Finding the Optimal Amount of Stress for Our Bodies to Thrive

Hi there. I'm Dr. Donni Wilson. And I believe that it's possible for us to be healthy even though we are exposed to stress. I'm going to tell you more about why I think that today. You see, I basically grew up in a pharmacy. My father is a pharmacist. So I grew up watching people come and go from the pharmacy. The thing is that my father didn't teach me about using prescription medications. Instead, he taught me that I could use nutrients and herbs and exercise in order to prevent health conditions and prevent the need for medications. Well, I thought that was amazing. And so when I went to college, I decided to study nutrition as well as science. And I fell in love with the idea that we could use food as medicine. That led me to naturopathic medical school. And I went to school at Bastyr University in Seattle. Washing I studied both naturopathic medicine as well as midwifery. And I was really interested in how stress affects women in labor. You see, what happens is what turns out is that women who are exposed to stress, if they have too much stress in labor, labor slows down. But if they don't have enough stress, labor doesn't happen either. So it's a matter of having this optimal amount of stress in order for our bodies to thrive. Which just shows us that it doesn't help for us to try to completely avoid stress in our life. But we also need to pay attention and understand that if we have too much stress exposure without enough stress recovery, that that can have a negative influence on our health and our lives. I'm so inspired by this that I've talked about it in my practice and helped patients with their stress recovery over almost 20 years. I also wrote a book called the Stress Remedy. And I want to share those concepts more with you in this presentation. So it's important to remember that our health is determined both by our stress exposure and our genetics. I think of it like an equation. We know that our genes play a role, but they're not the whole determinant of our health. It's our genetic tendencies plus our stress exposure, our unique stress exposure that determines our health at any point in time. Now that stress exposure could be in the current moment. It could also be our stress exposure from earlier in life or even in our parents and our grandparents life exposure to stress. So when you add it together, it's our genetics plus our stress exposure that determines our health. So let's talk more about stress. What is stress? What stress are we talking about? Because most people think of stress as major life events, which definitely are stress. Things like loss of a loved one or divorce or moving homes or moving cities can definitely be a major stress. A crisis, a trauma, an accident. There's also stresses that are the day to day mental stresses we're exposed to, like deadlines at work and to do lists, lots of things to get done. Even too many emails and messages to take care of can be stressful, right? Financial stress. So a lot of stress we're exposed to is psycho emotional stress in our mind. But there's also stress that comes in that affects us on a physical level. For example, there could be an injury or an infection. Those are stresses. It's basically anything that requires that your body take action to recover and get you back to balance. So I would even say that stress can come in the form of toxins in our environment. Toxins in the air, the water, the food, metals we also get exposed to and can be a stress to our body. It can also be a stress in the form of certain foods. Any foods that.

Increase inflammation or require a response from our body, such as a high sugar intake, would be a stress. Sometimes certain foods like gluten, dairy can be causing inflammation and be a stress to the body. Certain medications can even be a stress. And I bet you can think of a few more things that when you think about it, could be potentially considered stress for your body. So we know that we're going to be exposed to stress and we know that the point is not to try to eliminate all of it. It would be great if we can minimize the stresses we're exposed to, the ones that we have some control over. But really what we want to do is help counterbalance the stress and add in activities and foods and nutrients that help our body recover from stress and come back to balance.

So let's see. So let's talk about this stress response. Think about when say an alarm goes off and you feel your heart racing and your mind racing, you're ready to run, or this what we call a fight or flight response. That's your adrenaline responding in the nervous system as well as cortisol. Now it's important that we have that stress response. That's the thing that helps us survive. So again, we don't want to do without it, we just want to understand it and we want to have a healthy stress response. But what should happen is as soon as that stress is gone, then everything calms back down. Our stress hormones, including cortisol and adrenaline, will come back to an optimal level, not zero. We don't want zero cortisol and adrenaline. We just don't want it to be too high or too low all the time.

