#96 Self-Love and Stress Recovery

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

Hi, it's Dr. Donni and well, we're going to talk about the ways that stress shows up often. So for example, anxiety is a really common way, but also I want to start to talk about what to do about that, how to help with anxiety and stress. And even with this.

Idea of the upcoming, this holiday, the Valentine's holiday and the idea of self love and how just giving yourself support with stress is a, as a way to help with just your taking better care of yourself. Right. And, and connecting with yourself and caring about yourself. Thank you for joining me wherever you are and I love, I'd love to hear more from you. So, but let's jump in. Let's talk about how, how stress shows up. Because, I mean, I have to say for myself, like, for many years, I mean, I knew that I was stressed because for many years I was a single mom and practicing running business and also had health struggles of my own. And so I had a sense that there was stress happening, but I didn't always know that I was feeling anxious. Like sometimes it's possible to experience anxiety but without realizing that that's what it is. So for some people, the way they might describe it might be like if you have a lot of worries, if you, or if you find your mind is racing a lot of times, like if you find yourself just with your mind taking over. And sometimes it can affect your sleep. Like if you either can't fall asleep or you wake up with racing thoughts, or it can happen during the day especially too if you're, if you're, you know, there's something you'd like to do, but maybe you, the anxiety comes up in terms of, you know, being able to choose it or, you know, make it happen in your life. Right? So I don't know if some of you can relate to that or maybe you have other ways that anxiety shows up for you. And I want to also mention that I'm going to be using this conversation in the How Humans Heal podcast. So thank you all for participating because I think this way your live comments and input will help people also who are listening to this later. So, you know, I'm happy to hear, like, how, how it shows up for you. What is that? Maybe anxiety or nervousness or racing thoughts. And really what I think sometimes helps the most, like when I'm talking to patients about this, what they share with me and what I find helps them the most is to start to realize that these worries or anxieties or however you want to call it, this rumination even, about what's going to happen or what might happen, what might not happen, right? We're playing all of this out in our mind, and this is actually all part of something that could be called the conditioned state, just a mental state, a state of being that's based on our conditionality from earlier in our life, usually from childhood, to just stop for a minute and realize those anxious thoughts are not you, not the real you. Those are the thoughts that come from experiences from your past, whether it's from childhood, like parenting, that you were exposed to, or even from school or from sometimes from cultural messages that we receive earlier in our life, the things we should do or should be. Even this concept of being good or bad, right, like it gets into our mind and it's just a neural pathway that gets established early in life.

This is often what sets us up for these anxious thoughts or the way we experience stress in our lives is often based on these conditioned ways of thinking that were established in childhood. Once you have an awareness for that, then that already creates a shift because you're separating yourself from your experience. Whenever we are completely identified with our experience, if we worry about something and we're completely identified with whatever that concern is now we've essentially become whatever that anxious thought is. But if we can start to stand back a little bit and see the anxious thought as separate from us, ourselves, from yourself, you start to see that you're separate from the anxious thoughts now you're creating space for yourself in your thinking process and your experience.

One step from there would be to even start to notice or track or journal about how often is your mind going into that conditioned state. How often is it that you find yourself in the anxious state, state or worry? Maybe it's every 15 minutes, maybe it's every three hours, maybe it's only every couple days. So you can, as you start to track it, then you become even more aware of it. And it's one of those things, the more aware of it you become. It's like you're putting your finger on it and you're starting to break the pattern. You're starting to create new neural pathways. The new neural pathways that you're going to be creating are more aligned with you being your authentic self. And this, as I mentioned it, I like to point out that it's actually possible to create new neural pathways. Right. It's like we've been driving down the same road all of our lives and we just keep going down that same path in our nervous system. And so it's set on automatic. Sometimes it happens so fast you don't even realize you're already into the stress and the worry and you're like, how did I get on this road again? Right. So as soon as you start to realize, oh my gosh, I'm on that same stressed nervous neural pathway now, you can start to realize you can choose a different neural pathway and you can start to emphasize and help catch yourself and send yourself down this other neural pathway. The other new neural pathway that you want to create is one that's connected with your true self, which is also called authentic self, which is always going to be more of coming from love and gratitude and, and this more place of joy and compassion.

You can even in this very moment practice that. One good way to do it is to just. Well, you can close your eyes if you like. I like to put my hand over my chest or over my heart and just take a couple deep breaths. Immediately when we take deep breaths, we're connecting and stimulating the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is one of the, or is the longest nerve in our bodies. It's connecting our brain to everything else, essentially to our digestion, to our all of our different glands that make our hormones. And so it, and it's a two way communication. So it also sends communication from our body back to our brain. So when we're under a lot of stress and we keep going down that stressed neural pathway.

