The Importance of Self C.A.R.E. with Dr. Doni | How Humans Heal Podcast

Hi and welcome. I'm Dr. Donnie Wilson and this is how humans heal. I'm so glad you're joining me today for this episode where I'm going to be talking about self care and I'm going to be talking about what it is to go on a retreat. So the thing is, I've been noticing that term self care being used way more lately and I'm excited about that. I think that's a good thing. But I also think it helps to talk through what is really self care. What does that mean to us and how can it benefit our health as well as what is a retreat and how can that benefit our health? So what do you say? Let's look into it some more. So I also want to look into these related to what we've just experienced in the pandemic and now post pandemic. What did we learn about self care and taking breaks during the retreat, during the pandemic and how is that going to influence how we take care of ourselves now that the pandemic is really past? So I want to start by just talking about self care. What is it? And a lot of times I think we refer to it as just from a basic level is taking care of ourselves, which ultimately we do every day anyway, right? We get dressed, we eat, we brush our teeth, we go to sleep. Some of this is our essential self care and daily activities. This is actually something that's monitored. When someone has a brain injury or other kind of injury in their life, one of the ways we evaluate how well they're functioning is how well they can do their self care. So that's kind of a basic sense of what it is. And I think that now we're hearing about it a lot because for many years, probably decades actually, self care was downplayed. We were, the messaging was a lot about putting the emphasis on paying attention and taking care of others and less so about taking care of ourselves. We were taught that self care was pampering or kind of a bonus, an extra, even potentially someone who's being lazy or, or just sitting on the couch eating bonbons. Right. Would be kind of like, is that what self care is? And I would say it's not necessarily just, you know, doing these pampering activities. It's more than that. It's really about doing the activities that are going to help you experience the essence of taking care of yourself, which involves self compassion and self prioritization of your time and your resources to do what it is that not only that you want to do. But what would be beneficial to your health. And so I think we're starting to see self care used more in that way as a way of understanding what is it that we can do to take better care of ourselves. Because ultimately we are the ones to take care of ourselves. We have other people in our life, but when it comes down to it, really, the main person we can each depend on for our health and our wellness is ourselves. And so I think more and more people are realizing that and realizing, wow, if I'm not filling my own cup, so to speak, if I'm not taking care of myself in terms of even just the basics of food and water and shelter, if I'm not able to prioritize that, then I'm not gonna be able to help anyone else. And so even if our goal is to be able to serve others and help others, we first need to make sure we're taking care of ourselves. And even beyond just the essentials of food and water and shelter, there's many other aspects of taking care of ourselves that can really change our health. Because what research shows us is the people who do a better job of taking care of their selves, they actually have longer and health. So if you're listening in and you're like, yeah, I want a longer and healthier life, then I encourage you to start evaluating your current level of self care and thinking about how you might want to improve it. Now, I always like to come at everything with a sense of acceptance and unconditionality because I believe that if we are, as soon as we have a high expectation of ourselves, as soon as we're being hard on ourselves or judging ourselves even for a lack of self care, now we're just piling stress on top of stress. So I want to warn you against that. If you find this critical voice saying, oh, I'm not doing enough self care in a critical voice kind of way, then I encourage you to take a breath and let that critical voice set aside and come back to your more loving, compassionate voice. That's saying, hey, yeah, I deserve and I want to take better care of myself. And it's not because it's not in opposition to what somebody else else is doing, it's because you're choosing it for yourself. And so automatically the prioritization of self care involves a shift in our mindset related to our communication with ourselves that we accept that we are humans, we accept that we do need taking care of. We're not robots. Even if we were robots, robots would probably need some care. Also but we're not robots, we're humans. And humans have a built in stress response system. We don't even have to try to have a stress response. Our bodies are automatically going to respond to stress and our bodies will attempt to recover from stress also. But the problem is, is that we tend to have lives where we keep on choosing into stress. It's way easier for us to and more familiar to be under a constant state of stress. And we are not taught that we need to counterbalance that with anti stress. And so I encourage you to just not notice. Are you feeling in your life like it's. You might not even feel stressed per se, but if you just know that your day is busy from the minute you wake up to the minute you go to sleep and you start to think about, wow, do I actually have time to do things beyond the basics? Do you actually have time to make sure you're getting at least seven and a half hours of sleep? Do you have time to go to a grocery store or at least order food online that's healthier for you? Do you have time to do activities like journaling, gardening, dancing, playing music, singing, spending time with friends and family? Do you have time for those