Mastering Stress and Hormesis – with Dr. Doni | How Humans Heal Podcast

Hi there. I'm Dr. Donnie Wilson and I am a naturopathic doctor and I'm also an author, including of my latest new book that's coming out May 3rd called Master your Stress, Reset yout Health. I'm so excited for it to be available to all of you. I've worked hard on writing this book over the past couple years. During the pandemic, I was writing the book about stress and it's based on everything I've learned about helping patients with stress and myself recover from stress over the past. Well, I've been in practice for 22 years, but I've been stressed since I was born. Just like all of us. That's the thing. To me it's not about trying to be stress free or it's not about trying to avoid stress. Even to me, it's not about trying to manage stress because to me if we are just managing stress, it feels like more work and it is stressful to try to manage stress. So what I always wanted, the point I really want to get across is that I believe that it is possible to be healthy and thrive even though we are still exposed to stress. Because ultimately we are going to be exposed to stress. We are humans, we are living in this day and age, even any humans who are always exposed to stress, that's just part of being human. There's going to be stress of just getting food, let alone food that's healthy for us. There's stress, having shelter, shelter that's going to be safe and effective. Those are some of the basic stresses. But then you put on top of that having a job, financial stress, having a family, relationships, parents, children.

There'S going to be stress on us. So I really want to encourage you all to take a breath and have compassion for yourself as a human. Understanding that as a human you're going to be exposed to stress and you're going to have a stress response that's normal and healthy. We are supposed to have a response to stress. If we didn't have a response to stress, we wouldn't be surviving as humans just realizing like okay, I'm a human, I'm going to have stress and I'm going to have a stress response. Once we get to that point, then we can start to think about, ok, so how do I really harness my stress response? How do I understand how my body responds to stress so that I can give it the best support to recover from stress? Anything. We have to have a counterbalance. If we have stress, we need to have anti stress. But a lot of times we go through our day to day life thinking that we're supposed to be able to handle the stress without enough anti stress, without enough support to recover from stress to counterbalance it. I think that's when health issues develop. That's when we start to feel anxious and overwhelmed or depressed. That's when we have sleep issues, that's when we have digestive issues, or we have trouble getting pregnant, or we have miscarriages, or we have abnormal cells developing or cancer. We have blood sugar issues and heart disease. These things happen. A lot of times we think of it as age, but I think it's not just about age. Yes, age makes it more likely because now you have more years for it to accumulate and be a potential issue. But it's not just about age. I don't want you to think, oh I feel this way just because I'm getting older or, or because of my age. I really believe that it is a matter of we start having symptoms, aches and pains, both physical and emotional pain. We start to experience pain and discomfort when we have more stress than we have anti stress. And so I am here to really encourage you to just notice that, not to judge it, not to criticize it. We're all in the same boat together. Believe me. I, I definitely had times of more stress than anti stress and that is how we learn how to help with it. I had migraines for 25 years.

My migraines taught me that if I have too much stress and not enough stress recovery, I am going to get a migraine. So I have to figure this out.

I just chose, I don't want to just be reliant on a medication to treat the pain. I want to now sometimes medications is necessary, sometimes I take medication too. But I really wanted to be able to prevent it. I wanted to shift the pattern. I wanted to be able to look deeper and figure it out and say what do I have to do to not have a migraine? And the migraine is just an example. Whatever it is for you and your health, what do we have to do to not have that happening? And for me, the way we do that is.

It'S in some ways sometimes seems too simple or subtle, but it's actually in the simplicity and the subtlety that we really find the biggest solutions. The most profound shift is sometimes in the subtlety. And so I want to, even though we're used to going harder, pushing harder, we're willing to do more, we're willing to do it better, we're willing to exercise longer we're willing to fast for longer, we're willing to put in these big efforts. And yet sometimes if we put in even too much of a good thing, it can be a stress on our bodies. I want to encourage you to not only embrace your humanness and embrace your stress and stress response, but also embrace that sometimes it's in the gentleness that we get the most recovery. And I actually have found that we need to take our recovery from stress in a sequential process, a three phase process, which I call the stress recovery protocol. And I teach you everything about it in this book. So if this is resonating with you and you've been trying to figure out how to do this, I want you to know that this is not just any other book about stress. And it's definitely not intended to stress you out more. It's intended to actually help you understand how stress affects you uniquely. This is what I refer to as your stress pattern or your stress type. But I want to get clear about that because the term stress type is used in different ways, different people who've been trying to help us with stress might also be using this term stress type. I really want to be clear about what I see as our stress type.

And get back around to this concept of hormesis here in a minute.

What it is is that we're each our stress response. Even though as humans we have generally similar stress response system. Our stress response system involves our adrenal glands making cortisol. It involves our nervous system and our adrenal glands making adrenaline. That part is part of being human. That part's the same. But what's different is, is how much cortisol and adrenaline does your body make? How long does it last?

How is it affected over time, over your lifetime, over your stress exposure. That's what makes it unique.

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. This 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 seven 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 and.

What I've seen, and this is seeing thousands of patients over the years, is that if we treat everyone the same, if I give everyone the same herbs or nutrients or protocol for stress recovery or for adrenal. Sometimes this is referred to as adrenal fatigue or adrenal exhaustion or burnout. Some people refer to this as burnout.

If I give everyone the same treatment, they're not all going to feel better. A cookie cutter approach to adrenal fatigue or burnout doesn't work. From what I've seen, I want my patients to feel better.