The vagus nerve essentially gets stuck in that stressed pattern. That's part of why when we're what I call stuck in stress mode and stuck in anxiety, a lot of the time we end up not just with symptoms of anxiety, but also symptoms of digestive issues. Whether that's reflux or constipation or diarrhea or bloating or imbalanced gut bacteria, whether it's maybe diagnosed as IBS or IBD or whatever the diagnosis is. To me it's that the stress and the vagus nerve have been in such a stress state all the time that sympathetic. Right. In a sympathetic stress response, we're signaling adrenaline, but we're also telling the Vagus nerve to tell our digestion that we're stressed. Plus, the vagus nerve is going to tell all of your other hormones that you're stressed. We start to see hormone imbalances, whether that's blood sugar imbalances or changes in the menstrual cycle or thyroid. Any of the hormones can get thrown out of balance by this stress state. Same with the immune system. Immune system also becomes thrown off. Maybe more allergies, autoimmunity infections of various types, even chronic infections like viral infections. Also, the nervous system gets thrown off the neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine and gaba. This stressed state, this conditioned stress state, ends up causing all of these different imbalances and symptoms and health issues in our body. Sometimes it's like, then we feel overwhelmed by that. You know, it's stressful to deal with health issues. And so it becomes this vicious cycle. The stress about the health issue ends up creating more health issues. And that's why some people, when you write into me, I've noticed when you reply to me on different social media, you start to say, oh my gosh, I have. All of. All of these things are showing up for me. Well, then that tells us that this stress and the vagus nerve are. All of the areas of your body are picking up on that stress state. And it can feel like you get hopeless and trapped. Like, what am I supposed to do now? It's just all consuming and it's snowballing on itself. It's growing, growing, growing every day. And it's. I think, why, Sometimes we just get to the point of what we call burnout or overwhelm or, you know, sometimes people even get to just saying, like, I'm at the end of my rope. I'm ready to give up. I don't want to. I can't do this another day. Right? Like, that's why. And, and so what I want you to know is we can. We can totally change it. It's not. It doesn't have to be stuck that way. Like, the research really shows us. And I see it with my patients every day. I get. I can have the coolest job, I think, because I get to hear from patients who are implementing their stress recovery. They start to have less anxiety, they have less depression, they are sleeping better, their digestion feels better, and their hormones are getting back on track and they're fending off infections. I mean, it's so amazing, right? So I just feel so honored to get to see every day how the body can shift and heal. And it's when we part of it, I think the first step is understanding that it's even possible, it's even possible to change these patterns. And then we have to ask the question, well, how are we going to do that and how is it unique to you? Because what I find is that it is really unique to each individual. Of course we're all unique. We all have our own genetic variations. We all have our own unique past history. We have our own unique way that these symptoms show up for us. It's not one size fits all. There are some things that we can do that help all humans, but there's also a way to make it more specific and unique to you. So that's what I do when I help people, one on one is to do testing. So we can see for you, okay, what exactly is going on with your adrenaline. What exactly is going on with your cortisol, which is the main stress hormone also playing a role in all of this. And this, this is what I wrote about in my new book that is coming out on May 3rd. The book is called Master your Stress, Reset yout Health. Exactly. For this reason that when we can master, meaning we can become aware, we can start to learn what we need to do. We can start to implement in a way that works, that's strategic and effective, that you can actually completely change your health and your experience in your life. And so I'll put a link so you can. Because you can pre order the book. It's available to pre order at Amazon and everywhere else that you might want to order a book. Just search for Master your Stress, Reset your Health. And we'll put a link. We'll put a link for you. And so I'm really wanting to help you understand already, even before you have the book, what does this mean for you? What can you start to do about it already starting today? And one of the ways that we get specific is I developed a quiz that's in the book, but I'm working on making it an online version so you could do that quiz anytime. So I'll update you when that's available. But it's a quiz to identify your unique stress type. Because I identified five stress types which are the most common scenarios that we see that I see in terms of how stress shows up for different people. And then what I did is I went through all the research to see what are the best treatment approaches for each unique stress type. Because again, it's just like the way stress affects you is unique. The way you heal from stress is unique. So we need to match up your stress type with your best stress recovery plan. So that's what I'm going to be sharing more about with all of you along the way. But especially today, I want to emphasize some of the things you can start in with already. If you feel like you want to know more, then definitely feel free to reach out to me in my office because I can meet with you and we can dive in deeper one on one. I offer testing so we can also do urine and saliva testing so we know exactly what your adrenaline levels are, what, what your cortisol levels are at different times a day. We can also measure your neurotransmitter levels like serotonin and GABA and dopamine. So we know exactly where we're starting from. And all of these hormones and neurotransmitters are made in our bodies. Our human bodies know how to make these. So you don't need necessarily to take a pill as a replacement, right? We don't need, most people don't need a replacement or even a chemical for neurotransmitters or hormones. There's so much that we can do just by giving your body the right signals and sometimes using nutrients or herbs to rebalance these neurotransmitters and hormones.