things? Which sometimes if we're not doing self care, we might be perceiving those things as frivolous. Or maybe we just decide we're only going to do those things when we're on vacation or when it's a holiday. But the problem with that strategy is that first of all, holidays and vacations don't come along that often. It's not every week. And so we're often depleting ourselves waiting for this, finally having a vacation. Or when we finally do get to our holiday or vacation, it's also stressful. How many of you have been on a vacation or gone to a holiday event and then you're more exhausted when you return and you're like, now I need a vacation from my vacation, right? So that strategy really is inadequate. We need to be integrating our self care into our day to day, our week by week, our month, our usual means of going about our life. It needs to be fully integrated into what we're up to. And I only figured this out by going through it myself, only by going through medical school and training to deliver babies, only by running my own practice and businesses and by being a mom, a single mom, raising my daughter at the same time as going through health issues myself. And I would say to myself, how do I, when I go say away for a few days and we get that feeling where you can just take a breath and you're not so focused on what, what's, what's happening in the next five minutes, what's happening in the next hour, what's due tomorrow. Like you just can let go of that. You almost forget what day it is. And then I would come back to my usual daily schedule and I would think to myself how can I integrate this in, how can I maintain this same state in my usual life? And that became my mission, that became the question I woke up asking myself every day. How do I maintain a sense of being on vacation but while doing my usual life? And it took years of trial and error. So I want to really encourage you to say this is not something you're going to be perfect at on day one. In fact, I would try to set aside perfections. If you find yourself trying to perfect, be perfect, go. No, this is not about being perfect. This is about being human. This is about listening to your body, trying things, noticing how it feels, trying it different the next day. Notice how that feels and you fine tune it little by little by little over time. And that to me is where I've found the most success with integrating self care into my day to day activities. Now in my new book the Master your Stress Reset yout Health Book which you can see here over my shoulder and it's available on Amazon and other places where you might order books including Audible. In this master's dress book there's a whole section where I talk about self care and hundreds of research studies that tell us that self care benefits our health. Very specific forms of self care. I'm going to go into in more detail and I talk about how to create a self care routine. And then I came out with a journal or notebook that's a self care notebook to help you journal about your experience of implementing self care and learning along the way how to fine tune it for you. Because I really believe that self care is not one size fits all. It's what I do for self care may not be exact thing that's going to benefit you for self care. So we can use each other for ideas but ultimately you need to know your body and implement self care that's going to match for you. And what I argue in the book Master your Stress is that our self care is as unique as our stress type. Our stress type is the pattern that our body falls into when we're under constant stress. So when we're under constant stress our cortisol and adrenaline levels are not coming back to optimal the way we would like them to. Because studies show that when humans have optimal cortisol at different times a day and optimal adrenaline at different times a day, they have fewer health issues, they have less heart attacks, less cancer, less dementia, less, you name it, autoimmunity injuries, and they have improved productivity and quality of life. So we want that, right? We want to experience the positive. And the way we get that is by having optimal cortisol and optimal adrenaline. When we're under constant, constant stress, even if we don't feel stressed, we still can get our cortisol and adrenaline thrown off track. And when cortisol is either too high or too low, that creates your stress pattern or what I refer to as your stress type. You can do the stress type quiz in my book or on the website@drdani.com, we'll put a link for you. So you can do the stress type quiz if you haven't done it yet. So then you know likely whether your cortisone adrenaline is too high or too low. Once you know your stress type, then I can suggest the supplements that will help you optimize your cortisol and adrenaline. There are certain herbs that are good at bringing cortisol down that's too high and different herbs when cortisol is too low to bring it back up to optimal. And same with adrenaline, different nutrients based on what your adrenaline levels are. You can also order from my office a test. It's a home test, specialty test. You pay out of pocket and you measure your cortisol and adrenaline levels so you know exactly what your cortisol and adrenaline are up to. So that's also an option. And once you know your stress type, then you can use your supplements to get it to optimal and you can fine tune your self care to based on your stress type. Again, it's not one size fits all. Now I use the acronym CARE to help us fine tune and really go into detail about how do we take better care of ourselves. C is for clean eating. This can be everything from even just avoiding foods that are more stressful to our body's processed foods, choosing whole foods, avoiding pesticides by choosing organic foods, avoiding things like sugar that we know disrupts our blood sugar and is inflammatory to our bodies, avoiding food sensitivities that are inflammatory like gluten and dairy, or doing a food sensitivity test