Understanding Your Stress Pattern

The information provided in this podcast is educational and not intended to diagnose or treat medical conditions. Dr. Donni Wilson struggled for decades to solve her numerous health issues and heal her body. But with focused determination, she healed herself. And in doing so, she discovered the Dr. Donnie stress recovery Protocol. On this show, you're going to hear from doctors, nutritionists and Experts along with Dr. Donnie, who will give practical advice and wisdom to help heal your body. This is how humans heal.

Hey guys.

This episode is from one of Dr. Donnie's live Facebook streams where she answered listeners questions live on Facebook.

I feel like I'm a student of stress and a student of how stress affects humans. And so I love get to interact with all of you because I look at it as just really opportunity to understand how stress affects each of you differently. Like, I mean, yes, we're all human and we all have somewhat similar stresses probably to some degree. I mean, there's so many different types of stresses out there. Usually when we talk about stress, we think of things like divorce or moving from one house to a new house or a different state or a different country, or the stress of the death of a loved one or family member or even a pet is definitely a stress. Those are some of the ones that are more obvious to us. Right. And those are human experiences that we most all do have in our lifetime. We don't always have the experience of going through a pandemic, but now all of us have done that. And that's definitely going to be added to the list of possible stresses that we didn't even know probably in the past. If you had asked me a year ago, I wouldn't even had that on the list or thought about it. And there's also stress certainly with sometimes stress in relationships at home or relationships at work, even just work in general can be stressful if you have a lot of demands at your work, a lot of deadlines. I know that I a lot of times hear from people who work in, let's say journalism where they have a lot of deadlines and they have to get the story done by a certain time or in the financial world or right now the accountants, because tax season shifted to July. I think this is the most stressful time of year for accounting offices. Right. Trying to get the taxes all done. So work can be really a stress. Or even if it's, say you're a performer, a musician or an artist, then you have the stress of auditions and are you going to get the part and then how to make sure you have everything prepared for your performance. If you're a teacher, there's a lot of stress with needing to be prepared for your students and meeting all of the criteria that come along with being a teacher. Right. So I just know that with a lot of different positions at work, there's stress. I mean, even, you know, every job, right? Even just like my daughter right now, she's working for a Italian restaurant. And I can even see the stress there where you're. Sometimes you're just trying to do your best customer service and get what people ordered for their food out at the time they need it. And, you know, sometimes we can feel stress with, you know, with many different things that we possibly do during the day, Even stress with parenting, right? Like we. So this is the thing is we can't. It's not like we're going to try to avoid all these stresses. You know, we. Many of you likely want to be parenting children, and it's okay to acknowledge that there's some stress that goes along with all of these things. Being in a relationship, having a job, being human is gonna have stress involved. So part of it, I think, is realizing that there's nothing wrong with you or wrong with the situation when you're experiencing stress to realize that's a human thing. In fact, humans are built to deal with stress. That's one way I think about it is like, really our brains pick up our kind of stress radar system picks up on stress constantly. Stress, not only even in psychological stress, but also there can be stress from changes in light exposure or sounds can be a stress or even toxins in our environment. Something we smell could be a stress.

Even an injury or an infection can be a stress. So stress comes in so many forms, but that's what our bodies are built to do. Our brains are built to notice things that are stressful. Our immune system is meant to help protect us from things that are stressful.

Our bodies are built for stress. Our brain then triggers the adrenal glands to make cortisol and adrenaline and respond to stress. Right? So I see a question here. Is stress and anxiety the same thing?

And.

You know, I would say that anxiety is a feeling, right? Like a worry or nervous or a mind racing. So when we usually say the term anxiety, we're referring to the mental state of it's triggered by stress. And I think sometimes they're used a little bit interchangeably, right? Like, I think sometimes we. Some people might say, I'm feeling stressed. And really what they're probably feeling is maybe anxious, nervous, worried, but they might Also feel kind of like, tense. Right? Those are another words we use. Or kind of like heart racing, maybe brain fog.

