C.A.R.E.: The Foundation of Health, Healing, and Resilience to Stress

Hi and welcome to how humans heal. I'm Dr. Donnie Wilson and in this episode we're going to be talking about something that I consider to be the foundation of health and healing. And that is what I refer to as care, C A R E or sometimes we refer to it as self care. I'm going to be describing to you in this episode, what is this career care and the care method that I use with my patients? Because it's actually one of the simplest things we can do for our health, but it's so simple that we often overlook it. And it's when we start paying attention to care that we can really create major change in our health. That's true whether you're dealing with fatigue, anxiety, burnout, depression, menstrual cycle related symptoms or fertility issues, digestive issues, hormonal issues, autoimmunity, allergies, sleep issues, infections of all different types that I've helped patients with of all different ages. From skin infections, sinus infections, bladder infections, to chronic viral infections like ebv, HPV and even long Covid symptoms, all respond to these foundational steps. You can start today. So I really wanted to get this into an episode to be able to guide you with these important steps you can start to take. It doesn't require perfection. In fact, it's the opposite of that. It's about connecting with yourself, listening to your body and getting to know what your body needs from you in order to stay well. In fact, you might notice that my voice is a little hoarse today because I wasn't keeping up with my care and ended up catching a cold virus last week. And it's always a reminder for me to come back to and look at what is it that I How did I not take good enough care of my body and my immune system in order for it to help protect me from this virus. And of course then my immune system kicked in and helped fend off the virus and bacteria and I'm feeling better. So it's there. It's about appreciating our bodies, connecting with our bodies and asking the question, what do our bodies need based on our physiology, based on our unique being a unique individual because we each actually need individualized care. It's not one size fits all. I can give you the guidelines and then I want you to be thinking about how do you implement care for you as an individual. So we'll talk more about that today as well. And I'm going to be giving you more resources so that you can dig in deeper and have support to really Fine. Tune your self. Care. Okay, so let's get started. What is care? Right. Once and for all, what does that stand for? So the. It was something that I've been writing about and reading about and saying so many times over the years. And I realized one day that if this acronym, care, it was like, oh, that's amazing, because it's also the word care is what we're doing in the process. So it's a perfect acronym for these activities that you can do on a daily basis. The C stands for clean eating, Eating in a way that matches your physiology and supports your health. So I'm going to be going into more detail about each of these. A is for adequate sleep. Key for all of us as humans is as much as we sometimes think that we can go without sleep, actually, just like eating is essential, sleep is essential to us as humans. The R stands for recovery activities. And this is a whole menu of possible activities that help us counterbalance the stress we're exposed to. And E is for exercise. The important thing is that we all need to exercise at our own pace to match what our body is able to do and give benefit from. So, okay. And you might want to be taking notes as you're listening to this episode. So there you have it. Hair. And how did I find this? First of all, it's because as a practitioner, I'm also a researcher. So I'm always observing and looking for patterns amongst my patients, including the patients who are successful with transforming their health. What are they doing that's helping them be successful and how do they maintain that over time? What are they doing that keeps them resilient to stress and not fall right back into their health issues? Well, the more I kept looking for it, what's making the biggest difference for patients, the more I was able to see these are the things that make the biggest difference. So I want you to know, I don't want you to have to recreate the wheel or figure this out on your own. I want you to be able to know, hey, let me just follow this simple strategy of care. And these are actually, if you really consider it, these are foundational in naturopathic medicine as well. It just happens to be that they're in the format of care. They're integrating my research and my clinical practice. So it's really able to integrate what you might be hearing from other practitioners, but into a method and a protocol that I see working in my practice and in my programs. And I'm going to be talking about as well in this episode, how to individualize your care based on your stress type, which is how your body is uniquely affected by stress. So first, I want to take some time and really get more specific about each of these categories. C, A, R, E. And I do this in the book, by the way, this Master stress reset your health book, I have it open because I was referring to the chapters on care. There's actually a chapter on each, on C, on A, on R and E. And there's hundreds of references. All of the references that I read to gather this information are here in the book. So this is actually. This information is based on research. This is not just my observation, but it's observation of so many researchers over decades that have been studying these same factors related to health. It's just I was able to bring it all into this care acronym to help it be organized and simple for you to follow. Okay, so C for clean eating. A lot of people when I'm interviewed in the media will ask me, what do I mean by that? Well, I mean several things. As I mentioned before, to me, clean eating is about eating in a way to support your health. As originally trained as a nutritionist, that was one of my key factors that brought me to the work that I do, is that I see food as medicine. That's true if we're choosing to see our food as medicine and to choose to eat in a way that is medicine to our bodies. And so just to reframe eating for us and to say, wow, every time I eat, I really want my food that I'm taking in to be medicine for my body to contain nutrients, antioxidants, to be containing macronutrients. The macronutrients are the carbs, protein, and fat. We need to get these things from our food. That's how our bodies function and survive. So it's a matter of really honoring food as this source of nutrition for us. Instead of just eating