Dr. Donese Worden shares stress management tactics for entrepreneurs: prioritize sleep and gut health, use breathing breaks to interrupt stress, and track cortisol and heart rate variability to understand your body's patterns. Cortisol should spike about 400% within 30 minutes of waking, then decline.
Questions this video answers
About 400% within 30 minutes of waking.
Saliva and urine (salivary cortisol testing).
To assess post–myocardial infarction (post MI) risk (developed out of Columbia).
Chapters
Sleep is very, very important. If you're waking up in the middle of the night or at different times of night, try controlled release melatonin, something natural and it will keep you down a little bit better throughout the night. But sleep is very important. As Lee said, poo seemed to be the best part. I had seven pillars of health, but everybody kept talking about the bowel movement piece. And it is true. Health begins in the gut. As naturopaths, we always said we get people pooping and sleeping. You're in good shape. But if the bowel movements are not normal, look back at my 10 minute talk, you can see what that should look like. But your immune system can't function, it can't regulate. Neither can your brain chemistry. That means your chemistry that keeps you calm and happy and okay and not stressed out. Because if you continue to do that two way street, the brain is too active and stressed. It affects the gut. Now, the gut doesn't help you make the neurotransmitters and it is a bad, vicious cycle that you can get into.
Dr. Doneese, I was here in the room with you with Jason in June when you led the infamous meeting around poo. Right now there were all these questions and you've given a lot of great information and a lot of follow up on that. And what we want to talk to you about right now is the number one thing that's hitting people this quarter. Kids are back in school, socializing, some people are moving out of the country. There's all these things going on. We want to talk about how do we manage our stress. So I'd love to bring you on, highlight you, and maybe we can have a little Q and A around, you know, some stress. And then we're going to bring Jason up and he's going to give us a moment of Zen before we go to lunch. So this is really, sit back and relax. Take it in. And Dr. Doneese, you're up. And why don't you share some of your stress relief ideas and stress release ideas with us?
Okay. Well, what I think we're all seeing, I see in my patients, it's uncertainty about everything. Our jobs, our families, our health. It is the uncertainty. And you know, entrepreneurs, you think that we could roll with those punches a little bit better because everything is always uncertain. As soon as it becomes certain, we create something else that makes it uncertain. So we should have better coping skills. But the problem is, as entrepreneurs and busy mind people, is we never shut down. You wake up in the morning and the first thing you do is hit the ground running. And you haven't given your body to time to adjust to day and night. When we look at labs, we can see the cortisol level is supposed to be a certain level when you wake up in the morning. And within 30 minutes it's supposed to go up about 400%. And then within 60 minutes, it calms back down. So in that first hour, we are supposed to mount a response, calm back down, and slowly come back down the rest of the day. So at night we can sleep entrepreneurs many times are flipped, hit the ground running, hit it all day long, and cortisol's high. But what happens is you do it only so long and then your adrenal glands go, I don't care if there's a bear and I even need to survive. I'm out of gas, car's empty, got a Ferrari, but there's no gas and it can't do it anymore. The most important things we can remember is sleep. Sleep is very, very important. If you're waking up in the middle of the night or at different times of night, try controlled release melatonin, something natural, and it will keep you down a little bit better throughout the night. But sleep is very important. As Lee said, poo seemed to be the best part. I had seven pillars of health, but everybody kept talking about the bowel movement piece. And it is true. Health begins in the gut. As naturopaths, we always said we get people pooping and sleeping, you're in good shape, but if their bowel movements are not normal, look back at my 10 minute talk, you can see what that should look like. But your immune system can't function, it can't regulate. Neither can your brain chemistry. And that means your chemistry that keeps you calm and happy and okay and not stressed out. Because if you continue to do that two way street, the brain is too active and stressed, it affects the gut. Now, the gut doesn't help you make the neurotransmitters. And it is a bad, vicious cycle that you can get into work with practitioners or people that help you know how to do that. But if you get up in the morning and at night, take those moments, meditation time, peaceful time, not the time to go do your most expansive workout. That's not the time we've got to be able to transition night and day. And I think that's a big piece right now. Lee. Uncertainty. And your body doesn't even know night and day anymore.
