Healing Is a Head Game: Honing Your Mental Approach to Wellness

Hi and welcome to how humans heal. I'm Dr. Donnie Wilson and today this episode is going to be about the head game of healing. So what does that mean? I just sort of came up with that term because so much of the time I find that when I'm talking with patients and helping people with their health, a lot of what I'm doing is really coaching them on the process of healing. And I find that that' really important because a lot of times we can feel like we're in this dark tunnel on our own or locked in a dark room by ourselves, and we, we don't know which way to go. We keep trying to find a door to the room to get out and we can't find the door. And we're just searching and searching in all of this darkness that's feeling alone and feeling trapped and feeling confused and anxious and afraid, right? And we're just like, how, where do I go from here? And I think so much of time it's when we. Believe me, I've been there too. There's been many times in my life with my health issues that I've felt alone in the dark and realizing, how do I, where do I go from here? And as much as I can recommend for you the specific dietary changes and nutrients and herbs to rebalance and restore what's out of balance, I also find an important process. Important part of the healing process is the head game of healing. How do you think about the healing process and how do you think about what's going on in your body? Right? Because if we're having a high level of anxiety about whatever your diagnosis is, then that just ends up working against you. Because when we're in a state of fear, which is what happens with anxiety, right, we are in a state of thinking of all the worst case scenarios. We're worrying, worrying, worrying. That's this ruminating thoughts of anxiety and fear. And when we're in a state of fear, it's very hard to be proactive and problem solving. And it's very. In that fear state, we're just reactivating our stress response constantly, right? So now we not only have the original stress response that likely created the health issue, but now we have the fear, fear response that's triggering you more stress and it just snowballs, right? I think a lot of you could probably relate to this, right? Or if you feel like you, it's the diagnosis that's causing you more stress than you even had before. And so then we see that that stress response to the health issue ends up working against you and actually making the health issue worse. So that's why I really want to help you solve that. It's very important part of this to break that pattern. You see what I mean? Like, as long as we're in that same stress response, stress mode pattern, even if it's about a diagnosis, it's just perpetuating the same pattern. And it's that pattern of stress response that's uncorrected, unbalanced, that's perpetuating and making you more likely to have even more health issues. And then you're like, oh, now I have this health issue and this health issue and this. I'm tired and then my hair's falling out, and then I got the skin issue and then I'm gaining weight, and now I have digestive issues. And. Right. The list just piles up, let alone something like getting HPV positive back on your Pap smear or, you know, any other infection for that matter, if it's Lyme or Epstein Barr or autoimmunity or whatever. The diagnosis. This is why to me, the diagnosis is really just your body's way of communicating with us. That's one of the key pieces of this head game, is first of all to understand the language of diagnostics and really what does it mean to you? Because ultimately you are not your diagnosis. Right. A lot of times what our mind will tend to want to do is to attach our. An identity, our identity to a definition of a role. Like sometimes we're. We identify ourselves as like the oldest child or someone who's married or a single mom, or we identify with our experience, and we can identify with, you know, say some, you know, with a diagnosis. And now it's like we.

See ourselves, can only see ourselves as that identity. And it's important part of your healing process to detach a bit. Because if we are. If you're completely identified with a specific diagnosis, I'll use myself as an example. I had migraines. I would get migraines for years now. If I identified myself as.

Someone who gets migraines, then.

That becomes my identity. That actually the way our brains work is our brains recreate that same circumstance. So we. If we identify with a diagnosis, we end up recreating that same health issue. So if we. The more I could stand back from the migraines right in the. And it's really hard to do because when you're in the midst of pain like that, that's the only experience you can have. Right. Like your 100% experience is having A migraine or whatever pain you might be experiencing, even if it's anxiety, even if it's depression, even if whatever your diagnosis, it becomes all encompassing, it, it, you. It's hard to even imagine how you could separate yourself from the symptoms or the diagnosis. And so I want to just put the thought out there and see what, where that falls for you. There's, there's no, I never, I don't believe that judgment or criticism is ever helpful. So it's just a way of saying just notice. Just notice for yourself if you find that you, when you think of who are you, who are you as a, as a spirit, as an essence, as a person, as the person who's existing in this human experience, in this body.

Who are you separate from your symptoms or diagnosis? Who, who are the you that exists in this experience? And this way you can create a little bit of what I call separation between who you are and what your situation, your experience is in your body, whether it's psycho emotional or physical symptoms or a diagnos.

