The Power of Gratitude

Hi, and welcome to how humans heal. I'm Dr. Dolly Wilson, and I'm so glad you're joining me today for this episode about gratitude. I am a burnout expert and guide to help you to recover from stress while in the midst of stress. And that's one of the key differences about what I teach and what I help my patients to do when I help them to recover from whatever health issue they're experiencing is. I'm really coming from the point of view that it's the various sources of stress. We're exposed to emotional, physical toxins as stresses, infections, and injuries that cause the symptoms and health issues we experience. And so the best way to then reverse those health issues is to reverse the impact of stress. And so to do that, we first need to understand how stress is affecting you uniquely. And I start you off to do that by doing your finding out your stress type. And I developed a quiz called the Stress Type Quiz. I'll put the link so you can take that in case you haven't already discovered your stress type. And by knowing your stress type, we can understand how stress is impacting your cortisol and adrenaline levels, which are the stress hormones made by the adrenal glands. By understanding how stress has disrupted your cortisol and adrenaline, we have one key piece of the puzzle of solving the impact of stress on your system and how we can then optimize cortisol and adrenaline to get you recovered from stress, even if you are still. Of course, most all of us are still in the midst of stress day in and day out because we're humans, and humans are exposed to stress constantly. So it's not about avoiding all the stress, it's about helping us to recover from the stress. But we have to. In general, most times we want to individualize your approach to stress based on exactly how stress has caused imbalances in your body, mind, nervous system, and so on. So then where does gratitude come into play with this? And the way I think about gratitude is it's one of the tools we can use to help us recover from stress. And actually, one of the cool things about gratitude is that it works for all the stress types. Many things we have in our toolbox for stress recovery really need to be fine tuned and honed in. Certain herbs or nutrients are best for one stress type and not for another. But when it comes to gratitude, it works well for all different stress types. That means it's good for all humans to experience gratitude. The thing is, is that when we're most stressed, we're least likely to be able to experience gratitude, believe me, I've been there. I've been through burnout. I've been through anxiety, depression, physical pain. And I understand that when we're feeling awful, it's the hardest time to luster up some experience of gratitude. And so I want to talk you through that today. How can you start to bring more experience of gratitude into your life, into your experience, and explain to you the science behind gratitude, why you would want to do that, of all the possible treatments out there, but because believe me, I get it. When you're dealing with, for example, severe anxiety, pain, even autoimmunity, chronic infections like even HPV virus and risk of cancer, these things are looming and they're creating more stress. A lot of times our health issues create more stress. And it's hard to sort three down enough to say, what can I do to break this pattern and get out of this circling pattern of stress upon stress. And so that's what I want to help you to do. I want you to be able to get a big enough picture view to understand how do we start solving this? Because otherwise, if we're stuck in what the conventional medicine often creates, which is a cycle of fear and a focus on a diagnosis and a focus on things getting worse and not believing that things can get better, we're going to just spiral into the stress world more. We see what I mean? So to outsmart that and to reverse that, we have to be looking a different direction. We have to change our focus. We have to start realizing that it's possible for the human body to heal, it's possible to recover from stress, and we can intentionally start making choices down this other direction. This actually in the direction of recovery from stress and burnout, as well as recovery from many health issues that most times are thought irreversible. Things like autoimmunity and even diabetes and fertility issues. Do you name it? People are told are irreversible and unpreventable. And that's not what I see in my patients because we're focused on a different path. It's a path of supporting ourselves through the stress, supporting ourselves through the stress recovery. I use an acronym that's C.A.R.E. c A R E. And those of you who've been listening in, I'm first of all so grateful for you for being here and listening into these episodes. I that's one of my ways to start to share that feeling of gratitude and experience of gratitude. C A R E Care is C for clean