Burnout and HPV: The Hidden Connection

What does burnout have to do with testing positive for high risk HPV virus? And what does cortisol have to do with getting an abnormal Pap smear result? Well, this might be what you're wondering and what's on your mind if they might be related and maybe you heard they are and you're trying to understand why that is, that stress and burnout and cortisol have anything to do with, with why you have an abnormal Pap smear and potentially abnormal cells, then you're in the right place because that's exactly what I'm going to talk about in this video. I'm Dr. Donni Wilson. I am a naturopathic doctor, certified professional midwife and clinical nutritionist. And I've been helping women for over 25 years to recover from, to resolve abnormal Pap smears and high risk HPV virus so that we can get it to negative and keep it negative and so that you don't have to be on the vicious cycle of repeat procedures and never ending high risk HPV virus or human papillomavirus. So I'm glad you found this video and let's dive in to understanding how stress, trauma, as well as burnout, what we often refer to as burnout, has to do with your susceptibility to high risk hpv. And I want to point out first of all that I talk about high risk HPV and abnormal Pap smears completely differently than what you're going to hear in a standard gynecology office. And that's because I've been studying this virus and I myself had high risk HPV virus 30 years ago and have been able to clear the virus to negative and never had it come back again. So I look at it differently. I look at it as, as humans and research shows this our immune system has the capability to clear high risk HPV to negative all different types of HPV, even the 14 high risk types. And even if you've had high risk HPV for years or even decades, no matter what age you are, and no matter how you were exposed to it or when you were exposed to it, no matter what, I've seen all different cases over the years of women from around the world who've been able to get rid of hpv, to get it to not detected and negative on a test result and keep it that way on into the future. And so that's how I know that it's about susceptibility. If you're testing positive right now to high risk hpv one or more Types of it. It means that there's something overwhelming your, overwhelming your body's ability to, to protect you from it. And that's the truth that you're not being told out there or in the medical community. So I want to make sure you have the truth now. And you can start shifting the way you think about hpv, that it's about understanding what your body needs in order to help you to clear it. And when you give your body what it needs, it's going to be able to clear it and protect you from it going forward. So. So we start asking a different question in my group online program, and when I work with women, one on one, we ask the question, why.

Is it that your body hasn't cleared the virus? And what is it that your body needs in order to support you to clear the virus? And from there we can get a lot more information about how we can support you specifically as an individual. And because it turns out that stress and trauma affects each of us uniquely and individually. And that's what I wrote about in this book, you see Over My Shoulder Master your stress reset your health. I write about my research on how stress, trauma and burnout affects us as women and men and children, but specifically women. How the stress and trauma affects us on a physiological level in our biology, in our biochemistry. How does stress trauma, whether it's from the past, present, or both, how is that affecting your immune system, your hormones, your nervous system, and your gut health, as well as your vaginal health. And when we can understand how the stress that we're exposed to is affecting us, then we can address that and reverse engineer health. And in doing so, we can make it so that your body can protect you from high risk HPV virus, human papillomavirus, even if you're exposed over and over again. So here's what we need to understand about burnout. So we use the term burnout as a way to say, hey, the stress I'm exposed to is piling up and I'm really starting to feel it. And if you're starting to feel it, likely it's disrupting biochemistry in your body. So let's talk this through. Burnout. Maybe you're. You felt that way before, right? I encourage you to kind of check in with yourself. Have you ever thought, oh, maybe I have burnout, Maybe I'm burned out right now. How would you know that you have burnout? Maybe you feel like, I don't know if I can do another day, right? That's a common way that women describe it. To me, like, I am so overwhelmed. I've been burning the candle at both ends and in the middle and I don't even know if I can get through another day. If you know you've been working from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep, and if you're getting less than eight hours of sleep on a regular basis, likely you're burned out. Sometimes we dismiss it and we think, ah, believe me, I've been there too, where I was like, oh, I'm not going to get burned out. That's not going to happen to me. And yet it happens to all of us because we are under a lot of stress. First of all, all of us in the world, we've come through a pandemic. We're still recovering from it. And likely as women, you've also been under a lot of pressure in your family, taking care of maybe your, your loved ones, your, even