You guys give me some words, too. Like, if. How does it feel to you when you feel stressed? Does it. Would you describe it as anxiety? Or would you describe it as something else? That'd be kind of interesting to see if we have different words to describe a similar experience. Right. Because it can be, you know, different, feel slightly different for each person. Again, that's one thing that I find really interesting is that while we know that there's a kind of. In physiology and what we learned from this physiologist named, an endocrinologist named Hans Selye back in history, back in the early 1900s, he studied stress and how it affects humans. And what he taught us is that there's a sequence of responses that the human body has. You know, at first, it's this, what we usually think of as a fight or flight, you know, where we. Our mind races, our heart races, our blood's pumping, we're ready to respond, or sometimes we freeze. But either way, that's kind of this initial alarm phase, he called it, of stress response. And then after that, there can be kind of an adaptation phase where the body's still making cortisol and adrenaline, but it's kind of like figuring out if it needs to still respond. And then there can be an exhaustion phase. If a person's exposed to a lot of stress, they can get to an exhaustion phase where the body is no longer producing the same cortisol and adrenaline response. And understanding that stress stages like that can be helpful in just understanding that we have a stress response. And it can vary over time and at different times. What I find is that working with patients, I want to see how that particular patient is responding to stress at that moment in time. So I want to know what is your cortisol and adrenaline right now based on your current stress exposure? And so that can be very unique. So as I test these levels, we test for cortisol levels, we test for adrenaline. We also can test for the other neurotransmitter levels in urine. And when we measure these, we can really start to see patterns. You would think that everybody would be the same, right? We'd be like, oh, well, we're all human. We probably all have high cortisol or we all have high adrenaline. But actually, that's not the case. Even in the past three months, of the people that I've checked their cortisol and adrenaline levels, they're not all the same. They don't all come back with high cortisol. They don't all come back with high adrenaline. There's some really unique patterns that show up. And I'm researching this more and defining what I'm calling stress types. So we can understand your stress type or what your body does when you're stressed, which can be very different from what the next person's body does when it's stressed. And so one of the stress types. So I'm going to just talk it through a little bit with you and tell me if you can relate. Tell me if some of these words match your experience and start to kind of help you understand your body better. Because here's the thing is, when you understand how your body responds, when you understand your stress symptoms, but also your stress type, if you understand if your cortisol is high or low, is your adrenaline high or low, the more you understand about your body, the more you'll know what to do to help it when it's under stress. Like, what are going to be the solutions that help you rebalance and recover from stress? Because really, when it comes to health.

When it comes to preventing stress from causing health issues, because we do know from studies that a very high percentage of health issues, it's over 75%, if not 80 or 90%, of health issues, are to some degree caused by stress. So we don't want to be ignoring stress, but we also don't want to be afraid of stress. We want to be engaged in understanding how your body responds to stress so we can give your body what it needs. And again, it may be different for your body than someone else. Okay, let me just. Before I talk more about the unique stress types, let me just see your questions here. So I see.

I think of it as I get almost brain fogged with anxiety, hit, like, forget things, even get dizzy and disoriented for a short time. So she's explaining how when she feels stressed, it really comes over her mind like a fog and disorientation and even feeling dizzy. So see if some of you feel that way too. Like, if it's a. Whereas another person saying here that she feels like the stress causes her to experience anxiety. Like, and what does. See what that anxiety feels like? Does it feel like heart racing? Does it feel like this brain fog, like, like the other person was describing? Or how does that anxiety feel to you? To me, when I think of anxiety, I think of mind racing, heart racing, feeling really uncomfortable in my body. Like, what am I going to do? What am I going to do like, almost like.

There'S not enough time and you can't solve it quick enough kind of thing. That's what it kind of feels like to me sometimes. Okay, here's another question I missed. How is the adrenals can be measured? Okay, perfect. Questions. Okay, so she's saying anxiety feels like heart palpitations, shortness of breath and trouble sleeping. Yeah. So those definitely sound like stress response symptoms. Right. Like, so heart. There could be heart racing where your heart feels like it's going fast, like above 72 beats per minute, which would be a common heart rate. And a heart palpitation is when it feels that your heart's kind of jumping a little bit. And both of those can happen when you're stressed. Shortness of breath. So feeling like you can't take a deep breath. Right. And sometimes I think a lot of us, we almost forget to breathe. Right. Like I almost would. Let's just take a minute and take a deep breath. Take a deep breath with each other because it's amazing. Like we can be. We kind of rely on our body to keep us breathing right. While we're doing things through the day. But when our. When we're so preoccupied with something stressful, what are we gonna do and what's going on and you know, we're responding to whatever the stress is, then we can feel like we're not even taking a deep breath. And sometimes you just have to stop and be like, okay, let's get some oxygen in. And it's amazing because what happens is when you take a deep breath, it actually signals to this nerve called the vagal nerve. The vagal nerve connects and communicates between our brain and our digestion, our stomach. And when we take a deep breath, it pushes our diaphragm down and it signals to the vagal nerve to signal an anti stress back to our brain. So we get this, what's called a parasympathetic, which is the calming, the opposite of a stress response by taking a deep breath. So sometimes that's a great. For those of you who are feeling that like, if you. It's almost like the signal your body is giving you that you're stressed could be helpful to you if you think of it that way. If you go, oh, if I feel short of breath, it probably means I need to take a deep breath and help calm my body, help send a different signal through your nervous system. And so sometimes if you can break it down and really see what these symptoms are, then, then you can actually do things Right then in the moment, that might help, at least for the moment. I mean, now, from there, the stress may still be there, or at least you can give yourself a little bit of space. I call it like a brain space, right? Where you can actually kind of step back for a minute and go, okay, what's really going on? Why am I feeling this way? Is there something that needs my attention urgently in the moment? Or is this something where I can take a minute and maybe journal, make a list, prioritize.

