The Gut-Brain Axis with Dr. Doni | How Humans Heal

Welcome to How Humans Heal. Today I wanted to go into depth about the gut brain axis and how stress and cortisol disrupt our gut health. And then how our gut health disrupts our cortisol levels in our nervous system. And how this vicious cycle can lead to various different health issues including anxiety, depression, insomnia and many more. And how by solving the gut brain axis that and healing it that we can actually resolve and heal from these chronic health issues. So let's dive in. This is actually one of my favorite topics because every time I read research about gut brain and gut brain microbiota axis, I am so excited about the possibility for healing. So I encourage any of you who like to read research articles when you go into pubmed.com just enter in gut brain axis or gut brain microbiota axis and you're going to find so many thousands of studies. And I've also written several blog blog articles on this topic and I mention it in all of my books. So if you want to learn more, there's a lot of places you can learn more. But I want to get you started here today because I am so often helping patients with their stress recovery and what I I know some of the common cor questions and kind of stuck points that patients run into in their healing process. And this is, I would say want this information about the gut brain axis is sometimes the thing when we solve it, it really helps patients move forward with their healing process. And so I wanted to share it here to inspire all of you on your healing process. Okay, so what is this gut brain access anyway? Maybe a lot some of you have heard that our gut is like our second brain. And this really emphasizes that as much as we think that our brain and our mind is running the show around here, it our gut is actually informing a lot of what we're experiencing in our mind. And I think this is why it's so important for us to have awareness for it. Because it makes you stop and think, wait a minute, am I having this craving or am I having this anxious thought because it's some signal from within my brain? Or is this craving or anxious thought actually something that's coming from my digestion and it's signaling to my brain to have this thought, right? And we start to realize, first of all, I'm not my anxious thoughts and I'm not my cravings. I don't have to fully identify with every thought and experience I have. And we start to realize that that question of who am I then really? Right? This is where some of the emotional work and spiritual work and mindfulness work that you're doing is also going to really help because you can start to know who you are as an authentic being and an authentic self. And you start to be more aware of the experiences and sensations and feelings and thoughts that you have as something that's happening. But it's not necessarily something you have to react to immediately. You can have awareness and then you can decide how you want to respond. So I love to mention that here because I like to emphasize that it's so much of the time I think we're in a battle with our own bodies and we can be in a battle with our own digestion and we can be in a battle with our own nervous system even. And I want you to know that we can just let go of that and we can know, hey, this isn't a battle within ourselves. This isn't that we, you know, that you are, that you're you. You know, you can't get another body anyway, right? This is the body you live in. This is the nervous system you have, even everything you've been through in your life, this is the system you're dealing with. And so a strategy I suggest and encourage is to have acceptance for your body and acceptance for your nervous system. And I think a lot of that acceptance comes from understanding, right? So this is why I, I want teach you about it so that you can understand how your body works. So that you can then be at peace with your body and your mind. And then you can understand that any symptoms are really signals from inside of you that are saying that something needs attention. Instead of feeling like you're at odds with it. You can feel like you're working together and you're thinking, oh, what needs to change here? What is my body telling me that it needs? And you can be more in a collaborative effort with your body to, to solve the issues that are coming up. So let's understand this mind gut connection. And it a lot of it comes down to the vagus nerve. V A G U S so if you want to also look up the vagus nerve and I've written a lot about the vagus nerve as well, so I'm happy to share more information with you. The vagus nerve is considered the longest nerve in our bodies and it really makes a strong connection between the brain and the gut. Although the vagus nerve also communicates to other systems in the body, including heart and the lungs and other glands, glands like the thyroid gland, hormone production. So the vagus nerve a lot of it is signaling what's called the parasympathetic nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system, the anti stress system. So it's the opposite of the sympathetic nervous system. Sympathetic is what we think of as fight or flight or freeze response. It's the adrenaline response when we're under stress. And the opposite of that is the parasympathetic. Of course we want our bodies to be doing both. We want our bodies to be able to go into sympathetic and stress mode when necessary and to be able to go into parasympathetic when necessary and to counterbalance and have that ability to go back and forth. And so it's the vagus nerve that really signals out to our bodies. To say it's time to rest and digest is another way that we refer to the parasympathetic nervous system is it signals to our digestion to digest our food and absorb our nutrients. It signals to our body that it's time to rest and repair. And so if we don't get enough of this parasympathetic system happening, then, then our health gets depleted by that. Right? So if we're constantly in stress and we're constantly in sympathetic nervous system response, we're not going to get enough rest and digest. And so that is the cause of a lot of health issues is just not having enough time in a parasympathetic nervous system. Now our parasympathetic nervous system is considered automatic. It works without us thinking about it. It makes our heart beat, it tells us to breathe, it tells our cells to repair. It does this on automatic, right? But there are ways for us to signal to the parasympathetic nervous system and the vagus nerve on purpose. So I'm going to share some of those with you today because I think that's so cool that we can purposely signal to our vagus nerve and