eating. A A for adequate sleep. R for recovery activities. E for exercise. And these are the foundational steps for healing, for going down this other path. And when you. When you wake up each day, what are you focusing on? Instead of focusing on the fear and the negativity, we focus on care. How do we take better care of ourselves under stress? And it starts with how we're going to make diet changes, which you've heard other episodes from me about that. How do we get adequate sleep? How do we get recovery from stress within each and every day? And how do we start to get some exercise or movement into our daily routine? Okay, so in this episode, I'm especially focusing on the recovery activity called gratitude. And amazingly, there's quite a lot of research on it. I'll reference some studies in the episode notes, and I definitely reference some studies in the Master your Stress Reset your Health book, which is my most recent book about stress, how to master stress and recover from it to build resiliency. In this book, in the recovery section, there's all kinds of references about gratitude and what happens. I'm going to summarize the science for you here is that gratitude is really a healing medicine. It literally is a medicine that you can access within yourself without having to swallow a pill, without having to pay for anything. You can access it at any moment in time, 24 hours a day, and anywhere you're located. I mean, that's pretty amazing if you think about it. What kind of medicine is that accessible and that powerful that there's so many studies showing over and over again that it can help us not just in a mental, emotional. And I'm going to be talking about that in detail. It can help us on a mental, emotional level. It could also help us on a physical level. So gratitude is a powerful, powerful medicine. It's just that we have to first know that it's a medicine and we have to know how to access it and how to fit it into our daily routine so that it becomes something that we do automatically. And the more we learn how to choose gratitude and practice gratitude, the more it's like building a muscle. You go to the gym, you do bicep curls, you're growing your biceps, you practice gratitude, you build your gratitude muscle, and your nervous system learns how to do it and how to access it more and more automatically. You'll wake up just feeling gratitude without even having to try. So at first, it can seem like, okay, how am I going to do this? It seems kind of, like awkward at first. Believe me, I understand. But amazingly, the more you just get yourself into that mode of thinking what you feel grateful for, the more it's going to benefit your health. Again, what they show is that it's helping is most of the research is on anxiety and depression and improvement of mood. So that alone is good reason to practice gratitude, right? If, especially if you're experiencing anxiety and or depression or any version of mental health issues, gratitude been shown to help. It's also been shown to help with sleep issues. So any of you who are not falling asleep or staying asleep very well, any kind of insomnia, gratitude has been shown to help, right? So already if you're raising your hand like, yeah, I could use that. It also can help with any other stress related health issues because it's helping us recover from stress and stress is related to more than 90% of health issues. So if we do something that helps us recover from stress, it's going to help us reduce our health issues of all different types from autoimmunity, digestive issues, skin issues, hormone imbalances and chronic infections or cancer risk or dementia risk, you name it, it's going to help. So that's again, powerful medicine if it can help in so many different ways. And it has been shown to help us reduce experience of stress. But not only that, it specifically helps to optimize cortisol levels. Remember how I mentioned that what happens when we're under stress exposure, which we all are, it throws off our cortisol. Our cortisol goes too high or too low, it's in some people it's both. I see patients where sometimes they have low cortisol, sometimes in the day, and high cortisol different times a day. So it could be a combination of stress types. Anyway, when you have imbalanced cortisol, that's what ends up causing the health issues. And we know that when people have optimal cortisol levels, they live longer because they have less health issues. So we all should be aiming for optimal cortisol levels. And gratitude is one of the tools we can use to get there. It has been shown to help optimize cortisol levels. Amazing, right? Again, you don't even have to take a pillow. You can just practice gratitude and be on your way to solving this. It may not be the only thing you need, but it certainly is a tool that you should add to your toolbox and try to get into your daily self care routine. How is gratitude working? This is kind of a cool. If you're