You, your identity doesn't have to be completely attached or associated with that diagnosis or physical experience, if that makes sense. So just putting that out there for you to realize that if we want to create change in your health, you will no longer be that diagnosis. Right. So we need to kind of separate from the diagnosis in order to create the possibility for something different to exist. To create the possibility for change, we have to even notice your language when you, when. And I try to be very careful whenever I'm writing articles or speaking in the podcast or talking to patients, I try to be very careful to talk about the person separate from the diagnostic experience. Really the symptoms that we have. Symptoms are, you know, whether it's a physical pain, an emotional pain, you know, however that shows for you. It usually shows up in our human bodies as, you know, like a mood change, an energy change, a sleep change, you know, focus, brain fog, or physical feeling in your body. Those are why I call those the daily check in is because I'm looking at those areas. That's where our bodies indicate to us that they need attention. So to me the symptoms is, or the even the diagnosis is your body telling us it, that something's out of balance, something needs attention, something it's trying to give us a signal, an alarm, let's say a fire alarm is going off. It's, it's not for us to judge it. It doesn't help if we say if. It doesn't help if we're hard on ourselves about it, if we're in a battle with our own bodies over what our body is trying to tell us. We're not getting anywhere now. We're just in a battle with our own body. And that just creates more stress. So if you're having, if. And if it's anxiety and you're like, I'm so tired of depression. I'm so tired of having a low mood, believe me, I've been there. At the same time, if we are just angry and frustrated at our own selves for the symptoms we're having, it just perpetuates it. So I encourage you to, as scary as it may seem, because sometimes it feels scary to find a level of acceptance of. And. And the way I think about it is whatever signals your body is giving you is it's trying to communicate to you that it needs help, that it. Something's out of balance, something needs attention. And it has. Our bodies have different ways of doing that. Our bodies. We could, you know, it could be a heart palpitation, it could be reflux, it could be feeling tired, it could be hair falling out, it could be. Right. Like, these are the symptoms that tell us that something needs attention. Then in the medical world, what we do is we go through a process of evaluating to understand those indications so that we know what they're appropriate treatment would be. Now, as a naturopathic doctor, I trained at Bastyr University in Seattle, and my professors were all also professors at the University of Washington Medical School. So just so some of you understand that a naturopathic doctor with my level of training has completed these same courses. You would expect any doctor who's going to be helping with diagnostics of a human. So we learn anatomy and physiology and pathology and histology, and you name it, all of what's involved in understanding all the possible things that could happen in a human body, all of the indicators, right? It would be like if you were learning, you know, like how to fix a car. You would have to learn all the different lights and signals that could go off and what do they mean and how do you fix it? Same with the human body. What are all the different indicator lights that could go off and what does it mean and how do we fix it? Now, the how do we fix it is slightly different for a naturopathic doctor than like a classically trained medical doctor or osteopathic doctor. Medical doctors are mostly trained to use medications, pharmaceutical medications, or surgeries or procedures. That's their training of how they would fix. So they're looking for indications in the body that something requires a medication or surgery. But a lot of times we might have things happening in our body that doesn't, it doesn't match or it doesn't require that. Maybe it doesn't require a medication, maybe it doesn't require a surgery. So then that type of practitioner is going to say to you they don't have anything. They're going to say they can monitor, they can do, continue to do more imaging and testing to evaluate if things get to the point where it does require a medication or a surgery. But if it's not to that point, then they, they may not have any other tools for you. Right. Whereas with a naturopathic doctor, we're trained in a lot of other potential tools you can use. We're trained in dietary changes you could make for, you know, okay, is what this indications that you're getting from your body. Could your diet, what you're eating and drinking have something to do with it? Well then we can make changes to your diet and your lifestyle even. How could it have something to do with the way you're sleep sleeping? Could it have something to do with your exercising? Could it have something, you know. So we have all these tools as a nature about their doctor. We also learn all clinical nutrition. Clinical nutrition is not just standard nutrition. I also have a degree in nutrition. Then I learned clinical nutrition at Nature Valley Medical School. We learn how to use nutrients based on research in clinical textbooks. How to use nutrients in for clinical use for different health issues. That's not a class that's in most medical schools, but it is a class in nature pathic medical schools. Actually it's a whole like year or longer class, not just a single class. And same with herbs, we take a whole series of, I don't know, it's probably like at least six classes of herbs learning every herb. In fact I also took a class in Chinese herbs. We learn all the herbs, the names of the herbs, what they're used for. I'm so amazed to think over history that different people have tried out all these plants in nature to figure out what, how they function. And I'm sure along the way they took some plants that were poisonous or made them sick and they figured out here's the plants that are good for these purposes. Well, I have all of that training and I have all the textbooks and I have, I've been doing this for all these years so I know which ones are most likely to help with specific situations. Also learn homeopathy, which is a main system of medicine in India. Still to this day. And homeopathy is amazing medicine. I think of it as an energetic medicine that aligns with our, Helps our body realign with its own ability to heal. So it's using very gentle, subtle, energetic medicines to that match the specific person and the specific symptoms to help the body get back to balance. I mean, what better than that? That's what we're trying to do all the way anyway. Right. The end with the indicators or the symptoms are telling us something's out of balance, then we want to use treatments that help us get back into balance. And so we use homeopathy as a way to help bring back balance. And so that's another tool in the toolbox, let alone so many others. So many others. I mean, you. There's from, from peptides to other kinds of plant medicines, to meditation and breath work to. There is such a long list of possible healing modalities, even physical medicine that we can use.

Massage, physical therapy, stretching. That's all part of my training as a naturopathic doctor. So it's. All of these tools are available to us. So I really want you to understand too, because a lot of people we're trained to think, oh, I pay for my health insurance. I'm going to go to the clinic, you know, that your health insurance pays for, and I'm going to tell me what to do. Now if there's, say you have, all of a sudden you have a sinus infection or you're coughing and you. And you have a bronchitis, let's say, or you have a urinary infection. Yes. You want to go in and have them do the testing to do objective analysis of what's going on, diagnose it and give you the treatment. Maybe you need an antibiotic, maybe you, maybe there is a need for surgery. A couple years ago, I developed a rare form of arthritis that caused the growth of a growth on my neck and I had to have surgery to have it removed and diagnosed. Sometimes surgery is necessary. So it's not to say that these tools are not important. It's just to understand, understand that your insurance, health insurance in most countries and states, because I know some of you, I'm hoping some of you are listening from even other countries around the world. It's the health system and the health insurance might only cover certain practitioners with certain training. So if you go into your, whoever your, your doctor is, your primary care doctor or whatever you call it, your internist, they, if their training is in pharmaceuticals and surgery, then they're either going to recommend that or they're going to say that they don't have a treatment for you. Then you might decide, hey, but there's all these other treatment possibilities, diet and herbs and nutrients and so on. So then you. But that's some states it is covered by insurance. For example, like, I'm licensed also in Connecticut and Washington state, and both of those states, I have colleagues who are primary care providers under insurance in those states. So sometimes, depending on where you're located, insurance might cover you to see a nature biologic doctor or a different provider who has this training. When you see the term functional medicine practitioner, that's a term that was developed in the past 20 years from.