purposely signal on the parasympathetic nervous system so that we can have a break from the sympathetic nervous system. And I think this is a tool we, we all need to have at our fingertips, including for helping with this healing this brain. This I guess we call the gut brain connection. That brain gut axis or gut brain axis. So that's this super highway. It's considered as the vagus nerve. And an important other thing to know about it, which I mentioned already, but I want to emphasize is that the communication goes from the brain to the gut and from the gut back to the brain. So here's what happens when we're under chronic constant stress not only are we always in sympathetic mode, but we also have constant signaling to our adrenal glands. And the adrenal glands are making cortisol. Right? This cortisol is a healthy hormone, but when we're constantly under stress, the cortisol can go too high or too low, not off the charts. So the endocrinologist is likely not going to pick up on it. But it's just a little bit too high and a little bit too low. And so if the cortisol is a little too high or a little too low, and it's different for each of us, right? Not all of us have high cortisol and not all of us have low cortisol. We need to test and find out. Or you can find out your stress type through my stress type quiz, which is@drdonnie.com quiz and then you're going to know whether you probably have high cortisol or high cortisol or low cortisol and high adrenaline or low adrenaline. So you can find, get a sense of it through the stress type quiz, or you can test it specifically using a urine and saliva test that you can order through my online store. We'll put a link here for you. So do the stress type quiz and if you really want to know specifically, do the urine saliva test. And then you're going to know if your cortisol and adrenaline is too high or too low. And then you're going to know whether the signaling to your, on your vagus nerve and your digestion is, is it, is it in a stressed state? Right? Because if this gut brain axis is getting stress signals from your cortisol and adrenaline, then what happens is we don't digest our food as well, so we're not going to absorb our nutrients as well. Right? So you could be eating healthy food, but it's not going to get digested and absorbed. If your cortisol and adrenaline are too high or too low, then you're eating all this healthy food and what's happening, it's going to overfeed the gut bacteria, and then it goes out in the stool. It doesn't even get into your cells, Right? So this is common. If you're like, I'm eating healthy food, tired, I'm anxious, I can't sleep, I've got skin rashes, I've got itching all over my body. Okay? There you're, you're actually not getting the benefit of your foods. And instead what happens is we start having immune inflammatory responses to our foods. So the stress, meaning the imbalance cortisol and adrenaline causes something called leaky gut, which is when the intestinal cells are not recovering the way they should. We should grow back new intestinal cells constantly, all the time. We want very healthy intestinal cells because their job, they have a super important job. These intestinal cells, they have to make sure that our food's getting digested. They actually finish the digestive process and they only let the nutrients through. That's key. We need those nutrients, so we need our intestinal cells doing their job. But when we, when our cortisol and adrenaline is not.

Those intestinal cells are not getting the signal to replace themselves. And so then we end up with what we call leaky or permeable intestinal lining, which means that undigested food is able to leak through the intestinal cells into the space outside of our intestines. What's in that space? Our immune system. 80% of our immune system is waiting there on guard to protect us. It's there to protect us from viruses and bacteria and paras. But if undigested food gets through, our immune system is going to want to protect us from our undigested food. And if your immune system starts protecting you from your food now, you're getting inflammatory responses even to healthy foods. It could react to almonds or bananas or, you name it, avocado. It can also react to foods like the common foods that most people end up eating, which is dairy and gluten. And gluten actually also damages these cell, so gluten perpetuates the damage to the intestinal cells, making it more likely that you're going to react to other foods you eat. So when you see that you have foods that are reacting on an IGA and igg, this is the food panel I'm talking about, not an ige. Ige are classic food allergies that an allergist can test for. I'm talking for about delayed food sensitivities with IgA and IgG antibodies, which allergists usually don't test for and regular labs don't test well for. So I recommend running through a lab that does it really well. And that's what I offer through my office and through my online store is a finger poke blood test for food sensitivities to the IGA and IGG 96 most important foods. And from my research over the past 22 years, I've identified that testing for 96 foods gives us the if we test for less or we for more, it doesn't give us as good of information. So we test for 96 from the lab. That does it best. And so we can see which of the food that you're eating are ending up leaking through because of the leaky gut. And triggering an inflammatory response, triggers inflammation. It's sending that inflammation everywhere in your body, to your joints, to your skin, to your brain. And that's why it's the gut brain access, because it's sending inflammation even to the brain and the nervous system. What does inflammation in the brain look like? It looks like you can't focus well, you can't remember well, you, you, you're feeling anxious or depressed and, or depressed. You're not sleeping well, you feel like what's going on? I can't function. And that's inflammation in the brain. In fact, inflammation in the brain is associated with development of dementia later in life. Well, hopefully later. It could happen at any time. Actually if we have enough inflammation in our brain, we start showing signs of dementia even earlier. So this is really important to address and it's not something that gets addressed in the conventional medical system or medical offices. That's why I'm talking about it is because I feel strongly that I think everyone should have this information. I'm so grateful that I happened to learn this relatively early in my life and have been able to share it with so many of 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, 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 and.