I'm coming from the perspective of a naturopathic doctor and nutritionist, but the way I'm also hearing from many of you is that you'd rather be able to address your, your health using your lifestyle, your day to day routine, your diet, your nutrients and maybe plants and herbs from nature. We'd rather use these tools, if possible, to correct imbalances versus immediately having to reach for medication. Now sometimes medications are needed. Some cases we need, let's say, to replace cortisol if it's really, really low and your adrenals are not going to make it on there their own. So sometimes it's not to say that we never use these chemical or prescription pharmaceuticals. Sometimes they're necessary, especially when things become really severe. But a lot of times we can catch it early and then we can also help your body heal so that eventually you're not needing the medications anymore. Right? So it's a matter of figuring out where are you at this point in time for your body in terms of what's causing the anxiety or any other symptoms. What is it for you and where do we need to match up for your body and your system? Do we need to just make a few tweaks to your lifestyle like Meditation, maybe, and deep breathing? Or do we need to bring in some nutrients, herbs? Do we need a prescription for a little while? Let's figure out what you need based on where you are at this point in time. And then know that as your body heals, then the body can start to make these neurotransmitters. If they're too low, then we can help your body to make more of these neurotransmitters. Or if the cortisol is too high or low, we can get it back on track. I just really want you to know that it's possible to rebalance all of this. You don't have to. Just. It's not like, like, sometimes I think we figure, well, all this stress that I went through in my life caused this, and now I'm just stuck this way. Right. Like, it would be common to think that. And I want you to know that no. Our brain and nervous system can always heal and create new neural pathways. Hormones and gut can heal all of these things. In most cases, we can get some support. Even when I work in severe cases of neurodegeneration with, we can still get some improvement. So most cases, there's something we can do to help your body recover and to rebalance. And so here we go. So I got a couple of questions. Oh, yes. I love it when you're saying that your symptoms show up as headaches, muscle tension and teeth grinding. Oh, my gosh. Well, that sounds like me. I definitely. I used to be the. The teeth grinder all the time and headaches all the time. So those. Thank you for mentioning that. It's really, really common. And then another person saying spine issues and contributing to the stomach problems. That's so interesting. Right, because we can then see like this how the digestion ends up tying into other stress symptoms. And of course, in conventional medicine, you end up going to different practitioners. You're going to a different doctor for the gastroenterologist for your digestion, and maybe the neurologist or orthopedic doctor for the other issues. And they're not necessarily going to be thinking about the connection or suggest anything related to that connection. That's one of the things that's different about the way I think about it is I'm always thinking about how things are interconnected. And I'm also looking at the symptoms as indicators that something's out of balance. So sometimes we end up just being critical of ourselves, of even having symptoms. You know, there's such a perfectionism out there that we think we're Supposed to be perfect. We're supposed to never have symptoms, or we're supposed to be superheroes all the time, right? And we're holding ourselves to this standard. That's impossible. So but it's sometimes again, our conditioned thinking from our childhood in our culture. I want to just let you all just take a breath and lift off that heavy weight. If you've been carrying around that heavy weight of perfectionism, lift it off, let it go. Shake out your shoulders and your body a little bit and be like, oh, what does it feel like to not hold yourself to such high expectations and to realize that we're living in these human bodies. And our human bodies, of course, are going to be both responsive to stress, which is good. We want to be responsive to stress. That protects us. That's helpful, that's useful. We're responsive to stress, but we also require stress recovery.

We often don't make space for that sometimes in our lives. It just. It gets left behind. It gets forgotten. Right? Like I was communicating with, with one of you on, on Instagram the other day about, you know, being a mom and having children, and even if your children have. Your children have special needs or, you know, this is. How are you supposed to find time for yourself when you're working and you're being a parent or you're, you know, all the things that maybe you're caretaking for your parents, it's hard to find time for yourself. And sometimes we even feel like.