mindlessly, we want to start to eat mindfully and choose our food with intention and gratitude. So the simplest way that I encourage people to choose their macronutrients is to have a relatively equal percentage or balance of carb, protein and fat. And it, because it depends a little bit, you're going to modify a little bit based on your body. But I see a lot of diets out there where they go a little bit too extreme one direction or the other two. You know, you can do a ketogenic diet that's high fat. You can do a carnivore diet that's very high protein. You can, you know, you can do diets that are very low carbs and there's different intentions and reasons why we might choose those diets. I really encourage you to work with a practitioner who can help. I do. So that you don't find yourself feeling worse following a certain diet. Even plant based diets can make people feel worse if they're not getting enough nutrients. So I really want to caution you. There's so many practitioners, not just me out there, who can help you to be following a diet and getting enough nutrients and still be getting the health benefits from it. And I tend to find that I'm gonna, I see the most difference with my patients and I'm most likely to encourage people to not go to such an extreme with your diet. Because anytime we go to an extreme with our bodies, we can create more stress. So if we go to an extreme of fasting, intermittent fasting, if we go to an extreme of, of how we choose our macronutrients, if we go to any kind of extreme with our diet, it can become more of a stress on our system and create a lot of symptoms. I can't tell you how many patients I help recover after they, they've come to me after they did some sort of extreme dieting that made them feel worse. So please don't do that for yourself. It's. You don't need that. Your body doesn't really usually need that kind of extreme. What our bodies need is predictability, consistency and stability. So that's what we want to create with our eating. We want to have predictable meals that are the amount of food that we can easily digest. Because when we can digest our food, we can absorb the nutrients. And then we want to have intervals in between our meals so that we can complete our digestion. That's usually three to four hours. This is all based on science that's well established. So with three to four hours between meals, if you go too far between meals, it can disrupt your digestion and create stress responses. So I really encourage you to have smaller meals at three to four hour intervals through the day. And then we want to have a time of not eating overnight. Lot of that period of time will be sleeping. And we're going to talk about sleep next. So if you're asleep, let's say for hopefully eight hours, you're not eating during that eight hours. And I encourage you to stop eating at least a couple hours before you go to bed. So that means you'd have at least 10 hours without eating. And maybe you're going to want to extend that if you're feeling well. Right. We need to make sure your adrenal glands can handle. If you want to extend your fast a little bit, maybe to 12 hours. You're going to only do that when your body's ready for that and when you, when it feels good to you. And then yes, there can be some health benefits to temporarily or occasionally extending your overnight fast to between 12 and 16 hours. But it's really important to modify your daily activities and make sure your body's ready for that. So I don't encourage it or recommend it for everyone. From the beginning, the first thing we want to do is eat it, balance our blood sugar and create predictability in our body so that our stress response can calm down. We want to have these small, predictable meals. I always emphasize protein. I'm always my. The quickest way that I think about it is to say, make sure with every meal you're getting at least 20 grams of protein and no more than 20 grams of carbs. Unless for some reason you have a need for a higher carb diet or a lower protein diet. Those are some kind of quick and simple guidelines is to say at least 20 grams of protein around there, 18 to 20 grams and no more than 20 grams of carbs. Because you can quickly assess for that and not have to go to such extremes of counting and, and calculating. Right. We need to be able to have some quick ways to assess, hey, is there protein in this meal? Where's the protein coming from? If so, okay, this is a good meal. Is there maybe a little bit of carbs from healthy sources? Vegetables and fruits have carbs in them. Nuts and seeds have carbs in them. Those are great sources. Or gluten free grains can be used in some cases or other things like other forms of starches, such as sweet potatoes, potatoes on quinoa, for example, have carbs. So it's easy to get a little bit of carbs in one of those nice high fiber sources. And then you're going to have the healthy fats, which are things like olive oil, which you're not going to use at high temperatures. You can use olive oil for like salads and salad dressing. And then for temperature, high temperatures, you can use avocado oil, rapeseed oil, and potentially even sometimes butter as a source of fat for cooking. And so this way we get our protein, our healthy carbs, and it's in those healthy carbs, by the way, that we're feeding our gut bacteria. And I consider this part of the clean eating is we want to be feeding our gut bacteria, but we don't want to overfeed them either. Whatever we eat and whatever we digest is going to determine what is feeding our gut bacteria. If we eat too large of a meal before under too much stress, when we're eating, we're not digesting our food well. And that undigested food is going to overfeed our gut bacteria. When gut bacteria overfed, that's when you start to notice bloating and gas and bowel changes and all kinds of other symptoms. We don't, you know, if you've been there, you know, you don't want to be going there. So be careful and mindful to feed yourself. But it's even possible to overfeed your good bacteria by having too large quantity of fruit and vegetable at a single serving. So it's much better to space our foods over meals and to pay attention to your body signals. How much can you have at one sitting that you can actually digest well. And digesting well, by the way, has to do with this mindful eating. To set aside time to eat, to take breaths, signal to your vagus nerve that it's time to eat, to chew your food well, to have a calm environment for eating. And this way you're allowing your digestive signaling to happen to get the best ability to digest your food and, or you can support your food, your digestion of your food with digestive enzymes. And I can put suggestions for any products I mentioned.