So what happens is remember we're under chronic stress because we have chronically stressful lives and we've had a lot of stress in our lives in the past as well. This disrupts our cortisol and adrenaline either to one of the stress type Patterns either too high cortisol and adrenaline, too low cortisol and adrenaline, or so on. This imbalance of cortisol and adrenaline sends off, sends off track the signaling on your vagus nerve into your nervous system and through your cortisol to your digestion. Now, you're not digesting well. You've got leaky gut. And not only that, the leaky gut is causing inflammation. And this, all this imbalance is imbalancing your gut bacteria. Right? We know we have these trillions of bacteria that live really all over our bodies and especially in our intestines. And these gut bacteria do so many good things for us. They make nutrients for us, they make neurotransmitters, they signal to our immune system. It's been demonstrated that the health of your gut bacteria determine the likelihood of other infections, whether acute infections like Covid and other viruses or chronic viruses like Epstein Barr virus and HPV virus. It's also associated with autoimmune disease. So the health of your gut bacteria, if they're out of balance, you're more likely to have allergies, autoimmunity, asthma, eczema, all different kinds of health issues, including anxiety and depression. They now have correlated imbalance of gut bacteria with also dementia. Right. So so many health issues are associated with our gut health, and our gut health is completely associated with how well we're recovering from stress. So if you're under all this stress and you might not even have any digestive issues, by the way, most people who I identify with these gut brain issues, they, they say, I ask them how you're your digestion feeling, and they're like, my digestion feels fine. Like, you might, you might be. You're like, I don't never get a stomachache. I don't feel bloated. I. My bowel movements are regular. And still there may be imbalance in your gut bacteria and there may be leaky gut because it doesn't always show up as digestive symptoms. Now, some people do have some. If you have heartburn and bloating and burping or diarrhea or constipation, then the likelihood is even higher. I could say definitely. We need to find out, we need to find out the degree of leaky gut. Is it mild, moderate, or severe? And let's test your gut bacteria because there's also a DNA analysis stool panel, so we can actually see who's living in your gut. I can see exactly if there's high or low of gut bacteria, and we can see if there's overgrowing yeast. And we can see if there's other microbes that are overgrowing. We can see how well you're digesting your food. These are not. This is not a panel run. Unfortunately, it's not integrated in the conventional medical system. So you're not going to get it at the regular doctor's office. This is not going to be covered by insurance. But it's so worth it for your health to invest if you not. I'm not saying don't go to the gastroenterologist, definitely, if you have digestive issues, go to the gastroenterologist and have them do their workup. But oftentimes they will do the workup and they will find that they don't see anything wrong. But when I do these other tests, we can see what's going on because these tests are showing us the doctors aren't testing for leaky gut. They don't have a good test for leaky gut. But I can tell you the best test for leaky gut, and this is with my 22 years of experience doing this and for my own health and my thousands of patients, is this specific food sensitivity test. I'll put a link for you. And if we want to know about your gut bacteria, I can tell you the test that currently exists. That's the best test to understand if your gut bacteria are out of balance. And what I'll do is over years, when they come out with better tests, I'll tell you. But these are the tests at this point in time that are giving us the best information. And then what I do is I work with you either one on one or in one of my group online programs to help you solve this, because you shouldn't have to do this on your own. I've learned this through so much experience. You shouldn't have to go do all of that and recreate the wheel yourself. You have me to help you, and I can help you from, by zoom or phone from wherever you are in the world. And I can work with you in my group programs from wherever you are in the world. So we should not be limited by time and space or location. We can do this. We. You don't have to work with me in person in my office where you know where some patients do. If you're local, you can come in person, but it doesn't have to be. And we can do these tests. You can do these tests from home. So you're like, yes, I need this information about. You think your gut brain axis is challenged and needing Help healing it. We can do that. This is solvable. I want you to know that, like, that's why you'll hear me say that. I really see that chronic health issues can be solved because we can get the information we need. We can see whether your cortisol is too high or too low. We can see whether your adrenaline is too high or too low. We can see what degree of leaky gut you have. We can see whether there's imbalance in the gut bacteria, and then I can help you to address them. These things can be addressed. If cortisol is too high or too low, we can look in the research at nutrients and herbs that