You know, kind of think it through for a minute and realize, hey, what really needs to happen in this moment? Or is this something that I can take care of in a few hours or tomorrow? Or can I call someone who could help me? Like, you can start to get into problem solving mode, right? But when we're in the moment of feeling stressed and anxious, it's very hard to. I don't think you can do problem solving at the same time, because when you're in that stressed moment, it literally, your, your body, our bodies as humans are going to naturally go into this stress response that can almost make us freeze. And so just let. Not expecting anything else from yourself at that moment realizing, oh, this is what my body is built to do when I feel stressed. Let me let my body have that and give my body some calming signals so I can get out of that alarm, immediate stress response, right? And then you can actually stand back and go, okay, now what is really needed from me in this moment? Because most times.

Most times we can, you know, we probably don't need to do anything this very minute. Maybe we can just kind of think it through and gather information and then make a decision from there. So that's kind of thinking about that immediate stress response. But what can happen too is when work stressed, we're exposed to stress over time. Kind of like constantly, day after day, stress after stress. What happens is our bodies shift into their unique stress mode, I call it, which is less about that immediate stress in the moment and more about kind of the static state of stress. If you want to think about it that way, that kind of your body can get stuck in over time. Does this make sense to some of you where maybe you, you feel like, you know, you're walking around in a state of stress every day all the time. And that can definitely affect. You mentioned sleep. That can affect your. You might feel tired, you, you might feel anxious all day, every day. You might start to feel that it's affecting your health in different ways. Like you might start getting headaches, you might Start getting infections like sinus infections or bladder infections, you might get skin rashes or digestive issues and that just show those are more stress signals telling you that, that there's an imbalance in this. If you think of it like, you know, we need a balance of stress and anti stress and when there's an imbalance there, when we have more stress than anti stress, that's when health issues start developing. And so it's your body, the health issues are your body indicating to you that you need more anti stress. And to some degree maybe there's some stresses we can eliminate or avoid. Sort of bring down this side and bring up the calming the anti stress so that it can get back in balance again. Does that help to think of it that way? Like how do we get your body back into this balance? And the thing is, is that.