So that's the concept of clean eating. It also has to do with eating organic, avoiding pesticides on your food and any other kinds of artificial sweeteners, fillers, preservatives that are just not necessary as much as possible. How do we eat whole foods that we're cooking ourselves? Or maybe we're going to restaurants and are paying attention, making sure that we're not eating stuff that we really, our bodies really don't need and are not serving our health. Also.

I pay attention to if you've been under a lot of stress and leaky gut fast developed and now maybe you have food sensitivities. So sometimes they might be healthy foods. But if you have leaky gut and that food is leaking through your intestinal lining and it's triggering an inflammatory response, it's no longer a healthy food for you. Now it's an inflammatory food. And the most common inflammatory foods are dairy and gluten. But it can happen with things like eggs and almonds and bananas and many other foods. So if you're not feeling well from any health issue and you know you've been under stress, which I know we all have. It's important to assess for the hiigot and food sensitivities and to identify the highest reactive inflammatory foods and go through a process of hearing the leaky gut and so you can get back to eating a wider variety of foods. Really it comes down to having those macronutrients but also a variety of food options in a way that we can digest it and not adding foods that are inflammatory or containing chemicals that are going to work against us. That to me is clean eating. And if you want to learn more, oh my gosh, I have so many resources for you, let alone blog articles, other podcasts, episodes, my books and programs. So if you're ready to learn more about how to eat clean and learn what that is for your body and have support with recipes and meal plans and so on, please connect with me. I'll put some links below and you'll find them here on my website because all of my programs include care as foundation. Okay, so a for adequate sleep.

