Your breakfast is why you can't create after 2pm

Imagine this day. You wake up with an idea and you know it's a great one and you're excited to get out of bed and to see it implemented out in the world. Like, you can see how it's going to fit into everything that you're creating. And after getting up and getting going, you say after lunch you're going to work on it once you clear a few things off your to-do list. Then 2 o'clock rolls around and you're done and By done, I mean you're spent. You are exhausted. So you reheat the coffee, you open the blank doc, you go over your notes, and it looks like a stranger wrote them. And 20 minutes later, you move on because you decide that tomorrow you're going to do it when you're fresh. You've decided that the problem is that afternoon, or it's your discipline, or it's The things that are happening in the week. But the problem was breakfast. And I know exactly how that sounds on a show about creative work, but stay with me because my guest has spent years finding out why capable people run outta gas. And she can draw a straight line from what you ate at 7 in the morning to why you could not write at 2. And breakfast is the smallest of the 4 things she names today. And it's one thing that you can change very easily tomorrow morning with very little cost to yourself. And the other 3 are why you spent 2 years treating a physical problem like a character flaw. And here's what it's costing you. If your ability to make the work depends on a good day, you're going to publish about a third of your good ideas. And because the window On when you can act on them is closed at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. You have to keep scheduling your real work on the other side of whatever. So today we're going to talk about how your energy is input into you that you can set on purpose the same way you set a meeting on your calendar. Along the way, we'll talk about why your coffee habit is charging you interest. Rest is what makes you more creative rather than the prize for being creative. And a line that stopped me in this interview is, half the time, the first sign of a heart attack is the heart attack. So here's what I want you to hold for the rest of this episode. If 2 o'clock never stole your afternoon away from you again, What would you be able to accomplish? Every episode of this show runs on one idea. You are the ultimate input into your own work. And today I mean your physical body. And I want to be blunt on why this belongs on this show, because you can be completely clear on your message, aimed at exactly the right people, doing exactly the right work, and still sit down at 2 o'clock or whatever time of day. happens for you when you don't have anything in the tank and no amount of clarity is going to move you forward. The creator is the input and the input has a body, and that physical body already made decisions about your energy in the afternoon before you opened the laptop. Distance between a muffin and the thing you've never published is a lot shorter than what you like to think. My guest today is Dr. Alicia Newsom. She's a functional medicine physician and founder of the Body Wellness Institute. Now, all that means is she's the person who finds out why you're tired. How does she do that? She runs the labs other doctors skip on the people who keep getting told their blood work came back normal. So with that, let's welcome Dr. Alicia. Thanks for coming on the show. And I think maybe we should start out with what is functional medicine for those that might not know what it is. Let's just start there.

Yeah. So functional medicine is, think about if you get a headache, you can go head over to your cabinet, grab a Tylenol or an Advil. You can take that medication. Your headache most likely will go away. But you did not have a headache because you had a Tylenol deficiency. There's something else going on inside of your body. So in functional medicine, what we do is we really look at what's going on with your body holistically. We get to the root cause of what's going on. And we look at everything that's going on in your life, your stress levels, what's going on with your family, your kids, your work. We also look at different systems within the body and toxins and sleep and all these different areas. Versus just saying, I'm gonna give you this and send you on your way.

Boom. Okay. So if there's so many different avenues that could be ailing someone, right? Or stressing them out. Yes. Or impacting their energy. Right. So there's probably a physiological component, you know, neurological, which I guess would be similar, but it could be the things you're eating. It could be habits. Like psychology, how do you go about and find the root cause of, hey, you don't have a Tylenol deficiency, it's dehydration or something else?

So in functional medicine, one thing that we do is we spend a lot of time with our clients and a lot of us have virtual practices. So for myself, my practice is virtual. Everyone hops on Zoom with me. I work with people all over the country, all over the world. So we have an appointment, but before that you fill out a lot of forms. So my intake forms, there's over 300 questions.

Wow.

So I have all these different questions that I'm asking about all the different areas of your life, all the weird things that you've— symptoms that you've had. If it's you have some brain fog or low energy, or you've got some funky digestion things, you eat something and you feel bloated, or you get a headache, all types of questions. And From those questions, it translates into a health score. So it scores all these different areas of your body. So that's one place that we start out, and that's really from a subjective standpoint. So that's just you self-reporting what's going on. We get on a call, we talk about everything that's going on, and then from there we do advanced lab testing. So this is very different than what you would have if you just went to the doctor and you had your well visit or your annual exam. We do a lot of advanced lab work that's looking at your cortisol levels, which deal with your stress, and we're testing those throughout the day to see how well your body is able to adapt and handle the stress in your life. Because we can't get rid of it all, right?

