The Dangers of Cortisol Resistance: Dissolve Stress and Transform Lives with Dr. Bob Rakowski

Speaking of best versions of ourselves, I'd love to invite a dear friend of mine to the stage who has changed for the better, transformed for the better millions of lives. He's somebody who's traveled the world. He's somebody who has worked with some of the most elite athletes on the planet, some of the most elite physicians on the planet. People fly down to his clinic to shadow him. Okay. And he is one of my greatest teachers and mentors, and that's Dr. Bob Rakowski. So please help me welcome Dr. Bob Rakowski to our stage. Let's show him some love in the chat. We can wiggle our fingers. Welcome Dr. Bob. Thank you for being here today, my friend. Okay, we can see. There he is.

Can you hear me?

I sure can. How are you, my friend?

Okay. Beautiful. I am epic and thrilled to be here. So thanks for always sharing that amazing wisdom. You know the first thing I want to point out to everybody, I want to ask a question. If you can see my cover slide, I'm sharing the sleep the screen. Write your perfect practice.

Yes.

Promo. Have you ever seen a group of healthier, happier doctors, healthcare providers, ever in one setting? Sharing this is absolutely epic. So the people that are here are living exactly what we're teaching the world to do and that's quite simply to live better and hopefully to live longer. We're going to talk about stress and how to dissolve the effects of that on your body and fast. And I do mean fast in ways that will move the body, mind and spirit to better. So quick summary. Three plus decades in clinical practice, all ends of the spectrum. I've seen world champions from every major professional sport. I've also seen people sent home to die. I've been on six different continents teaching over 10,000 hours of seminars. And then my beautiful family, my wife of 35 years, three great children, four amazing granddaughters, and life keeps getting better. You know, I love how you outlined what you want everybody to achieve. And the nice thing is we're on the exact same page as always. We're going to give you things that I've used for 15 plus years to make great changes in bodies against what is might be the top cause of death of all time. When we get good results fast that will create consistent flow. Satchin and his team are so amazing at teaching you how to leverage the technology and automations. And what I'm going to share is advancements in actually our knowledge of how what we do works so well. We can talk about how to create more streams of income with what we're doing and certainly the key is transformational care. So this National Geographic cover stress portrait of a killer, a serial killer, a silent killer. Again, this may be what has killed most people throughout the history of humanity. Over a million published medical studies on PubMed and growing and this was an estimate from 2021, 75 to 90% of all Dr. Visits related in some way to stress related issues. And America alone, $300 billion a year on stress induced challenges. Dr. Jeff Bland and I taught a functional medicine series. We tag team around the world. He'd teach the hard science, I'd teach the clinical intervention. And he had a really good write up of what stress does. But we'll focus on the big things. It's really bad for the mind, it's bad for the body, including body composition. It's bad for the immune system. And you know what, if your mind's not working, your body is getting fat and out of shape with hypertension and all these other issues and your immune system's not working well, we call that a formula for disaster. But when they look at fossil records going back hundreds of thousands of years when they found skulls that had evidence of grinding their teeth, that wonderful bruxism which by the way is associated with distress, these skeletons were estimated to have died 15.4 years earlier. Pretty amazing there. And so I want to bring out this graphic and then highlight some of the things that are very critical on it. So first and foremost, three in four people report that stress is disrupted to their physical health. 2 and 3 report that it's disrupted to their mental health. And notice what it says, chronic stress cortisol resistance. And that's what we're going to talk about and how prevalent it is. And I'll let the cat out of the bag. It suggested that pretty much everybody walking around has some degree of cortisol resistance. And what happens then is cortisol, remember, is an anti inflammatory, a glucocorticoid. And when you cannot down regulate the inflammatory process, your body will burn up, your body will burn out. So notice that this reference talks about the fact that sensitivity to any signaling molecule, not just hormones, is related to the amount of receptors. And here's what we know. In cortisol resistance, you will down regulate the number of receptors to cortisol on most cells and you will downregulate the benefits. Now here's one of the biggest challenges. One of the things that doesn't appear to get downregulated is the chronic immune suppression related to this elevation of cortisol. I'll give you this quote directly from the medical literature. Many or most likely all New World primates, and we're in that category, have markedly elevated cortisol and resistance essentially to dexamethasone suppression, no matter what medically they do. Even super physiologic doses of ways of dampening the stress response, it doesn't work. Dexamethasone is estimated to be about 30 times as strong as cortisol. And then in theory, it should have a much greater effect on the hypothalamus and the pituitary adrenal axis. So when we look, when someone has an ideally functioning stress system, their body makes stress hormones according to appropriate demand, and then it calms down the response when the stressor is reduced. But here's the challenge. When people have cortisol resistance, the dexamethasone does not calm down the drive of stress on the body. And therefore we need to figure out a different way to do it. So here's my simple summary of what those studies say. Many, if not all of us are stuck in a cycle of elevated cortisol, which makes us inflamed, which can make us fat, which can break down our lean tissue, which can suppress our immune system, which can make us depressed. And that's really just the tip of the iceberg. I like this graph of blood flow basically at rest and during intense physical activity. And the intense physical activity in my mind mimics fight or flight, that chronic stress response. The liver is most affected, followed by the kidneys, followed by the brain. We'll talk about liver, kidneys and brain in a moment. But this graphic, not exactly accurate, but you get the idea. Your brain will not be the same under stress. Blood flow is dramatic, dramatically reduced. Your body loses the ability for higher decision making, it loses joy, and it essentially functions on reflex action. And I tell people whenever there's a lethal stress, you can literally get to the point where you can't do anything. Think of the deer in the headlights. So there was a scene from Saving Private Ryan, that movie, where soldiers in the heat of battle and one of his good friends is being killed in hand to hand combat just feet away. But he's paralyzed. He can't even reach up to help him. When we start looking at depression, which seems to be way too dominant in this world at younger and younger ages, we know that the more cortisol people have, the more likely they are to be depressed. Powerful study here shows that chronic stress can literally physically damage the liver both directly and indirectly. When you start looking at what this means, very, very simply is the body is going to have a decreased ability to detoxify. When we look at stress related disorders, very, very simply, it also disrupts kidney function and can even progress kidney pathology, liver and kidneys, big detoxification organs. I've told people for decades the symptoms of chronic poisoning include fatigue, sleep disturbance, intestinal distress, allergy symptoms, headaches, confusion and anxiety. And I've said for years, if we were to get rid of these circumstances, I might have to do something else in clinical practice because this is what people are walking into my door with. Now keep in mind, stress is likely to increase every single one of these problems and not just by the ability of decreasing toxins with our body. The oxidation, the inflammation, the shutting down of sex steroids, the shutting down of joy and thought process, all these things magnify the negative effects. And then very, very simply, 20, 21, cortisol resistance is associated with inflammation. Definitely. Which we'll find out in a moment is linked to all chronic disease and certainly immunosuppression. And