It's something that I think we all hear about, right? Oh, I should be getting adequate sleep. But this is actually I think how I became susceptible to this cold virus is because I only got I had like three nights in a row of less than five hours sleep. And one of the first things that happens to all of us when we don't get enough sleep is our immune function decreases. Because when we're sleeping a lot of good stuff happens, including our immune system is helping to protect us from infections. It's helping ourselves to repair. There's a process called glymphatics which is actually a process called of a clean out in our brain. Isn't that amazing? It's like I think of it like a self cleaning oven except it's a self cleaning brain. But it happens when we sleep. If we're not sleeping, it's not happening. So we're not getting that healing and repair if we don't get enough sleep. When we look at sleep, we look at quality of sleep, quantity of sleep duration, in other words, and the timing of your sleep. Like are you sleeping according to a circadian rhythm in the where you are in the world? Right? So if you can sleep when it's dark versus when you work, if someone's working the night shift and you're awake when it's dark and they're sleeping during the daytime, that also affects our sleep and increases our risk of different health issues. So it's important to know and to Support your body through that. I would consider lack of sleep or working on the night shift as something where we need to know, oh, this is a stress on my system. What can I do to help prevent it from causing health issues for me? What can I do to help my body get through this stress and get as optimal sleep as possible? With sleep, we sleep in cycles, about 90 minute cycles. You don't necessarily wake up after the 90, 90 minutes, but your body's going into gradually deeper sleep until we get into the deepest sleep. Well, we hear it, we hear about REM sleep, deep sleep. We spend percentage in time in each of these sleep types and then it starts over again. And you it's best to be able to complete several sleep cycles in a row because each time we create a subsequent sleep cycle, we spend more time in REM sleep. And the studies show that when we're in these deep sleep types where actually our brain waves go into what's called delta waves. And it's really when our brains get to heal, but also our whole body gets to heal. In fact, the sleep hormone called melatonin is produced when we're sleeping because it's produced when it's dark. If it's dark outside, our body starts making melatonin. It's dark because it's dark in the bedroom, our body's making melatonin. Melatonin is a hormone that's signaling all kinds of repair in our bodies. If we don't have enough melatonin, we know that's increasing risk of health issues. So I'm sure you've heard about various sleep hygiene. One thing that I do in my book, the Master Stress Book and also in my blog, I'll send you a connect a link to the blog is I think about sleep hygiene in terms of our senses, right, our five senses. So if you think of it in terms of our sight. So first of all, I mentioned that melatonin happens when it's dark. So we need to go into our bedroom during the day and, and even at bedtime and say, hey, is this a good sleep environment? Is am I getting enough darkness or is there light coming in? Do I need blackout curtains? Do I need to cover over any lights or turn off devices? And including are we getting light exposure before bed because any light is particularly blue. Light exposure in the evening is signaling to your brain that it's, it's not bedtime yet and it's going to inhibit your melatonin. So it's important to create a bedtime routine where you're Turning down the lights. I like to turn down the lights and put on a candle, even a led, a battery powered candle, because I'm signaling to my brain that it's time for bed, right? And look in your bedroom and just see is there clutter? There are studies that show even having a cluttered bedroom can affect your sleep. So you want to use your senses also. Smell. Smell. How is, you know, in terms of smell? I would say even thinking of dust, you know, is your bedroom need to be cleaned? Is there dust in there? What, what's it. Could there be something in terms of, you know, your, the air in your bedroom that's affecting your sleep? For sound, we want to be paying attention to noise that we're exposed to. And there's certain noises that of course can disrupt our sleep and there's also certain sounds that can benefit our sleep. So if you're having trouble with sleep, you can actually use sounds like white noise, pink noise to help with calming your nervous system and help with sleep. Also for touch, think about your, the fabrics of your bed, even your mattress. Do you need a new mattress? An organic mattress is what I recommend. Organic sheets and, and blankets, pillows. Make sure you have a comfortable place, including the temperature. They say that actually humans sleep better at a little bit when there's a little bit lower temperature in the room. You can still be under a blanket, but it's better sleep if the room temperature is around, I think it's around 67.

Let me see, 67 to 69 degrees Fahrenheit. So you know, consider all of these different things if you're considering your sleep environment. And in terms of taste, this comes back to eating. I'm making sure that you, you're. It's a matter of keeping your blood sugar balanced. You don't want to eat carbs too close to bed because you're going to more likely have your blood sugar go up. And when your blood sugar drops, it can wake you up. It's important to even just to not eat even within a couple hours of, of bedtime so that you can not have a full stomach and heartburn and all those kinds of things going on when you're trying to sleep. So that's just some of my ideas for helping you with your sleep. But again, actually I wrote a whole separate book called the Natural Insomnia Solutions. You can find it on Amazon. I'll put a link and I go into detail in a whole book about how to help with sleep issues. So if you're struggling with sleep, I recommend you Definitely get that book and work through it and you'll see a big difference in your sleep.

Let's see, for those of you again who are working the night shift, I just always want to have you keep in mind that the more years that you work the night shift, the greater effect it can have on your health. Some of you need to be I up at night temporarily. It's going to have less of an effect and we just have to help you recover. If you're going to be working the night night shift for longer periods of time. We really want to be intentional about helping your body to get your cortisol levels to optimal and your melatonin to optimal. So I encourage you to, if you can, reach out to me and have me help you with that so I can really help prevent health issues from being from working the night shift. I also like to mention, if you have children, babies.