If we should feel guilty or something about taking time for ourselves. And I want to just change all that. Like, I want to just help you all realize that taking time for yourself is essential. If we don't make time for ourselves, then eventually our health is going to be compromised and we're not even going to be able to help someone else because we feel too awful, Right? For me, I used to get these migraines, and then I couldn't even talk to my patients because I was so sick from a migraine. And it taught me I need to create time off.

Because I would feel bad. I wanted to always be available and always helping people. But I realized I have to have time for myself to help myself recover, or else I'm not even going to be able to be there for anyone else. And so just noticing these thought patterns and catching yourself and going, even if you start little by little, I always tell people, don't feel like you have to make a huge change overnight. Like, what if we just make little incremental shifts? Just start to become more aware of it. Start to notice what these thoughts are and start to listen to what you're telling yourself. Are you being critical of yourself? If you take a break, are you thinking, oh, that means I'm lazy or I'm, you know, whatever the words are, right? Believe me, I've heard all of that too. So just notice what those messages are and realize that that's not real. That's just a message from the past, from somewhere or someone that doesn't have to be true. You could choose a completely different thought pattern. You can choose a completely different reality for yourself. You can choose to believe that taking a break or taking time off or taking time away from Wi Fi is, is actually good for you and essential. And then we can all together choose that, right? We can all decide that that's a good thing for us to do and we create new, you know, societal patterns. But at the very least, let's, you know, let's start doing it for ourselves and to be able to connect with your, your authentic self, your. And that's where I was starting with earlier, where I was saying, take a deep breath, put your hand on your heart. And what happens when we do that is we start to increase oxytocin production. Oxytocin we think of as the love hormone. I always think it's so amazing that our heart creates the love hormone. I don't think that's well known that our heart, our anatomical heart, actually makes the hormone that helps us feel love. You can encourage your heart to make that hormone just by taking a deep breath, put your hand over your heart. You can think about someone you love or your pet or an experience in your life that makes you just feel warm and a lot of gratitude when you bring those images to your mind. That also can create oxytocin. You don't actually need to have another person or pet there in person to get this effect. You can do it yourself from your just going through this pattern. And it can happen even within a short period of time, a couple minutes. So while you're listening to me, I encourage you to just go for it. You know, put your hand on your heart and let your body just let that oxytocin flow. Oxytocin is one of the what I would call anti stress hormones or anti stress messenger and we can help our bodies produce it. Then you could do this multiple times a day or certainly anytime you're feeling stressed or anxious.

You want to build in these practices as well as meditation, journaling, listening to music, dancing. There's so many different activities that also help with anti stress. It helps signal to the vagus nerve also that you can now digest and you can make hormones and you can do all the things your body knows how to do. So you want to support the signaling of the vagus nerve. You can also support the vagus nerve by giving a splash of cold water on your face or gargling, singing, even playing music yourself. If you play an instrument, that can also help. So just choosing these activities, even if it's short amount of time on a regular basis, can make a difference. Those are things you can do even whether you've done a test or whether you know what your exact levels are. I'm hoping they do even more research in the future to identify specific activities and specific time frames based on the stress types. But in the book I share what research is available in that regard. Then what I do is I would say if you said to me, what can I take? What can I do now? As like a nutrient that would help. One of my favorites is to reach for magnesium, but not any regular, any type of magnesium. I would go for specifically magnesium threonate, which is sometimes also called neuromag, but it's a specific type of magnesium that goes to the nervous system preferentially versus say magnesium oxide and citrate, which go more to the digestion and might help with bowel regularity. So if you have constipation, those would be good magnesiums to use. But for anxiety and high adrenaline, high adrenaline, you would feel like heart racing, mind racing. Then you want to use neuromag because magnesium and this magnesium in particular helps the metabolism of adrenaline. So it helps your body use up the adrenaline and get it out of your system faster. The thing about magnesium is it really doesn't have side effects. It's very safe and there's no dependency. You can use it and benefit from it, but it's not like you become dependent on it.

This neuromeg or mag3innate, I have an online store because I like to make sure patients have access to these high quality specific nutrients that I find are helpful. You can always go to drdani.com to find them. And I meant to bring, I didn't bring actually in the neuro mag, so I don't have it to show you. But.

Andrea who's helping me, she could put a link to it and I could put a link after.

Something a lot of people don't know is that too much stress can actually create an abundance of health problems like high blood pressure, high blood sugar, Anxiety, migraines, insomnia, even fertility issues. This is because high stress puts your adrenal glands on overload. They release cortisol and adrenaline which controls your digestion, hormones, immune system, energy focus and even your emotional response. So how can you beat stress when you don't know where to start? That's why we have a free seven 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.