I think, I mean definitely for me in my, the way I grew up in my generation, the idea of self care, you know, like taking care of ourselves and in a moment of stress would have been considered self indulgent or self centered or selfish. I don't know if some of you can relate to those words. You know, like sometimes it feels like you might be aware that there's a lot going on and it would really help you to be able to go take care of yourself for a few minutes and recover from the stress. But maybe you stop yourself because of some feeling of I don't want to be selfish or I need to take care of everybody else first. Or almost like a codependency pattern, right, where we're feeling like we can't take care of ourselves because we're afraid to say that we need that or we're not comfortable making the decisions that might be needed to give ourselves that support. And so when we're looking at this balance and we see that maybe you're low on the self, on the anti stress and in that moment you realize, oh, I really need some, what I'm calling anti stress. Which would be maybe to go for a walk, maybe it's time with your pet, maybe it's just time alone, maybe it's putting on some music or doing a meditation, taking some deep breaths. But if you're, if you're feeling like you don't deserve that or you're not comfortable choosing that, then you're going to stay in that imbalanced state, right? And so just I'm really curious if some of you can relate to that. If it's, do you find it's hard for you to choose something that would be helpful for you, you know, that would serve you, that would help you to get out of a stress mode. Is that hard for you to choose? Does it feel self indulgent to you? Oh, here she's saying she has it hard. She. It's hard to prioritize your, yourself. Yeah, that's the thing, is it, it can be really hard to prioritize yourself, especially if you have, you know, children and you're, or you know, you're in a relationship or you run a business or you're, you know, you have parents, maybe you're helping with your parents care, you know, so there's so many things that we're trying to help with at any given moment that sometimes it's hard to really realize, hey, what can I do in that moment? What do I need in that moment? And so just encouraging you to, to be aware of that in that moment. If you can kind of start to just even be aware if there's, if there's something that, you know, you're like, realize, oh my gosh, I'm overwhelmed, I'm feeling that feeling whatever that is for you. If it's feeling brain fog, if it's feeling anxious, if it's like I can't sleep, I can't. You can just feel your body spiraling, then kind of say to yourself, hey, what, what could I do here in this moment? That would be a little bit of prioritizing yourself. You know what would be just practice and feel it out a little bit. And if it's really uncomfortable, maybe even kind of look into that for yourself and say, why is it so uncomfortable for me to prioritize myself or realize that I need a little time for myself? You know, is it from my childhood stress? And that's one thing we really know from the research is that stress in childhood.

Can definitely affect the way you experience stress now. And not only that, but not only stress from your childhood, but stress from your parents and your grandparents actually goes into your genetic pathways and those, it's called epigenetics. It's how stress exposure influences your genetic expression. And our genetics do play a role in how we respond to stress. So you might have had experienced stress or in childhood, which most all of us had some stress in childhood. Whether it was from, you know, parents who were getting divorced or substance abuse or many other possible scenarios in childhood that can cause stress. That sets you up for how you respond to stress now. It also sets you up for how able you are to choose self care now. And so it can Be. Not that you have to go and re. Look, you can't redo your childhood, but what you can do is become aware of it. And become aware, okay, maybe what I'm feeling and experiencing and choosing right now is because of something I experienced in childhood. And so maybe I can do something to shift that now. Maybe I can just by realizing it. A lot of times we can go, oh, okay. That's why it feels that way. That's why if I feel hesitant to ask for support or why I feel hesitant to prioritize myself, makes sense because I wasn't taught to do that in my childhood. But I can now try to. I can now find ways. And it may take practice, right? You probably won't say it exactly the way you want to say it the first time, but you might start to go, wait a minute, what would actually help? And I think you might be surprised that the people around you might be more supportive than you think. Like if you say to them, you know, I realize I really need an hour every afternoon just to myself in the room by myself, to take a shower or a bath or take a walk or do whatever the heck you want, right? Have some of you experienced that where you just, like so much of your life, you're not really doing what you want in that moment. You're doing what your job says you're supposed to do, or what you're supposed to do as a parent, or what you're supposed to do as a. Whatever your role is in your life. You're doing what you're supposed to do in that moment. But what if you had an hour where you could just do whatever you felt like doing? If that's eating something healthy, if that's going to the store, if that's going to the beach, whatever you want to do in that moment. Sometimes you just need that kind of some time, some open space. Maybe you want to read a book. Whatever it is, you just want some time to be able to just choose for yourself. And sometimes it can feel like such a foreign thing, right? To be like, now what am I supposed to do?

I have all this time, what do I do now? So, yeah, just, I encourage you to play with that and I'd love to hear back from you what you notice, if you notice, okay, when I get that feeling, what am I going to try? That could be an anti stress technique for myself, even if it's for 15 minutes and notice both. Was it hard to ask for that? Was it hard to create that? Was it easy? How did the people in your life respond to you and how did you feel during and after? Right? So just like anything, we can learn from how our body feels and what that experience is because then you might choose differently going forward. How might you want to change your schedule or make room for these things, these self care and anti stress? Again, the things that would help your body get out of stress mode and recover from stress. Because that's the thing is just as much as our bodies are built to know how to respond to stress, our bodies also know how to recover from stress. We just have to give them the time to recover from stress.

