Grief and Stress with Dr. Doni | How Humans Heal

Hi, I'm Dr. Donnie Wilson, and welcome to How Humans Heal. Today I want to talk about one of the greatest stresses that we experience as humans, and that is the loss of a loved one. Now, often when we talk about and when they research the loss of a loved one, it's related to the death of a spouse or a parent. But a lot of times loss can occur in different forms. We also experience loss and grief related to the end of a relationship, even if it's not due to death, for example, because of a divorce or a breakup, or even the end of a friendship. It could be from the loss of a job or choosing to leave a job, also choosing to move homes or needing to move homes. Also, the loss of a pet can also cause grief. And some of you listening may be thinking of other experiences you've had in your life where you may have experienced grief and you didn't even at first realize, wow, I'm feeling sad and grieving something. And then you realize that there has been a change in your life or a loss of a connection or a relationship with someone or something in your life and that has created this experience of grief or mourning, or sometimes it's called bereavement. So these are all experiences where we, we go through this process known as a grief process. And this has been studied and well established, the stages of grief. But it's important to recognize that the stages of grief are not necessarily linear. It's not that we go through each step one after the next. A lot of times we may experience the symptoms and the feelings associated with loss in all different combinations and sometimes all in the same day. So we know that common experience of grief would include things like feeling denial, like not even being able to believe that this happened, like being in shock about sometimes a loss that occurs in our lives. We might experience anger or even feelings of guilt and fear. We may also experience depression and sadness. And there can be also then a stage where we experience more of an acceptance of what has occurred. And again, this can happen all at once and it can look different for each person. So it's also really important to allow ourselves to experience grief the way that it happens for each of us individually and to know that others in your life who might be experiencing grief, it might not look the same for everyone. And it's important for us to be, to learn ways to be present for ourselves and present for each other as we're going through this process in a non mental, nonjudgmental and very supportive way.

So I want to share with you more about the research related to how loss and grief becomes a stress on our bodies, because, again, it is known as one of the top stresses that humans are exposed to. And so that's what's been researched into what happens to us on the inside in terms of our hormones and our neurotransmitter levels, what happens when we're going through a loss and the recovery from a loss in our lives. And there's definitely a lot of studies, one in particular that I was referring to, and I'll put a link to the study as well, in case you want to read more about it. This is a study from 2012. And what they found is, and they were doing a review as well as new research, is that there's definitely a change in our cortisol levels and our adrenaline levels when we experience a loss. As some of you know, this is one of the areas that I have been researching for over 20 years is measuring cortisol levels in myself and my patients and adrenaline levels and understanding how we are unique in terms of how our cortisol and adrenaline shifts when we're under stress. So I find it very interesting that the studies on cortisol and adrenaline related to loss and death of a loved one showed that it's more common in the first two weeks to six months for people to have higher cortisol levels. Especially if there was a. If there was some other health issues leading up to the death of the loved one, then the person's even more likely to have elevated cortisol levels. But I want to point out that that's not always the case for everyone. It's just in the studies, it's more likely there may be high cortisol. At the same time, there's people who have low cortisol. And especially when it's been more than a year after the loss, people are more likely to have low cortisol levels if they still have symptoms associated with the grief. Same thing with adrenaline levels. Adrenaline is more likely to go higher soon right after the loss, and then over time, then it's more likely that the adrenaline levels may be lower. But again, I like to emphasize that it's really important to know how your body's responding because to me, and this is not in the research, the research shows, here's what happens to humans when we experience loss. But the research doesn't so much tell us what can we do about it. And this is where I like to be more proactive. I like to say, okay, if we know that cortisol and adrenaline is disrupted by grief, then what can we do to help ourselves recover? So I want to go more into that in a minute, but I first want to help you understand a little bit more about what's happening. And in the research, what they refer to this cortisol and adrenaline effect, it's referred to as HPA axis dysregulation. So remember, the HPA axis is how our brain is communicating to our adrenal glands and how the adrenal glands are then communicating back to our brain. So if our brain is experiencing a stress or a loss, even if we aren't even aware of it, sometimes this communication is still happening and it's the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. So it's the brain communicating to the adrenal glands. And the adrenal glands make the cortisol and