Then the next thing that I would do is use a.

Theanine. So T H e a N I N E Theanine is an amino acid. So amino acids come from protein. So that means if you're eat, you want to make sure you're getting enough protein first of all in your diet. Because if you're getting enough protein in your diet, you're going to get all the amino acids and amino acids are necessary for making neurotransmitters. That's what our body makes neurotransmitters from. We also use amino acids for making muscles, so we need this amino acids anyway. But specifically amino acids are good for making neurotransmitters. And this specific amino acid called theanine is supportive of a neurotransmitter called gaba. G A B A and gaba. I think of it as our stress buffer. It's kind of a cushion between you and.

The stress, right? So in some ways you're like, if you feel like every stress, like if you were in a car and the car didn't have any shocks, then every bump on the road you feel it, right? The same thing happens if you don't have enough gaba. Every stress that happens, you feel like you just keep getting hit with the stress over and over. You're like, why do I feel stressed constantly? Well, very likely you might have low GABA levels, which we can measure in urine. But in the meantime you could also try supporting your GABA levels with theanine, which you can get by itself. You can get theanine by itself. Let me see if I can get a link for you guys.

So theanine comes as like 100, 200 milligrams. So you could start with that. And I always encourage you to start with like a single dose, because no matter what, you want to just see how your body's going to respond. You don't want to overdo it, you know, you don't want to no matter what. I'd rather start with a small dose and see how you feel. And then you. Because everyone's unique, you know, and I, I don't know your case. So you got to like, you know, start simple and small and then observe how your body feels and then you'll start to get the feel for it. How much should I take? How often do I need to repeat it? But theanine, for example, sometimes you might need one capsule or two capsules at a time, like 100 to 200 milligrams. And you could, depending on the severity of, say, the anxiety. You could repeat it like morning, noon and night. That would be common dosing of theanine. You can also get theanine combined with gaba. See, gaba, we can actually get GABA in a supplement form. And so you could get it by itself or a lot of times I find it works really well to get GABA combined with danine. This is an example of that, of combining GABA and Danine together. And there's different thinking out there, like, okay, how does the GAB actually get to the nervous system to work? The studies have looked at that. Some of it is because we think it's interacting through the digestion and, and supporting GABA production that way. Sometimes we think it's able to get through to the nervous system and so that's how it's working. But either way, a lot of people find that GABA really is helpful for them, for calming anxiety. And especially, I would think people who might have low GABA levels, right? Then taking DNA and GABA is going to be especially helpful. Whereas if you have high adrenaline, then the neuro mag is going to be more helpful. Right, because the magnesium helps metabolize adrenaline. And some people, it's both. Right? Some people have high adrenaline and they need magnesium and they might also have low GABA and they would benefit from taking theanine and GABA also. And so then you start to layer them in. But I always feel like it's important to know your body and understand that we're just not randomly throwing in these nutrients. We're actually addressing what your body needs the most help with. There was a question about magnesium.

The question is magnesium oxide. So magnesium oxide is, as I mentioned, more helpful for getting the bowels moving. So we would use it for constipation.

Basically what we usually do is we increase the dose until you get a bowel movement. Usually the dose is determined by your intestines. And sometimes a person might need 400, 800, 1200 milligrams. That's not dangerous if that's what you're. If that's what's helpful for helping to keep your bowels moving, that's okay. But of course, it's very unique to each individual. But there's not a known toxicity for, say, 1200 milligrams of magoxide if you, if you need it to keep your bowels moving. If you get diarrhea, then you've got to decrease.

See, in terms of, if a person's taking medication. So this is a good question, too, if you already take a medication, and it kind of depends on what type of medication. Right. It's always important to check with your practitioner, although I know a lot of them don't know about nutrients, so they might not be able to answer that question. And certainly when I work with people one on one, I help them based on whatever medication they're taking and how to add the supplements safely. So in a general video like this, it's hard for me to be very specific, but I mean, I would say just always check in with your practitioner is the safest way to go. But in general, magnesium is not going to interact with medications, and theanine is in general not going to interact with medication. So that's why I feel comfortable saying that those might be some safe places to start because they can be effective at even relatively low doses without causing. Most people don't have side effects. Most people don't have interactions with other things they might be taking. But again, please always check with your practitioner if you're one, if you're having a question, and if you try anything, start with the lowest possible dose first. Take it with food first so your stomach doesn't feel upset. Although I don't expect that with magnesium 3 and 8 or, or theanine. But it's always better to take something with a little food if you're wondering if your stomach's going to get upset. And if anything ever feels worse when you try a nutrient or a supplement, then stop. You know, there's no, no benefit in pushing through and making yourself feel worse. So if something doesn't feel right to you, my rule is always stop and meet. You know, check in with me or another practitioner who understands how to balance neurotransmitters, because sometimes some cases we need to start with Tiny, tiny doses. I have. I work with cases where sometimes we have to open the capsules and start with one quarter of the dose, for example, and go very slowly, especially with anxiety. Because sometimes with anxiety, what happens is we get anxious about taking something new.