Mm-hmm.

But we want to be able to have your body be able to respond better to the stress. So there's different lab testing that we do. We could look at Stool, like what's going on with your gut, like poop samples. The lab does all of that, but we're able to look at that. We can look at hair samples. We look at urine, blood, all those things. It depends on what you specifically need. But from there, we are able to find out exactly what's going on inside of your body and then put together very customized plans to help you feel better, think better, perform better, all of, all the things that you want in life.

Right on. Yeah. So much more than a typical doctor's visit, right? Like a family practice.

Yes.

Yeah. I think very interesting, right? There's so much data we can have about ourselves and then sifting through what's relevant or not, I'm sure is a whole other topic. So I'm curious, you know, we're talking about stress resiliency and you mentioned cortisol, right? And I know, yes, from my limited understanding of cortisol that it's essential hormone that helps you get up in the morning. And I know that things like coffee can drive that up, which is interesting to me, but yeah, stressing yourself out a cup at a time. But if you're like me, I love coffee.

So I love coffee too.

But could you talk a little bit more about if someone, say a creator is like, hey, I feel always exhausted. I feel like I can't Sit at my desk and concentrate. I feel like at the whims of my energy. Like, how would you maybe start to pull apart what's going on behind the scenes?

Yeah, this is one of my favorite topics to talk about because this is where I started in functional medicine. So I had a wellness practice, but I was tired all day long. I'd wake up and I'm like dragging through the day. I love coffee. Let me grab my coffee, but then I need another one around 2 o'clock to push through. At that time I had my babies too. So they were young and in diapers. So I would work all day, see patients, rush home, sit in rush hour traffic, get my babies, feed them, bathe them, get them in bed because mama needed to get in bed, right? And it really impacted my ability to focus during work, to create content, to want to put myself out there, to network, do all the things that we do as entrepreneurs, right? We need our ability to focus and Mm-hmm. To brainstorm and all of those things. If we don't have it, it's hard for us to show up for our work and to show up for the people that we're called to serve and to impact. So when I got into functional medicine, I ended up meeting a doctor who did functional medicine and really helped me understand what was going on, ran advanced lab work on me. One of the things that's so important when it comes to stress resiliency and this energy levels that people have, cuz a lot of times, like you said, cortisol is that stress hormone. It's great. It helps us wake up in the morning. It gets us started going throughout the day. But for some people, they have spikes in cortisol throughout the day where it goes really high. And one of the things we test is called a cortisol awakening response, where cortisol should go up about 50 to 150% in that first 30 minutes in the morning, and then it should slowly go down the rest of the day, and it should stay down at nighttime so you can go to sleep. But what I find With a lot of entrepreneurs is you're up all night, like dragging all day and then up all night. And now you're like wired, you have a tired but wired feeling. You may not feel productive during that time. You might just be scrolling social media and things like that, doom scrolling. Or throughout the day, you're having spikes of cortisol, which give you more of an anxious feeling versus like calming and all of those different types of things. So cortisol is a really important hormone because it impacts Everything from our weight to our sex hormones. So even for men, testosterone, women, their menstrual cycles, the testing is one of the biggest things that we do. So we're able to see exactly what's going on with their cortisol throughout the day. But there's also very important blood markers like blood sugar regulation. So not just looking at glucose or hemoglobin A1C, which is standard blood work, And what I find a lot of times is people have what's called dessert for breakfast. So think about pancakes with syrup on it, or French toast, or muffins, or coffee. But now this coffee has like all this sugar and things in it. And what that does is it spikes your blood sugar first thing in the morning, and then it will crash. And then all day you're on this roller coaster with your, you Mm-hmm. And it will cause you to want to go for more coffee. It may have you go for a sugary snack. All of those different types of things could also be signals that there's things going on with your hormones in your body that's causing issues with fatigue and all of that. Another big area is toxins. So toxins come in 2 forms. There's biotoxins and then there's environmental toxins. Biotoxins are things like Mold, fungus, parasites, bacteria, viruses. They're living things that they take your nutrients, which you need for energy. They disrupt your gut microbiome. They literally live in your body. And then there's environmental toxins. So that could be heavy metals. It could be things from your skincare products, your cleaning products, medications all have toxic side effects, radiation, all of those. But a lot of those can cross the blood-brain barrier, and that can start causing issues with your ability to focus. So you're sitting there, you're wanting to do, but you're like, I've gotta create this reel, right? But then you're sitting there and you're like, I can't even concentrate to get this done. Or you're researching, figuring out what kind of script you're gonna use. Those can be things that are really blocking you as well. And then there's a bucket that I called of deficiencies. That's gonna be nutrients. So not getting enough good protein, good fats, starting that morning with dessert instead of a nice savory breakfast. So savory breakfast is something that's going to have good protein in it and good fats. Your body needs a certain amount of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, antioxidants in it to give you the energy that you need. You also need good sleep. It's one of the most underrated free things that are out there. And I don't know if you have kids or not, but I have teenagers and then I have a 3-year-old. And my 3-year-old knows that when we say, okay, time to go to bed, he— that's a trigger for him. He knows he's going to go get in the bathtub, then he's going to get lotioned down. We're going to read a book to him and he's going to go to bed. But as adults, we don't do that. We're like, no, I can push through. I can stay up all night. And we know kids need sleep, but then we forget that we as adults need sleep as well.