There'S a Jeffrey Bland. He actually was one of my professors when I was at Bastyr, before functional medicine even existed. He was one of my teachers, and I learned so much from him. And he then went on to develop a training program for other practitioner types to learn how to implement nature pelvic medicine, and it was called functional medicine. So there's more and more functional medicine practitioners, whether medical doctors, nurse practitioners, even health coaches who are learning these other modalities. And sometimes they do. They might be calling themselves functional medicine or alternative medicine. And luckily they're learning some of these other healing modalities so that they can offer more than just pharmaceuticals and surgery. Because I think more and more people are becoming aware that these options exist. And I think it's a wonderful, beautiful thing. And it's so great that in the past 20 years there's become more awareness and more training. I just want you to know that it's usually those practitioners have a standard medical training or, you know, and then go to learn about some naturopathic approaches, or sometimes as a health coach, they might just start in with learning how to coach people with their lifestyle or their diet or certain supplements, but they may not have a full medical training like I do. So you always want to be clear when you're thinking about, hey, I want to access these other healing modalities. You want to be aware of all the different practitioner types and who you might want to choose. You might find, hey, under my health insurance, I can choose a naturopathic doctor, and it's covered by a health insurance. Great. But still, if there's specialty tests or if there's certain herbs and nutrient supplements, those might not be covered by standard health insurance. Now, usually if you have in the United States what's called a health savings plan, which is where you can put money into an account that's not taxed for your health, used for your health, then you can usually use a health savings account for health services such as specialty tests and supplements that are not covered under insurance. So that's another way to be able to save, to budget to take care of your health without having to be taxed on that money. There's a limit to how much you can use each year for that, but it is a way to help you have money to spend on your house. Because otherwise we start to realize that.

We. I think we have to go back and think about our bank account and our budgeting a little bit differently. Like, I look at it as I have a certain amount that I pay to my health insurance. I do have health insurance, and I do sometimes go to providers under that health insurance when I need diagnostic procedures or what their treatment is, then I will use the health insurance for that. It's important to have health insurance in case you needed something, an accident or an urgent, or if you need, if you develop a health condition that requires that you want to have health insurance. But it's important to recognize that health insurance doesn't cover everything. Health insurance is not going to cover necessarily, like certain specialty tests, they are not going to cover certain supplements, let's say. So you need to have another part of your budget for that. And I really encourage all of you to even think about, start to think about it that way. Because.

Ultimately, prevention of health issues is for each of us to choose for ourselves.

And I think this is one of the other key head games of healing is to take on that responsibility and accountability to ourselves for our own health. You know, if we're here, we are living this life experience, and each of us gets to decide each day what that's going to look like for us. You know, do we are. How can we become more intentional about each day in our life? How can we become more intentional about what our health looks like in a decade from now or two decades from now, or three decades from now? How can you become more the one in the driver's seat of your health, not just, oh, I'm gonna do, eat whatever, do whatever, work, work a million hours, not take care of myself, and then just depend on my health insurance and whatever doctor I see to help me whenever something goes wrong? I mean, yes, that's a possible strategy, but then you're really putting your health in the hands of the health insurance company and the doctor that you see when something happens, right? And that, I find, is one of the things that people then come when they do find me and contact Me, they have realized, oh my gosh, what. How come I didn't realize that there were things I could have done to prevent this or avoid this or, you know, and so then, so I'm trying to help you all know now, like, how can you become more in charge of your own health and your own future? And then you become more intentional about each decision you make, not because you want to become stressed about it or OCD about it or, you know, again, we don't want to perpetuate the stress pattern, but we want to choose it with intentionality each day. And that's why I tend to call it, you know, self care. Your self care routine. Your. You're taking care of yourself. And it turns out that the more we have compassion for ourselves, the more we are accepting of our experience in our bodies and in our lives, then it becomes, it's, it's. It decreases our stress and it actually creates more peace and it actually prevents health issues. So just encouraging all of you to take this chance to. And I do this for myself all the time. How can I be better taking care of myself on every level? How can I be taking better care of myself on a physical level in terms of how I feed myself, what I feed myself, when I take breaks during the day, do I exercise, when do I go to bed? Those are decisions I'm making. And sometimes if we're living in a home with other people, it's easy to get distracted because we're maybe our. What we're eating and when we're going to bed is determined by this other person in the house or even if we have a job and all of a sudden our job takes over our whole existence. I talked to a patient the other day where literally for years, her job was taking over her whole life in existence. And yes, we can get lost like that. We can get lost in relationships, we can get lost in our jobs. We can get. I say lost because we literally lose ourselves. We lose.

Somebody else or something else is ending up determining our experience in the day. And what can happen is the only way we kind of figure it out is when our health, our body, starts sending alarm signals. We're exhausted, we have a. Headaches, we're depressed, we're in pain, we're gaining weight, right? Because our body's saying, whoa, remember me? I'm the one you're. This is the body you're living in. I need some attention here. So catch it just a moment to catch yourself and be like, am I the one determining. I have a couple patients Right now who are going through job transitions where one job ended for whatever reason. And now they're in a place of choosing a new job or interviewing for new jobs. And what I encourage them to do is to first create their optimal self care schedule. What do you want to be doing each day and each week to take good care of yourself? What, what do you want your diet to be? When do you need to be going grocery shopping? What, how, when do you need time to prepare your food? What is your sleep schedule look like? What does your exercise schedule look like? Let's set up your care. I use CARE as an acronym. C for clean eating, A for adequate sleep, R for recovery activities, E for exercise. Let's set up your care schedule and then let's.