We have a baby in my house right now because my granddaughter is here and she sleeps through the night. She's amazing with that. But my daughter did not sleep through the night. So I had a very wakeful sleep when my daughter was young. And I understand how difficult that can be. And it's like almost an imposed insomnia. Normally you would sleep fine, but you're being woken up by maybe a child, maybe a pet, maybe an elderly person that you're taking care of. So there's many reasons that we can be woken from our sleep. And even like when having a cold, I've been woken from my sleep. And so what we want to do is to try to stay calm because sometimes when we're woken from our sleep, the first response is to get stressed about it. Oh my gosh, what if I don't sleep? It's going to ruin my day. And we get ourselves more stressed and that just works against us. We're less likely to be able to sleep when we've got high adrenaline and a stress response going on. So try to just keep yourself calm. Put on some calming music or a calming meditation. Meditation actually can get us very close to Delta's brain waves are back into sleep. Or at least you're getting the benefits of meditation if you're not falling asleep. Hope, try to have strategies that you can use to help yourself to get through those wakeful nights and hopefully soon then you can have some nights of full sleep, at least seven and a half hours. Okay, let's go to R, which is the recovery activities. There is a long list of recovery activities and I'm going to list some here that I cover in the master stress book, but there's many, many more that I'm sure you can think of. These are activities that help our bodies recover from stress. They have been shown in research to help bring cortisol levels back to optimal, adrenaline levels back to optimal. And that's what we want, we need. We have plenty of activities during the day that raise our cortisol adrenaline or disrupt our cortisol and adrenaline. What we lack is activities that help correct and counterbalance those effects. So I encourage you to look at this almost like a menu and choose what interests you. It's about choosing something that you're curious about or you enjoy. Maybe there's things you do already that you can continue choosing to do or there's things that you've been thinking, oh, I've been really wanting to do that and I haven't yet. And maybe this gives you a chance to say, okay, it's time to, to bring some recovery activities into each and every day. So first of all, it could even be setting boundaries. Setting boundaries around your self care. Setting boundaries to say, hey, I need this time in my schedule to take care of me and to reset from stress. Also gratitude. Any time when we practice. Gratitude meaning just allowing ourselves to feel grateful or things that are happening in our lives, people in our lives, pets in our lives, experiences when we go into a state of gratitude. Absolutely. Studies show how it increases our anti stress hormones like oxytocin and helps us to recover from stress. So it can be as simple as journaling about what you feel grateful for or thinking about it before bed or when you wake up in the morning. HPV positive. I invite you to attend my free online workshop called five Days to Heal hpv. Sign up today and access a proven protocol that has helped thousands of women around the world. I will teach you how to understand your Pap results and what's making you susceptible to this virus so that you can take precise action. Let's work together to to help get HPV to negative heal abnormal cells and also to keep it negative and become resilient. I'll see you there. Quiet. Sometimes just being in quiet can help us reset from stress. So much of the time I think we're so used to having the TV on or the radio on or people talking to us, we're just used to constantly having something going on. And so it takes intention to say, hey, you know what, I just need a few minutes of quiet. And it's amazing what can happen when you have that quiet time. So create that for Yourself. Meditation and mindfulness can. Oh my gosh. So. So much research on these activities. And so you. Some people, I mean, I love meditation and bringing it to my day every day. Some people I know can be kind of afraid or confused about how to do meditation. And I encourage you to just start simple, start small, start with five minutes. Start. There's so many videos on YouTube and I also have sample videos for you as well. Start little by little. Meditation is really about becoming more aware of your thoughts and becoming the observer in your own body. So much of the time, we're just immediately responding to sounds and triggers and what's going on and what's next. We don't even. We lose track, I should say we lose track of our ability to be the observer in our own experience. And so that's how I describe meditation and how I think about it is simply taking a couple minutes to just breathe and allow yourself to notice. Notice the sounds, notice the feelings in your body, notice your thoughts, but don't react to anything. Just be with them. And that's meditation. At the very beginning stages, you can go to more advanced levels of meditation. But I really think it starts with the greater awareness for our thoughts and our feelings in our body at each moment.