help get it back on track. And you can use those nutrients and herbs that get cortisol that's too high back into range, or cortisol that's too low back into range, or adrenaline that's too high or too low. We can address that with nutrients too. And we can. If you have leaky gut, I can show you how to heal that. I have a whole program to help with that protocol that I can teach you. If your gut bacteria are out of balance, I can help you with that too. There's amazing products that exist that don't cause other problems, that don't have side effects that actually help solve the issue. So I see patients who had chronic anxiety and other mental health issues and now they're feeling better. They're not needing as much or they're not needing the medications they needed before. They are. The, their autoimmunity is going away, their chronic viral infections are going away because we're actually helping your body heal. And so part of this is I want to go back to the vagus nerve here that, as I mentioned, we can on purpose signal to the vagus nerve. So that means you, if you have, if. Imagine if you had a button in your nervous system where you could you just like, I just want to hit the reset button. I just want to. Want to be able to hit the anti stress button. I mean, we have plenty of stress and we know we're not gonna be able to eliminate all the stress that's part of being human. So we can't. The, the goal is not to eliminate all the stress. I mean, certainly we can reduce our stress, but we're not gonna try to eliminate all the stress. But what we can do is we can signal to the anti stress system on purpose. And ways you can do that include breath work. And there's a lot of different ways to do breath work and maybe some of you have studied different ways, but I encourage you just to start with. We call sometimes it's called box breathing. We also use this in meditation and biofeedback. And it's just simply to take a nice deep breath. So you can close your eyes if you'd like, while you're listening and take a nice deep breath in. And then you take a nice deep breath out.

And you can repeat that. You can breathe in for the count of four and breathe out for the count of four. And as you take these deep breaths, you're actually signaling to your vagus nerve to signal parasympathetic nervous system to calm so you can digest your food better. So I encourage you, before you sit down to eat, take a few deep breaths. Just take a couple minutes and take a couple deep breaths and signal to your digestion and your vagus nerve that it's time to digest.

Ah, amazing how that works, right? Just simply taking breaths. And I know that when we're under a lot of stress, sometimes it seems impossible to take a couple deep breaths. So at first you might have to just really start small. Start with a small breath and start just with little practice. And little by little you'll be like, oh my gosh, I can breathe again. And of course, we were breathing along anyway, but it's just bringing our attention to the breathing. Right? Another way you can signal to the vagus nerve is with gargling. If you just gargle water, even you're signaling to the vagus nerve or by singing, by humming, also by even any kind of stimulation to your. In your throat, right? So breathing, gargling, singing, hummingbirds. Also, you can signal to the vagus nerve by putting cold on your forehead. So like a cold washcloth on your forehead signals to the vagus nerve? Yes, you can also do. You'll hear about people doing cold water therapy where you're getting in a tub of cold water or taking a. When you get in a shower, turn the water to cold for 30 seconds. This also signals to the vagus nerve. So you can do that. But I usually always think with our nervous system, our nervous system is stressed. We don't want to stress it with some thing like immediate cold exposure. I feel like a better way to heal our nervous system is to go slowly, gently, with compassion, right? So we want to teach our nervous system we can be gentle and it can be safe. So we want to start with just some nice deep breaths until we can go, oh, that feels good. Okay, now our nervous system is starting to realize that it can Signal into the calming response. Okay, maybe now we start with humming something gentle like singing that feels safe. Maybe you can feel okay with a cold washcloth on your or maybe just a cool washcloth to begin with, changing temperature in gentle ways. And then if you're like okay, this is maybe over several weeks or even months, then you might be like, okay, now maybe I can consider putting my whole body in colder water, a little bit colder water. So you go gradually. We don't need to go fast and we don't need to. That's, I think one of the biggest challenges for us humans to realize is that we're so used to going harder, longer, stronger, we're so willing to do more. But actually the healing for our nervous system and for our gut brain axis goes much better when we take it slow. So one of the main things I do in my programs with my patients is teaching you to come back into alignment with the rhythm of your body and the rhythm of healing. What is that rhythm for you? And it can be different for each person. This also is why it's important to know your stress type. In my book Master your stress, reset your health, I talk about knowing your stress type so that you can implement self care and stress recovery based on your stress type. Which means learning and having awareness for your