your parents, children. Maybe you've been taking care of children for years, if not decades. Maybe you also have a job and financial stresses. Maybe you also have other stresses in your life related to relationships, divorce, separation, relationship, toxic relationships, also death of, or loss of a loved one, even loss of pets. And so these start to add up. They start to add up. They're actually, even if you think so many women say to me, oh, I didn't even think I was stressed. I didn't think the stress was affecting me until we started doing tests to understand their biochemistry and then I could show them, I could reveal to them, these results show me that actually the stress is affecting your body on the inside. Even if in your mind you're thinking, oh, I'm not affected by stress, but when we do the right tests, we can see it. And I'm going to describe those tests to you here in a second. I would say even simply, if you're testing positive for high risk HPV virus, it tells me that likely you're burned out to some degree and that you've been under a lot of stress and you haven't had a chance to support yourself to recover from it. And that's essentially how I define burnout. Being exposed to stress and trauma without the opportunity to recover from it. That's what leads to burnout. And burnout might lead you to experience fatigue, like waking up in the morning and still feeling like you need to sleep more, or feeling like you need to take a nap in the middle of the day or sleep part of the day or all of the day. It could also be you have disrupted sleep and it could be that you have bloating or any other digestive symptoms. Let's say stomach pain or constipation or diarrhea. I hear this from women all the time. Also can be on your skin if you're feeling like you're getting breakouts or your skin is aging, or you're getting skin rashes like eczema or other kind of allergic reactions, mast cell activation, histamine type reactions, sneezing, runny nose, even migraines, which I used to have all of these things for many, many years. I had to figure out how to solve them. And the way to solve them is to solve the burnout. Then we can solve the symptoms that are. These symptoms are from your body, are just trying to get your attention and say to you, hey, we need some help in here, we need a break. And a lot of women then will say, well, how am I supposed to take a break when I have so much to keep up with? And I get it. I have been a doctor, a business owner, a single mom for decades. And so I understand. I get it. I get how hard it can be and how hard it can be to imagine how you're going to create any time for yourself. Even as a college student, my daughter says to me, mom, how can I possibly take time for myself with all of the things I need to get done every single day? And so to me, the way that I finally learned that I needed to take time for myself is because I was getting severe migraines that put me on the bathroom floor with severe nausea over and over and over again for years. And I finally asked myself the question.

Why is it that I'm having to get to this point of pain and distress and then having to recover from it over and over again? And I realized, if only I could figure out how to give myself even a little small breaks in my schedule, then my body wouldn't have to create a migraine in order to get a break, right? Our bodies find a way to try. They keep trying to get our attention, and they will find a way to cause us to literally take a break if we don't give ourselves a break. And one of the ways that your body's likely trying to get your attention and asking for you to take care of it is with high risk HPV and abnormal Pap smear. Because the HPV takes advantage of you being depleted, burned out, run down, and deficient in many different ways. And that's exactly when HPV jumps right in and starts doing what it does, right? HPV just does what it does. High risk HPV can hijack your cells, cause them to look more and more like cancer cells, and can even cause you to have to go through numerous procedures, surgeries, and even a cancer diagnosis and treatment, and even lose your life to this virus because of cancer. If we don't get the message to start looking at what does our body need us to do in order to protect it. So does that give you a better sense of you Maybe you heard some of the symptoms I was saying maybe think, oh, yeah, that sounds like me. Or if you have autoimmunity or if you have really pretty much any other symptoms start popping up, right? Patients say to me, oh, now I'm having trouble getting pregnant. If you're having trouble getting pregnant or your menstrual cycle is irregular, that also happens when we're burned out. Also, perimenopausal or menopausal symptoms, vaginal symptoms, frequent infections like bladder infections, sinus infections, respiratory infections, and so on. This is all part of the possibility and the picture of burnout and risk for high risk HPV virus. So I see them as completely overlapping and related. Even so, let me explain how is it that they're related? First, I want to teach you how to what test you can do, because you don't even have to just guess whether you have burnout. You can actually test it. Now, you could start with my stress type quiz. I developed a quiz to help you to identify do you have burnout? And how is burnout affecting your stress? Stress hormones. Our stress hormones are cortisol and adrenaline. Those are the hormones that respond when we're