Find a job position that matches. It allows you to continue taking care of yourself in that way. Because I do believe that that exists. And I think the more we start all thinking this way, the more that business owners will want employees who are taking good care of themselves. Because ultimately an employee who is taking good care of themselves is going to be healthier, be able to be more productive. Right? So it's, I'm a business owner and I want my, the people who work for me to be able to take good care of themselves. Because I know if they're taking good care of themselves, they're gonna feel good, they're gonna enjoy what they're doing, and they're gonna be healthier. And, and so I think employees will want, I mean, business owners will want employees who are taking good care of themselves. And so just know that if you create a good business way of taking care of yourself, then go find a job position that matches. Or if you're already in a job position, you can communicate with your boss and say, hey, I'm realizing I need to make these modifications to my life and my schedule. Can I modify my work schedule to fit that? Again, if you talk to your boss in terms of how this is going to improve your productivity at work, they're likely going to be all for it. And there's a ton of research on this too. So just again, realizing that part of the healing head game is create setting yourself up for success, right? Setting yourself up for success. And it, it's not that we have to like so much of the time, people say to me, someone sent to me today, she's like, my life is, life is stressful. I can't, I can't turn off the stress. I can't just not be stressed. And I said, I understand. It's true. Stress is part of life. All humans are going to have stress. I know I'm going to have stress every day. I'm not trying to be stress free. That's not my goal. My goal is how do I help my body recover from stress in the moment right alongside the stress exposure. How do I counterbalance the stress? How do I help my body keep up with this experience? Think about like a marathon runner. A marathon runner doesn't just run and then at the end, they finally take care of themselves. No, a marathon runner takes care of themselves while they're training. They make sure they are drinking enough water. They have to have electrolytes. They have to have protein, carbs and fats. They have to get sleep. A marathon runner is constantly taking care of themselves. Same with any kind of athlete. They learn quickly. They have to take care of themselves every day, every moment, in order to be successful at their performance as that athlete. But all of us are the same. See yourself as the marathon runner every day. You're your marathon runner in your own life. So how do you make sure that you are fueled up and you have the recovery you need to perform again best the next day? Even if you're a mom, you need to be taking care of yourself to be ready to take care of your kids. So it's all a matter of how do we help ourselves recover from stress while in the stress. You can't just wait for a vacation. Most times for me, whenever I go on vacation, then I feel like I need a vacation from my vacation. So it's not about waiting for this specific time off. Although it is nice when you can have a really healing retreat. I realize like my best times away is when I have time away where I'm actually doing a lot of healing. That's like when I go to the Amazon or anytime I try to, if I have time off, it's usually me going to actually be healing and learning from healing experiences at the same time. So that your time away actually helps you get ahead of the stress and recover more. So when you come back, you're ready to be withstanding the stress again. That stress is going to be there. It's so it's not about trying to eliminate the stress, it's how do we heal while stressed. And so that's part of also this mind game, right? We have to think of it that way. In fact, a lot of times I use this analogy of flying an airplane. I've never flown an airplane, but I've been in a lot of airplanes and I'VE even been in the co pilot seat of airplanes. And I see that there's this whole dashboard of dials and knobs and switches and I'm like, I'm not gonna, I'm afraid to touch any of them.

Because with an airplane, we, we need the airplane to fly straight, right? You don't want the airplane to be, you know, off kilter or going too low or too high. You want your airplane flying straight. So how do we get an airplane to fly straight? We need to calibrate each of these dials. We have to. I'm imagining again, I need to talk to my patients who are pilots, but I think this is what they're doing is let's get these things dialed in and the switches just right so that the plane flight flies straight. And a plane doesn't have zero stress. A plane has stress. A plane has to balance all the stress on the wings and whatever weather it's encountering and still fly straight, right? So if we think of ourselves like we don't have just one thing to balance we in a human body, there's a lot of little dials and knobs and switches and if even a couple of them are a little bit off, we're not going to fly straight. We're going to be out of balance. We're going to have. And what are those symptoms? You know, the symptoms are, oh my gosh, I feel dizzy, I feel tired, I feel I can't lose weight, I, you know, whatever it is, okay, things are just out of balance. The plane is not flying straight. So my job as a naturopathic doctor is I go in and I try to figure out for you where what's out of balance. Is it. Can we do some of it in regular blood work covered by insurance? Great. Is the thyroid out of balance? Let's look at the tests. And when I'm looking at blood tests, by the way, I'm looking at it at a very different level than most practitioners. So most practitioners, again, I had the same professors, so I understand the way they teach. Here's the blood work we do. Okay. If you go in for standard blood work, really in standard blood work, what they're trying to do is figure out if you need to be in the emergency room. Okay. So if you go in and your cbc, which is your red blood cells and white blood cells, they can easily check red blood cells and white blood cells in blood, Right? Because that's what's in our blood. So we can see red blood cells, white blood cells, what can that tell Us, it can tell us if you have anemia, I can tell us if you have an infection. It can tell us if there's something really out of balance with your red or white blood cells. And the reason we do that test is if it's really out of balance then we can say, oh, do you need a blood transfusion, do you need an antibiotic? Right, like so this is what we're getting from the blood work. But if you don't have anemia or a severe infection, they're going to say your blood work looks normal. Right. But when I look at a cbc, yes, I look for that, I look for oh, there's signs of anemia or infection. But I'm also looking at a much more fine tuned level. It would be like, you know, when you, those old time, old time radios, which is what I had when I was a kid, where you have to tune the dial right? Maybe some of you still have a radios like that in your cars where you, you have to turn the dial to find the radio station. So if you turn it too quickly, you turn right past the radio station and you can't get it. They were very annoying to me. But you, if you turn it just right, you can get right onto that radio station. Now we have that all digital or you know, like different ways we can tune in. We don't even have to turn the dial right. But in our human bodies I think of it like that, like I'm, what I do is I help you to tune in your body to a much more optimal level. Like in standard blood work, the ranges are wide, right? Like it's like oh well you're in the range. That means you don't have anemia or an infection. But what about in the range? You still might not feel good, you might still feel tired, you might still have maybe borderline anemia or you might have, it's not anemia but maybe you have low iron, you can have low iron without anemia. Maybe you have low B12 or folate. I'm really excited to open enrollment in my new 14 day detox program. It's based on my experience spending 16 days in the Amazon. And I realized I really want to be able to support all of you to safely and effectively detox from home. The 14 day detox includes a kit with protein powder, including antioxidants to support liver detoxification as well as an anti inflammatory diet plan, daily videos and tips from me as well as my self care notebook and lots of encouragement to spend time in nature to reset Your circadian rhythm. I want you to be able to detox your mind, body and spirit so you can get back to balance and move forward in your life with resilience. I can't wait for you to join me in this transformational process.