Mindfulness is along those same lines. Mindfulness is even being mindful when you're eating, mindful when you're doing the dishes, mindfulness you're doing laundry. It's about being in the present moment instead of being trying to do think about something else or figure something else out, or be on the phone while we're doing all this multitasking. That's kind of like the opposite of being mindful. So mindfulness is something that you just practice and choose and can make amazing difference with healing. Not only our nervous system and our brain, but our whole body can respond positively to meditation and mindfulness. Also prayer or whatever spiritual practice is for you has been shown to really be key for stress recovery. So if you already doing that, great, you're already doing some stress recovery, or if you haven't been lately, maybe it's something to bring back into your life. Also breath work or any kind of deep breathing, there's a lot of books and videos out there on how to use breath work for healing, even breath work from. For healing from trauma. Amazingly, simply breathing can help us release the stress that we've been through. So I encourage you to explore that as well as yoga has a lot of research of how yoga can help us recover from stress. And yoga involves mindfulness, breath work and movement, very intentional movements and positions of the body. Ancient, ancient practice. So is Tai Chi or for that matter, Tai Chi is a another form of movement and mindfulness. It can be very healing and recover for recovery from stress. Also time with animals, whatever animal I really think could work. There's a lot of research on timeless cats, dogs, but really when you're with an animal, it's something happens where our oxytocin is released, which is an anti stress hormone and we start to go into stress recovery. Amazing research on that as well as the research on spending time in nature. Simply just even if you're looking at pictures of nature without even going outside, taking care of plants, or actually if you can go outside and spend time in nature, huge amounts of stress recovery can happen. It sounds so simple to spend time in nature, but it's easy to miss it if you're busy all day. Next thing you know it's getting dark outside and you missed your chance to get outside. So I really encourage you as much as you can to even get outside first thing in the morning, even for a short walk, even five or 10 minutes and in the middle of the day just be able to observe nature. Now you're combining mindfulness with your time in nature to observe the plants and the sounds and the colors and the smells. Our human bodies respond to all of these things and they help us recover from stress. Laughter is well researched as well as a stress recovery activity. So is sound, as I mentioned, related to sleep. But I would say music and vibrations of various types can be very healing. So now you can even experience sound healing activities. And if you haven't done that before, I encourage you to try it. Amazing, amazing power of sound and vibration to help us with healing.

Also just playing instruments. If you like to sing, singing is very healing, including to the vagus nerve. Playing instruments if you like. If you like to play instruments or always wanted to play an instrument, I encourage you to do it because it's going to help you recover from stress. Also, sauna therapy is a form of stress recovery. Sex is a form of stress recovery. I of course, with consent and in the right circumstances and even intimacy in general can be and research has shown to be very helpful for recovering from stress, reaching out and just talking to someone who you care about, a friend, a family member, or working with a therapist. Being able to talk about your experience as a human in your life, talking. And there's so many forms of therapy that can be very helpful for stress recovery. Not just psycho emotional therapy, but also various forms of physical therapy, somatic therapy, myofascial therapy, and a lot of these I have covered in the How Humans Heal podcast because I love to interview practitioners who help with all these different things that I've mentioned. That's why I choose to interview those guests, is because I want you to be able to learn more about those specific activities that can help you recover from stress and trauma, solitude, for that matter. Just spending some time by yourself can also be very healing. And you want to know for you and your body and your nervous system, what do you need? And sometimes you have to try and see and learn from your body. Hey, what do I need right now? Do I need to be spending time with other people? Do I need to be talking this out with someone? Do I need just some time to myself, maybe taking a bath or solitude to spending time by yourself in nature.

There's also many plant substances or herbs that have been shown to help us recover from stress. And I put those in these cat this category because I really believe it's important to emphasize that it's that we can choose nature to take in nature in the form of plants and herbs and nutrients that can help us recover from stress. And so I talk a lot about this in the book as well. Everything from psychedelic medicine to cannabinoids and cannabis to.