What should happen actually with cortisol is it should be higher in the morning and gradually decreasing through the day so that it's lowest at night when we go to sleep. But what we find, and this has been in so many research studies over decades and decades, they found that what can happen is when we're exposed to stress day in and day out, and we don't have enough stress recovery time, that cortisol can remain a little too high or even become a little too low at different times of day. So let's say if the cortisol should be higher in the morning and gradually decreasing through the day, well, what happens when we're under stress and perhaps that cortisol stays a little too high at night or maybe it's a little too low in the morning, then that cortisol is going to throw off and send signals throughout the body and disrupting other systems. In fact, we know very well from the research that it affects four core systems. One is a digestion many of you probably have experienced when you feel stressed, that you get a stomach ache or butterflies in your stomach. That's stress affecting your digestion. We also know that stress affects the immune system. You might relate to this if you think about how when you maybe were under stress, you were more likely to catch a cold or get an infection. That's because the immune system is less effective fighting off infections when we're stressed. We also know that a stressed immune system is more likely to develop autoimmunity or even cancer. So again, we know that stress affects the immune system. It's unique for each person, and that's where the genetics come into play. But we know that it's going to throw off the immune system in some way. The third system that gets affected by stress is all the hormones in the body. So cortisol is a hormone, but then it can disrupt thyroid hormone, insulin, the ovarian hormones. Any other hormone that you can think of gets affected by stress and cortisol. And that's why, once again, say, for example, for women's health, when we're under stress, the ovaries are less likely to ovulate and pregnancy rates decrease.

The body's not thinking about fertility. It's thinking about dealing with the stress. Same with digestion. It's not thinking about digesting food. It's trying to help you deal with the stress. The problem is, if the stress never ends, then the body never gets to come back to these other activities. The fourth system that's affected by stress is the nervous system. So this is, say, like neurotransmitters, serotonin and GABA and dopamine. Neurotransmitters are the messengers in the nervous system that determine our mood and our focus and our mental energy. So if we're stressed and it throws off our neurotransmitters, we're more likely to experience mood changes and brain fog and even feeling tired and less focused. So you see, for some people, it might just affect the. Affect one of those systems, maybe just the digestion or just the immune system. And other people start to feel symptoms in all four areas. Digestion, immune, hormones, and nervous system. So it helps us to understand that these symptoms we get are really indicators from our body that our body's struggling with recovering from stress. And once we understand that, then we can reverse the process and we can know, hey, if I can help my body recover from stress, then all the symptoms are going to go away. That's the amazing thing that I've been doing with patients and seeing that. That's very true. That does happen. And we can recover from stress, and we can help our bodies become resilient so that even though we're exposed to stress ongoing, we can maintain more balanced levels over time. By the way, it's possible to measure these things, and this is how we know what the levels are. We can measure cortisol in. Yes, you could measure it in blood, but because we want to know your cortisol levels throughout the day, it's better to use saliva or urine because we can measure the cortisol the morning, the middle of the day, the evening, and the bedtime, and really find out what your cortisol is up to. We can also measure neurotransmitters like anadrenaline in the urine. And this way we know exactly how your body's been responding and affected by stress.

Let's see. So the next step to understand is once those four systems are affected by stress, there's three conditions that become quite common. I call them problem networks. The first is what I call adrenal distress. Adrenal distress. Well, this is because the adrenal glands are the ones making the cortisol and adrenaline. And so, of course, when they're under constant stress exposure, they're under constant shifting of this cortisol and adrenaline. And that's what we call adrenal distress. So when we measure cortisol and adrenaline, we're really determining what does adrenal distress look like in your body? The second condition that develops is leaky gut. Leaky gut is a situation in the digestive tract where the intestinal cells are not as healthy as they could be and should be. And those intestinal cells have a very important job. Their job is to absorb your nutrients, make sure your food gets digested and the nutrients get in. But when we're stressed, those cells are not able to stay as healthy as they could be and should be. And now they're allowing undigested food to leak through the intestinal wall, where it triggers the immune system. This sends a whole flare of inflammation, not just in your digestion, but everywhere in your body. So now the digestion is becoming an internal stress that feeds back into the stress system. So that's why leaky gut is such an important problem network to address. It's called caused by stress, and it creates more stress. The third is imbalanced blood sugar levels. We know that when that cortisol gets thrown off track, either too high or too low, it affects insulin function, which affects your blood sugar levels. We also know that when leaky gut exists, that also disrupts your blood sugar levels. And once blood sugar is little too high, maybe not even all the way to diabetes. But if blood sugar's too high, we know that that itself creates a stress, an internal stress of inflammation that feeds forward into the adrenal distress and leaky gut. So it becomes like a vicious cycle that goes round and round. And as time goes on, people begin to experience more and more symptoms, things like fatigue and weight gain and pain, in addition to the digestive issues and the energy and mood issues and issues related to their hormones and their immune system. So it becomes this almost like a snowball effect which can be quite overwhelming. I completely understand. I've been there. I've experienced a lot of this myself and learned through experience of helping myself heal. So the whole goal becomes reversing this vicious cycle, which is quite possible. We need to just break the patterns. We need to help the adrenal glands recover from stress, help the digestion and leaky gut to heal, and help to rebalance the blood sugar levels. So let's talk more about how we can do that.