And I want myself to feel better. I am like, no, I've got to figure out how to do this in a way where the highest percentage of people see a benefit. The way to do that is to realize that we're not all the same. We have to understand how your response system is working when you're under stress versus another person. And it varies. I've looked at the data, I've analyzed it. I measure. What I do is I measure cortisol levels for myself and for my patients all the time, and I measure adrenaline levels all the time. So I have the data in front of me constantly and I'm constantly trying.

How do we solve this? How do we get our cortisol and adrenaline back to optimal? Because what happens is when we're exposed to ongoing stress, our cortisol and adrenaline starts to adapt away from optimal. It either goes, the cortisol could go way too high at different times of day, the adrenaline could go high at different times of day, or either one or both could go too low. And so we can't assume. I know it's tempting to assume that your cortisol is high. A lot of times that's what we think is like, okay, I'm stressed, my cortisol is probably high. But actually, when I measure people's cortisol levels, we don't all have high cortisol. Probably less than 50% have high cortisol. Some of them may have high cortisol certain points of the day, and the other part of them have low cortisol all of the day or part of the day. So it's. I want to caution you not to assume that we all have the same response to stress by looking not just at the immediate response to stress, but I'm looking at your response to stress based on your lifetime of exposure and your genetics. When we look at cortisol and adrenaline based on that, we can identify your unique stress pattern or stress type. This is what it looks like when you're in what I call stress mode, right? So if you're having symptoms from stress, and you may not even be aware of them, but if you're having any kind of symptoms in your body, from irregular menstrual cycles to digestive issues to skin rashes, to anxiety, depression, sleep issues, if you're having any symptoms in your energy, mood, focus, sleep, you're being affected by stress. Now, we need to know what is your stress mode look like?

I'm developing a quiz and it'll be available soon. And it's also in the book. If you order the book, which you can find in my stories in my bio, you're going to find out what your stress type is, and then you're going to find out exactly how to help based on your stress type. You don't want to just guess. You want to make sure that you're addressing your cortisol and adrenaline based on your body's pattern, right? Doesn't that make sense? Like, you don't want to take a treatment that's for somebody else's stress mode pattern. We want to take treatment that matches for your stress mode pattern so you're more likely to feel better. And so here's where I want to bring it back to hormesis. Hormesis is.

In science, what we refer to as how our body responds to a stress or a toxin or a change. Think of it as any kind of change. And what they find is there's a. If you're exposed to a small amount of stress or a small amount of change, it could be a positive thing. The body actually will adjust and adapt and shift based on that small amount of change. But if we create too much change, like a big change or too strong of a change or too much of a stress on the system, then it actually backfires and we end up feeling worse. I really want you all to notice this and recognize that again, our bodies are paying attention all the time to our stress exposure. Our environment, the light, the darkness, the sound, the temperature, what, what's on our mind, what's on our to do list? Our bodies and brains are paying attention. Now, if we want to create a shift, right? If you say you've been in stress mode and we want to get you out of stress mode, we can't just expect that we can make A big change and have that fix it. Because if we make too big of a change, it could actually cause more of a stress. And I think this is why a lot of people try to solve their health issues and maybe implement a quick fix, but then it backfires and fails and they end up right back where they were or even feeling worse than they started with. It's because I think we push ourselves too hard. Say we're going to do intermittent fasting, for example, and we decide, oh, intermittent fasting sounds great, I'm going to jump in. And you jump to 16 or 18 hour.

Fasting window. That might be too much for your system. That might have been beyond that. Hormesis became a stress and now it's raising your cortisol and you're not going to feel better, you're going to feel worse. So if ever you go about trying to implement a change, a dietary change, exercise, even stress reduction activity, but you overdo it at first and you feel worse, then don't be hard on yourself and don't give up. Just know that you probably you just hit the point of the hormesis curve where it ended up to be a stress instead of a benefit. And so you just need to back off and kind of recover and then try again. But try with more with a smaller shift start. If you want to do intermittent fasting, start by extending your fasting window by an hour instead of by five or six hours. If you want to start to exercise, instead of starting with an hour of exercise, start with five minutes. So when we can implement small adaptive changes, our bodies can accept that and integrate that and they can move us closer to a healthier state. But if we do too much, it ends up throwing us back to where we started from. I hope that's helpful in terms of thinking about how stress affects us, thinking about understanding that stress mode looks different for each of us and your stress recovery looks different for each of us. And stress recovery needs to utilize this concept of hormesis. We have to be aware that we can overdo, we can do too much of a good thing and it's not going to help. We need to do just the right amount of the right things for you in order to really effectively help you feel better and recover and become resilient to stress. Which is the ultimate goal that I talk about in the book is how to become resilient to stress so that you can be going about living your life and your purpose, doing what you love. And even if you are exposed or when you are exposed to stresses. You know how to bounce back. You know what to do, what your body needs in order to come back to a healthy state again. That's the goal. That's the goal of mastering your stress is how to thrive even when stressed. Thanks so much for joining me. I'll be sure to put the link so you can pre order the book. You can really order this book anywhere you normally order books. But definitely come back to my website to drdonnie.com and then it's.

MSRH Master Stress Reset Health MSRH. So if you go drdonnie.com spelled out D O C T O R d o n I.commsrh and you're going to tell me, put in your email and tell me you ordered the book so that I can send you all kinds of thank you gifts and support for utilizing the book. I have recipes for you, meditation for you, a stress reset for you. So I really want to help you take this information and use it for your benefit. Please, please. It's my gift to you. I want you to know this so that you can so they can help you in your life too. Thanks for joining me and I'll see you again soon.

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