Substances that support telomeres like green tea and curcumin, and other substances that are restorative to our human body. So I encourage you, if you want to learn more, to definitely get the Master Stress Book so you can learn more. And also I can put mention of I have episodes about some of these, like, for example, psychedelic therapy, for example. So if you want to learn more, I've got more for you. But I want you in this episode to just get a sense of like, wow, there's so many things I could choose from to help me recover from stress. And you can then start to integrate some of them into your daily life every month or every year. You know, find ways to integrate these into your. Your recovery time. You know, most times when we think of a vacation, we end up again telling you how many patients go on a vacation and come back needing a vacation because the vacation wasn't really a downtime, they ended up being more stressed, you know, short on sleep and eating foods that were inflammatory and not having any time to themselves and. And then they end up feeling worse after their vacation. So I encourage you to start thinking about planning your time away from work for more, like a retreat and time for you to choose these recovery activities. Let's move on to E for exercise. Exercise is one of the activities that we can choose that has the greatest ability to improve our resilience to stress. What does that mean? Well, that means that when we are exercising, we're preparing our body for stress exposure both in terms of creating a healthy response to stress and a healthy recovery from stress. And so that's one of the reasons why it's so important for men and women to be finding ways to integrate exercise into your life, into your routine, your regular routine.

Now, the other side of that is to make sure we don't overdo it. But there is such a thing as overdoing exercise. If we go too intense with our exercise or for too long, we end up increasing our cortisol levels. And that works against us in terms of our health. So it's important to exercise, but to listen to your body and to be aware of what's the right amount and intensity for you. And I would even see, say, to know what time of day is best for you to exercise.

For example, we know that with exercise there's strength in strength training, which is exercise and aerobic training. And we need both. We need the strength and we need the aerobic or cardio activity. Both of those help us to become resilient to stress and to recover from stress. So much research on this, but you can choose so many different activities. It's important to choose activities that match your body, your current activity level and also your interests. I encourage you to choose something you enjoy and that you like to do as exercise. So for example, if you don't like to swim, you're not going to choose swimming as your exercise. Right? It's better for you to choose something that you're going to love. Like I love ballroom dancing, and ballroom dancing is one of my favorite forms of exercise every week. I also love low impact or high impact training and usually in short, shorter increments. So especially for those of you who might just be starting to exercise, I encourage you to start small. Start, start with five minutes. Start with, then you can work up to 10 minutes or 15 minutes. The studies show that we can get the benefits from strengthening even in short periods of time. And then you can even potentially repeat that a couple different times in a day to add more time to your exercise. For those of you with joint hypermobility like me, it's important to be really cautious with exercise, to not overdo it, because you're more likely to get injured from standard exercise. So I encourage you to really become more mindful about the exercise you're choosing. Even if it's yoga, you might have to do a little bit less than other people if you have joint hypermobility. One of my favorites is Pilates because it's helping me to gain strength and body posture and position for my joints, which I find to be really helpful for the symptoms of joint hypermobility. So here again, the important thing with exercise is to know where you're starting. There's no reason to try to push yourself beyond what feels good to you. Always listen to your body during exercise and after. How do you feel after you exercise? If you feel tired, exhausted, that means you overdid it. So we need to be considering also making sure you're staying hydrated, that you have enough protein and enough sleep for your body to be able to recover from exercise. Because especially when you're doing strengthening, you're actually creating some damage to the muscles that helps you then to build new muscles. And building new muscles requires protein and adequate sleep and hydration. So really being mindful about your exercise, to do it in a way that's working for your body and not working against your body. Right? So this is to say for all of care, it's about taking that opportunity to know ourselves, know our bodies, know where we're starting from. You might have a goal of where you'd like to go, but it's gotta be based on what, how the signals you're getting from your body, about how you can integrate these changes and how to implement in a way that is best for your health. And this brings me to modifying care based on your stress type. So stress type again is how your body is affected by stress, specifically related to cortisol and adrenaline levels. So the thing I found in my research is that we don't all react to stress the same way. We don't all have high cortisol, high adrenaline. Even if we might think that might be the case, it's simply not the case. So it's important to know for you in your body what's happening with your cortisol and adrenaline levels. Because your cortisol and adrenaline levels will influence what's the best care for you.