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So let's see. I want to just, I'm curious, I want to hear, I want to dive in a little more about this piece about having unique stress responses. And one of the things is that one of the unique stress types that I identify is a stress type where the person who may have high cortisol and adrenaline, right, that's the one where we kind of assume that we would all be there. And it does happen sometimes. Some people have high cortisol in the morning when they first wake up. And those people tend to wake up in a rush of stress. So I don't know if some of you can relate to that. Where you, if you wake up in the morning and your mind is just racing and you feel like you got to get out of bed and get a lot done and you're just, and you might even wake up really early in the morning like an early bird, that's more likely that you have high cortisol. Now you may also have high adrenaline. The high adrenaline will feel like more like mind racing and things need to get done quickly and heart racing. And you know that that's going to be more like that high adrenaline. Or here's the thing is it could also happen in the evening. So for other people is that the high cortisol happens in the evening, right? And cortisol should go down in the evening. So if it's going up in the evening, you're more likely to get your second wind after dinner and feel like you're going to get a lot done late at night and have a hard time being able to go to sleep and feeling like you're just gonna, like you couldn't go to sleep if you want to. Your mind is racing and running and you're just up, up, up late. So that's more like high cortisol, high adrenaline in the evening. And then another scenario would be the person who has more like low cortisol in the morning. And this can feel like, wake up and feel tired, like you slept, but you wake up and you're like, I just don't want to go get out of bed. I want to stay in bed. I'm just, I feel unmotivated, I feel blah. That's that morning low cortisol. Now even if you had, interestingly, if you have low cortisol in the morning, you might have high adrenaline. So it's possible to have low cortisol and high adrenaline, in which case you might still feel tired, but you might have that wired feeling that tired and wired that we hear about can be from low cortisol, high adrenaline. And there can also be where you might wake up in the morning just fine, but maybe it's the mid afternoon where you start to feel tired, where you start to feel that low cortisol happening in the afternoon. So these are some examples I'm interested if some of you please write in to me if you can relate to some of these scenarios. And for some people it's a combination. You might experience more than one of those possible stress patterns. And here's the key is, yes, we can test for the adrenals, we can test for the cortisol.

You can either test cortisol or you can test it in blood. But the thing is, when you test cortisol in blood, you're getting a single level at the time you had your blood drawn. And really what we want is we want to know your cortisol through the day. So we want to know your cortisol from morning, midday, evening, bedtime. So really at least four different cortisol levels. And we, we can either do that with saliva, where you spit in a tube at different times a day, or with urine, where you can do a urine collection at different times a day. And this way we can actually see your cortisol levels at different times of day. And adrenaline and neurotransmitters can be measured in the urine. So these are tests done at home. Most doctors offices are not doing these tests. It's not standard tests. These are more specialty tests, but they are available and you usually would have to pay out of pocket. But it's a few hundred dollars and it can be really important information, right, because you could try to, you know, kind of go by your symptoms and your, you know, and understand what's going on with your cortisol and adrenaline. But when you can actually measure the levels, then you know exactly what your stress type looks like. You know exactly what your body does under stress. Does it go to high cortisol? Does it go to low cortisol? Does it go to high adrenaline? Low adrenaline? Because these things all have different ways to help. So if the cortisol is high, we're going to use different herbs and nutrients than if the cortisol is low. If the cortisol is high, then we're going to want to use phosphatidylserine and banaba leaf or magnolia root or ashwagandha. These are herbs that are used to help decrease the cortisol. It's basically helping your brain know to turn off the stress response. And then there's also, if the cortisol is too low, we use different nutrients and herbs we can use. We do very gentle, supportive nutrients like B vitamins, vitamin C. And then we can use herbs like holy basil and rhodiola and glycyrrhiza that are herbs that increase the production of cortisol. And so you would use totally different products depending on what your cortisol levels are. And same with adrenaline. If adrenaline's high, we want to use. I usually turn first to magnesium, because magnesium, which a lot of us are depleted in magnesium, but magnesium helps us to process adrenaline and get rid of adrenaline. So if you're getting this heart racing, mind racing, can't go to sleep, you know, feeling of high adrenaline, you might want to try some magnesium. And not just any magnesium. I usually recommend using a magnesium threonate because it's more calming to the nervous system, whereas magnesium citrate is better for helping with constipation. And then when the adrenaline is low, we use totally different nutrients. We're going to use the nutrients that help the body make more adrenaline. So we'll use tyrosine, for example, which is the precursor nutrient so your body can make more adrenaline. Right. Now here's the thing is, even once I see where your stress type and your stress pattern is, then what I do is guide you through a step by step process. Because it's tempting when you, when you find this out to just jump right in. But what's important to know is we have to first help your body get out of stress mode. So if you've been, you know, you've been in stress mode and you've been having a lot of stress symptoms, whether it's some of these we talked about during the day or not sleeping at night, our first thing is we got to help your body get out of stress mode. We got to get this balance back, get the stress and anti stress in balance first. If we just start, if we see a low cortisol or low adrenaline and we just dive in and start trying to increase it, you're probably going to feel worse. Maybe some of you can relate to that. Have some of you taken products to help with adrenals or cortisol and felt worse because your body wasn't ready for it. If you're still in stress mode and you start supporting your adrenals, you're probably going to feel worse because your body's not ready for that. We have to really match, we have to go, oh, let's help the body get out of stress mode first. Which may mean helping with magnesium to calm the adrenaline. It may mean supporting this calming neurotransmitters like serotonin and gaba. And once we have enough calmness and making sure you get the self care during the day, the anti stress during the day so that you can get to a better place of balance and out of stress mode, then we can help your adrenal glands recover. Because that's the other thing is you're probably not going to hear very many places your adrenals can recover. It's amazed, I mean, patients have really taught me over the years the adrenal glands can recover. You're not, I don't want any of you to feel stuck because it's unnecessary. Our bodies, yes, respond to stress and stress can affect us, but we can also recover from stress. Our adrenal glands can heal. We can get our cortisol and adrenaline back on track again. This is all possible. You're not stuck where you are, although I know sometimes it feels that way because you maybe been feeling Stressed for a long time and you're like, I can't imagine when this is ever going to change.