By the way, if you haven't yet, you might want to take my stress quiz, which you can find@drdoni.com d r d o n I.com and in that quiz, it's an online quiz that asks you questions about how stress affects your body. You're going to find that it gives you a score at the end about how strongly stress is affecting you and how, what are the common symptoms that it's causing in your body. So that quiz is one way you can tell. There's also a questionnaire in the stress remedy book that's a bit more in depth. So if you really want to understand how stress is affecting these four core systems and how likely is it causing adrenal distress, leaky gut and blood sugar imbalance for you, then the Stress Remedy book is the place to go.

Okay, so let's talk more about how to reverse this pattern. Now what I found is a three step approach. It's really three phases and I find that when patients follow these three phases, they get the most benefit. So the first phase has to do with removing the stresses that we can remove. There's some that we can start to take away just to give our body relief. Of course there's certain stresses that are just going to stay, you know, just being a parent or having a job and normal day to day things that those aren't, we're not going to try to take all of that away. But what we can do is we can take away the stresses that are overwhelming the body. So stress is like certain foods. Now that's a common place to start for me is we'll identify if there's certain foods that are stressed to your body. Now sugar is a common one for a lot of people. So that's a good place to start, is to look at your ingredients in your diet and go, hey, am I getting exposed to too much sugar? Where can I reduce that? You could also do a food sensitivity panel and find out if you might be having immune responses to certain foods like gluten and dairy are two common foods to react to. And then we want to look at your environment and identify any toxins that you're getting exposed to that would be a stress. So could you get an air filter, water filter maybe? You need to choose some new personal care products and cleaning products so you can decrease your exposure to, to stress as a toxin. We can also look at if you maybe have any kind of residual or recurring infection, we may need to address that so that that stress is off your plate and out of your way.

We want to start to also start down this path of healing the leaky gut. And in the process we want to do this testing I mentioned to really understand how stress has affected your body.

So then the next phase is to create, to rebalance. So now that we've removed some of the stresses that are possible to take out of your world. We now want to help bring back balance. Now bringing back the balance is this two step process. It's very important that we start by calming first and then second we'll start do more support with stimulating. I think you'll understand what I mean here in a second. So a lot of times when I get people's test results back, it shows that they may have elevated cortisol in the evening, for example, that's when we want to be calming down to go to sleep. So we need to calm the cortisol and we can do that with nutrients and herbs that have been shown to help calm the nervous system and get it out of stress mode. It might, some people, it's that they have elevated adrenaline levels or it could even be that you don't have enough calming. Like if your body doesn't have enough serotonin or gaba, those are calming neurotransmitters. So when we are doing the calming step, we want to increase the calming neurotransmitters and decrease the cortisol and adrenaline that might be too high because of stress. We also want to decrease blood sugar levels if the blood sugar is too high. And we want to help with digestion of food and starting to heal those intestinal cells from leaky gut. We can do that with nutrients like glutamine and herbs like DGL and aloe that we know help heal the intestinal lining. So helping to calm and recover from the effects of stress.

Next, we want to help with, even with sleep, how can we not only drop the cortisol but help to raise the melatonin so that you can get better sleep? We know that when people get at least seven and a half hours of sleep, they're getting stress recovery time. So we want to bring in that stress recovery time through sleep.

We also want to. Let's see, we talked about calming the nervous system and calming the blood sugar.

