at our Life and our day to day schedule and we realize, oh my gosh, what am I doing to myself? Ultimately, I'm the one choosing what I'm doing each day and who I'm doing it with and how I'm doing it. So if I'm the one choosing, why do I keep choosing the thing that's causing me illness or causing me to feel worse? How can I start to shift it? And it can be scary sometimes to do things differently. Sometimes even making a diet change can be scary. I talk to patients every day where we find out, for example, they have a food sensitivity, let's say to dairy, like from cow milk and cheese and yogurt and ice cream. At first it's scary for them to think of their life, their next day or their next hour without being able to have yogurt or ice cream from cow milk at first. That triggers a stress response that can trigger the adrenaline and the cortisol. Just the thought of a dietary change. Just imagine if we're going to talk about making a lot of changes or big changes in your life already. We have resistance because it feels scary. It triggers our stress response again. And so we tend to go back to what feels familiar, what feels normal. We keep going back to the same patterns. I want to acknowledge you for even having the thought of like, oh, what if something could be different? Because it can be a bit scary and overwhelming just to be like, how am I going to do this? How am I going to create this much change? And what I want to teach you about is something called hormesis, which I write about in my new book too. Hormesis is this way where we want to make small changes, just enough change that our body notices it and starts to adapt to catch up with us, so to speak, Then we can make these little small changes. The body can adapt, come up to a new normal or homeostasis, and then we can make another little change. And our body re establishes again our balance point. Little by little. We create change over time, versus if we try to make too much change all at once, right? So back to this New Year's resolution. If we're like, okay, I'm going to start in with an hour workout every day or an hour of meditation every day, whatever it is, and it's like too big of a change. And then we might be able to do it for a day or two, but then so many things even in signals inside your body are going to pull you back to where you've been in this kind of pattern that's been the repeated pattern that your body thinks this is normal. Every signal in your body thinks that's normal. From your hormones to your neurochemicals to every metabolic process in your body is wanting to maintain this. So if you decide, oh, I'm going to do this instead, your body will deal with it for a couple of days. And then you might feel more tired, you might feel more pain, or you might be like, oh my gosh, am I supposed to just push through and make myself get there?

It's possible, but it's really difficult that way. And then a lot of times then you eventually, we call it falling off the wagon, you end up right back where you started from. You might lose weight for a couple weeks or a month and then boom, you're right back to the weight you started from. It's frustrating and it actually re establishes the place where you're not wanting to be. It's like you get more and more stuck there. What I want to do is be able to teach you how to make change in a very incremental way, little by little, over time, so that all your systems in the body have a chance to realign with the changes you're wanting to make. You have to make a little change. Let's say you're wanting to get to sleep earlier. Instead of going to bed at 1am, you want to work toward being able to go to bed at 10:00pm, let's say, because 10:00pm is when melatonin levels are most optimum and you're more likely to get that deep sleep, the most deep sleep overnight. If you get to bed by 10pm wherever you live, how are you going to get to bed at 10pm if you just start going laying down at 10pm you're probably not going to fall asleep. Then you're going to get frustrated and give up. We can't just expect our bodies to make that much change all at once. We need to go in small increments. If you're wanting to go to bed earlier, I would say maybe start with going to bed 15 minutes earlier each night. Then you go, okay, if it was 1am last night, tonight I'm going to bed at 12:45 and then 12:30 and then 12:15. You see what I mean? You might actually have to set a reminder on your phone to help you, because otherwise, next thing you know, it's 1:00am again. So you need. Sometimes this is how I do it, is I have to set a reminder, an alarm on the phone that says it's bedtime, I need to I need to figure out all the things I need to do before bed. Do you need to feed your pets? You need to start the dishwasher? You just start the. Maybe you're going to start your washing machine. Maybe you're going to brush your teeth. Maybe you're going to, you know what I mean, whatever that list is of things. Maybe you're going to do a meditation, read a book, turn down the lights. Like, when you think about it, there's actually quite a lot of things that we usually have on our to do list before we even get in bed, go to sleep. Well, some people don't, but I do. I don't know if you're like me. So start to write it down and think about it. Hey, what are all the things that you want to do before you go to bed and how long is that going to take you? Is it going to take you an hour? Is it going to take you two hours? So then you can figure out what time do you really need to start those activities so that you have them completed at a time where you can then more realistically get to bed earlier. And so sometimes we have to like think it through that specifically in order to create change. And I know it's not always like fun and sexy to be thinking of like, oh, I need to do my dishes an hour earlier.

But.