Yeah, you can recover from stress. Our bodies can recover and the adrenal glands can. We can calm down the cortisol. We can, we can, or we can increase. The cortisol, however, is out of balance. We. That can be addressed. So just go into it knowing that we want to know your body. We want to understand your past exposure from stress, the various stresses you've been exposed to in your life. And we want to acknowledge that. We also want to know your genetic patterns. What are your genetic tendencies towards stress? Maybe you tend toward high cortisol or high adrenaline because of your genes. And by knowing that information first and then realizing that our first step is how to help you get out of stress mode, then we can do the adrenal recovery. Then you can really get your body to a place where you can get to what I call resiliency, stress resiliency, where stress may come along, but your body can bounce back. Your body can go into stress mode and come back to healthy balance without you having to spiral and have a bunch of symptoms that don't feel good. We want your body to be able to be resilient and bounce back from stress. And that's absolutely possible. But it is a process. It doesn't happen overnight. It's a process of learning your body, being aware and willing to, first of all, willing to just be like, hey, this is my body. I'm human. This is my body. And kind of accept that about yourself and accept your stress past. And so that level of acceptance helps, I find. And then the understanding and learning about your body, knowing exactly this is what my body does when I'm stressed, and then really starting to figure out what is it your body needs to help rebalance and become resilient to stress. Okay, I see a comment here. I work night shift, which night shifts can be a stress as another example of a stress on your body. And I have to switch my sleep back and forth depending on the day. I feel that affects my cortisol and adrenaline levels as my body helps keep me awake at night. Yes, this is a really good example. They've studied people who work the night shift. And because we know it's such a stress on the body to change, basically I think of it like changing time zones. It would be like, you know, if you flew around the world, say you flew from the United States to India, you'd be 12 hours difference. And that's essentially like going to A night shift is like, you would be like traveling to a whole different time zone and back again and back again and back again. And it is, it's a stress for the body because our bodies are so responsive to our light exposure. That just shows you, like in the night shift, you're exposed to light during the hours that we would normally be exposed to darkness. And that change in light exposure sends different signals to the brain and that's what you're experiencing. Is that so then when it's daytime, you're trying to create some darkness so you can go to sleep and give your brain the darkness signal. But even then, because you're having to flip back and forth, it would be again the same as someone who has to travel, right? They have to travel and change time zones a lot. I see the same patterns. It's, it's a lot of stress and it definitely affects the cortisol because think, remember, cortisol should be high in the morning when we wake up and then gradually decreasing through the day. Now when a person's working the night shift, what I try to encourage you to do is to try to get as many days in a row if you can, like, see if you could do five, six, seven days in a row. So at least if you're doing a time zone change to the night shift, you're going to stay on that same time zone for a number of days. And what you would want to do is really support your body to shift your levels, shift it so that you have high cortisol when you're getting up to go to work, and then gradually decreasing cortisol through the work hours overnight and have the lower cortisol in the morning when you're going to be going to bed. So literally allow your body to change time zone, so to speak, to the night shift. And then when you are back on your, when you're not on the night shift, switch back. Although some people, I saw this when I have spent time in the Philippines a couple times in my life. I've been in the Philippines. I was there when I was training as a midwife delivering babies. And I was there presenting about stress to audiences in Manila. And what I learned from them is a lot of people in Manila work the night shift. They are working for companies in the US and so they stay up all night Manila time, answering the phones for us in the United States. And so they, what they do is they tend to just shift their lives to be completely on the night shift. And in Manila, actually a lot of businesses stay open so that people who work the night shift can stay on the night shift even when they're not working. So even their days off, they stay on the night shift, if that makes sense. So they just stay living on this different time zone. And I wonder if that might be better because then you're not constantly asking your body to switch back and forth, right? You're just allowing your body to basically live on a different time schedule. And you would just want to really make sure that you still expose yourself to darkness when you're trying to sleep so that you signal the right darkness to your pineal gland. The pineal gland makes melatonin and melatonin is our sleep hormone. And so much good stuff happens when we sleep that we want to make sure that you get those healthy signals, the repair signals and the reset signals. And the memory, a lot of our memory occurs while we're sleeping and a whole clean out process in our brain happens while we're sleeping. So we want to make sure that you're getting good sleep. And some of you who struggle with sleep, this is where we're so motivated to help you with sleep. And I've written a book about insomnia, helping with different causes of insomnia because it's so important to help you get your sleep back because so much good stuff happens while we sleep. I'm gonna be writing more about sleep next week. So this, this week I just wrote a new blog about stress and some of these topics we've been covering today about self care and about stress types and how you can measure your cortisol levels. So that's gonna be live on my website today and next week I'm gonna be writing about sleep. So this is a perfect. Because you know, those of you who are either working the night shift or struggling with sleep, then I'll have some more tips for you there. But it definitely, I think, you know, can this can all kind of, this awareness can kind of help us realize, hey, because sometimes we feel like we don't really have choices, right? We kind of feel like we're getting up and every day just going through the motions, doing the things we're supposed to be doing. But sometimes if you stand back and you can kind of realize, hey, maybe I do have a choice here, maybe I can, you know, I know it can be scary sometimes to ask for what you need. But you know, for example, asking for, hey, if I'm going to work the night shift, how can I set this up so it's best for my body so that I Can help my hormones manage the night shift if I have to work the night shift. And then if, if you've been working the night shift for a while, I would encourage you to see if there's a way where we can get you not to working the night shift. Because the longer, the more years you work the night shift, the harder it is on your body. And so at a certain point, it may be time to just say, hey, for my health and my body and my life, maybe I need to ask for a different schedule or even consider a job change because we need, you know, to me, your health is your priority. Your health is my priority. That's why I'm here. Sharing this with you is, I feel like.