You know, that's what we learned even in vet medicine. It's the fear of the unknown, right?
That's right.
In us and in them. So I have an Oura ring. A lot of people in this community have Oura rings so we can measure our sleep. They have whoop. They have different ways to measure sleep. How are you measuring cortisol?
So it's salivary, so we can do urine and salivary. Some of the hormone testing I do is very, very deep. We're looking at pathways of where testosterone is going. A lot of men are on testosterone, especially ingenious, but it's converting to estrogen, so now it's working against you. So these types of specialty tests are very, very important. But salivary cortisol lets me look at that morning, 60 minute, 30 minute throughout the day and at night, then I can see the pattern. Are you flipped? Are you too high? Are you already crashed and you're too low across the bottom? Then we know how to give you individualized, perfect strategies to get better. But there's help out there and we can do it.
Can you give us one or two things to do to control our cortisol? Other than meditation, which we know, what are some of the other things?
I think it's recognizing when you're getting to that point during the day. We're going, going, going, but we're not breathing, we're not in connection with our body. To know that gone out of control, that releases that cortisol and the stress hormones. Getting to know your body well enough to say, I'm starting to head there in the afternoon, take a five minute vacation, listen to that music, do the breathing, do whatever it is that takes you to a happy place. But the point is you've got to recognize it and most people don't. They just plow through to the end of the day. So learning to recognize it, getting to sleep, blacking out your curtains, make sure that bedroom is cold and dark. Those are basics. And make sure you have a good bowel movement and that you rate yourself. Where is your health right now? And that was my 10 minute talk, right? Where is your energy level? Where is your relationships, your spirituality? Where are you? Don't wait for a lab. Labs only show us this much of health. And your doctor says everything's OK but you don't feel okay. Listen to that. Listen, rate yourself in different areas and then find out where's the root of the problem.
I have one last question for you and then we're going to switch over to our moment of Zen when we're talking about sleep. My doctor is saying to really Pay attention to heart rate variability. Hrv, can you tell us a little bit about it and then what we.
Should be paying attention to, Right. We want our heart to be variable. It's supposed to speed up when we need it to and slow down when it needs to. And that variability, the more variable it is, the better off we are. We are healthier. It's a great way to look at post MI risk. That's what it was developed for out of Columbia. But it's a good way to look at your overall ability of you to adapt. That means your body, your immune system, your heart rate variability. Your body knows how to adapt when it needs to. And the HRV that's being looked at in the Oura ring, it's not the full picture and as deep as we want, but it's enough. And I like it because, Lee, until you learn how to know when you wake up in the morning to, today's a day to go out and really push myself and exercise hard, or today's an, oh, you know what, I should go take a walk in nature and not push it. That Oura ring and other technologies say, you're ready, you're not until you learn how to feel it yourself, which is always the best.
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So what are the specific numbers we should be looking at in heart rate variability? I know when Ian goes to sleep and his is under 100, it's different than when it's over 100. Me, I wish it was over 100. How do we know those numbers?
Well, this is where we get competitive, right? Where we start saying, well, my number is better than yours. You know, if you look at the average in there, men and women are a little bit different. Are different. So I would just say go by the numbers of when you feel best. You say, listen, my husband may be here, but I am here, but I feel okay at this number. We want the most variable that we personally can get. But I have a lot of patients, and some of them are, you know, genius network members are going, I can't get my HRV where it is supposed to be. And I will say, well, how are we feeling? How are we doing? Well, that is okay for you because everything is all right. But most of the time, there's something off in those seven pillars. There's something off that's causing that HRV not to be where it needs to be.
Well, thanks for giving us the things to pay attention to. I appreciate it. You are amazing. I know a lot of people have been connecting with you since the last meeting. I recommend her highly. And a lot of people call you the female Dr. Oz.
I think you're even better.
Okay. I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead. They're over here. Do it now.