I can see signs of that in a cbc. We can look at the mcv, the mch, mchc. These are other measurements of the red blood cells in a CBC that most practitioners aren't paying attention to because they're only thinking, does this person have a severe health issue? They're not thinking, does this person need more B12? That's probably not what they're thinking, but when you talk to me, that's what I'm thinking. Is this a nutrient deficiency? Is this where you need more iron? Is this where you need more B12 and folate? Is this a methylation issue? Do you have an MTHFR gene variation? Like, I start, there's so much more I can consider. And then I might even want to do more blood work that's even more specific. I might say, well, I see that your MCH is a little high. Let's do a homocysteine level and a methylmalonic acid level in your blood that's covered by insurance. This is going to give us a much better sense of how your body's metabolizing the B vitamins. Because if there's. If your body's not metabolizing B vitamins, well, it's going to shift. Your homocysteine and methylmalonic acid is related to B12 metabolism. So this helps us understand what's going on in your body that you were not going to get from the standard blood work. So if your standard blood work is all normal, and the doctor says, well, your blood work's healthy, you're healthy. That's the problem. I don't think doctors should make that connection. If you're. If you're in the ranges, I think what they should say is.

Your standard blood work is within the ranges.

But that doesn't mean, like, if you still have symptoms, there's a cause. So the problem is if doctors say it's all normal ranges, you must be healthy, then there it feels like you're getting dismissed, right? It feels like they just said, hey, who cares if you feel tired, your blood work's normal. And I think this is where things get lost, things get missed, and. And so. And people feel dismissed, right? You end up feeling like, what the heck, I'm going to my doctor. They say everything is normal, but I don't feel good. If you don't feel good, there's a reason. That's always the case if you, if some, if your body's giving you indications in some shape or form, symptoms, pain, fatigue, whatever, however it's showing up, there's a reason something's out of balance and it might not show in the regular blood work because again, the regular blood works is really for identifying more emergency situations. Even when we do a complete metabolic panel. A complete metabolic panel is to identify the liver and kidney function and blood sugar levels and electrolyte levels. But you could have in range glucose and in range elect electrolytes and in range kidney and liver function and still not feel good for some other reason that doesn't show on the metabolic panel. So just know if the doctor only ran a CBC and a metabolic panel, they're only going to pick up on if you have.

Severe electrolyte imbalance, dehydration, for example, severe kidney issues, liver issues, that's going to show.

So if they say normal, it just means those things are normal, but it doesn't mean everything's normal. Like the adrenal glands really don't show well in blood work. You can pick up on the adrenal glands a little bit with the sodium and potassium, the electrolyte levels, because part of the job as the adrenal glands is to manage our sodium and potassium. So if there's an imbalance in sodium, potassium even slightly in the blood work, we should be thinking about the adrenal glands. But what I find is I don't even wait for that because by the time it shows in your electrolytes, it's already more severe, your adrenal issue. I'd much rather pick up on an adrenal issue before it starts affecting your electrolytes. So how are we going to find out what's going on with your adrenals? I mean, yes, you can run a blood level for cortisol, which is a hormone made by the adrenal glands. But even then the range is, the normal range is very broad. It's easy to fall in normal. And I think that most of us, most humans, children and adults, we're in this normal range, but that doesn't mean we're optimal. It doesn't mean that our airplane's flying straight. It doesn't mean that we're tuned into the radio station perfectly. It means we're in what's considered normal range, which means we don't need to go into the hospital, it's not an emergency. But the More we optimize, the more we prevent ourselves from becoming an emergency. The more we can prevent health issues, the more we can prevent and reverse health issues. I can't tell you how many patients I work with who the practitioner said this condition is you're going to have for the rest of your life. It's irreversible. And I'm having patients now testing negative for decades.

What is that? If it's gone for a long period of time, I would say it's gone, right? That's as good as gone. So someone could test positive for an autoimmune condition like rheumatoid arthritis at one point in time. But then by making diet changes and detoxifying and resetting all of their systems, their airplane starts flying straight again and they don't have rheumatoid arthritis anymore. They might have a predisposition or a tendency if, if they don't keep up with taking care of themselves, it could turn back on again. But to me, there's ways to turn this off. And this does come back to this conversation about genetics, because for many years, this is also part of the head game, by the way. For many years we thought that genetics determine most of our health, right? Like our genetics was our destiny or something. And that's why they did the whole human Genome Project to identify all the genes in a human. And what they ended up finding out is that our health is not mostly determined by our genes. Our health is mostly determined by our, what I refer to as our stress exposure, our environmental exposures, whether that's emotional stress, physical stress, injuries, infections, toxin exposure, all of those exposures in our life. And even our parents, stress exposure and our grandparents, stress exposure affects us and what's going to happen with our health. And yes, the genetics are a small percentage of that. But I always like to emphasize, because it's this nature versus nurture, right? Like how much of what happens in a human's life experience is because of their genes. And they did all these different studies, including twin studies, to figure this out, right? How much of it was our genes and how much is our exposure? And what we really know now is that a very small percentage, most health issues, it's less than 10% genetically determined. So even if, I mean, believe me, I study genes, I studied my genes and thousands of patients genes, I can help you with your genetics if you'd like, and what you'll find. Because I even a patient said this to me the other day, you know, she's saying she ran a genetic panel and it showed that she has certain genetic gene variations. Right? We all do as humans. That's the thing. We are all unique. There's certain things as humans that we mostly have the same. But when you get that specific, we're very unique. We're unique in how we use nutrients, we're unique in, and how much we need of certain nutrients, where we're unique in so many ways. And so like this patient, you know, was saying that she had a genetic variation related to gaba. So what I was, or let's say, you know, same thing could be with, you know, related to risk for autoimmunity or risk for dementia for that matter. APOE genes or any gene, if you have a genetic tendency or you have a genetic variation, it does not mean that you have that issue. The only way we can know if that gene or gene variation is actually causing a health issue for you is to test your body and look in this real time, real experience is this gene affecting you at this moment in time. And we, those genetic variations can turn on and off. So what we're doing is if we see a genetic variation, let's say mthfr, because it's one that's very common, and, and I talk about a lot. MTHFR is a gene variation that affects metabolism of folic acid to folate. And 40 to 50% of us have a gene variation. I have two of them on MTHFR. But that doesn't mean that MTHFR is affecting my health this moment today. How do I know if my MTHFR gene variations are affecting my health? I have to measure in my current body. I have to do blood work for homocysteine, for example, to look at my B vitamin metabolism. If my homocysteine is healthy.