When your body's been in a very stressed state, what can happen is your body's even going to have a stress response to something new and even something potentially beneficial. So it's tricky, right? So we have to just recognize that it's like your body may have a. I think of it like a radar system. Like your body's radar system might be right there. So as soon as you try something new, you're like, hey, I just tried to change my diet, or I tried to take magnesium and I felt worse. Well, it could be because anything you try that's new or different already triggers that stress response and more anxiety, right? And so we want to start then by recognizing these patterns and helping you create daily routines where you can already maybe even start with just the deep breathing and meditation and tools and activities that help shift that without taking any new substance. And then as you start to, like I talked about, you want to create space between you and the anxious response, you start to realize that the anxious response is not you. You are the one who's observing the anxious response. And so you can start to have compassion for yourself. Start to go, oh, wow, I'm the one experiencing this. How can I. Instead of being critical of yourself, right? We so often are going to be critical of, oh, my gosh, why is this happening to me? What's wrong with me? All these critical phrases that we come up with. But instead, what I'm encouraging you to do is have compassion for yourself. You're a human who's been under stress and your stress response system is trying to protect you. Let's have compassion for that and then create awareness for that so that you can start to separate yourself from the anxious response. And you can then start to be strategic. You can go, okay, well, if I take one capsule of magnesium and I feel anxious, then what if I open the capsule, empty out half of it, and then put it back together and take a half a dose, then what? What happens if I take a half a dose? Can I avoid that trigger? Can I go under the radar and still get the benefit? You can still get the benefit of the processing of adrenaline and calming your nervous system and creating new neural pathways, and you start to get more confident. You start to go, oh, okay, I can take this, and I feel better. Then we Gradually can increase the dose over time as you feel ready and as your stress response trigger, it'll shift. Then your stress response trigger is not going to be so fast to react. It's going to become easier for you to introduce new and beneficial things without constantly retriggering it, if that makes sense. And so I really, that's what I find has really helped a lot of people, is to just work gradually. And sometimes I'm meeting with patients every day, every four days, every week, every two weeks, until we start to really get that sense that they are able to see that shift happening and creating new neural pathways. I was talking to a patient today who I think I've been working with her for about two months. And when she first contacted me, her stress and anxiety was at a high. And she's a mom of, I think, four kids. And it's like she wasn't able to even get through the day, let alone figure out how she was going to do something to take care of herself. And it's so overwhelming. I get it. We just started small. You start with small little steps, little by little, start giving her the support she needed. And her day and her life are completely different now. I tell that story to just hopefully empower and inspire all of you that it's possible for you too to start in with some of these nutrients and start to see a difference.

There's a couple other products I want to mention, and I see your questions as well. This is another one of the products I have@drdani.com called calming support. This calming support also contains GABA.

That's another way if you want to try GABA without the theanine. This one also contains glycine and a couple other nutrients, B vitamins that help metabolize stress and adrenaline. So this is another one that can be very helpful. And you could also try this one again. Start with one, see how it feels. There's no with GABA and theanine and magnesium, there's no dependency, there's no withdrawal symptoms. It's either you take it and you see a benefit or you don't take it and you have your prior symptoms again, right? So you can start to feel like you can implement these things. But again, I always would go carefully and always, if anything doesn't feel right, then stop and ask for more help. This is another product that is called Stress Support. Stress Support has multiple ingredients, including theanine is in there. And then it also has Ashwagandha. A lot of times I hear from you all how Much ashwagandha has been helpful. Ashwagandha is an ayurvedic herb, and the research shows that in general it helps us with stress responses. So to calm a stress response, I find in the research, as well as clinically, that it's especially good at decreasing cortisol when the cortisol is too high. So now a lot of people figure, oh, my cortisol is probably too high. Well, you could try ashwagandha. And some people, when we test, sometimes you have actually low cortisol, in which case I might use a different herb than ashwagandha if you have low cortisol. But. But in general, ashwagandha is really good at helping us with stress recovery. And so some people take it by itself. And what I try to do is I try to match it up with the time of day. So if you know your cortisol is high in the middle of the day or the evening, then I would dose your ashwagandha to match that to help bring your cortisol down at the time of day that it's too high. This product also contains magnesium and it contains 5 HTP. One of you was asking me about tryptophan. So tryptophan and 5 HTP are the precursor nutrients to serotonin, which is another neurotransmitter. It's a calming neurotransmitter. So it's also. We usually think of serotonin related to mood, but it also relates to sleep and focus and energy levels. A lot of people I find that have low serotonin actually don't have depression. Like people think, oh, well, if I have low serotonin, I'm supposed to have depression. But that's not always the case. And sometimes it is, but it's not always. So just so you know, sometimes it's like, well, I don't have to worry about that because I don't have depression. Well, I would still worry about it. If you're experiencing anxiety, sleep issues.