so you can know exactly which foods are inflammatory for you and whether you have leaky gut which is caused by stress. So we can really fine tune our diet even the intervals of eating, the balance of macronutrients, and how long we fast overnight. That all is unique to you and determined by your stress type. The A in care is for adequate sleep. So much of the time we're not getting enough sleep, whether that's because we have a baby or child who's waking us or an an animal who's waking us, or we have too much on our to do list, or our nervous system is waking us up. So we need to figure out if you're not getting good sleep, we need to figure out why and address it so that you can get that sleep. The sleep is when we do so much recovery. We know our nervous system recovers while we sleep, but so does the rest of our body. All kinds of rest and repair occurs and hormone resets are happening. We need. There's so much to get done while we sleep. It's essential. So that's why this. A in CARE stands for adequate sleep. R is for recovery activities. And this includes everything from just taking a break, even if it's just to have some quiet to yourself, to spending time in nature, spending time with pets, spending time with loved ones, music, dancing, meditation, yoga, and even substances like psychedelic substances and peptides, among others that help us recover from stress. The E in care stands for exercise. Here again, it's a matter of choosing what's the right type and duration and time of day for you to exercise based on your stress type. Because any of these care activities, actually, if we overdo it, then we could actually be causing more stress. That's right. There's such a thing as too much of a good thing. So even if exercise is good, but we overdo it, we're now raising our cortisol and causing more stress in our bodies. Even if having a fast overnight is good, if we fast for too long, that could be a stress on our bodies. So many things that we think about and we know are good for us, but if we do too much, it is the opposite effect. And this is something that's referred to as the Goldilocks principle, which is it's very tempting for us to choose black or white, right? We want to go for. And we always think that more is better. We were somehow taught that more is better. And actually when it comes to stress recovery, more is not necessarily better. We need to find just the right amount. Just like Goldilocks, right? She could go, is this too small? Is this too little, Is this too much? What's just the right amount for your body, which is unique to you and for you to experience stress recovery instead of additional stress. And so I argue that it's about self care, but it's also about self care based on your stress type and your unique body and the stress you've been exposed to in your past and the way your body responds to stress. So I encourage you to read the book, the Mastery of stress Book so you can learn all about this in more detail.

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

I wanted to mention again the studies related to taking breaks because I want to go into talking about whatever is a retreat. And why would we even choose a retreat? You see, even if you think about it, in a standard work day we're required to take breaks. Even at school, children are required to have a break or a recess, right? Or a lunch break. And sometimes when we're not in that kind of a sense, preset schedule, we end up not taking breaks. We keep going, going, going and thinking of the next thing we need to get done. And actually studies show that when we take breaks, even a short break, that we increase our productivity, we improve our health and we decrease illness. So we need to figure out, we need to learn how to take more breaks. So if I encourage you to evaluate how are you taking some breaks in your day? Especially if you're working from home or you're setting your own sched, or you're a student and you, you're, you're, you have a different schedule each day. Are you taking breaks? Do you, can you take five minutes? Start with something small. Can you take half an hour? This is how I did it. I had to start small with creating breaks in my day and my schedule. What if I could take a four hour break. How do I create that where nobody needs me, I'm not expected anywhere, I can do whatever I want. And at first you might feel like you're being lazy. But actually doing nothing is a really good thing for our nervous system. Our nervous system needs us to sometimes just do nothing or do something just very gentle and soothing. Maybe it's watching something that's very soothing to you or listening to something that's soothing to you, or just being in nature, being at the beach and listening to the waves. Right? So we need those breaks for our nervous system. And then I think you'll find when you go back to doing whatever you want to do, you're going to be more efficient at it and more productive and enjoy it more. So, you know, we can, it does require that we prioritize it in our schedule. We have to kind of even set a timer or put it on the calendar. If you have a calendar that's shared with other people, get used to it, get, just make it part of the automatic pattern in your day. And you know, maybe it's you take a five minute break every hour. Maybe it's that you take an hour break in the middle of the day. Maybe it's that you make sure that in your week you have a day where you don't have to do anything. Maybe it's that you even every month you get several days off or even be able to go to a retreat. A retreat is often used. It could be anywhere from one day to 10 days or longer, even a month. And a retreat is where we. The difference from a vacation is usually that in a retreat the focus is on self care. In general, it's about self discovery, self reflection. Sometimes a retreat involves a type of exercise like yoga. It might be a meditation retreat. It might be a retreat where you're spending time in nature. Maybe you're camping, maybe you're.