Mm-hmm.

And then the last bucket that really impacts energy and focus is in the gut health. So there's 10 times the amount of nerves that go from your gut to your brain than leaving out going to your entire peripheral nervous system. So what's really going on with your gut? If you're constipated all the time or you have diarrhea or you're bloaty, those are signals that there's something going on inside of your body and that impacts your brain and how you function. throughout your day.

Wow. Okay. So there's a lot that can go wrong. Some people might've felt their cortisol spike just hearing this, right?

Sorry. It can all be helped.

It can all be helped, right?

Yeah.

I think with the people I work with, a lot of times they feel like they're at the whims of the environment or how their body feels, and they're missing that direct intervention. Are there any other beliefs that you think, before we get into how to fix it all, what are some other beliefs that go into feeling like low energy or increase people's stress in your casual but professional observation?

Yeah. Inside of my integrated leadership framework, we talk about business, body, and beliefs. Business is like how you are running your business, your life. How you're— what you're delegating, where you're asking for help, how are you structuring your calendar throughout the week. And a lot of times we can have things that pull from our energy because we're simply saying yes to things that we want to say, right?

Mm-hmm.

We're being more agreeable when we're like, I don't want to do that. We're spending time doing things that suck our energy versus give us life and all of that. The other part is, of course, all the body things, but then belief. There's a lot of self-limiting beliefs that run in the background that I find a lot of times in high-achieving people. Entrepreneurs, we're a whole different kind of beast of a human that get out and, I'm gonna do it on my own and I'm gonna create content and build a business, do all those things. But a lot of times there are things that run in the background, like I'm not enough, or it has to be perfect. I've gotta get it right. Or. I'm all alone, so I've just got to handle everything myself. And those self-limiting beliefs show up. They determine how we show up in life versus if I have a belief that all of earth, all of life is supporting me. There's plenty of good people in my life that want to help me, and then I'm willing to actually ask them for help and get all this extra stuff off of my plate that don't— doesn't actually require me. One thing about In business, and this is so important for content creation. And a lot of times we can get a little distracted with the busy work. I've been guilty of it too. I'll get caught up all day in my email or working on something else, right? And I know I gotta film, right? I know that I've gotta do all this, but I'll spend time doing other things. What I've done as far as when it comes to my business is that if it doesn't require my face, And it doesn't require my voice, most likely it can be delegated. And I really need to get those things off from my plate and ask for help. Now, the one thing that a lot of times can't be delegated is our content creation, right? It's, we need our faces for that. I know there's a bunch of AI and different things out there, which is cool. I haven't gotten into all of that yet. I don't know if you do that, but it requires us to be able to show up, to go live, to To get on camera and do all of these things. We can't delegate those things away. But what we can do is start making space in our calendar, in our day, to not have those distractions and things that pull us away from creating our content by really addressing what I believe a lot of those limiting beliefs that we have inside of us, that things have to be perfect, or I always have to handle everything myself. Nobody's going to help me with this. I think— Those are some of my thoughts around that.

Yeah, I love what you said about believing that you need to do the creation yourself. I do use a lot of AI in my business.

