It’s Getting Hot in Here - How to Stay Cool in Hot Weather | Ep. 69 (Audio Only)

Welcome to the Holistic Inner Balance podcast with Dr. Nicole Cain and Happy healthy.

Hadley, your go to resource for natural mental health and wellness strategies so that you can become the expert of your own emotional and physical well being.

Merging modern science with ancient wisdom.

In recent news, record breaking heat across the world is plaguing people in the United States. We are seeing coast to coast. Over 100 million Americans are under heat warnings of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. According to Reuters, Europeans are dealing with record breaking heat temperatures, fires across different countries. And one really interesting finding is that while 88% of American households have air conditioning, only 20, 20% of European households have air conditioning. While some of them do have ac, it's quite rare to find it in schools and offices. And so this is resulting in closures and a ton of emotional and physical symptoms are coming out of the woodwork. And an article that was recently published in NBC Think asserts that we need more air conditioning to protect ourselves from the effects of heat, even though it may be deleterious for the climate in the long run. They're asserting that we need to protect ourselves in the now with air conditioning.

I have to say that that's not the only solution. And while it definitely is really important to keep us cool, there are other ways to keep us cool as well. And I'm not saying that we don't use air conditioning because I am a big fan of air conditioning. I use it myself. But it's not the only way to cool us down. And I really want to, you know, just make again bring a nuanced conversation because that's what we're all about here. And talk a little bit about how we can stay cool just blasting the AC because it's actually not as good for us as we might think. And we're gonna talk a little bit about why that is in this podcast.

So today we're gonna talk all about heat, heat anger, heat jealousy, which I just learned about when I was today years old. Heat, gut heat, hormones, and all things heat in your mind and body. And we're going to explore what Ayurveda and holistic medicine has to say about the causes of heat and what to do about it.

Awesome.

So, Hadley, you have a completely different perspective than this. NBSYNC author yes.

Yeah, so it's actually, it's really interesting because obviously air conditioning is not beneficial for the environment. Like we all know that it takes up a lot of energy. And I'm gonna assert that it's also according to Ayurveda or At least the principles of Ayurveda, they didn't have AC back 5,000 years ago. But the principles of Ayurveda, it can actually mess with seasonal rhythms that our bodies have. So right, we have like a circadian rhythm that are like our daily rhythms and we also have these seasonal rhythms. And our bodies actually, actually need to experience some level of heat in the summer. Plus it's really not helpful for us to go from hot, really hot outside to really cold inside and to constantly be changing temperatures to potentially like 20, 30 degree differences in Fahrenheit, that is. And so that's actually really, really hard on our immune system. And that is beyond Ayurveda. Like we know that in Western medical science as well, that it's actually pretty bad for our immunity as well. And then the other thing, and this is according to Ayurveda, is that it can mess with our digestion to be constantly between hot and cold and then also to be in the cold because our bodies are like, oh, it's summer, it's hot most of the time. And then we're in these really cold environments while we're, our bodies are supposed to be in heat. And it makes us have cravings for foods that are just not very appropriate for this time of year. Our bodies want to eat things that are fresh and like available, ready for us outside. You know, a lot of the fruits and vegetables and even like proteins and all of the things that are growing right now that are available right now are light, cool, bitter, astringent, and those are all things that are appropriate this time of year. And that's what we would be craving more. I don't love the word crave, but that, that would be something that we would want to eat more of this time of year if we were just in, in the heat more often. When we're in the cool more often, we might crave things that are heavy, that are like heating and things that will potentially actually make us hotter in the long run and have all of these deleterious health effects that are, you know, just pitta. Imbalances, which is basically a fire imbalance.

So what I hear you saying is that there's a seasonal rhythm to our bodies.

Totally.