under stress. And we. I love cortisol and adrenaline. We, we need cortisol and adrenaline every day because they give us energy to wake up in the morning and do what we love. They improve our mood, they improve our. Everything feels better when you have the right amount of cortisol and adrenaline. The problem is that when we're under constant stress and never have enough recovery, our cortisol and adrenaline are not optimal. They're either too high or too low. And so the way to find out if you have burnout and how those stress hormones have been affected is you can start by doing a quiz in my book called the Stress Type Quiz. And that will give you a sense of it. And then I recommend doing the actual cortisol and adrenaline test. You can test your cortisol? Yes, you could test it in a blood level, but I find it's not so helpful because it's only at the time you have your blood drawn. Much more helpful is to measure your cortisol at different times of day, like morning, midday, evening, bedtime. So we can see your cortisol different times a day. You see, cortisol is a type of hormone that doesn't just stay the same all day. Right? Thyroid hormone just stays the same. But cortisol should be higher in the morning and gradually decreasing through the day. So we need to measure it at different times of day to see what it's up to and see if your stress and trauma and toxin exposure has affected your cortisol level. Is it too low in the morning? Is it too high in the afternoon? Because the treatment's gonna be different. There is no pharmaceutical treatment for cortisol being too high or too low, really, unless your cortisol completely stops working, then there's a treatment. But majority of cases it didn't go to zero. It's just either a little too high or too low. But. And we can use herbs, nutrients and lifestyle changes and dietary changes to get it back to optimal. So we just need to know, where is it? Because then we can choose the most effective herbs and nutrients based on where your cortisol level is. Is it too high or too low? And the same with adrenaline. We can measure it in urine, and this way we can see your adrenaline level. Is it too high or too low? And we can use the appropriate nutrients to either raise it up if it's too low or bring it down if it's too high. You see what I mean? So this is a test you can do from home. You just need to have a practitioner like me to order it for you, because it's not going to be ordered from the standard doctor's office. It's just not part of standard workup and it's not covered by insurance, and it's just not integrated into the standard medical system at this point in time. But you can get them and there's different labs that offer them. I have a lab in particular that I prefer because I find I see very good result, accurate results that then I can explain to patients and they can implement the suggested treatment and they can feel better. And so there's a lab that I use that has salivary testing. You spit in a tube morning, midday, evening, bedtime, and you do a morning urine sample. And. And with that we actually can see your biochemistry based on the stress you're exposed to. And it's not just the stress you were exposed to the day you did the test. These levels are reflective of Your stress exposure and your lack of recovery over years. Right? This is your, essentially your set point. Think about it as your stress hormone set point. And your stress hormone set point is based on your genetics. And it's also based on your stress exposures over time and how much you've been able to recover. And so when we look at your cortisol levels at different times of day in your salivary samples, and we look at your adrenaline levels, we can actually see how your body's been affected by stress in terms of the stress hormones. And we can determine your stress type. What I refer to your stress type, which is whether you have high cortisol and and adrenaline or low cortisol and adrenaline, or a combination of the two. Having optimal cortisol and adrenaline levels is essential for health and longevity. And yet the stress in the present and in the past can affect our cortisol and adrenaline levels, causing them to be too high or too low. The thing is that we're not all affected by stress in the same way. So over the past two decades, I've been researching and discovering how to help my patients recover from stress. And I've identified the five stress types, which are the five common patterns of disruption in cortisol and adrenaline levels. The reason why this is so important is because the treatment is different. When cortisol is too high, we use different herbs, nutrients, and other modalities to bring levels back to optimal than if the levels are too low. So that's why I, through research, developed the stress type quiz, which allows you, in under two minutes to discover what likely your cortisol and adrenaline levels are. So then you can make decisions about which herbs, nutrients, and other healing activities to choose to help optimize your cortisol and adrenaline again and improve your health now and into the future. Just go to stresstypequiz.com where you can take the quiz and take it from there. And so we can get a lot of information from a test like this. This is a. Currently that test is $500 out of pocket and you can order it through my office as a patient or in one of my programs. So if you're interested in getting that test done, then definitely reach out to my office and let's get to