Oh, cool.

I use it for creating things or actually doing a voiceless podcast, which seems insane to me, but I know people do it and they're successful with it. And I think for me, the belief is you really have to know yourself. if you're going to create with tools, 'cause it just amplifies. So—

Yeah.

If you don't feel like you're enough, you're gonna make a bunch of content that is proving that— not proving, but if you do 100 pieces of content and get zero views, that's then now proof that you're not enough 'cause you did 100 things and so on and so forth.

Yeah.

But we really do need to own it. And I think in using technology and in using tools, it becomes stressful when there is that separation of Who I am as a creator, my message, my voice, and then the things that I'm putting out there. If that's not aligned, that is stress city, at least from what I've seen.

But how do you help people get into alignment where they are creating content that's actually in alignment with who they are versus anything and everything else?

I mean, I'm a high-performance coach, so I have a process that's really tailored to do that, but I have a light process that I've been working with creators on helping them define their point of view and strong opinions about things and figuring out how to synthesize that into a document that you can read and be like, this is me. And, you know, I think so many creators skip that step.

Yeah.

Where they're like, I'm not sure what I'm really about at any given time, or they can feel kind of lost, like, but Being able to hand that to a teammate or to your friend Claude or whatever, to then have it make things more aligned with you is something I've been focusing on quite a bit.

Yeah, AI has helped a lot, especially with the delegation of tasks too. But like you said, you have to have that initial internal beliefs and knowing of who you are to put that input in there, right? Literally input into Claude. To get the output that you want. Oh, I like that.

The way that I've been trying to structure the show, and just for everyone listening, this is still freeform, but it's working. I'm liking what we're doing so far. If I talk about the creator as the ultimate input into their work, they're also the signal of what they're putting out into the world, right? So what goes into the creator are things like beliefs, habits, and, and that's why I was hammering on belief, the front part of this. But are there common habits or the current political environment. There's tons of different sources on what good health is and isn't and what can we trust. Like, how do we, in terms of energy and stress, like, how do we determine— let's start with influences. Like, how do we know who's someone to trust with our health or to help us? Figure out our energy, right? And I hope that doesn't sound like an attack, but it's just an open question for me.

Yeah, I think that one thing that we have to do is understand that doctors work for us, even though it may be our insurance that's paying them and we really pay for our insurance, or even if we get it through a job or our spouse's job, we're paying for it regardless. I think that's one thing to be mindful of. Doctors work for us. So you want to work with a doctor who also shares that belief in understanding you're not just another number that's coming in here that I'm going to see real quickly, barely listen to, and then just give you that Tylenol, right? Versus looking under the hood. Really, I like to think about it this way. If you were driving down the street and Check engine light came on in your car. You're like, okay, I got to take my car into the mechanic. You're gonna take your car into the mechanic, and imagine when you get there, if the mechanic's sitting there, he has his pen and paper, and you're saying, my check engine light came on last week, and I've been hearing a little rattling noise. And he's sitting there taking notes, and he's nodding his head, and then he reaches into his pocket, and he says, that's all you have to do is take this sticker and put it right over that check engine. That would be crazy, right? You'd expect that mechanic to open up the hood, run some diagnostic tests, find out why is my check engine light going off. I'm not just going to take this sticker and put it over this. If I keep driving my car, it's going to keep breaking down, right? So one thing to think about with the doctor that you're working with or practitioner is where are they? What are they doing? How are they responding to that check engine light that's coming on in your body? Low energy. That's a check engine light. Digestion issues. That's a check engine light where your body used to be able to handle stress and now you feel like every little thing is kind of stressing you out. Check engine light. Okay. Headaches, check engine light. So how are they responding to that? And I give that example of the car because I hope you never forget it. Right. And then you pay attention to, wait, did they just give me a sticker to put on this? Is this actually looking at the root causes of what's going on inside my body? So I think that's one thing to really think about because just like with the headache, it's not due to a Tylenol deficiency. Tylenol helps, but it's not because your body is like, I'm lacking Tylenol. And there's definitely a place, a time and a place for medication, right? If I end up— I have— my daughter broke her foot. We took her to urgent care. We needed an X-ray. She needed some pain medication because she was in pain, right? If There's a car accident. There's all types of things. But we also have to be mindful of the fact that a lot of times the first sign of a heart attack is the heart attack.

Mm-hmm.

