Dr. Doni Wilson explains why stress affects everyone differently based on cortisol and adrenaline levels. She shares a stress-type quiz to identify your pattern and a CARE protocol for recovery: clean eating, adequate sleep, recovery activities, and exercise. Unmanaged stress disrupts sleep, digestion, weight, and immunity.
Questions this video answers
Master Your Stress, Reset Your Health.
22 years.
Her website (spoken as 'drdonnie.comquiz' in the transcript) — referenced as drdonnie.com/quiz.
Chapters
Following portion of Bloom is sponsored by.
Seven Marketing PR on behalf of Dr. Donni Wilson. For a lot of us, tis the season to stress out, which can seriously impact your memory and mental health. Joining us now is national stress expert and the author of Master your Stress reset yout health, Dr. Donni Wilson. Dr. Donnie, welcome to Bloom.
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
And your book is so timely right now because over the last few years I know stress levels have come and especially now during the holidays, they even go higher.
Absolutely. We've all felt stress. I think we now have a sense of, oh, this is what it's like to feel stressed. And then you add the holidays on top of it and it's just like we're like, what am I supposed to do now?
Yeah. And people feel like they can't slow down enough to bring down their stress levels. But you actually treat so many people and teach them how to incorporate actions every day to bring those levels down.
Exactly. This is the thing I found. I mean, I was under so much stress in my medical school training and being a mom and running a practice and I was getting migraines and I was like, there's got to be a way to be able to do this. And so I just started reading the research and testing. I would test myself and my patients. We tested cortisol levels and adrenaline levels and I was looking for what are the patterns here so that we can actually implement strategies that work. And so what I found is that stress is not one size fits all. It doesn't affect us all the same. Some of us, our cortisol goes high and we assume that all of us have high cortisol, but it's not the case. Some people have low cortisol, some people have high adrenaline, and some people have low adrenaline. So that's when I realized, okay, I need to be able to make it easy for people to identify do I have high cortisol or high adrenaline? Low cortisol, low adrenaline. And that's when I developed my stress type quiz.
Okay, so, yeah, tell me more about your particular protocol and how you help folks.
So what I do is we, we want to implement what I call self care with the acronym care. So C is for clean eating, A is for adequate sleep, R is for recovery activities, and E is for exercise. And we want to be able, these are things we think about and we know that are good for us. But what I'm wanting people to do is how to integrate these into your day to day schedule so that you're actually Getting the benefit of this anti stress care each and every day because ultimately it's when we think we're going to wait for the weekend for our stress recovery. It doesn't work that way. We need it every day. So we need to implement care in everything we're doing. And so we want to do it.
In small strategies and recovery activities. Give me an example of one of those.
Okay, so recovery activities can be as simple as taking a five minute break to just take deep breaths, get outside in nature, turn on some music or call a friend. Yes, it can be something like meditation, but it doesn't have to be. It can be actually something you do in small increments of time.
And you know, a lot of us worry over the holidays that we're going to gain weight. And you say if you do not have a handle on your stress, that's only going to exacerbate the problem.
Absolutely. That's the thing is stress shows up sometimes in ways we don't expect. Like feeling tired, feeling anxious, not sleeping well, or weight gain and digestive issues is another common way. So it's often showing up in our bodies are feeling it, even if we're thinking we're doing okay. If you're having symptoms, then your body's telling you that there's indications of stress inside and we can start to take steps that are actual things you can do in your day to day life to address it.
I love the fact that you've put all of these tips and tricks into a book because you've helped so many people over the years.
Yeah, that's the thing. 22 years of helping patients recover from stress. And I'm so grateful for them because they helped me figure out what does it take to prevent health issues. Not only acute things like infections, but even chronic illnesses we can be preventing by implementing these strategies day to day, including during the holiday season.
Yeah. And people don't realize that living under that constant stress is a recipe for disaster for your health. Because that's really where it all starts with stress.
Absolutely. Because once the cortisol levels are either too high or too low, it sends a cascade of issues through the body. We don't digest our food or absorb our nutrients as well. The inflammation goes up, the hormones go out of balance, the immune system doesn't work as well. And so you can just see, oh, this is just this cascade of stress. But if we can really use the research and implement in our day to day life intentionally, we don't have to be so affected by stress. My mission is I want to figure out how and help people to be healthy even when they're stressed.
Dr. What a pleasure it is to meet you and your book. It should be on the list of every holiday list this season. Thank you so much.
Thank you for sharing. Let's hear who are all right.
And Dr. Donni Wilson's stress quiz can be found in her book, Master your Stress, Reset yout Health. And for more information, you can head to her website, drdonnie.comquiz. we'll be back with more Bloom right after this.
The preceding portion of Bloom was sponsored by Seven Marketing PR on behalf of Dr. Donni Wilson.