which cells are most affected? Well, the natural killer cells. So if we go back to our physiology of the immune system, natural killer cells kill cancer cells and viral infected cells and we certainly don't want those increasing. And cancer, by the way, has just been going up exponentially for a long period of time. It's been over 50 years since we declared the war on cancer here in the US and all we've done is put money into things that don't work and fall further and further behind. What if we could actually deal with this? Stress and inflammation, two major factors in cancer. You can get people's attention when their clothes don't fit right, when they're not feeling good in their own skin. And by multiple mechanisms. Chronic distress can make you fat. It'll mess up your love life. Simple quote stress. You're either making stress hormones or sex hormones, not both simultaneously. Here they start looking at cortisol resistance and all the things that can cause it. But ultimately, here's what it says. Anti inflammatory therapy is mandatory. So you know, again, I love Sachin's introduction to that. Well, what if we just actually got cortisol working again by doing a stress reset and that would certainly help. What about good Omega 3s? What about an anti inflammatory diet? What about a great night's sleep? All of these things are absolutely critical. And by the way, they're all disrupted by chronic stress, even the anti inflammatory diet, because guess what, even your digestion will not be as good. So this article I found so magnificent and so telling. And here's what it talks about. Systemic chronic inflammation leading to many diseases that are collectively the leading causes of death and disability around the planet. So when the body's inflamed, more insulin resistance, prediabetes, diabetes, top risk factor for cardiovascular disease, top risk factor for cancer. An inflamed brain is a depressed brain. When you're inflamed and therefore having cortisol resistance, that's a horrible storm for autoimmune disease. Neurodegeneration, you'll break down muscle and bone and again the immune system shuts down. But when we look at these triggering Factors in the 90s, I started calling this the deadly quartet. Stress, toxins, malnutrition and physical inactivity. And all of these things are setting up that chronic inflammatory process and stress. Here they call it out directly. And how about indirectly when we sleep? One of the things that I tell people that's one of the most powerful brain anti inflammatories experts now are calling sleep mental floss. Not dental floss, but mental floss. That's how you clean your mind, clean out all the crevices. And I've said for years if you're not running on rest and recovery, you're running on stress hormones and those are bad overall for your system. So now let's get into solutions. So it was about 20 years ago I was at a major conference where an endocrinologist put up the data and that they had actually found melatonin receptors on the adrenal cortex. Why would it be there? Well, turns out the gut makes 400 times the melatonin as the pineal gland. You might get the idea that melatonin is important for a lot of things gut related. Think back when Hippocrates said all disease starts in the gut. Well, he wasn't quite right on that, but he wasn't off by much. Now they suggest that 90% of disease can be retraced back to the gut and the microbiome. But melatonin then actually helps to suppress or helps to buffer the non responsiveness of the hypothalamus and the pituitary. And they say that melatonin can be helpful for adrenal insufficiency. And that's both acute adrenal medulla and chronic adrenal cortex distress. My recommendation is 1-2mg melatonin every waking hour. You might ask why every waking hour. Bodies respond to frequency, duration, intensity, quality and timing of stimuli. Melatonin Theanine and most natural molecules have a short half life in the body about an hour. And that means an hour after taking it, half the benefit is gone. If you really want to know the power of melatonin, great article. Most recently comparing melatonin and vitamin D. So many parallels between the two. Both are absolutely life critical and affected by so many things, including especially mitochondrial function which is related to all of energy activity or 94.4% of energy activity of our body. Melatonin is also very powerful against cancer. All ten hallmarks of cancer are positively modulated. And it's not toxic. Sometimes people worry. Can I get too much? Well, it's not a practical concern. If you got too much, well, guess what, you might feel a little off for a period of time, but stop taking it a couple hours, you're perfectly fine. When we look at theanine and distress, 153 different published medical studies going back over 25 years. Second title. It shows that it reduces both psychological and physiologic stress. So it's going to reduce stress in the mind and in the body. It promotes relaxation without promoting drowsiness. My dose here is 100 to 200 milligrams every waking hour. Then ganoderma, also known as Reishi, also known as Ling Chi 3000 plus medical studies 277 on its effects related to stress and distress. It took them till 2022 to realize that ganoderma actually lowers serum cortisol. So immediately you're going to get some of that break. So it's going to decrease the stress in the body. It's also great for the mind. Serotonin and gaba are both called out in this study. But it's also good for dopamine and acetylcholine, giving it both anti Parkinson's and anti Alzheimer's action. It's been known as the king of herbs. It's known as the herb of spiritual potency. And the medical literature even says that it calms the body, the mind and the spirit. And when we start looking at the brain, many different references on how it can be good for so many different things. So what's my dose? 250 to 500 milligrams every waking hour. There's your references there. Calms the body, the mind and the spirit. And my favorite source or form is going to be the ganoderma spores. We talked about the challenges with detox. Ganoderma is one of the most powerful detoxification agents ever. Protects against MPTP induced Parkinson's, carbon Tetrachloride induced liver failure, STZ induced pancreatic failure, and even neural tube defects. And yes, it is safe for pregnant women. And again, we recommend it frequently, every waking hour because we do know that that'll get us the fastest results. So I'm going to tell a fun story here. This is Camilla Hiller. She reached out to me from Sweden about two years ago and she said, Dr. Bob, I'm dying. And I said, what do you mean you're dying? She goes, things are really bad in my body. My liver's shutting down, my kidneys shutting down. I'm anemic, I have no energy. I thought, well, what the heck's going on with you? Well, it turns out she had bariatric surgery a dozen years earlier. They took her stomach from the size of a soccer ball and took it down to a tennis ball. And medically that induces malnutrition. So when I looked at her labs, I thought, oh my gosh, you are dying. Knowing that her gut couldn't absorb much, my game plan was to start with the stress reset. Melatonin, theanine spores every waking hour. And you know what? At the end we'll share that. She thought, felt that this was completely and totally life changing, life enhancing, and even created an easier way to do the stress reset. So here's what I'm going to tell you. Nearly 20 years I've been using this stress reset. Every category of patient, whether we're talking about the elite or the critically ill, and they notice a vast difference when they get great results. They tell their friends, we can create multiple streams of income and create that translational transformative care. And ultimately we do it by getting after cause and effect. Recognizing that stress is a big issue for most people out there. The way that we're going to attract clients is by absolutely wowing them. And by the way, this is a way to leverage technology. When I get a really phenomenal result, especially if it's unique, I might shoot a film there. I have the after effects of this foot. And what an amazing job happened there. Maybe it was four perfect practices ago, I gave a lecture called Functional medicine in a cup. And because we have ganoderma lucidum in that cup and that creates phenomenal compliance because when people drink coffee, they do it multiple times, multiple times a day, they never plan to quit and they never need to be reminded. And you can still see in our Facebook pages the conversation that satchin I had on this guilt free and turbocharged coffee. So I left a few minutes for Q and A Satchin. I'm happy to answer questions or help with the flow of the data today if it's easy to quit a few minutes or whatever you like.