Then I don't have to worry. I can just keep taking what I'm taking and be preventing and taking care of my health and preventing this gene variation from turning on and causing a negative effect. If the.

If, if it is, if I do see that homocysteine is high, let's say I see patients with a homocysteine of 15 or 20, okay, maybe their gene variation is turned on. It can also be other stress exposures in their life. If you have high stress, high inflammation, high toxin level, it's going to decrease your ability to use the B vitamins. So one of the most common errors I see is people find out they have a gene variation and then they just assume that they need the treatment for that gene variation. And that's not the case. We have to look at if you have a gene variation, let's say of serotonin, it doesn't mean that that's the problem. We need to measure your serotonin. If you have a gene variation related to comt, we need to measure your catecholamines. If you have a gene variation for mthfr, we need to measure your homocysteine, you see, so we can see is that gene affecting your health. And if so, then we can take steps to address it. We can take steps. How do we turn a gene back off again? Stress recovery. Because what turns a gene on is stress exposure and how do we turn it off? Stress recovery. So that's why.

For me, when I'm working with any kind of case, to me it comes back to understanding how stress has caused imbalances and then address those imbalances and get you back to balance. Now we've helped you recover from stress. When you recover from stress, you turn off those gene variations again. Now you're back to, I feel, I say like it's like if you could have a computer or a phone and you hit the reset button. Now I don't know if we even have those anymore, but we used to hit the reset button on the computers. If you can hit the reset button, you're back to your default healthy state. How do you hit the reset on your house? Well, it comes back to, first of all, the care, back to your daily self care because we need to give your body safety signals. Our bodies are constantly getting stress signals all the time from change in temperature, change in light, sound. Right? Constantly. This has to get done. That has to get done. We have plenty of stress signals, but what we lack is the anti stress signals. So we need to learn to balance how. We already have enough stress signals. We're lacking in the anti stress signals. How do we boost the anti stress signals? Even if it's taking a deep breath, even if it's spending time in nature, even if it's petting your cat, taking, you know, taking a bath, there's so many anti stress signals we can choose to counterbalance the stress. So we need to integrate that into our day. Then we need to see what's out of balance. And the standard blood work a lot of times doesn't show these things. It just doesn't. It's just not the way the medical systems are set up. But there are specialty labs that exist now. I hope that specialty labs continue to be developed because we need more information about our body. But at least we have some Information like, at least there's very effective ways to identify what effect stress has had on your body. Has stress caused leaky gut? One of the most common effects of stress on the human body is something called leaky gut or intestinal permeability. It's because our intestinal cells are there trying to protect us all the time. And when we're exposed to whether it's emotional, physical stress, injuries, toxins, it makes it hard for those intestinal cells to stay healthy. Our body can't prioritize making intestinal cells. It's trying to help us deal with the stress. So these intestinal cells are not as healthy as they should be. That's what we call leaky gut. And our food is not getting digested well. Right. When we really need our food, we're not digesting it well because we're under too much stress. Right. The stress is out of balance with the anti stress. So we're not digesting well. The food's leaking through, it's triggering more inflammation, it's feed overfeeding our gut bacteria. The gut bacteria make more toxins, that's causing more inflammation, and things start to spiral out of control from the digestion. As naturopathic doctors were always taught, start with the gut. And you'll see that from a lot of people saying that because it's true. Our, as a human body, our digestion is essential. That's how we get our nutrients, that's how we eliminate toxins. We have to have our digestion working. As a human, it's really important. I mean, we, we also need our heart working and our brain working, but we need our digestion working. And when we're under stress, all these systems don't work well anymore. But because we're pushing them to the max, we're pushing them to the max. So we need to be like, oh, how do I help my digestion, digest my food, heal my intestinal cells so I can absorb my nutrients? Yes, you need your healthy bacteria, but that's really easy to do. Way more often I see people who are overfeeding their gut bacteria and that's leading to so many other problems. Because the gut biome then affects our immune system, our nervous system, our hormones, everything. And the gut biome affects the vaginal biome and the urinary biome. And so then you're more likely to get various infections, bacterial infections, viral infections, yeast infections. So it spirals out of control with different infections. But it all started with being under so much stress and not enough stress recovery. So I Back up. And I say I have to look at the healing from what can I help you do? Because we can't do a million things at once. We're already overwhelmed. As much as we'd like to take a million herbs and nutrients and all of that at once is too, we already don't feel good and we're overwhelmed. So we have to prioritize. To me, the thing about the healing head game is we have to be strategic. We have to think about it from a big picture view and we have to think about it from what can I do in this moment that's gonna have the most positive ripple effect going forward? What are the things I can do that have the most healing potential on multiple levels? Because we are an interconnected system anyway. So that's when I started thinking about it that way. I started realizing, okay, we need to be. There's two core areas. And when I help patients address these two core areas, it creates such a positive ripple effect in their healing. And if they don't address these two core areas, they're spinning and spinning and spinning and overwhelmed and not getting anywhere. We have to address the leaky gut. We have to address your ability to digest the food. Of course we're going to help you eat healthy foods, but you have to be able to digest those healthy foods and absorb those nutrients and not have inflammation and more toxicity coming from your gut. So we have to work on healing leaky gut. We also have to heal your adrenals. Your adrenal glands are your bodyguards. They're your main protection from stress. Here we are talking about all the stress we're exposed to and we have a built in stress response system that protects us. But if we're under constant stress and not enough stress recovery, our system's going to break down. It's not going to work well. And it's different for each person. For some people, when their stress system is not doing well, they end up with the cortisol being too high, you know, and I see that quite a lot. But it's not everybody, right? So if, if your stress system's out of balance, it could be that you have cortisol that's way too high at certain times of the day. It could be that you have cortisol that's too low at certain times of day. Same with adrenaline. And both cortisol and adrenaline are made by