Memory or brain fog issues, or even fatigue, then I would definitely want to measure your serotonin, which we can measure in the urine and see is it low. If it's too low, then is when I would suggest using the precursor nutrients. Now, if you think about it from a biochemistry perspective, what happens is the tryptophan is an amino acid, right? We're back to amino acids again. Tryptophan converts to 5 HTP, 5 hydroxytryptophan, and then 5 HTP converts to serotonin. So if you take Tryptophan, it has to go through two biochemical steps to get to serotonin and it requires several cofactors like vitamin B6, so it's a little harder process. Right. Plus tryptophan could possibly go down a different pathway, which is more of a neurotoxic pathway. So I prefer to use 5 HTP because it's only one step to serotonin. It's a lot easier and it's only going to go to serotonin. It can't go down a different pathway. That's why I tend to, if I see someone has low serotonin, I tend to suggest 5 HTP because I know it's going to lead towards serotonin. Whereas tryptophan.

I don't like to use a nutrient that might go a couple of different pathways because then I don't know exactly what it's going to result in. The only time I use tryptophan is if a person has very, very, very low serotonin levels and they're very sensitive to 5 HTP, then we might use tryptophan for a period of time as a more gentle approach to the serotonin. But that's the only time I tend to use tryptophan. So in terms of your question, that's my answer about tryptophan. And if you're wondering about supporting serotonin first, I mean, my preference is to do a test first. I really encourage you to do that. Especially if you're taking a medication like an SSRI to affect the serotonin receptors, then you're going to want to work with me or someone like me who's trained in how to do this because now we need to get more specific.

I just hate for any of you to take a supplement and not get benefit from it. I'd rather you, if you really need the help, get the testing and get the help, the support along the way to be successful so that you can get feeling better faster and be efficient with it.

That's my answer. Related to serotonin in general is get more help with it, especially if your symptoms are severe and especially if you're taking a medication. But if your symptom, if you're thinking, hey, let me just try something first, then you can get 5 HTP by itself, or you can get 5 HTP in a product like this, Stress support. And you see why it's called stress support because it's got multiple ingredients. It's got the magnesium, the theanine, the ashwagandha the five HTP and multiple other ingredients all in one. And so this can be a way to just see, hey, how does this help? Does this help turn down my cortisol, turn down my adrenaline, help my body get out of that stress mode? I would definitely encourage all of you to do this along with the other things I talked about, like making time for yourself, taking deep breaths, meditation or guided imagery, like whatever works for you. We need to give your body the signals that it can get out of stress mode. If your body's constantly getting stress signals, then when is it supposed to do the opposite? Like there's no time.

We need to create space and time in your schedule for your body to actually get some different signals so that you can go be in nature and experience the colors and patterns and shapes in nature. Our brain picks up on this and starts to recover from stress just from being in nature. There's so much research on that. And so we need to create time. Even if you start with five minutes, even if you start with 15 minutes, maybe you can build up to an hour, maybe you can build up to a whole day of just time where you're giving your body anti stress signals to counteract and counterbalance the stress signals that we have plenty of. We don't have to try to make those, those are happening anyway. The key is how to create the anti stress signals. And even if you're super busy, even if you have a lot of responsibilities, then it's a matter of belie how to do it too. Like how do I ask for help, how do I, how can I either have family or friends or hire someone? If you need to and if you're able to, to give you time to yourself, you know, an hour even, you know, and maybe you can trade with someone. Hey, you give, if they give you an hour of a stress recovery break, you'll, you'll do what, you know, cover for them for an hour so they can have a stress recovery break, right? Like there's ways we can do this without having to, without having to cost more money. There's ways you can start to go down this path and create this for yourself.