Well, champions don't quit, so I'm not going to ask you to do that, and I know you wouldn't either. You're here to be supportive and to be generous, which you were in. And actually, you know, one thing I want to say about Dr. Bob is he, he is an amazing communicator and if you were there for breakfast of champions, right, you can see how he is so balanced in his communication style and his presentation style, right? Presented stories, presented facts, presented research, presented how he's supportive in transforming people's lives. So what a fantastic presentation to just kind of pay attention to and model. Aside from the powerful knowledge that he shared, one of the secrets to your success in practice will be doing a factory reset on somebody's nervous system. If you can do that using this protocol, they're now able to heal in a way they were never able to heal before. Even drugs work better when the nervous system is tuned to a balanced state, right? Fight or flight destroys our health. It's destroying our client's health. And in a practice, it also destroys your outcomes because how we use nutrients is also different. Right? The one of the slides that Dr. Bob shared that I love to share with my clients is that under fight or flight, there's a 90% of decrease to the kidneys and liver. So if your clients are going through a detox program, a weight loss program, or they're starting to clean up their diet, they're going to start releasing toxins. But if they stay in a stressed out state, the very organs that are responsible for helping them remove those toxins aren't going to work as effectively because where we send blood flow is where we send function. So the way you heal every cell, tissue, organ and cell in somebody's body and system, rather in somebody's body, is you get them into a parasympathetic state, you get them sleeping again, which is most parasympathetic thing that we do. You get them breathing properly again, which can override the nervous system, and then you work on their physiology. And so melatonin. I know some people have aversions to things that our body can make right. I know Dr. Jack Cruz is big on this as an example. But not everyone lives on a beach. Not everyone can optimize their circadian rhythm. So for seven days you can put them on a protocol that resets them Right. We're not talking about long term use and abuse, we're talking about resetting them. Then you set them back on their way. Right? So think of formatting your hard drive on your computer. You don't format. You format it once and then you're conscious about what you upload to your computer after that. You don't have to keep formatting it every week. Right. No one would advise you to do that. So if you can do anything to get people's nervous systems to go back to that setting, you're going to get clinically, your outcomes are going to be way, way, way better. Right. Can everyone see that? Right. Even how we use nutrients like magnesium. Right. Magnesium is used to break down adrenaline and noradrenaline. Right. So if somebody is under chronic stress, they're burning up all that magnesium. But if they're not under stress and that magnesium is being utilized differently right now it's being utilized in the mitochondria to create energy. Right now it's being utilized to regulate blood pressure, to create peristalsis in the gut, to help with muscle function and activity, to help build new bone. Right. So how we use our nutrients also varies when we're under states of stress. So what Dr. Bob shared, I know is like very short, concise and condensed, but there's really a lot to unpack there clinically. So this, if you can, for those of you that purchase recordings, this will be a very valuable recording to watch. Like worth more than the price of admission. If you can unpack everything that he shared. Dr. Bob, I'd love to hear what some of your favorite case studies are in using this stress protocol.