the adrenal glands. The adrenal glands are above the kidneys. Their job is to, it's. We need it all day long. Cortisol and adrenaline. We need more cortisol in the morning to wake us up and gradually decreasing through the day. We also need adrenaline. It gives us energy and focus, but we don't want too much or too little of either one of them. If the cortisol. If you're flying this airplane and your cortisol dial is too high or too low, your airplane's not going to fly straight and you're not going to feel good, and yet it's not going to show on your regular blood work. So we have to dial in the cortisol. We need to optimize your cortisol levels. And you're likely. If you go to a standard doctor's appointment, they're not. They're going to be like, why do you want to check your cortisol? They're not thinking that way because they're not thinking about this optimization of your health to prevent health issues. That's not how they're thinking. That's how I'm thinking. So I'm thinking, okay, if I want to help you be performing at your best and preventing health issues, I need you to have an optimal cortisol level. So that's why I'm going to measure your cortisol morning, midday, evening, bedtime, to know what your cortisol curve is up to. And we can do that in saliva or urine. You do it at home. Adrenaline. If I only measure cortisol. Ah, it's only part of the equation. I have to know your adrenaline, too. The adrenal glands also make adrenaline, and we can measure it in urine at home. Let's measure it. Is your adrenaline too high or too low? That just tells us this is where your metabolism is needing more or less help with the adrenaline. Metabolism. Okay, let's get that information. Because we can use herbs and nutrients to address it. The things that these are functions that happen in our normal human physiology. We make cortisol, we make adrenaline, we process cortisol, we process adrenaline. Our bodies know how to do it. But when we're under stress and we're out of balance, our body gets off track. And what happens is our body almost. It's like it gets into a set point that's unique to you. So one person there, when they're under stress, their body goes, oh, it gets just stuck at high cortisol, high adrenaline in the afternoon, let's say. So I need to know that I need to measure it. And then I can say to that person, oh, there's a ton of research on this. There's a Ton of research. Here's phosphatidylserine. And it helps reset cortisol signaling. So we can bring our cortisol down and tell teach your body it doesn't need that much cortisol at that time of day. Now, if your life isn't. If you haven't done your self care to reset your daily schedule and you're still getting huge stress signals in the afternoon, your body's going to keep thinking it needs to make more cortisol. So we can take something like phosphatidylserine to reset the signaling, but we also need to reset your day so that it doesn't just recreate the pattern. Right. It's not just about relying on a nutrient even. It's how do we reset ourselves and our relationship to ourselves so that we can help our bodies to stay in a balanced state. Same thing with cortisol, right? I mean, if cortisol is too low, okay, your adrenal glands can make cortisol. Most people, I mean, there's rare cases where a person's adrenal glands really drop low. And even them, I've helped their adrenal glands recover to some degree to be able to make more cortisol on their own. And we can do that with nutrients and herbs. Amazing, right? Nutrients and herbs can help our bodies heal and make more cortisol again. So then we have adequate cortisol and adrenaline. This is not like. Sometimes people say to me, is this like masking something or is it. Is there withdrawal symptoms or dependency? No, this is actually how your human body works. And we're using substances from nature to give your body the nutrients and herbs it needs to recover from stress and rebalance what got out of balance, really. And then it's actually getting it back to balance. And no, you don't have to keep on taking these substances forever. You recover back to balance, now your airplane's flying straight again, then you only need maintenance, Right. When a plane's flying straight, I think the pilot doesn't have to do very much to keep it flying straight unless a big wind comes in. Right. So then if a big stress comes, you might have to be like, oh, boy, okay, I have a wedding. Oh, my gosh, I'm gonna have to like, help my cortisol get back on track again. Oh, I had this big project at work. Oh, I just had a baby. We can anticipate. If the big wind comes the plane, you're gonna have to get it back on balance again. But then it's about how do we maintain over time? That's why my stress recovery protocol has three phases. One is get out of stress mode. First of all, how do we get things, get the stress signaling to calm down enough so we can actually heal? If we're, if we're in this constant stress signaling, we can, we can try to tread water and keep up with it, but the more we can reset your cortisol and adrenaline and reset your self care routine, then we can really phase two, rebalance everything and do the real recovery. And then phase three is maintenance and resilience. How do you become resilient under stress? Because so many, like say for example women say to me, okay, I can help you. I can help you reset your immune function, reset your hormones and microbiome and so you can fend off hpv, for example, which is. HPV is a virus that can cause cancer for men and women. So if HPV is present, it's because we're run down and our systems are out of balance. We rebalance everything. Now your body can protect you from this virus. We know the human body can protect us from the HPV virus. How? Well, when it's in balance and it's functioning well, then what if you keep getting exposed to HPV from a sexual partner, new sexual partner, whichever. Well, if your body's in a state of balance and recovery from stress, no matter if you get exposed to this virus again, you're going to be able to protect yourself. Your body is going to be able to protect itself. And I always think of it, I've learned that it's not just on a physical level. By the way, this, this again, part of the head game is how do we learn to protect ourselves? I really don't think we learn that from a young age or in school. We don't learn well how to protect ourselves. We're taught to always be thinking of someone else, which is also, yes, important. We want to be altruistic and care about other people in our lives, but we need to also learn how to protect ourselves on a physical level, mental, emotional level, and even energetic and spiritual level. How do we protect ourselves from various stress exposures? Well, this is part of the healing process. I really see that, that I think that's what's happening is more and more as humans, and I see this for myself too, is we're learning how to shoes for ourselves. And the more we actually have compassion for ourselves, have compassion for our human bodies, right? Our bodies are doing their best to help us survive. How can we feel gratitude for our Human bodies and how much they're working hard to help us survive. And then they're giving us these signals when things are out of balance. That's an amazing thing. And so we change our view of our symptoms. Instead of feeling negative about our body, we start to realize, oh, my body's trying to tell me something. It needs help. What's really the signal? What needs attention? A lot of times I find when talking to patients, there might be even a stress from way earlier in their life, maybe a grief, maybe a sudden loss, maybe something that happened to you, Even abuse in a relationship or sexual abuse. Something where.