You could do care in general, but what I find is when you fine tune your care based on your stress type, you're going to benefit even more. So the way to know your stress type, you can do the stress type quiz right on my website. I'll put the link. You can also find the stress type quiz in the book, the Master stress Book. And this helps you to identify your likely stress pattern, your likely cortisol and adrenaline levels based on the effect of stress that you've been exposed to in your life, not just recent, but from your whole lifetime, including your genetic tendencies toward the imbalances of cortisol and adrenaline. So it's a quiz that you can do in less than two minutes and it shows you what likely is your stress type out of the five most common stress types. What I found in my my research is that those five are the most common imbalances of cortisol and adrenaline because of stress. So there's the stress magnet that tends to have high cortisol and adrenaline at some point or all day. Sluggish and stressed. Who has high cortisol with low adrenaline, tired and wired that has the opposite high adrenaline with low cortisol. That night owl is like a stress magnet, but they have high cortisol and or adrenaline at night and blah and blue is opposite. They have low cortisol, low adrenaline all day or part of the day. It's also possible to have a combination of stress types. So it's important to know your stress type because that tells you what your cortisol adrenaline are up to, especially when you're under stress and not doing enough care. Where you're start likely starting from. Then we can use nutrients and herbs to bring your cortisol and adrenaline back to optimal. Care helps you to get your cortisone adrenaline back to optimal and care helps you to keep your cortisol adrenaline at optimal going forward. Because to me, the ultimate for health is resiliency, is our ability to be exposed to stress, do things we love, whether that's traveling or different sports or activities or being a parent or grandparent or whatever you're doing in your life, building a business, a project. We want you to be able to do these activities, but we want you to be resilient to the stress so that the stress doesn't have a negative impact on your life. And that's why it's so important to know your stress type and to modify your care based on your stress type, which is what I also describe in the Master Stress book. So if you want to know all the details of how to do that, read the book. And then I also have created an online program called the Stress Warrior Program where I guide you to do all of this. So you can literally sign up now and have me show you, based on your stress type, how to implement care and recovery from stress so that you can get your cortisol and adrenaline to optimal and what to do to keep them optimal going forward. Okay, so I think you guys got it. I'm going to give you a lot of resources for where to go for additional information and to know that by taking these steps to establish care, it can be foundational to your healing and to your health over time and your longevity over time, meaning being able to live as long as you can, as healthy as you can. It's going to be supporting your body in the way that it needs, specifically as an individual so that you can heal, whether from HPV and abnormal Pap smear, whether you're trying to get your menstrual cycle regular for fertility reasons, whether you're Perry or postmenopausal and needing to address your health for that reason. Maybe you're preventing heart disease, dementia or cancer for all of these reasons.

Solving and establishing your care based on your stress type will help you accomplish those goals. And some of the ways that I have created to help you include the self care notebook. And so the self care notebook is really a journal, but it's a way for you to not only journal as a stress recovery activity, but to keep track of your care as you're working on integrating it and implementing it and fine tuning it to really create a self care routine that's going to work well for you over time. I also have created, as I mentioned, the Stress Warrior program and the other programs, the Leaky Gut healing program and the HPV healing program. These all integrate care as the foundations in these programs. So I encourage you, if you have a specific health issue or you're working on a specific area, then go and check out those programs as well as working with me one on one. These are what, this is what I'm helping you to do when I'm working with you one on one as a patient is helping you to learn how to eat clean, how to get the optimal sleep, how to integrate recovery and get your cortisol adrenaline back to optimal, and how to get your exercise to the place where you feel excited to exercise, choose the exercise you love and feel good during it after. So this is a big part of what I do in helping people is to help integrate care, including with supplements. Supplements that help you to reset your cortisol and adrenaline help you to recover from stress and also protein. So as I mentioned, protein is so important and that's one of the reasons that I take so much time to identify and bring healthy, clean protein into the nature empowered product line. So you can find pea protein, which is a plant based protein or bone broth protein which is an animal based protein that are clean, meaning no sugar, no preservatives, nothing in there that you don't want, only the stuff you do want. Tastes good, easy to make a shake and this way you can get protein first thing in the morning or on the go or as part of a detox program. In the detox program that I developed we include plant based or bone broth based protein powder again as a way to help you to get the protein get to establishing your care. That's one of the key things we do in the 14 day detox is help you to understand how to integrate care into your life so you can then continue on that path going forward. I'm all about being here to provide the information for you so you can do you can be your own best health advocate. You, you're doing your self healing and you're getting those health transformations you're looking for because you have the information in an easy to implement and integrate way. So thank you so much for joining me on how humans Heal today. I hope you'll join me again in the next episode. Be sure to subscribe wherever you happen to be listening. And you can also subscribe to my weekly Wellness Wisdom newsletter because I'll send you then an email every Thursday when the next episode comes out. All right, thanks for joining me. I look forward to hearing what you discover on your path to identifying your best self care routine for health. Take care.

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