Well, let's go with both extremes. When we look at Camilla Hiller, she actually, by the way, partnered with a nutrition company in Europe to create stress reset drops of melatonin, theanine and other adaptogens in there. And by the way, that was hard to do because one's fat soluble, one's water soluble, but she went from having such severe malnutrition, severe kidney dysfunction, liver dysfunction, brain challenges, even balance challenges, she had actually fallen, took a bad fall at one point in time and suffered a significant injury and her body was dying. But when we did that stress reset, everything started getting better. Between the ability to clear those levels of toxins, to start having more absorption from the nutrients, which would be critical with a really compromised digestive system, life changing for her, and she's paying it forward to the world with stress reset drops. Then let's go to the other end of the stream extreme, we look at elite athletes, and I did a stress reset with a guy named Tyson gay, who knows 12, 13 years ago, and the following two weeks later, beat Usain Bolt straight up in the 100 meters. And I asked Tyson, I said, hey, what was different about that race? And he says, you know what, Bob? I was so relaxed. Well, you might not equate being relaxed with running faster and beating the fastest man on the planet. But he said very simply, any excess tension slows down mechanical efficiency and slows down speed. So relaxing was absolutely critical. And here's what I can tell you. We probably all have way more tension than we need to have. This will take the edge off of it. So, you know, if you like yoga, you're going to be better at that. If you like sport, you're going to be better at that. If you want to concentrate and focus and learn better, you're going to be better at that. So, you know, here we're talking about a world champion and someone who was legitimately dying and both having phenomenal response. So here's one other thing I'll share. So with Camila, we did it for 10 days. And when she, as soon as she backed off, she started regressing again. And she said, how long am I going to need this? I said, well, Camila, guess what? I've never seen anybody that needed to continue after the 10 days. But that just tells me you are so profoundly malnourished and not in control of your physiologic process. Now, hers was a malabsorption, but think about malnutrition being the top cause of death on the planet. If we can get people getting more out of their food and not needing to feed their brain with addictive food, with, you know, good natural food sources, think about how much better they can get. So across the board, it doesn't matter if it's a child, an elite athlete, someone dying, a good intervention. This is phenomenal for all of them.