And that makes sense. You know, the body is, especially the female body, we can see this really objectively. With every full moon there's changes in ovulation. And so people tend to cycle with the lunar schedule, which is really interesting. And even if you're not with a lunar schedule, we see that there's A cycle. And so you build up your uterine lining, you ovulate, and then you shed your uterine lining and it goes in this cycle. And then we have the sleep wake cycle for all genders. And so your melatonin rises as the sun goes down, and then you sleep. And then as the sun comes back up, it suppresses melatonin, you boost your serotonin, and then you go through your day. So there's this rhythmicness of our body systems. And what you're suggesting is that we are not only disrupting this rhythm, but we're also potentially provoking these drastic swings in our body temperature. So you may be walking from your air conditioned building, and so it's like 71 degrees. Or if, let's be real, a lot of air conditioned buildings are like 62 and you're freezing.

Yeah, right.

And then you walk out. And I love this feeling, especially when I'm in Arizona, is I like walk out of a building where I've been freezing all day and then it's 110 degrees or more in my car and I just sit there and bake and it feels delightful. And you're suggesting that this is actually a problem of this drastic swings. And it makes sense to me that that requires a lot of quick adaptation by our bodies. And so tell us a little bit more. So you were describing changes in food cravings and how those food cravings can further aggravate us. And so kind of explain that process a little more.

Yeah, so it's really interesting. Like imagine that you are. It's a really hot day and you're at a like carnival or a fair. You know, that's very common this time of year. And then imagine that you like a funnel cake. You know, it's fried, it's got a bunch of sugar, it's heavy, it's actually hot. Like they serve it hot. And then imagine eating that. And imagine how you would feel after that. Like, what do you think you would feel like?

I would have funnel gut when I eat those kinds of things. So I'm imagining being at the Arizona State Fair and I eat a funnel cake. And it like sounds like a fun thing, thing to do, but then it just like sits in my stomach and it's like gross and bleh.

And then your whole body feels hot and heavy. Yes. And it's like. And it's, it's already hot outside and you're just. And then. So you've got all of these things going on physically. And then what do you do? What do you do? What do you think? And then what do you do then?

If I was. If I was a normal American, I probably would go and get an iced Coca Cola, but instead, because I'm. I'm like a weird, weird naturopathic person, I would probably get a bubble water, which I know isn't really any better, but less sugar.

Oh, yeah. No. Well, we don't have to assign morality. You're going to drink the Coke. That's fine. And. And what do you. What do you feel like your emotional state becomes once you have the heavy.

Hot.

You know, dense food in your stomach?

Oh, I want to. I go into a food coma.

Yeah, totally. So you either become, you know, like, you can't do anything right. You don't. You want to just, like, lay down on the ground, which is actually an adaptive response. Your body is like, okay, I need to lie down, let myself digest this food. Maybe sprawl out, have your arms and legs out. That's actually a great way to cool down starfish style, to just do a starfish pose on the ground. I do that sometimes. I didn't have. I didn't have air conditioning when I lived in Seattle for three years, and it still did get really hot in the summer. So starfish was very much my pose.

She's doing it right now.

Yeah, I'm just lying here.

The microphone is. It's one of those ones that hang over your face.

She's just starfishing.

It's fine.

It's not true. But I might do that right after this. So, yeah, so we start to feel like, blah. And then if you have a lot of pizza, you might. You might resonate with this. This is something that I experience. I get super irritable and annoyed with everyone around me, and I just want to be alone. And if I can't be alone, then I'm just super, super annoyed. And that is the heat from the heat and the heaviness that those both kind of go hand in hand when we're in this scenario, when we're eating something that's hot and heavy. So. So we experience this thing in our physiology, and then that actually translates into our emotional. Our mind, our emotions, all of that stuff. And so that's where the heat irritability can come in. Right. And so I actually wanted to hear from you, Dr. Kane, about heat anger. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

I started thinking about heat anger because my husband would get heat anger. I was like, why are you so grumpy, Summer? So my. My constitution Is I like the heat. I want a lizard. I want to be in the sun. I want to bake. Hotter the better. Arizona summer doesn't bother me, especially because it's a dry heat. So it just dehydrates me out and bakes me, which I know makes my constitution worse. But we lean in, we lean into our imbalances. Yeah, our imbalances, yes. But Paul, on the other hand, he would be much more irritable if, especially on really hot days, if we were outside in the sun, he would be driving and get road rage and just be really frustrated. And then as the seasons changed and it was cooler and he just wasn't. He was just so much cooler himself. So I started to research and I found that there's actually a pretty good amount of data linking heat with aggression. And so I started to try to explore that. And so I'm thinking about like basal metabolic rate, like what's happening, happening with your metabolism, what's happening to your thyroid hormone, what's happening to your endocrine system, your cortisol levels as this external metabolic process is increasing. And so as your body is dealing with heat. And it's really fascinating to me that Ayurveda explains it.