body and learning the rhythm of your vagus nerve and letting your vagus learn a new pattern in your life and learning that it can be safe, it doesn't have to go in fight or flight mode all the time. Okay. So oh my gosh, I'm excited for all of you to be learning this and listening to this and it's getting dark where I am. So I don't, I'm, I'm like, oh my God, it's going to get dark in this video. But that's okay. I'm glad for you too. This is true. Even our exposure to light and darkness is information to our nervous system, right? Like it's realizing that, oh my gosh, our nervous system really just needs more signals, safety signals than our nervous system actually really benefits from the signals of, from coldness to warmth, from darkness to light, and from lightness to dark. The more we expose our nervous system to these signals from nature, right? These are natural signals from nature that when we give our body and our nervous system those signals, it learns to trust again. It learns to trust us again and learns to trust that we're going to give it what it needs. Including, I want to come back to eating food in a safe way. So I want to Encourage you to also think about and make sure that you're feeding yourself and your nervous system in a way that it can know that it's safe to receive the food, to digest the food, to process the food so that it doesn't have to trigger an immune response and an inflammatory response to protect you from your own food, Right? So what I encourage you to do, and this is what I teach in my programs, is take some deep breaths before you eat, take some deep breaths after you eat, right? You don't want to take a deep breath right when you're chewing because then you might choke, right? So, so take deep breaths and chew well. Use the chewing to signal to your body it's time to digest. It's time to make digestive enzymes. It's time to process this food and absorb the nutrients. It's time to grow healthy intestinal cells. And the gut bacteria get those signals too. Because when the gut bacteria are getting stress signals, they end up sending out toxins. And we, and if we're not digesting our food well, we end up overfeeding certain bacteria and those overfed bacteria make toxins and those tox then spread out into our body and make us feel worse. And those toxins and those gut bacteria signal to our nervous system to create cravings to eat the food that benefits them, not us. So if you find yourself eating foods, you're like, why do I have this craving for this sweet food or this carb again, or this even sometimes it's fruit. Because these bacteria will live off of fiber that comes from fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds, for example. So if you, you might even be finding yourself of eating more fruit and vegetables and nuts and seeds your body can possibly digest and absorb, then it's only overfeeding your gut bacteria. In fact, the most common scenario of patients that I find have overgrowing gut bacteria are patients who are plant based because they're overeating the fiber that feeds their bacteria. And so you have to be really careful if you're plant based. I eat plant based fiber small periods of time. And then I go back to not plant based. Because if we over consume plant based foods, we end up overfeeding our gut bacteria and then we get the bloating and the gas and the burping because the bacteria are being overfed and people are like, yeah, but it's healthy. Food is healthy food. But if we eat too much of it at one sitting and we're under too much stress and we're not digesting it well, we end it ends up working against us. And so sometimes we need to go back and revisit and say, what is the quantity of food? Even the quantity of healthy food that I can eat in one sitting, that I can actually digest, actually absorb the nutrients, and they'll be plenty for your gut bacteria. These gut bacteria don't require very much food. They're like goldfish. I say, you know, goldfish only needs a little sprinkle of goldfish food. It doesn't need a whole huge gut amount of food every meal. So eat in small quantities. Make sure you're getting enough protein and healthy fat with your meals. Even if you're plant based, you still need adequate protein and fat. The healthy protein is where we get amino acids for our neurotransmitters and much more. And the healthy fat is so important for our nervous system, our skin, our cells, everywhere in the body. So it's very important if you're plant based that you're still getting and it's easy get enough carbs, but it's harder. You have to focus on how am I going to get enough protein and fat and how to make sure you're signaling to your vagus nerve so that you're digesting well, you're absorbing your nutrients so you're not reacting to your food and you and your gut bacteria are not getting overfed. Now you're signaling your vagus nerve to reset and you're helping your gut brain axis recover from stress. Thanks so much for joining me. I hope this was helpful. Please write into me your comments, anything that you'd like for me to cover more. And definitely subscribe to this How Humans Heal wherever you're listening so that you hear from me when the next episode comes out. You can also subscribe to my newsletter so that you can hear from me every week with the latest podcast and blog articles and other updates from me. Thanks so much for joining me and I look forward to talking to you again soon.

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