You know, one other thing. I'll share this story because it's relevant to Melatonin. I won't share his name for privacy reasons, because if I did, you'd all know him. But he's one of the top entrepreneur coaches in the world. And, you know, him and I have become friends over the years, and, you know, he was struggling with COVID and his wife was. They both got it, and his deep sleep, like, totally tanked. Okay, so he messages me, and he's on posting a line about how miserable his response has been to Covid. And, you know, we started exchanging messages, and I said, I want you to take and hold your breath. 1.2 grams of melatonin. So we had to get it into a powdered format for him because capsules are usually a little bit harder to dose. You'd have to take a whole bunch of them. And within three days, he's having the best deep sleep he's ever had because he wears an aura ring. And he came back from the dead, basically. Now, would I tell him to do that forever for the rest of his life? No. But when we're super stressed and super depleted, these systems need a boost from the outside, right? If our clients, if their gut health is poor and we make 400 times more melatonin in the gut than we do in the pineal gland, then guess what? Maybe watching the sunrise and sunset isn't going to do the trick just yet until we can reestablish other aspects of their health first. So the way you get referrals faster is you help people feel better faster. That's what they pay you to do. Right. And by the safest way that you can possibly do that. So melatonin has no known levels of toxicity, but we do know that the alternative, which is high cortisol, has many mechanisms of toxicity. So you get to decide, do you want to keep them in a toxic state of high stress all the time and high cortisol, or do you want to dampen that by just giving them something really simple that has no toxicity level? Right. If anything, they might feel a little bit drowsy, but most people, they feel actually more alert because they function better when their cortisol is low, not when their cortisol is high. Right. Think about what cortisol does to somebody's hippocampus. Right? It basically destroys it. So how functional are they during the day if their cortisol is. And stress hormones are just running rampant? Right. So it's our job as clinicians to make a decision that serves the client best. And there's a lot of dogma around melatonin, and the world's leading melatonin expert takes 200 milligrams every night. Now, I'm not suggesting you do that, but the person that has done more research than any one of us combined, perhaps, except Dr. Bob, takes that much every night, so they might know something that we don't. Anything else you Want to add, Dr. Bob?