It'S amazing what a difference that can make in your health if you just start to go, okay. I think that the exciting part is that you're prioritizing yourself. You're not just prioritizing getting the dishes done, you're prioritizing, hey, I want to get the dishes done early enough so that I have time to take an Epsom salt bath or I have time to meditate for 15 minutes and get to bed earlier. Right. So it's all really in the big picture. It's about prioritizing you and your self care and your worth. You're worth it. You're worth it to be healthy. You matter to yourself, you matter to the people in your life. You're important here. And so you deserve to have the sleep you need, the food you need, exercise you need. I think so much of the time we're used to in our society, kind of like putting ourselves last. And it says if we're selfish, if we're thinking about ourselves, we're trying to feed ourselves or get ourselves set up for health, that we're supposed to feel guilty for that or feel bad for that. And so I really want to just point that out and let you just notice it and let it go and be like, okay, enough of that already. It's not about being selfish. It's about being being a self advocate. It's about being there for yourself. Because the more you're there for yourself and the more you're taking better care of yourself, then you actually can be there for the other people in your life in a healthier, better way. Right? Like, sometimes we actually have to remind ourselves that we sometimes have to shift the perspective so that we realize, like, hey, this is about me taking care of me so that I can be there for others. And that's why, you know, sometimes when it comes down to it, if we have to make a decision, you know, am I going to do this other thing or am I going to do something to take care of myself?

Sometimes it comes down to I'm going to do this for myself so that I'm better able to do that for someone else tomorrow.

Sometimes you then have to look at your schedule and see, okay, what can I accomplish today realistically in the time that I'm able to work and accomplish things, and what do I need to then stop doing so that I can take care of myself? And we talk a lot about this in the programs where I'm helping. You know, when I'm working with people one on one and when I'm working with people in group programs, we talk about this a lot. And it's so cool and exciting when I hear people who come back to me and say that they are communicating with their work, that they, you know, they can only accomplish this much in a day. They can't accomplish everything that was was previously expected of them, like to be, be brave and courageous enough to say this needs to shift. I can't keep up at. I need to be more realistic about what I can do as a human being. I'm not a machine. I'm a human that needs rest and food and stress recovery and exercise. And all of that really needs to be happening in your day. That's what I refer to as care. My care method, which is C standing for clean eating. So this is a focus on which foods to choose and not choose in a way that really supports you to eat the foods that are healthiest for your body. That's the C. Then the A stands for adequate sleep, prioritizing sleep and getting enough sleep, good sleep. R is for recovery activities. There's lots of different options there. Everything from meditation and prayer and breath work to time in nature and many, many more. And then E is for exercise so as you can see, as we've been talking, it comes down to these four categories as a way to really build a foundation for you. A foundation of daily activities and choices that are going to help you start healing, right? You start prioritizing you with your care, your self care, your clean eating, adequate sleep, recovery activities and exercise. And when we start to integrate these into our day to day, our body starts to notice different, something's different going on, right? We start to show these little small incremental changes. So your body can shift the inflammation, can decrease the autoimmunity, can turn off your digestion, can heal, your hormones can get rebalanced. It all happens in these day to day little chances for you to accomplish and use care to your advantage. It's not about jumping into care in a stressful way or.

There'S no expectation or perfect way of doing it. To me, it's about how to do it in small incremental steps. Because that's how hormesis works. That's how our bodies best respond. Again, if we're going to make diet changes, let's identify some small diet changes that make sense for you. Maybe it's sugar. Maybe we need to go, okay, we've been having too much sugar because of the holidays. Let's start eliminating the sugar. But you don't have to eliminate sugar 100% overnight. Let's go. Maybe you can think of it in percentages, 5% per day. Or look for the big sources of sugar and start to eliminate those and then go for the smaller I go exposures to sugar. You see what I mean? Same thing with stress recovery and exercise. You want to start slow. Start with five minutes of a gentle workout. Maybe core strengthening is where I like to begin. See how it feels, feel that sense of accomplishment. Pat yourself on the back and be like I did. I did my five minutes of squats and ab crunches. Okay, that was enough for today. Check it off the list. Okay. Now tomorrow you can build on that. And little by little you start to create a whole new self care routine that becomes your normal. We want that to be your normal. Right? Because that's when you don't even have to think about it. It's just, this is what you do. More of us, I think, who are having that self care routine as our routine, then we can all communicate about it. Oh, what are you doing that you like? What are you doing that feels good to you? Oh, I've got to go do my, I got to go to bed. Oh, I understand. I'm doing that too, right? So because now we can communicate with each other in this common language and understanding that humans need self care. Humans need clean eating, adequate sleep, recovery from stress and exercise. That's well established in many many studies of which many of them I can't wait for you guys to see. In my new book, the Master Stress Book. I'll put links down below.

Where you can sign up for more information about the book. Even soon you'll be able to pre order the book. Also right now, depending when you're listening to this, I'm doing a live seven day stress reset for those of you who are listening after, I also have a seven day stress reset you can do anytime. So I'll put a link so you can sign if you're in the moment and you're like I want to do a seven day stress reset now. Okay, sign up and I will support you through the seven day stress reset starting today and I will help you implement care into your self care routine so that you can start on this path of healing and understanding your body and being able to recenter to your authentic self and choose from there instead of choosing from the state of stress.

I'll put this seven day stress reset information down below and the book information. And please if you have liked this video and this information, please subscribe so that you hear from me with each week when the How Humans Heal episodes come out. I would love to also receive your review. Five star review. If you really enjoyed this, please send it in so that others really get to hear about this too. Again, I think the more of us who understand these concepts, it's only going to help more people and help you be successful because then you've got a support system around you understanding the same concepts. All right, well thanks for joining me. I can't wait to talk to you again soon. And again, happy New Year.

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.