one of those people who always ask why? Why does it help? How is it Helping. What is it doing? They've actually, researchers have started to look at that and they've actually been able to demonstrate that it has an impact on some of our neuro, neurochemicals, our neurotransmitters, the messengers in our nervous system, specifically dopamine. Dopamine. I think of it as our brain power. Dopamine gives us the ability to think and make decisions and enjoy. It's also connected with reward and pleasure. And so we want to have adequate dopamine. We don't want too little, we don't want too much. We want just the right amount of dopamine to be able to be enjoying our day and being productive, including being productive at our work or whatever. We're doing it during the day. So we want adequate dopamine levels. And gratitude helps to stimulate dopamine levels. Now it's always one of these things where yes, there is such a thing as too much, but it's more likely for us to get too much dopamine by doing activities that are more overstimulating, like watching video games and staring at a phone device or substances. Certain substances can raise our dopamine too high or certain kind of like adrenaline stimulating activities can raise our dopamine. Sometimes just almost like going for junk food can raise our dopamine levels. So a lot of times you might find yourself seeking out an experience of dopamine in some of these other things we do that we know are not so healthy for us when really if we can, if we can teach ourselves to do gratitude instead, we can increase our dopamine without any negative consequences. So if you find yourself stress eating or going for certain activities, even addiction to sexual activities, I mean, of course any of these things in moderation can be okay, right? There's a healthy amount of activities that are going to be healthy for us humans. Even like for example, I love dancing. Dancing also increases dopamine, but it's a good thing. It's an exercise activity, right? So you want to choose the things that are going to help and not overdo the things that work against you. If we overeat the, then we're going to, that's going to work against us, right? We need just the right amount of food, we need just the right amount of physical activity and we need just the right of gratitude. Just the amount of gratitude. The issue is that we often forget about gratitude, especially when we don't feel good. And so this is a reminder to say, come back to gratitude. Don't forget about gratitude. It's A powerful, powerful tool. 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. So gratitude also increases serotonin and it increases oxytocin. Oxytocin is what we usually think of as a bonding hormone, the love hormone. In fact, we know now that both men and women have oxytocin and benefit from oxytocin. I think about it as one of our anti stress hormones. And what better if we already have plenty of stress hormones around like cortisol and adrenaline, but we're locking in oxytocin. So how do we boost our oxytocin? Well, there's different ways. We can. We. You can boost oxytocin by hugging someone you love. You can boost oxytocin by spending time with a pet. You can also boost oxytocin with dancing, as I mentioned before. And you can boost oxytocin by practicing gratitude. So how wonderful that we can, with practicing gratitude, boost our anti stress hormone, oxytocin as well as endorphins in general. Endorphins are also anti stress, anti pain messengers in our bodies. And so they're beautiful things that get stimulated when we do amazing things like practicing gratitude. So this can be so simple and yet effective. And then you go, oh well, no wonder. It improves our mood and reduces our stress. And if we're doing something that encourages our anti stress hormones. Now the other thing that I want to mention because it brings us back to understanding the effects of stress and how we can counteract it when we experience a stress response. Right? So whether this stress response is because the alarm just went off or some people, it might be because like let's say you were in a medical procedure, maybe you, maybe I was talking to a patient who just had a baby and, and she was in the hospital and sometimes in the labor process, it can Be very stressful. Here you are having this precious newborn you're bringing into the world and there's a lot of unknowns and unpredictability and, and worries. Okay, is the baby doing okay? What else do we need to do to deliver this baby safely? And so definitely it can trigger a stress response in the labor process. I don't know, some of you listening experience that when you went through labor. Also it could be other things. Maybe you're moving your home, maybe you. It's a beautiful thing, you're moving to a new home. But that requires that you go through everything in your current home and go through all the tasks and process of packing your things and moving to a new location, all