Health is so important because it's what allows you to go to work. It allows you to be creative and be there for your family and enjoy yourself and do amazing things in the world. And so to me, having your health is so important that it's worth it to think about these things. It's worth it to stand back and think about, hey, is this really what I need to be doing at this moment in time? And is this really what I'm passionate about and want to be creating in my life? And what maybe could I do differently to create a different outcome? And I think if anything going through this pandemic time has been probably been more than I've ever heard before, a chance for people to really rethink their schedules and their lives, you know, to think, hey, maybe I don't have to be commuting into my office five days a week. Maybe I can work from home sometimes. Maybe I. Maybe that job isn't exactly the way I want to be spending my time. Maybe I want more time with my family and my friends at home. You know, we've been at home more. What are you learning about being at home? Do you get to feed yourself in a better way? Do you get to take care of yourself, exercise better? Or maybe for some of you, you've been exercising less since you've been home. So just take a chance to like, even journal. I don't know how many of you already journal, but maybe pull out a piece of paper or if you have an actual journal, pull it out and write it. Maybe after listening to this, write a little bit. What's coming to mind for you? What have you. What has come into your awareness during this time of being in quarantine or shelter in place? What have you noticed about your body, your schedule? What things have been harder? What things have been easier.

What things do you want to keep in your life and what things do you want to change? And think about your stress response and notice now when you have start to have feelings of stress.