Yeah.

That it's. Yeah. Because that person has now been put in a state of heat excess. And when I studied it. But in traditional Chinese medicine, they talk about that too, where if you have signs of heat, heat can affect your other organ systems in your body. And so it can, in traditional Chinese medicine, it can cause anger, which is associated with liver. And so then we see people who are in hot climates that have skin rashes on their body all over the place, like acne or psoriasis or eczema. They have bright red skin rashes. And we also see just a lot of reflux, like in traditional Chinese medicine. So the heat will affect the liver, which goes to the skin, it'll affect the stomach. And so then you have all of these burning symptoms. And so people tend to get refluxy. And then as you were describing, Hadley, that these people are also eating fatty, greasy foods because they're craving, like the burgers and all of those heavy funnel cakes in the summer. That's how we celebrate, at least in the Midwest. And then that amplifies and aggravates their symptoms. And so in traditional Chinese medicine, it sounds very consistent with what we see metabolically and in this 5,000 plus year old tradition. And so heat anger is a real thing. And so I would love to hear more about heat anger and the primary dosha that is out of balance with that.

Totally. Yeah. So I love that traditional Chinese medicine talks about this, which is very, very much related to Ayurveda. It's actually a derivative, like it came from Ayurveda, which is so cool. But so. So pitta. Pitta is the dosha. We've talked about the doshas before. So if you are not sure what we're talking about, definitely go back and listen to some of those podcasts that we've talked about, all of the doshas and you know, how they get out of balance and all of that stuff. But for now.

Oh, yeah, take the quiz.

Oh, also take the quiz. Yes.

If you don't know, if you don't know what your dosha imbalance is right now, because it can be changeable. Yes, take the quiz. We have it at my Instagram. It's in the link in the bio. You have it on your Instagram. We also have it on drnicolecane.com you could just type in the word dosha in the search bar and you have.

It at mehealthyhappy on my website as well. So, yeah, so go take the quiz. And we'll also link the quiz in, in the description as well. Definitely. Go take the quiz and see. Because if it's pitta, then you definitely want to pay attention even more to this episode. If it's not pitta, you still might want to listen because there, even if it's not your most prominent dosha, it might still be heightened because you can have more than one dosha. That's out of balance, guys. Yeah, like a Venn diagram. Ye. So like Dr. Kane, she is mostly vata and kapha doesn't have a ton of pitta. But, you know, if it's super hot outside and she eats a funnel cake, like, I feel it. Yeah. So. So these are just sort of like, everyone's gonna have this kind of imbalance. If they have enough. Enough heat, enough fire going on in their external environment, they're gonna have an imbalance. So. So, you know, even if you don't have a pitta imbalance, this is still. This is still going to be beneficial for you. So. So the. The element of pitta, you know, all of the doshas have correlate with the five elements in Ayurveda. Again, you can go listen to previous episodes about that. But the one for pitta, the most prominent one for pitta is fire with a little bit of water, a little bit of, like, oiliness. So if you ever have had a lot of acne, which is a pitta imbalance. You know that it also comes with a lot of oiliness. Or if it's a pitta, if it's pitta acne, then it comes with a lot of oiliness. There are some other, some other things that can happen there, but you might notice that you've got a lot of oily, your face is a lot of, has a lot of oil on it. And you might notice that you have more of that in the summer. And that's because pitta rises in the summer and that's totally normal. And our environment actually gives us a way to balance that. And it does it with specific foods that are growing this time of year. And you know, it does it with specific things like being able to go for a swim. Right. Like, we can't really do that in the winter if the water is frozen over. And so being able to swim in the summer is something that our environment gives us to be able to balance our dosha to cool down. Other things that we can do besides food and we'll get into some of the food things, but the other things that we can do besides food is, you know, anything, anything you can do with like ice or water, that's going to be huge. So even just if you can't go for a swim in the middle of your day, you can splash water on your face. That's one of my favorite things to do to cool down. Another thing, and this goes with our, with nervous system regulation, is putting ice on your face is actually really, really helpful for the vagus nerve. And maybe Dr. Kane, you can talk a little bit about that.