And 50% of the time, the other 50% of the time, there's these beginning signs, these early signs and symptoms that there's something going on inside the body. And right now in the United States, I just finished up the last bit of a book that I have coming out in October called Worthy of Rest, but I was adding in these statistics and I wanted to make sure I had the correct ones, updated ones. And right now there's over 110 million American adults that are pre-diabetic. 44% of American adults are pre-diabetic and over 80% of them don't even know it. And those statistics come right from the CDC. They know that most of the people listening, most of the people in our families are pre-diabetic. And don't know it, but we don't know it, right? When choosing someone to work with, you really want to work with someone that's going to get to the root cause of different issues so that you don't just end up being a statistic. So you're not the 1 in 3 people that end up with cancer and all of these other things. That's my soapbox on that.

Okay. Awesome.

He's like, who do we listen to? Listen to your gut, listen to intuition, and also what might make sense to you.

With all that said, okay, so I love it. The other thing, these empaths, so you wanna listen to someone that is going to look at all the data is kind of how I would—

Yeah.

That, so—

See you as an entire human being. Yeah.

So I'm wondering then, other than dessert for breakfast, are there any other habits that go into adding stress to your life or Leaving you exhausted for when you need to create the thing.

So one of the biggest habits that gives you just the biggest bang for your buck, it doesn't cost anything, are morning and evening routines and actually midday, end of day transition routines as well. So what I do every morning is I sit down and I only take a few minutes to do this. I don't recommend you have massive routines. But I write down 3 to 5 things that I'm grateful for. And I don't just write those down, like, I'm grateful for my husband. When I think about my son, and as I'm writing this, I allow myself to feel the experience of being grateful for my son. Like, I'm so thankful for him and how he just comes and hugs me. Or sometimes I hear his little pitter-patter of his feet running into my office.

Hmm.

And him saying, Mommy, and coming up and hugging me. I allow myself to experience that feeling first thing in the morning. I do that for 3 to 5 things. And then I write down 2 goals for the day. And those are— and sometimes it can be further out goals as well, but 2 goals into the future. So that helps keep us focused and intentional with our day versus overwhelmed. So that reduces a lot of just being scattered throughout the day, or I've got an entire to-do list over here. Like there's always things to do, but every day I set like, these are the 2 things that I want to get done today. So it might be record some content. It might be I needed to finish this last bit of my book. It depends what it is, whatever it is that's focused on your goals. So those 2 things really set the intention and the energy for your day. When you start with gratitude, that creates all types of oxytocin in your body. It blocks cortisol, which is your stress hormone. It does all kinds of wonderful things in the brain. And then also setting that intention. Evening routines are really important as well. So what I do in the evening, and I recommend, is a brain dump. And that can just say, I'm going to do 5 minutes and I'm going to write down everything that's on my mind. It could be my to-do list for tomorrow. It could be something I'm stressed out about, and I just write it down, get it out of my mind and onto paper. That really helps you to be able to get into a deep sleep without all these things running through your mind and all kinds of anxiousness that can be tied to that as well. So I do brain dump in the evening. And then also a thing that I recommend in the evening is binaural beats. So binaural beats are— you would wear headphones like the ones that I'm wearing Right now, or smaller ones. But basically you have it in both ears and binaural beats have different sounds that are going into each ear, but the brain interprets them as one. And that helps your brain to relax and get out of this go state that we're in all day and to be able to get into a deep REM sleep as well too. So I had said that sleep is so important, but a lot of times we have to recreate those routines for our brain and our body to be able to relax and go to bed. So that's what I recommend in the evening. And there's also daily transition routines as well too. So for myself, I work from home, right?

Mm-hmm.

Some other people, they may go into the office or different things like that, but it's very easy to carry work into all aspects of our life. Now the kids are home or you're with your partner, whatever's going on, and you're still thinking about work. But we need to be able to turn those things off for a period of time because that rest that we allow for our minds and our bodies actually make us more creative when we allow ourselves to have some stillness. So I recommend transition routines. So even if it's like you're just crossing over the threshold from your workspace into your home space, create a routine before doing that. That could be doing a brain dump. It could be taking a few minutes to color. I love adult coloring books. They're very relaxing, calming for me. It could be turning on some music that you love and dancing to it, or turning on some essential oils. It's something to just trigger the brain. Just like my son, when I say it's time to go to bed, he knows it's bath time now. We need those triggers for our mind to say, all right, now it's home time, or it's social life, or I'm leaving this work here. It will be here tomorrow because to-do lists don't ever end. It will be here, and now I can transition into and have some separation. from work and the rest of my life.