What is notice it? First of all, take. Let a part of your brain be aware of it. Let a part of your brain go, oh, I'm feeling stressed, I'm feeling anxious, I'm feeling that brain fog again. And then go, what would help? Ask yourself, what would help me right now? What would help me right now to help my body through this stress response? Would it help if I could just scream? Would it help if I could just say to the person I'm talking to, you know what? I'm feeling overwhelmed, I need a minute. And I think we can all allow ourselves that, right? Like, we could say, oh, yeah, I've felt overwhelmed before. And yeah, I can understand that this person may need a minute to just collect their thoughts and kind of realize, hey, what's, what's the priority in this moment and giving yourself that space to do that and then saying to yourself, hey, what can I create in my day to help myself to maybe not have to get into such stressful moments? Can I, you know, is there a certain time of day I want to wake up? Is there something I want to eat when I first, like, do you need a protein shake in the morning? Do you need to bring some food with you if you're going out for the day? Or do you need to be ordering food to be delivered so it's available in your refrigerator?

Start to kind of think, what do I want to have available to me so that I'm giving my body what it needs? Because I would even say that it's a stress if you don't have food available. If your blood sugar is dropping and then you're going for sugar and caffeine and your blood sugar's going back way up too high, that's also a stress to your body. Or if you, you know, if you're eating too large of a meal could even be a stress to your body. Or now intermittent fasting, and I'm going to be talking more about intermittent fasting soon and talking to my friend and colleague about intermittent fasting. And it can be very helpful because one side of it is if we're eating all day and we're up at night and we're eating all night, our digestion is never getting a break from digesting food, and that's also a stress. But at the same time, if we fast all day every day or we go Long hours without eating all day, that can be a stress. So a lot of understanding stress has to do with understanding the middle ground, this gray area in the middle. And I think as humans we're used to things being more black and white, right? We're really used to things being like either this or that. And the thing about stress is it's not black and white. First of all, you each respond to stress differently, uniquely. So right there, it's not black and white, it's already unique. And then even in your unique stress pattern, you have to kind of find your middle ground. Like what is the perfect amount of time for you to have to not be eating overnight while you're sleeping? Is it, is it 10 hours? Is it 12 hours? Is it 14 hours? How many hours of not eating? And then how many hours to get your meals in? And then even during your window of time that you're eating, say it's 10 hours between or 12 hours between 9am and 9pm, let's say, or from 9am to 7pm Is your window of eating your meals. What's the best intervals for you? For me, what I find is my body does much better with smaller meals at more like three or four hour intervals of time because then I can create the best blood sugar balance for my body. But for other people it could be different. For you, you might need even smaller meals a little more often, especially if you're having blood sugar issues, especially if your blood sugar is doing a roller coaster ride and you go to hypoglycemia, you might need to eat smaller meals more often. And another person who doesn't have that going on, maybe you do okay with a little bit larger meals every four hours or five hours. So you want to know for your body what's the right timing intervals for eating even because how we feed ourselves can be either an anti stress or a stress. And so you want to keep. That's a perfect example of things we can choose and things we can do to help our body stay in a stress balance is even just the timing of how we eat. And so I encourage you to even start journaling. How do you feel when you're hungry? How do you feel after you eat? How do you feel after you eat a small meal versus if you eat a large meal. And I think you'll start to, as you kind of observe your body and observe yourself, you'll start to learn.

What feels best to you. Your body will tell you, it will communicate to you what feels best and how you can start to choose even very simple activities that can be an anti stress or a way to decrease the stress so that it's more imbalance.

I hope that's all helpful for you. Let's see. So I think that's good for now. I have I want to make sure all of you know about my newsletter because I send an email newsletter every week and I include my most recent blog posts. Like today the newsletter will include my blog post about stress and my approach to stress and more about stress types. And then I also include the latest podcast episode and more information for you. If there's other podcasts I'm on or other activities that are going on, I like to share that as well. So I'll post a link to make sure if you go to. You know, if you look for the link here under this live, you'll see where you can sign up to be on my email list to get my newsletter and more information about the more information about stress and what you can do about it. And.

I'll I'm hoping you all have a really wonderful day just with understanding yourself a little bit better and taking this chance to just really understand that your stress response is unique. And by understanding your stress response, giving your body what it needs, you can become resilient to stress so that stress doesn't have to have a negative effect on your health. Thank you so much for joining me. I'll see you guys all soon.

Thanks for listening to how humans heal. If you liked this episode, leave a rating and a review. And for more resources visit drdani.com.