Yeah, this is called the dive response. Yeah, they talk about it a lot in dialectical behavioral therapy DBT, founded by the brilliant Dr. Marshall Linehan. And, and the researchers were observing how when deep sea divers would go into pretty deep water that there were a few physical physiological changes that occurred. One is that their blood pressure dropped. And so blood pressure is the power of the heart contraction. And then that thrust that beat that lub will create pressure. And then we measure that pressure. It's the blood pressure. And so there's two numbers. You have the systolic, which is the top, and the diastolic, which is the bottom. And so we see that deep sea divers, those numbers drop a little bit. And when we're in a state of high autonomic arousal or fight flight freeze, we see blood pressure tends to go up. And so in deep sea divers, that tends to go down. Another observation that they made is that body temperature went down. So we're talking about heat, we're talking about pitta. We're talking about heat excess. And so some of that is mitigated just because you're activating that vagus response and then using cool water in of itself is inherently cooling. And then they also saw that the pulse rate slowed down, and so they noticed all these different responses. And it was primarily attenuated by what you said, Hadley, the vagus nerve activation. And the vagus nerve, just for those who haven't met that yet, it's your longest nerve, and it goes all the way from your brain down into your enteric nervous system, which is the nervous system of your gut. And it regulates communication between your gut and your brain. And it's your control switch for shifting yourself into a state of calm and relaxation. So doing the cold on the face activates your vagus nerve, but it also changes what's happening biophysiologically to change your gut and to change your blood pressure and to change all of your things.

So cool. Yes. So when we have a pitta imbalance, a lot of times, you know, a lot of times we get into that, the fight mode. Right. So we're irritable. We don't, you know, we don't want to be around people maybe, or if we are around people, we want to like, start an argument or we want to do all these different things. And that's. We're in like the fight flight, just the fight nervous system state. And so when we can, we can cool that down, it actually cools. I mean, it's kind of like a cycle. If we can cool that down, it cools down our body temperature. Or if we cool down our body temperature, it also cools us down, you know, mentally, emotionally, and physically as well. So the other thing that happens when we have a pizza imbalance is our digestion is when we've got a lot of heat in our digestion. And you mentioned this earlier, Dr. Kane, that we get, you know, the acid reflux, or we get like liver congestion or liver heat, and that goes out to our liver is very, very connected to our skin, according to Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine. And so that comes out in our skin with different rashes, different skin conditions that are red and maybe itchy and all of that kind of thing. And so that is all closely related to our digestion. And we get that acid reflux, we get, you know, hot burps, like that kind of thing. And so that's. That's kind of what happens there then we tend to, at the end of digestion, potentially have more heat in the end of digestion. And what does that look like? That's going to be more like diarrhea, loose stools, maybe going to the bathroom a lot during. During the day. And so if you've ever experienced that, you probably have experienced at least. Least some of it is a pitta imbalance. So let's talk a little bit about how to actually balance that in our digestion. Yeah. Does that sound good?

Absolutely.

Okay, let's do it. All right. So when we are thinking about actually balancing the pitta in our digestion, there are specific foods that we want to think about. And I actually like to think about qualities of foods. In Ayurveda, it's called gunas. Rather than thinking about, like, oh, eat, you know, here's a food list and just eat these things that are on the food list. Instead, if we can really, like, relate to what are the actual qualities and the tastes and that kind of thing, it makes it a lot easier to be like, oh, what quality does this food have? And will it balance my body? So let's think about, like, cucumber. What qualities does a cucumber have?