adrenaline to help us respond under stress. And what should happen in a healthiest response to stress is we make more cortisol and adrenaline. And then as we recover from stress, that it tells our brain we don't need so much cortisol and adrenaline anymore and it starts to come back to operate optimal levels. But if we're under a lot of stress, or as the research shows, if a person experiences more than one loss back to back, then it's repeated stress coming through the system. And it's more like likely that the cortisol and adrenaline levels will be out of range, either too high or too low, and less likely that the body's able to reset the levels to optimal. And that's what's referred to as dysregulation. And if that becomes a more of a long term issue, they consider it a permanent dysfunction or dysregulation in my perspective, because what I see for myself and my patients is that it doesn't have to be permanent, that there's so many things we can do to help it get back on track so that it doesn't have to be a permanent problem. Because what we also see in the research is that when a person experiences loss and death of a loved one, for example, that it really can increase our health risks for ourselves. There's many studies that show increased likelihood of anxiety, depression, also other health concerns, including the immune system. It's well established that people experience higher level levels of inflammation in the body, inflammation in the blood vessels, in fact. So sometimes a person who is experiencing grief that's being supported to recover, they're more likely to themselves experience health issues, heart attacks, strokes, even, say, diabetes, cancer, and Many other health concerns, including more susceptibility to infections. One of the other areas I specialize in is hpv, which is a virus that a lot of times most all of us are exposed to, but in some cases, we become more susceptible to this virus as well as other viruses. But speaking of hpv, specifically, when we're more susceptible to this virus, it has the potential to cause cancer. And what I find from women who. And men, but especially I work with women who have hpv, they. When I ask them, has there been a significant stress in the past couple years before HPV became positive and started causing abnormal cells? And I would say there's a high percentage of women who tell me, yes, there has been a high level of stress in their lives, including oftentimes a loss of a loved one or loss of multiple people in their lives. And so they've been in a grief process that likely shifted their cortisol and shifted their immune function and made them more susceptible to hpv. This is also true of other viruses, Epstein Barr virus, and any other virus you can think of. We become more susceptible to viruses and other infections when we're in a grieving process that has disrupted our cortisol, our neuroendocrine system. It's referred to. Neuroendocrine means our nervous system and our hormone system, also our immune system. So we know these kinds of imbalances happen inside of us. And a lot of times we may not even be aware of it. We. Sometimes you might feel anxiety or sadness or irritability or. Insomnia is another common symptom of someone who's being affected by grief and having imbalanced levels inside your body. So sometimes you may find that you're not sleeping as well. That's a very common one. Or you're not sleeping at all. I've had patients where they. They're not sleeping, and then we talk about it, and they tell me they had a death in their family, they had a change in their job, retired even from their job, which they thought was going to be a good thing. And it ended up causing insomnia because of the loss of their. The change in their daily pattern. I also like to mention what we think of as a broken heart, right? We think of someone who goes through grief and loss as having a broken heart is the way we talk about it. And they've actually now identified what is called a broken heart syndrome, which is named after a Japanese word, which is takatsubo. And it means that the muscles of the heart are weakened and it makes it harder for the heart to pump the blood. And this can happen after a extremely distressing event. It can also happen after the loss of a loved one and it ends up that the person is having heart actual physiological heart issues. And we is what we usually think of as a broken heart. But a broken heart can also show in different ways sometimes because our heart also makes oxytocin. And when we go through grief and loss, we can experience a change in our oxytocin levels. So we can that can also be related to feeling more anxiety and stress. And oxytocin, if we can support it, can actually help us heal from grief and stress. So these are some interesting points in understanding how grief and loss affects us. And any of you listening, I invite you to just think to yourself if you've experienced a loss in your life, which most all of us have at some point, if you then have noticed different health issues in the subsequent years after that, and I encourage you, if you are experiencing health issues, to definitely have your cortisol and adrenaline levels measured. This is not done in the standard medical office, in the standard lab. You're going to need to go to a practitioner who does this type of testing and it's out of pocket testing. But to me, especially as I review this research on the effects of grief, it points out to me again how important and useful it is to be able to measure your cortisol levels, your adrenaline levels, your neurotransmitter levels as well. Neurotransmitters are serotonin, gaba, dopamine. We can measure these levels in urine and saliva so that we understand what's happening for you.