it. Let's get you the test kit and let's find out so I can guide you. We can also measure other levels in your body to identify the effect of stress. We can look at your blood sugar levels, insulin levels. We can look at thyroid levels and any other hormones, estrogen, progesterone, as well as neurotransmitters like serotonin, GABA and dopamine. These can all be measured so that we can actually understand how stress is affecting your biochemistry. We, we can look at your gut. Do you have leaky gut? Leaky gut is caused by stress and toxins. Toxins and trauma. So we need to know if you have leaky gut and how severe it is, because that's an effect of stress and burnout on your body, then we can help you heal from it. Is your microbiome disrupted? Definitely. Gut microbiome, vaginal microbiome. Every microbiome is negatively impacted by, by burnout. So we need to know if your microbiome has been affected so we can help it recover. You see what I mean? So by, by getting. We don't have to guess, right? We don't have to guess if you've been affected by stress. We can test and find out exactly how you've been affected by the stress in your life and then we can make a very clear plan to help you recover and in doing so will help your body to fend off high risk HPV and protect you going forward. So if this is not part of your HPV plan at this point in time, I absolutely recommend adding it. This needs to be part of everyone's plan for healing from hpv. Absolutely. Is the stress recovery. And there's research to show this as well. So, so let's talk about how does it lead to this susceptibility? How does burnout lead to a susceptibility of high risk hpv? Well, some of it I've just mentioned to you, but the way that I think about it in the most succinct and clear way is to understand that when we're, again, when we're exposed to stress and trauma and we haven't had a chance to recover, which most times we haven't, because we don't prioritize recovery, right? We don't recoup, we don't prioritize taking care of ourselves. We prioritize taking care of others and wearing ourselves out and pushing ourselves and staying quiet and not doing anything. Next thing we know, we come out the other end of our life and we're like, why? What have I been doing? Taking care of everyone else. And now I'm so depleted and dealing with hpv. Okay, well, the time is now for you to pivot, do a 180 and decide now's your time to take care of you. So the way we start to see this is that all of that stress and all of that imbalance of cortisol disrupts, first of all, your immune system. The immune system, whether your cortisol is too high or too low, the immune system goes lower. So we become more susceptible to infections. All humans, well established in the research. We also become more susceptible to allergies, autoimmunity and cancer because of stress and imbalanced cortisol levels. So we need to address, to get your immune system to protect you from hpv, we have to address your cortisol. Right. If we only support your immune system, but your cortisol's over here being too high or too low, it's going to keep throwing off your immune system. It's like a domino effect, right? So you can set dominoes back up again, but the cortisol keeps knocking them over. So what's the point? Okay, yes, we're going to support your immune system, but we're also going to get your cortisol back on track so it doesn't throw your immune system off again. We don't want that. We don't have to redo this over and over and over again. Right? Let's fix it correctly. Also, when cortisol is out of balance, it disrupts your other hormones. It disrupts every hormone I just mentioned, thyroid, insulin, as well as estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, you name it. Dhea. All the hormones get disrupted by when cortisol is disrupted. So this cortisol, either too high or too low, it keeps bumping your hormone levels off track. Yes. You can get address low thyroid. You could be taking thyroid hormone, you could be addressing ovaries and even doing hormone replacement therapy. You could be addressing your blood sugar levels. But if you never address the cortisol, it's going to keep on disrupting everything. And so you never get anywhere. And when those hormones are out of balance, they make you more susceptible to hpv. We know very well when blood sugar levels are fluctuating, HPV goes up. When insulin is all over the place, HPV goes up. When estrogen is either too high or too low, HPV goes up. So we need your hormones on track. It. We can't have, we can't risk having hormone imbalance because the hormone imbalance is going to lead to hpv. And in order to get your hormones on track, we need to get cortisol on track, which is also a hormone, by the way. Same thing with your gut health. Cortisol, either too high or too low directly affects digestion, makes it so you don't digest your food, you're more likely to have leaky gut, and it disrupts your gut microbiome. So now you have a disrupted gut health. All kinds of either reflux, gastritis, bloating, constipation, you name it, colitis. And all of that is well known to throw off vaginal health. The gut microbiome, and the gut inflammation leads to vaginal inflammation and vaginal imbalance in the biome. So, yes, we can go heal the vagina, and that's a key piece of this. We've got to heal the vaginal environment. We've got to drop inflammation, improve the immune system, get the microbiome back on track and the hormones back on track. But.