It's cool. It's wet. Wet.

Yeah.

Super hydrating, Refreshing.

Yes. Yeah. Soothing. We. We put it on our eyes at the spa. Right. Like it is. It's like a soothing vegetable or fruit technically, I guess, but so we've got all of those qualities that's going to be awesome in the summer, and that's when cucumbers are ripe and available. More. More available. So. So cucumbers are going to be awesome. And if we think about some other different tastes, obviously we want cooling. And we'll talk about some vegetables that are cooling or some fruits and vegetables and some different things that are cooling. But how about the other tastes? So in Ayurveda, there are six tastes, and three of those tastes are really great in the summer. And those are bitter, astringent, and sweet. Those are the three tastes that are going to be really great. The other tastes are sour and pungent or spicy and then salty. And those are not as great in the summer, though, of course. We're not gonna. We're not gonna assign morality. We're not gonna say that anything is good or bad. It's just gonna make you feel better or worse in the summer during this time. And so what we want to think about for bitter is what kinds of foods are bitter? What do you. What do you. What comes to mind when you think of bitter foods.

I'm blinking. I don't go for bitter.

I know, but that's okay. You. You actually don't need as much bitter because you don't have. You have a lot of vata, so you don't need as much. Much bitter. But in the summer, we all need a little bit more bitter. The. The food that comes to mind for me is any green. Any green are going to be more bitter.

Right.

Like, think about kale or spinach or even lettuce. You know, lettuce is a little bit sweeter, but it has some of that bitter taste as well. And so those are going to be really great this time of year. And they're also going to be cooling bitter. The taste of bitter is actually just cooling in nature. So those kinds of things also, like, you know, coffee is actually bitter, and it is often, like, the only bitter taste that we're getting in our diet.

This makes me so happy. Challenge accepted. Drinking the coffee.

So it's interesting because coffee is bitter, but it's also heating. So in the summer, it can make us have a more of a pitta imbalance. In the spring, it can actually be helpful because we have more of the kapha going on. It's stimulating, it's bitter, it's heating, and kapha needs that stuff. But in the summer, it can make us overheated. You. If you've ever had too much coffee, you might know that you get, like, diarrhea or you get acid reflux. Right. So. And a lot of times people are like, oh, I love coffee. Especially if you drink it black. You might just be missing bitter in other parts, in other foods. Foods you know, that you're not eating. And. And that's. That's an Ayurveda thing that it's like, yeah, you might just be using coffee for the bitter taste, and you just need more bitter.

I might be balancing myself out with my coffee.

Yeah.

Like, my body and its wisdom knows, like, we have a bitter deficiency. Drink more coffee.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Good job, body.

Good job, Bodi. So just give your body a little bit more bitter taste with the other things, and then you won't crave the coffee quite as much. Right. So. So the other, you know, so that's bitter, and then astringent is another one. And astringent. A lot of people are like, what the heck is astringent? What does that taste? The way that I like to describe it is the taste that happens when you eat a. Yeah, you're making the face.

Making a fish face.

Yeah.

Suck your cheeks in.

Exactly. So it basically is like if you eat pomegranate seeds, all of the water in your mouth is just like sucked out.

Right.

It's just, you know, it dries everything out. And that's really great this time of year because we are, you know, we have that heat. It's a. It's. It can cool us down. It also takes out any excess moisture and we can be kind of puffy this time of year. Right. We've got like a lot of. We maybe have a lot of humidity if we're not in the desert. And we also are obviously hot heated and pitta has a little bit of that oily quality. And so when we can take out some of that, it's going to be really helpful. And astringent foods are things like sprouts. So if you've ever eaten like pea sprouts, you know that it kind of leaves a taste in your mouth that is just very dry. Same with pomegranate cranberries. Even like legumes, beans are great. Those are astringent as well. Those kind of dry things out. And they tonify our digestive tract as well. So they kind of suck out any excess moisture. And usually they do it in a gentle way and it'll kind of like tonify. Which means what's a good way of describing what tonifying of the digestive system is?

Increases.