Something a lot of people don't know is that too much stress can actually create an abundance of health problems like high blood pressure, high blood sugar, anxiety, migraines, insomnia, even fertility issues. This is because high stress puts your adrenal glands on overload. They release cortisol and adrenaline which controls your digestion, hormones, immune system, energy focus and even your emotional response. So how can you beat stress when you don't know where to start? That's why we have a free 7 day stress reset program. It's designed to help support weight loss, digestive healing and hormone balancing. It includes support for integrating self care. Daily tips come to you by email and video, Gluten free dairy free meal plans as well as grocery shopping lists, journal pages and more. This free program will help you beat stress and put you on the path to wholeness in your body. Get your plan now for free@drdonnie.com this.

Testing is actually what's used in the research studies when they're measuring cortisol levels and adrenaline levels, as well as serotonin and dopamine and GABA levels. And this testing is available clinically for patients and practitioners. It's just that it's not at the standard labs. So that's why I offer it through my office. So if you're listening and you are wondering, do you have a high cortisol, do you have low cortisol, or do you have high or low adrenaline or neurotransmitter levels, know that you can, through my office, order this testing. It looks like this, for example. It comes in a box. You can do the test at home. It involves spitting in tubes. Because when you spit in a tube, let's say morning before lunch, before dinner, before bed, we can measure your cortisol levels at different times of day. And then we do a urine collection. Usually it's the second urine of the day. And this way we can measure your adrenaline levels, which is also known as norepinephrine, epinephrine, as well as dopamine. And we can measure the neurotransmitters like serotonin, GABA, and others. And so this information, you collect your samples, your urine and saliva, you send it out to the lab. This is a lab in North Carolina that's been doing this test for a long, long time. I really trust them, and I trust their results because I've been working with them for so long.

Then the results take about two weeks to come back. And then you would get them from my office, and you and I would meet, and I help you understand what your results are and how to address it. Because the thing is, is that there's. This is not something that's addressed in standard medicine. It's not addressed when you go to an endocrinologist, even though the adrenal glands are part of what an endocrinologist would deal with. But endocrinologists usually only pay attention when the adrenal glands completely stop working. If the cortisol is off, the charts are way down low. But what we're talking about, again, is a dysregulation. It's a imbalance that's not as extreme, but it's enough to cause major health issues. And that's why I feel like it should be available to everyone, because there is so much we can do to help get your levels back on track again. So this is also, by the way, referred to as adrenal dysfunction, or in my books, what I refer to as adrenal distress. Because the adrenal glands have been under stress, they are now distressed, and they're not producing optimal levels of cortisol adrenaline, as well as sometimes DHEA is disrupted as well as. So when we do this test, we're really getting a sense of how are your adrenal glands functioning, what are your cortisol levels at different times a day, what are your adrenaline levels, how is your body metabolizing adrenaline, and what are your neurotransmitter levels? And all of these have been well established in research to be accurate ways to measure these levels. And then what we can do is we can address the imbalances using nutrients and herbs. Because this is what patients say to me, if I do this test and I see there's imbalance, what's the treatment? Well, the treatment is going to be along the lines of nutrients and herbs that have been shown in research to effectively rebalance these levels. And so the treatment is not a chemical medication. The treatment is actually substances from nature like nutrients and herbs that are known to help your adrenal glands recover. And I know because I was trained way back when I was in naturopathic medical school more than 25 years ago, I was trained how to help with the adrenal glands. But what I find is that even when I was trained in 25 years ago, it was not adequate and not effective enough clinically or for myself. And so what I have done over the past couple decades is research a more effective way, efficient and effective way to actually optimize adrenal health, cortisol and adrenaline levels, again, including after the loss of a loved one. And so the difference is that we have. What I find is it has to be done in a systematic way. We can't just jump in with one nutrient and herb. It's not one size fits all. It's not the same herb or nutrient for everybody. It's not the same dose for everybody, and it's not the same sequence for everyone. And so what I did, including in this, in my book Master your Stress to Reset yout Health, is I identified the correct sequence for helping us to get our cortisol and adrenaline and neurotransmitters back to optimal again. And it's based on what I refer to as your stress type. So we need to first know what your cortisol and adrenaline levels are, which determines your stress type. Once we know your stress type, then we can efficiently have you implement the nutrients and herbs that will help bring your levels back to optimal. So, for