To really make sure that vaginal environment is going to stay healthy, we also need to heal your gut. And in order to totally heal your gut, we're going to need optimal cortisol so it doesn't keep on messing up your gut. You see what I mean? It's a. It's this domino effect, a ripple. It's like this stress and trauma, which we just try to deny and forget and hope that it's going to go away, and we're dismissing it. And yet we're under constant stress every day, and that stress is throwing everything else off track. And then we wonder, why don't we feel good? And why is this HPV here? Well, it's really. I'm hoping, now that you've heard me describe this, that you're like, oh, my gosh, no wonder the HPV is here. No wonder there's abnormal cells. But because there's all these other systems out of balance, and until we address them, the HPV is going to. Going to try to keep on causing trouble for you. So I just hope that helps you to know, like, wow, like, now you can see the big picture. This is not about a quick fix. This is not about just take one supplement. This is not about, oh, just take a mushroom extract. Okay, yes, we might use some mushrooms to support your immune system, but that's not enough. We've got to help you heal from burnout. We got to help you get your cortisol to optimal, your adrenaline to optimal, and all your other biochemistry back to optimal. And not only that, but what I find is that also really makes a difference when I help women to recover on an emotional and spiritual level. Because ultimately, the stress and trauma that we're exposed to affects us on an emotional, energetic, spiritual level. And we need to heal that level as well. And so in the work that I do. I also help you to heal the relationship with yourself, with yourself, with your body, with your life, with your future, and by starting to learn how to love ourselves, connect with our true passion and purpose and let go. Start to forgive and release what no longer serves you. Now that's actually healing from the stress and trauma and burnout so that it's not going to be able to continue to affect you in your life going forward. So if you would like to learn more about how I help women to fully recover. Right. We, we want to resolve the hpv. We want to prevent cervical cancer, vaginal cancer, and all of the above. And at the same time, we want to get you to your most optimal health because that's when you're going to be able to protect yourself going forward from HPV and from other health issues at the same time. This is true. I find for women, whether you're in the time of your life where you might be working on fertility, maybe you're wanting to get pregnant and you're finding out, oh my gosh, why am I not getting pregnant? What's going on? And now you find out there's hpv. Well, what we need to do in that case is help you to recover from the burnout, which is going to help your ovaries start functioning better so that you have improved fertility. And at the same time, it's going to help protect you from hpv. This also can happen for women who are perimenopausal. Right. When we're perimenopausal, it's within that decade or so before the period stops happening. And in that decade, lot of women experience burnout. That's when we're likely to have working a job for many years and maybe been in difficult relationship and maybe been raising children, and we get burned out. No shame about.

Simply happens as humans, we get burned out. So I want to release you from the shame of burnout and say, oh my gosh, no wonder. Almost just say out loud, I'm burned out. I need to recover, I need to prioritize my health and add. And that's very common for women to get to that point in perimenopause. Because what happens is the change in your ovarian hormones, the estrogen dropping, the progesterone dropping, the menstrual irregularities, that really activates and you start feeling so awful that you start to realize, I need help. And you're dealing with hpv. Right. And no wonder. It's all going together as well as in post menopause. I see a lot of women contacting me who are even in their 50s, 60s, 70s. Because now you're post menopausal and you're really feeling the burnout. You're like, whoa, I've just done so much, many decades taking care of everybody else, and now my menstrual cycle is gone, and yet I'm still dealing with some, you know, a vaginal issue and on the cervix. Even after your period, son. And you're like, wait a minute, I thought I wasn't going to have to think about this anymore. And actually we do. We need to be thinking about vaginal health our whole life, even into your 80s and 90s and over 100. The vaginal area is important. It's an important part of a woman's body. And we tend to take it for granted and dismiss it and just sacrifice it to sexual intercourse and wonder why is it that we're dealing with issues? And so I'm here to share with you. It's not a separate part of your body, it's part of your whole body. And what's happening vaginally is reflective of what's happening everywhere else. So if you're having vaginal infections, including high risk HPV and an abnormal pap smear, it says to us, we got to start paying attention not just to the vaginal area, but to your whole body, to your gut, to your hormones, to your nervous system. Because it's in the burnout. Right? Burnout can also show up as a dysregulated nervous system. If you're feeling anxious all the time, nervous, worried, your mind's not turning off, you're feeling, you can't sleep because you're constantly worried about hpv, right? It becomes this spiral and you can't even get your brain to stop. It just is