Your system got stuck into a state of stress and shock and didn't get to process. Didn't get to process the shock of it. And then it just perpetuates. So a lot of times, it's when we finally are able to be present with ourselves, we start to realize, oh, that's when this started. That's when this health issue started. How can I help my. How can I have compassion for myself and my body, forgive myself for what happened, and learn how to protect, not only recover, but also protect myself going forward? How do I communicate more, Communicate my feelings, even of gratitude and love, let alone anger, sadness, frustration, feel our feelings, communicate our feelings and communicate our needs, communicate our boundaries? I, you know, do I need these certain foods? Do I need to go to bed at this time? How do I. How do we communicate about this with other humans in our lives? And it's again, not something we learn in school or from our parents usually, but it's something we can teach ourselves and practice. It's a matter of practice. I really think that the human experience is learning the day by day, learning little by little how to have more compassion for ourselves so that we become.

Really the home and the advocate and, and the compassion. A lot of times we're looking, searching for someone else to do that for us, you know, searching out this other person. And then we become dependent on this other person. We can even become dependent on the medical system. We can become dependent on so many things, but really, it's when we realize we're the ones who take. Can take the best care of us. We're the ones who can make the decisions each day with intentionality. And when we choose that, that's when we're gonna find that we can achieve our best health and really be being most ourselves, living our purpose. And that's, I think, when we really feel like each day brings us joy because we're. We're doing what we enjoy Taking care of ourselves and looking forward to what's coming and knowing that we can make choices and listen to our bodies and give ourselves what they. What I. What we need. And also what happens. You know, there's less of this fear because we are in this more centered place of acceptance. You know, as much as we can be really attached to, you know, like, if we get too attached to a certain outcome.

And this is my final point with this. With this.

Episode. If we're so attached to.

Say, pregnancy or we're so attached to this particular outcome, I was for a long time so attached. I don't want to have another migraine. But if we. It's like the system doesn't work that way because then we're not allowing for possibilities and we're not accepting the way things are in the moment. And so there's a careful balance of saying, here's where I am, and I would like for this other possibility to exist, but I can't be so attached to it that I've locked myself in, and then it's preventing it from happening. We have to have this ability to be very clear about our intention for healing, but also unattached to the way it unfolds, unattached to the way it looks. Because sometimes once we get there, it looks different than we anticipated. So you want to start to become, like, really centered with yourself and ask yourself, what is my real intention? How do I first believe my body can heal? That's a key piece of this. Your body can heal. The human body has an amazing healing capability. The nervous system can heal, the brain can heal. I've seen people go through amazing healing processes. I can see that the human body can heal from a lot of. Then people might think that you could never heal from. People can heal. So the human body has a healing capacity. So you start with that and you go, okay, I accept that this is where I'm starting from. I know the body has this capability to heal. I can have an intention and see the more you visualize. Here's where I'm going. I say this even for my dance classes. You know, in any athlete, they visualize their. What they're doing. They visualize what they're going to be doing as an athlete. Same thing for you in your healing process. You can visualize your healing process. You can visualize. This is gutted imagery. This is used in so many meditation techniques. You can visualize what that looks like to have this healing, healthy body. And that gives your nervous system the information it needs to get there. So it's yes, visualizing where you're going, but also leaving open the possibilities for how that's going to happen. Just trusting in the process. And sometimes that's. It's hard to explain. But if I, I hope by just giving you those words that you can find that. And really what I'm doing is through this whole conversation, I'm hoping to put lights on that dark pathway. Remember we started off talking about the dark. You feel like you're in a dark tunnel or a dark room all by yourself and you're like, I don't know which way to go. I'm hoping from this conversation that I've put some candles or some lights, given you a light, at least a flashlight to say, oh, here's the doorway. The doorway is your body can heal and the lights are, oh, here's how to understand what's going on in your body. And here's the diagnostic light testing, the specialty testing that exists to help you get more information. We need to gather the information to understand what's out of balance and then we can use tools. I mean this is where I meet with patients. I, I mean a lot of practitioners out there, they don't still meet one on one with, with people. I still meet one on one with patients every day from around the world. And I offer online programs so that you can access my healing protocols in online programs that are in video modules. So if you're not able to work with me one on one, you can at any time access my video modules where you can start healing leaky gut, you can start healing your adrenals, you can start detoxifying, you can start changing your diet, you can start implementing self care. All of this is in my books, like the Master Stretch, Reset yout Health Book. All of this is in the online programs. I want you to have access to this information and this way you can start educating yourself. You can start down the path of these key core areas of establishing care for yourself, resetting the stress and anti stress healing leaky gut, healing adrenals and learn how to become your own health advocate. Then you get to choose where you want to go in the medical system. You get to choose what you're going to do each day and how you're going to support your body on this healing path. And it's a healing path that ultimately is our human experience, right as humans. That's the thing. We're, we're here to do what we love with the people we love. The whatever your purpose is, whatever your passion is. But Ultimately, we have to take care of our human physiology in our health, or else we're not going to be able to do those things. We're not going to feel good or something's going to develop that prevents us from doing that. So we have to learn how to take care of ourselves in the process. And so again, I hope I'm giving you so if I can be a guide on the path. Just from my experience in my own house and from helping doubts and thousands of patients over the past 23 years, I'm hoping to give you lights on the pathway to say, here's the tools to on your path of healing. When you hit certain forks, how do you choose which way to go? What's going to be the most strategic way to get you where you're trying to go in the most efficient way? And so that's why that's what I wanted to be able to share with you in this episode. So I hope that's helpful and I look forward to hearing from all of you. I always love to hear from you when you listen into the episodes. I encourage you to also you can submit a review if you're listening. You know, wherever you listen to this podcast, you can submit a comment or a review. I'd love to hear it. And also be sure to subscribe not only to the How Humans Heal podcast, but also to my newsletter so that you can get weekly updates from me when next episodes come out and other articles and interviews and information about my what I offer through programs and products. I just want you to have access to the information that's helping others so that you don't have to go recreate the wheel and be spinning your wheels. I want you to have the information you need to be successful on your path of understanding your body and understanding who you are in your human experience. Thanks so much for joining me and I look forward to connecting with you in the next episode. Take care.

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