of the different paperwork and get yourself there. And now unpack. It's one of the most stressful things us humans do, is move from one home to another. Were going to definitely trigger a stress response. Or my patients who are going through getting married, even if it's a small wedding and with family and friends, getting married can definitely trigger your stress response. Whether you realize it or not. You might be like, hey, I feel fine. But actually on the inside it's a stress response. Because any kind of change for humans, whether we're changing locations, maybe we're traveling to different places in the world, changing time zones, maybe we're changing our role, maybe we're changing our relationship, maybe we're making a commitment to another human or breaking a commitment to another human. All of these things have the potential to trigger a stress response. And what does that mean? A stress response is when our brain picks up on stress and it sends a signal to our what's called autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system carries both the stress highway. Think about it as a highway, the stress highway that heads toward adrenaline and cortisol and it has the potential for the anti stress highway. That anti stress highway is traveling on what's called the vagus nerve and it goes both directions. Right? The brain is sending out a stress anti stress signal and the anti stress from the body can come back to the brain. That's some of the really cool research is when we look at how do we counteract stress, right? Stress is going to happen. We don't really have to worry about making sure we're going to have a stress response that's already happening. Right. I think we all can agree we've got that part down. What we need work on is how do we emphasize how do we implement and how do we choose intentionally the anti stress pathway this other pathway that travels on the vagus nerve. How do we communicate on that pathway? Because we need that muscle to counteract the stress muscle. And one of the ways to do that is to help with the signaling along the vagus nerve. And there's many ways to help on the communication on the vagus nerve, which is again called the, that's holding the parasympathetic, it's communicating the parasympathetic or anti stress nervous system. And some of the ways that work is taking deep breaths. So one thing you can do, and this is part of just teaching you things you can do in the moment when you're feeling stressed, is take a couple deep breaths. Now at first, when you're feeling really stressed, it feels like you can't even take a breath. So you start with a slow breath, start with whatever kind of breath you can take. Just bring your attention to your breath. How does that feel when you breathe in? How does that feel when you breathe out? And as you bring your focus to your breath, you're teaching your brain that you, you get to choose. You're the one choosing what your brain's going to focus on. And you say brain, I want to focus on my breath for a couple minutes. Let me just see what it feels like to inhale and, and feel air in my lungs and exhale and feel air coming out of my lungs. Now you're, you're telling your brain where you want to focus. That's the beginning of this. From there you can decide maybe you want to sing, maybe you want to hum, maybe you want to put on music. It's calming this intentionality behind using our voice and, and singing and exposing ourselves to music, also very healing to the vagus nerve. So then we can say, what if we now add to this experience of breath and focus on our heart? Now we're crossing into something called biofeedback. I'm trained in heart mass biofeedback, but this is used in many other forms of medicine, including meditation and other forms of mindfulness. We bring our focus to our heart. Why do we bring our focus to our heart? Well, the heart, lo and behold, makes the love hormone called oxytocin. I taught you about the anti stress hormone. And when we bring our focus to our heart, we can then send more signals, anti stress signals to our brain. So we're essentially, by bringing our focus to our heart and stimulating oxytocin, we're essentially turning off the stress signal. We're saying we don't want to be worrying about every Last thing at this moment, we need a break. Let me turn on the anti stress pathway and I can do that by simply putting my hand on my heart. And then the next thing you can do is think about something you feel grateful for that could be anything. This could be anything you feel grateful for. This could literally be being grateful for this video or for this day or for this moment in time, or the fact that you have this amazing body that you have been able to live your life in. This could be gratitude for your pet or a family member or friend. It could be someone who's not even alive now. It could be someone who was part of your life in the past. It could be gratitude for the sun, the trees.