going to the worst case scenarios. I get it. Because you're dealing with a high risk virus and you don't want to deal with another visit to the doctor's office scaring you about another procedure. I understand. And at the same time, I know that that dysregulated nervous system that's going into anxious thoughts, unending, relentless thoughts, is going to end up making you more susceptible to high risk hpv. Because HPV itself and the stress of HPV can cause burnout. So we need to realize, okay, wait a minute. This HPV is winning here. This HPV is not only taking advantage of the fact that you're burned out, but it's causing more burnout. And it's not Fair to you. And this is your body, your life. You get to decide. You get to say, enough, I'm not okay with this anymore. Now that I see it right, now that I've pulled back the veil and showed you this is what's really going on here. It's not just that someone exposed you to HPV. It's that you've been depleted and HPVs take advantage of it. HPV is taking advantage of you being depleted. And it's your turn to start taking care of you because ultimately, you're the best one to take care of you. You're going to take better care of you than anyone else could, and you're going to take better care of you by reaching out for help. And it's really hard for women to ask for help and receive help. I know. I get it for myself as well. It's not easy for us to say, you know what? I need help with this. There's no shame in asking for help to recover from burnout and to help get your hormones back on track, get your immune system working for you instead of against you, and get your nervous system out of dysregulation into regulation. And I can teach you how. I can teach you because I've been there myself. I've recovered from trauma and burnout numerous times, and I've mastered it. I have mastered it and. And figured out exactly the step by step process to guide you through so that you, too, can recover from burnout. Yes. And you can clear HPV to negative and you can even heal your cervix and you can prevent it, HPV from causing abnormal cells ever again. So if this resonates for you, and if you think I'm the person to help you, and if you've been asking for help, if you've been praying and you've been asking the universe and you've been trying to manifest some way to resolve this and help you out of this situation, then take this as a sign. Here I am. This is exactly what I'm here to do in this life and in this space is to say, hey, I've been there. I get it. I've recovered. And I know you can recover, too. And I have ways I can help you that are not available in the standard medical office. They're just not. It's just not integrated. And yet I'm working toward it. I'm working to train practitioners so they can help you. It's going to take time, though, so I don't think you have time. I think you should get Started right away. Don't waste another minute allowing HPV to determine your future. It's time for you to determine your future. So if this is resonating for you and you've been looking for help, I encourage you to reach out to me. You can always go straight to my website@doctordonnie.com d r d o n I.com or d o C T O R D O N I dot com. You can also go to Clear HPV now dot com you can find more videos from me. You can come to free workshop or download my free guide. So you can start to get information about what's possible for you. Watch success case videos from other women who've been through this and start to imagine what's possible for you too. And then figure out how you can prioritize yourself based on your time and your finances and say enough is enough. Enough is enough of you not being the priority in your family and in your life. It's time for you to say, you know what? This, your health is more important than anything else because if you're not healthy, if you're not here, then you're not going to be able to take care of your family. So you can say to your family, hey, you know what? It's my time to take care of me and prioritize me so that I am able to be here for you, for your family. Right? Because if you're not feeling well, you're not gonna be able to help anyone. So it's time for you to take care of you and to know that it's possible and that there's a step by step process that I can guide you through. You can also find a lot of information in this book, the Master Stress Reset yout Health Book, so that you can start to see that it's possible to recover from stress, trauma and burnout and to start to feel better so, so that you can. It's not going to happen overnight. It's something we start to choose into little by little each day. And little by little you start to see what's possible and how you going to start to feel better. And as you feel better, that's a clear sign to me that, that HPV is getting weaker and weaker. I see it time and time again as women improve their energy, their mood, their sleep, their, their digestion. They're feeling excited to be alive and looking forward to the next day. And then we do another HPV test and it's negative because the way you feel in your whole body reflects how you, how things are doing vaginally and on your cervix as well. I can't wait for you to experience this for yourself and I'm looking forward to you reaching out to me. So you can always also contact my office at 855-316-2114 and set up a time to talk with us about your case and talk about how we can best serve you and help you to resolve high risk HPV and abnormal pap smears and get on with your life to do what you really want to be doing. I'll see you soon.

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