I'm just encouraging you to do that. And as you do that, you find more compassion for yourself, more love for yourself. That's why I'm thinking of it as the more you implement your self care, your stress support, the more you create self love and how you can really start to realize that we don't have to be so dependent on other people or things for self love. A patient was Telling me yesterday how when she feels stressed, she finds herself eating foods that she's in the kitchen eating. Sometimes we go to stress eating and it's because we've learned at some point in time that eating foods, or especially sweet foods or salty foods, is kind of like self soothing. It's a coping mechanism. It can become an addiction in some ways where we turn to something else, a food to help soothe us, or sometimes we're turning to alcohol to try to help us with the stress or other addictions. It could be sometimes we're addicted to sex as a way to feel love and feel.

That we've turned off the stress. Now of course there's definitely studies that show sexual activity can decrease our stress hormones and increase our oxytocin. But if it feels like it's an addiction or a dependency, then that's different. Then we're using either sex or some other substance or activity as a way to cope with the stress. But it's not really helping us rebalance or solve the stress. You see what I mean? So just noticing for yourself, like, see if you can feel the difference. Are there certain activities or substances that you're choosing because you're in a state of stress and you're trying to get yourself some comfort, right? So there's no judgment. It's human nature to want to choose something to help you with the stress. And sometimes it's a substance that can create or an activity that can create an addiction. So please don't be hard on yourself about that, but just to notice it and go, okay, what else can I do that's going to help my body recover from stress? Be less in a stressed state and less likely to choose that behavior. And then once you're recreating that balanced state, then you can choose differently. Then you might choose to eat. Of course, because we need to eat. We need food to survive. There's other things we need in our lives that are going to be, we're choosing it because it's good for us versus choosing it from a place of being stressed and anxious, if that makes sense. So I hope that's helpful to just think through like, and notice. I encourage you all just, just start with awareness and observation of yourself. Sometimes that alone you start to see the patterns and you start to go, oh, okay, how can I choose differently? So if a patient is reaching for foods as a coping mechanism to stress, it's not that we're going to say that's bad or don't do that. I tend to just say, okay, let's have compassion for you and yourself and how that pattern was created. And let's start to come up with ways to help with the stress you're experiencing in that moment. Can you put on some music or meditation? Can you call a friend? Can you maybe even drink some tea that feels calming or take a supplement like some magnesium or some GABA support? Because magnesium and gaba tend to work quickly. Like within half hour to an hour, you should start to feel like it's helping. So you could go for a walk, right? There's things you could try first, but you first have to be aware of it. You have to be able to catch yourself and go, oh, it's happening. Let me try something different. And you create a toolbox. You go, okay, let me go to my toolbox of things I can choose when I'm feeling anxious or stressed. Let me try these things first. And as you practice it, you start to figure out what works best for you. Is it 200 milligrams of theanine and your favorite song? Or you know, like, you'll find out like, this is what I need to do when I get to this moment. And then if half hour goes by and you're still hungry or you know, you haven't eaten in four hours, then of course go eat, you know, so it's not that you're not going to eat, it's just noticing are you eating because it's time to eat or are you eating because you're eating out of a stress reaction? And so anyway, so let me see if you guys have any other questions for me before we wrap up for today. I just really want to, I'm hoping help you to feel more understanding of yourself, more connection with yourself and knowing that help is available and you can reach out to me, whatever for. You can direct message me, you can email my office@officerdonnie.com and definitely I saw you, you were mentioning those of you, thank you for ordering my book as soon as you know, whenever you can because then you got the pre order and it's just going to show up on your doorstep after May 3rd and I'm going to have more and more support available to you as the stress type quiz and the book become available so that we can be doing this together. The thing is that we know also from studies that community and doing things with other people makes a difference. It helps to counteract the stress and just even if we're not in the same location, we can, I mean that's the good thing about technology is we can connect over technology so that we feel more of that sense of community and oxytocin even if we're not exactly in the same room. Again, thanks you all for joining me. Connect with Yourself this Valentine's Day plan. A Valentine's Day plan or could be the day before, the day after Valentine's Day planet has a chance to really listen to yourself, connect with yourself, create time for yourself and start to shift these stress patterns for yourself. And so we can even experience Valentine's Day in a different way. Experience Valentine's Day as you're your own Valentine, giving yourself stress, support and stressed love or self love I should say. And I just wish that for all of you. So thanks y' all for joining me and I look forward to connecting with all of you again soon.

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.