So once we have things more calm, then we can support the things that might have become depleted that are more stimulating. Like maybe in some cases a person might have too low cortisol in the morning or too low of adrenaline. So we can use different herbs and nutrients to support the cortisol in the morning, help the adrenal glands recover and also help them to make more adrenaline with nutrients like tyrosine and then herbs like say rhodiola and green tea. Then comes the B vitamins. Because B vitamins are not only important for the adrenal glands, but they're also important for something called methylation, which methylation is the good stuff that our B vitamins do for us. Right. We so often hear that B vitamins are important when we're stressed. Well, here's why. Because the B vitamins are involved with methylation. Methylation is how our body makes a substance called SAM that goes out and does all kinds of good things. It helps with making and breaking down neurotransmitters. It helps with making energy. It helps with detoxification. So we really need these B vitamins to make SAM to do all this good. That helps us recover and become resilient to stress over time. But oftentimes we can't just jump in with the B vitamins at the very beginning. First, we need to take away some stresses. We need to calm the system and get out of stress mode. Then we can bring in the B vitamins. And this is especially important for people who may know that they have genetic variations that affect the way their body uses B vitamins. There's one in particular called mthfr, which is a gene variation where some people are not able to use folic acid, that they really need to take folate in order to benefit from that B vitamin. But sometimes you can't just come in with folate from the beginning. We have to go through this process and then we can bring in folate as well as the other B vitamins and really benefit from it. So one way that I think about this phase of rebalance and restore is using what I call care activities. Care activities stay stands. C is for clean eating. So this is avoiding the stressful foods and bringing in the clean, healthy foods that are organic as much as possible. Not filled with sugar, but filled with nutrients. Fruits, vegetables, healthy proteins and healthy fats. The A in care activity stands for adequate sleep. So aiming and doing everything you can to get that seven and a half to nine hours of sleep each night. The R stands for bringing in stress reducing activities. I call them stress remedies. This would be things like journaling and mindfulness and meditation and gardening and listening to music and reading a book and calling a friend. And all of these things that we know help our body recover from stress. So choose the one that works best for you or more than one. But make sure you add in some stress remedies every day. The E is for exercise. Now, of course, we all have to start off exercising.

Where we need to start. We don't want exercise to become more of a stress because that could increase our cortisol levels again. So we need to do exercise in a way that's not stressful. And for you, that may be starting with literally five minutes or ten minutes.

And if you feel worse the next day, you know you got to do less. So everything we do is a matter of supporting our body and not creating more stress. And that's the idea between these care activities.

So once you've been implementing the care activities and you've been helping to rebalance your cortisol and heal leaky gut and balance your blood sugar, now you've broken all the patterns of stress and your body can heal and the symptoms can go away. I was going to mention that the care activities, I really support you with using my stress remedy program. So if you're interested in more help with implementing the care activities, you might want to check out the stress remedy program.

So I also want to touch on how we can customize this approach for different stress types. So, for example, if you're a kind of person who really works long hours, maybe you need to work long hours. Maybe you're an entrepreneur or you're needing to work extra hours.

For financial reasons. Well, sometimes we have to take on extra stress. So what we want to do is we want to use this concept of care activities to help our bodies to keep up with that stress. So that means you're just going to want to make sure that you have the good foods to eat throughout the day and that you get as much sleep as you can still, and that you take little breaks to implement stress remedies and even build in exercise each day and definitely throughout the week. So the idea here is that when we get to phase three, we're ready to build resilience and maintain our resilience to stress. And that's exactly what I'm excited for each of you to achieve. So phase one had to do with removing the stresses that we can remove or minimize and decrease. Phase two has to do with rebalance and restore using the care activities and addressing the imbalances that were existing in your body. And phase three has to do with building resilience and using the care activities to maintain a balance and recovery from stress on a day to day basis. Even if, for example, you travel a lot or maybe you're either a physical athlete or a mental athlete. These are things that you. These are stresses that we might choose, just like we might choose to have a baby like the women I mentioned. The thing is, is that how can we support ourselves in that stressful situation so that we can have that optimal outcome and really thrive in our lives.

It's a lot too, about self care and accepting that the more we care for ourselves at each moment of the day, the better that our body's gonna feel and the more productive we're gonna be, actually. So self care is not a luxury or something you do only when you're on vacation. Self care is something you do each day and that by doing that self care, you're going to help your body stay healthy while stressed, and you're going to make it so that you can get your best out of your genetics. And that's what I hope for all of you. Thank you so much for joining me, and I hope that was helpful for you. If you're interested in more, please reach out and join my mailing list. I'd love to hear from you. Have a great day.