Anything. You start anywhere essentially with gratitude that there's. You set aside your perfectionism and you get in touch with your intuition. What just comes to you when you think of what do you feel grateful for? Because you want to be simple, quick and easy, whatever comes to your mind. First think of what do I feel gratitude for in this moment? And as you literally as you have that thought, amazingly our thoughts, our body experiences as real. So as soon as we intentionally have a thought about something we have, we feel grateful for. Not only is that thought shifting all of the neurotransmitters we just talked about, but that thought is literally shifting the energy that's coming from your heart back up to your brain. Literally. If we talk about it in terms of quantum physics, we can even see the frequency and vibration shift. When they're measuring in eeg, they can measure brain waves and they can actually see a change in the brain waves when a person is thinking about something they feel grateful for. And that gratitude starts in your heart, goes to your brain, and completely starts to shift the patterns in the brain amazingly, right? So this simple thing that we call gratitude, feeling thankful for something, can actually create shifts very quickly. And you don't even have to be practicing gratitude all day long. Even if you just simply start with a short list of what you feel grateful for. Maybe when you wake up in the morning, or maybe if you feel overwhelmed in the day or before you go to bed, or all of the above. These are ways that you can start to integrate gratitude into your life. Now there's something called like journaling about, about gratitude. And I like to use my self care notebook for this. I pull out their self care notebook and I'll just write about what am I so grateful for and just write it down wherever. I mean it could whatever journal you have. But I love to use I give my patients a self care notebook for them to start to practice gratitude. And literally writing it down can actually help. So you can think it, you can have a thought about gratitude and that's powerful thought. And then when you write it down, it even gets more power toward the effectiveness of gratitude. You can also, you know, speak it to the people in your life. Use this as an opportunity to express your gratitude. We used to always write thank you notes, right? But sometimes we're not writing thank you notes so much anymore. But maybe we need to bring back the thank you notes and the thank you text messages and the thank you emails. Anytime you feel grateful for someone in your life, I encourage you to just say that to them. Sometimes we feel like we have to give a gift and give money, which is beautiful too. But simply speaking or expressing your gratitude benefits you and the person you express gratitude toward because now they are getting the experience of feeling that connection and appreciation. So you're actually feeling the gratitude yourself, you're getting the benefit and then you're giving that benefit to others in your life, which is a beautiful thing. So expressing gratitude and finding more ways to do that and allowing it, I think sometimes we, we just weren't taught this, so we end up not knowing how to do it right. We don't really know how to express gratitude well. And so it takes practice. We just have to learn how to feel it. What does that feel like to feel grateful and what does that feel like? How do we express it to another person in a way that feels safe? And actually when you express gratitude, it sends safety signals to your nervous system. So I encourage you to just give it a try. Actually, one of the things that has taught me the most about gratitude and this is, I mean, I've learned about gratitude in many different ways. I think meditation is a beautiful way. I'm definitely experienced beautiful levels of gratitude while in meditation. But the one that I was thinking of, that I wanted to share is in psychedelic experiences. Some of you may know that I have traveled in different areas of the world to experience different psychedelic plant medicines for. Because I'm constantly loving to travel and research other cultures and types of medicine and in the use of psychedelic medicine such as ayahuasca and psilocybin. One of the main benefits I have experienced is an immense sense of gratitude. So if you're ever interested in or called to using psychedelic medicines, even in micro doses, I encourage you to listen more. I have more episodes about that here and blog articles and I'm happy to connect with anyone to help you get more information. Psychedelic medicines work on our nervous system also as anti stress medicines to help us reset the stress response and recover from stress and trauma. And one of the ways they do that is by increasing our sense of of gratitude. So there's been times when I've been in a psychedelic retreat or ceremony and had experiences of being filled with a sense of gratitude. Literally tears pouring out of my eyes, feeling like my heart is so open and warm, and literally feeling more gratitude for the people in my life and the pain patients I've been able to help and the patients that have taught me so much about all of this. I wouldn't have all of this knowledge or experience without the people who come and trusted me to help them with their health. And so I feel such a huge amount of gratitude for all of you who are listening in, who are joining me here, who are reading my book and practicing these things that I'm teaching and benefiting from it because that's what I love to do. I love to be able to provide this information so people can benefit. And when people do get to benefit from it, I feel a huge amount of gratitude for that connection that we have and that inspiration for healing and empowerment that healing is possible. So far as your son love, I'm hoping that helps you get a sense of what gratitude can feel, feel like and look like and to see how it can be expressed to say thank you. You mean a lot to me and you've made a big difference in my life and I'm so grateful for the people who have been able to be there to support me in my process. And I'm here to express that gratitude so that we can all really learn what that's like, to intentionally choose gratitude and benefit from it. So thank you again so much for joining me here at How Humans Heal. If you have not already, I would love for you to subscribe and join my newsletter list so that you hear when the next episode comes out. I will be here as your stress and burnout recovery expert to help you every step of the way to understand stress, how it impacts us, and how you can take steps to recover from stress and in doing so reverse so many other possible health issues that you might be dealing with and at the same time increase your longevity. So thanks again for joining me and I'll see you in the next episode.

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