You'Re doing something else that's spending time in nature. Maybe you're. You. A retreat can also be combined with using a psychedelic substance. You could go to a country where, for example, a psychedelic substance like ayahuasca is legal. And you might combine diet changes with sleep and stress recovery activities as well as a psychedelic experience at the same time. Usually a retreat might also include music and journaling or maybe artwork like painting. So you're doing things that are all about helping you to have a break from your life and have time to reflect on your goals and your values and the things you've experienced and being able to Process them in a supportive environment without any distractions and sometimes without any devices like no phones or computers and definitely without any deadlines. It's all about just being able to relax and be in the moment and learn from the experience. So this might be something I want to encourage all of you if you haven't done that to think about. You can, you can find many different types of retreats available and I'm happy to, if you're interested, just let me know and I can share some ideas of retreats that I'm aware of. And I also have created an online retreat where it's called the seven Day Self Care Stress Reset Reset where you have seven days where I guide you through videos to change your diet and implement care as I've just described it. So that you can really take this as a chance to reset in your life. Even you can do it from home and you could even do it on a holiday weekend. You could do it. We're going to plan one live for the New year. So I hope, I hope you all can join me in that and I'll put a link for you to be able to sign up and join me for a new Year self care retreat online so that you can, you don't even have to travel to go to this retreat and help start to help you learn what that is and how it benefits you and then you can see if you want to choose more of that. I wanted to also mention this related to the pandemic because the thing I think that happened for a lot of people during the pandemic is that we were spending a lot more time at home and we learned that there is a lot of value of being able to not be constantly commuting and traveling that we can. What is it like to be in our home? What is the meaning of a home? And how did that reset our routine and our sense of self care? And from, from talking to so many people and patients, I've seen that there's a new awareness and understanding of what that is to take care of ourselves. In the case of the pandemic, a lot of it was preventing the exposure to a virus. But I actually think that it ended up teaching us about helping us to, helping us in many ways to take care of our health in terms of preventing a virus, but also in terms of preventing other health issues and also protect, you know, choosing differently. You know, when do we choose to go to an event? Say you're invited to something, is it something you really want to do? And how do we communicate A yes or a no. During the pandemic there was a we could say no because we could say no because of the pandemic. But now sometimes it gives us another chance to say hey, do I really want to go and participate in this activity? Maybe I do. Maybe it's going to benefit me and myself and my care for myself. Or maybe not. And how do I communicate that this might be something that I don't want to do? Learning how to say yes when it's the right thing for us and no when it's maybe something we don't want to do. And learning those boundaries. How do we know when what's the right choices for us based on our prioritization of our self care. So some of you may be still a little bit going through this process, post pandemic process of starting to feel more comfortable going out and traveling and spending time with others. And so I want to just.

Address that as well. You know that sometimes it because for so long we were at home and we were kind of teaching ourselves that that was the safest place. But now we need to reteach ourselves that there are safe ways to be around other people, to travel, to do things we love. Because we also know from research that if we're so isolated that's not necessarily good for our health else either that it's better if we can have exposure to other humans, to microbiome in the in the world, to community experiences, to adventure and to learning. And so really just to remind you that there are benefits of being able to take good care of ourselves at home and to then maintain that and carry that over to taking good care of ourselves when we go outside of our home and enjoy other locations and other people and learning how to communicate in a way where we can really protect ourselves. We can. By eating healthy, by getting good sleep, by taking the supplements that help us with stress recovery and supporting our immune system and exercising right, we're taking good self care. So then when we do go out into the world and have experiences with other people and other places, it can actually add to the benefit of our life and the benefit for our health. So really what I'm saying is that it's a lot about balance. A balance of activities, a balance of experiences, a balance of exposures, and really a balance of stress. Choosing the stress that is as best as possible for us and in line with our values and our purpose and also choosing an appropriate counterbalance of anti stress. How do we choose what we love and also choose to support ourselves while doing that. And again it's not something we've learned before. It's not something you should expect to do perfectly starting day one. It's not easy to achieve balance but I do believe that that's the goal. The goal is to practice self care and practice being ourselves, choosing what we love to do, communicating with others about it and learning each day how to find that balance. It's about a practice of self care. So thanks again all of you for joining me. I'd love to hear if you have any questions or comments or how this is inspiring you to implement more self care into your day to day routine. And please like and follow and subscribe to my newsletter so that you'll hear from me with the next episode. I can't wait to share my more with you. Take care.

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