example, if your cortisol levels are too high, we're going to use specific herbs and nutrients that help bring cortisol back to optimal, down to optimal if your cortisol is too low. So we're going to use different set of nutrients and herbs to bring your cortisol up to optimal. And we need to first, oftentimes address elevated adrenaline and low serotonin and GABA that comes first before being able to address a low cortisol level. And so this is, I'm just telling you a little bit of it here to help you get a sense that it's important to not get the cart before the horse, so to speak. We have to go in a specific sequence to get the most benefit from this. But we can use nutrients and herbs not just as a band aid. This is not a band aid. A temporary fix. This is actually helping your adrenal glands resolve this issue. This is actually solving the dysfunction. It's actually helping your body get to optimal cortisol and adrenaline levels and neurotransmitter levels again so that you can have optimal immune function, optimal digestion, optimal health once again, even though you have been exposed to grief and loss in your life. And so this is to say that just because we're exposed to stresses and loss in our life doesn't mean that it has to negatively affect our health. Now, of course, when you're in the midst of it, you're just getting through and that's okay. And it's very important to have that support. And I would say some of the most important things when you're going through grief is to really give yourself essential self care. Daily self care. And when I refer to self care, I use the acronym CARE to mean C for clean eating, in this case, even just giving yourself healthy meals at nice intervals through the day to maintain your blood sugar levels. A for adequate sleep, Doing whatever we need to do to help get your sleep back on track so you're getting adequate rest and recovery, especially when we're recovering from a grief. R for recovery activities. And there's a ton of them that have been researched, everything from quiet and solitude to music and being with loved ones and meditation and so much more. I would also categorize recovery activities to include things like working with a therapist, a grief counselor, and other practitioners who can help you through the process of grief recovery. That might also include massage therapy, acupuncture, and there's also a lot of research, just so you know, on the use of psychedelic therapy, psychedelic plant substances for the helping with the recovery from grief. And then E is for exercise. Exercise is, it can definitely be helpful for us whenever we're under stress. But the important thing is to make sure you're exercising in a way that doesn't stress you more. So just the right amount of exercise that feels good to you and your body. And sometimes, sometimes when you're in the midst of grief, it might mean you are doing very little exercise. Even just small movements or going for a walk out in nature can be sometimes the best thing when you're recovering from grief. So what I'm saying is I want to emphasize that grief recovery involves both having a self care routine, including by the way, things like journaling. And that's why I created this self care notebook because it's a journal to help you to not only journal your experiences and your and your process with grief, but also to journal about your self care process and as you practice and learn what is working best for you in your self care routine. So this is an important part of grief recovery and stress recovery in general. And that goes along with knowing your stress type, knowing your cortisol and adrenaline levels and using the right supplements to help get your levels back to optimal. Which is why I have set up the stress type supplement bundles so it has the specific supplements for each stress type so you know exactly which nutrients and herbs have the highest quality effective supplements so that you don't have to go try to figure this out on your own. You can have it. I have. This is where I've said I'll put the links with this podcast episode so you can see. You can do the quiz and figure out your stress type online or in the book, the Master stress Book. And then you can get the supplements to address your stress type to help optimize your levels. If you want to actually do the cortisol and adrenaline test, you can use the link I'll share in order to order that test and you could even work with me then to help you implement this in an effective way because this is how passionate I am about helping you to recover from stress, including stress from loss of a loved one. I know sometimes it's so easy for us to think that I should be able to get through this, I shouldn't be affected by this. And you know, we keep telling ourselves it's going to get better tomorrow and it will. Little by little. Grief does usually get better. Little by little, the big waves of grief will calm down and be smaller waves of grief over time. However, I encourage you to give yourself the support so that you can feel better sooner and you can prevent the health issues associated with loss and grief, and so that you can be thriving in your life, which is ultimately our best way of taking care of ourselves and living our purpose and and and living our life moving forward, even after the loss of a loved one. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode of How Humans Heal. I hope that it's helpful for you and if I can be of more assistance, please don't hesitate to reach out. And I also wrote a blog post about this topic, so if you'd like to read more, definitely check out that blog post. Alright, talk to you all very soon.

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