You know one, you do such a good job putting the icing on the cake. When we start talking about the hippocampus, for just a moment. You know, someone asked if in the chat if I ever have written a book about this. You know, decades ago, I taught a full day seminar. And at that point in time, with functional medicine, you had to use so much literature just to validate what we were doing. Now most people kind of get it, so we show more the how. But potentially I could create another one like that. But when you start talking about the hippocampus, it's fascinating that it has such a high level of cortisol receptors for a simple reason. If something's very, very stressful, our brain needs to be aware. And that will ultimately help us to learn from that lesson. But guess what? When we don't dampen the response like you said, it just obliterates the hippocampus and the function. And what neurodegeneration is something that is the top fear. Especially after the age of 55. Cancer before. The nice thing is this stress reset. We went into great detail. Especially helps brain inflammatory process and slows down the neurodegeneration. I might just make that comment real quick. Robert Sapolsky wrote a book called Stress the Aging Brain and Mechanisms of Neuron Cell Death. And this simple summary of the book is simple. Stress destroys the brain. So again, great job putting the icing on the cake. We'd probably have a harder time if as a group we tried to figure out something that stress wasn't bad for in the human body on a prolonged state. But what we can do is collectively reduce that in individuals by applying this simple and profoundly effective protocol.

Wonderful. I love it. Where can people access more information? Where would you like us to send them? I've got the drops here. So excited to use them myself and go through a stress reset. See what that feels like. Sometimes we're so addicted to our stress hormones. There's actually nothing more addictive than our stress hormones. People are addicted to cortisol and adrenaline. Right. One of the main functions of cortisol. The main function of cortisol is to raise blood sugar. So keeping that in mind so you can, it's, you know, if, if something raises our blood sugar and sugar itself is super addictive. You can only imagine the rush that it gives our body when we have tons of cortisol. So your aura ring will tell you if you haven't. If you're an aura ring wearer, if your HRV is low, chances are might be a good time for a reset. I know people who've done this reset. They report their deep sleep dramatically improves and their HRV improves. So the evidence is clear that there is a betterment of their health. Okay. Dr. Bob, if there's somewhere that you'd like to drop a link that people can learn more information in the chat, that would be totally awesome.

Sure, I'll drop in the chat. But thedoctorbob.com T-H-E-R-B-O-B.com it'll have links to my social media, to my YouTube channel, et cetera. So it's always an honor. Sachin, thank you.

Thank you, my dear friend. I love you and appreciate you. Thank you for adding so much value. Let's show Dr. Bob some love. Let's clap our hands. All right. Amazing, amazing, amazing. Another wonderful talk. And I hope you got some great, great value out of that. You know, like I was saying earlier, that the nervous system is the most important part of helping our clients heal. Okay? And if we can do that, they will see profound changes. Because the nervous system is our cosmic antenna, right? It's what enables us to interact with the world. All the information coming in comes in through our nervous system, and of course, it's processed in our nervous system and all the actions that we take as a result of our nervous system. So your nervous system is woven into every part of your body. Every cell is surrounded by three things. A nerve tissue, a blood vessel, and a lymphatic vessel. So if we can get nutrients to the cell, if we can remove the waste and send it the right signal. Right? So those are the three things we like to focus on. Right? There's a reason our bodies are designed this way. We get results where other people don't. Okay? And if our waste removal systems shut down because we don't address the stress issue, then guess what? We're compromised. Right? One of the main pumps of the lymphatic system is diaphragm. What happens when people are stressed out? How do they breathe? They breathe short and shallow, so their lymphatics don't work properly. So the waste removal system becomes compromised, the liver and the kidneys become compromised, Right? And there's actually an 80% decrease of blood flow to the gut. So all the systems of removal and detoxification become compromised when somebody is under stress. So this is why we focus on breathing. This is why we focus on addressing the nervous system, because now we get somebody's body working the way it's supposed to again. Does everyone see that? Right. Can you see how this can get results where everything else fails? Because nobody's putting this is Physiology 101, right? This is the stuff that we forget a lot of times, but it's hardwired into our biology. But when those systems get disrupted. See, the profoundly simple things to do are simple for a reason, right? That's what makes our body so brilliant. Our bodies would be like. They wouldn't be that brilliant if they were so hard to take care of. The greatest sign of sophistication is simplicity, right? I let nature do the hard work. I let my body do the hard work. I give it simple inputs. That's what makes your computer so sophisticated that it's easy to use.