So what I'm hearing is you want a habit that creates some feelings that you want for yourself, whether that's gratitude. Gratitude is like— everyone talks about gratitude journals, and I'm saying it with the energy of like everyone talks about it, but it is so impactful, right?

It's so underrated, but it is like a game changer.

And that then leads into When I sit down with the blank page at my computer, like, you're not fighting that anxiousness from all the coffee you're drinking or—

Yeah.

From whatever's going on in your life. You have a little bit of, uh, emotional inertia, then shows up in your work, and your work will show up with more gratitude and reverence. And I think, and what I've seen working, that setting that precondition of how I feel going into the work. Is like one of the, these things that we'll talk about here in a minute where I think is like the crux of what we're talking about. But I also, I appreciate the transition habits too. I, as a coach, have recommended this for quite a while and I work from home too.

Yeah.

My wife sometimes works from home. She's a therapist and it's really tough for us in relationship. When it's not, hi, how are you? I haven't seen you all day. It's, can't believe this person I talked to today. Or like, yeah, this really intense session happened with, she works with children and she's like, I have to talk about it cuz it's eating me. I'm like, okay. Like it can be really tough on the people around you. And it's that moment of awareness and the ability to then decide how we wanna show up.

Working from home, cuz my husband works from home too and he's quick to just come right through these doors over here. And tell me something that just happened with a client. And I do the same thing to him too. So it's really important to be able to turn that off. Me and my husband, we go for walks in the evening. I live in Arizona, so it's very hot.

Yeah.

But when it's cooler, we'll try to like, let's just go for a walk in the evening and just have that time to connect. Sometimes we still talk about work, to be able to connect and decompress or cook dinner together because we don't work. all that we do and all the working that we do for it to be the thing that takes over our lives, right? It's really here to support the lives that we create for our families and our enjoyment and our social life and all of those things.

I think if we're talking about inputs being beliefs and influences and habits, right? I think what we're talking about with energy and stress is the belief that you have agency over Your own energy.

Yes.

And stress level, right? Things will happen out in the world, right? That happens to everyone. And if it happens to everyone and some people are way more successful in managing it and others are not, what's the difference there? And I think for me, the difference is that one belief that, hey, I can figure this out. I can make this better. I can— Redirect the energy into something more productive, even in those moments where it might be so devastating or so much the world around you and your community and your family. Or so what do you think about— how do you respond to that?

I think a lot of times one of the things that we're feeling, just like humanity, I think also since COVID happened, we're still very isolated. We come out, people do more, but I find that people are still very much in their silos in handling life, a lot of life on their own. And oftentimes, we go through every day feeling very overwhelmed. There was a research article that I recently looked at that 1 in 4 people experience crushing levels of stress every single day. So people are very much stressed. So for the work that I do and what I see is we want to increase that zone of stress resiliency. And I know I listed all these things like toxins and sleep and all of those. And I think even what you said about trying to figure it out, those are things you don't have to try to figure out on your own. I'm an expert in that, right? I see people every day. So when I see that, I know how to put the pieces of the puzzle together and say, this is what's going to move the lever for you or move the needle for you, right? Because for some people, it's not doing all the things. I see people all the time that they're like every influencer, everything they see on social media, they're trying all these things, but that might not be the thing that you need. You've got to do the right thing at the right time and in the right way and what your body and what your nervous system needs. And my goal with people is to increase their zone of stress resiliency. So think about it as if you are Whitewater rafting. I've done it once. I'm not doing it again. Whitewater rafting. And you're going down on your raft and you're— imagine if that raft is just hitting the banks, like the sides of that river. That would not be good, right?

Mm-hmm.

What we wanna do is we wanna increase that zone of stress resiliency. Think about widening that river. So as life is still happening, right, things are going on with relationships, your kids, finances, you've got some toxins or some mold, or you didn't eat breakfast. Like, all of those are stressors on the body, right? Mm-hmm. But as all of that is happening, because we've widened that zone of stress resiliency, you're able to ebb and flow as life happens, right? As a functional medicine doctor, I can't get rid of all what's going on in your marriage or what's going on with your kids, but I can help you widen that zone. As life lives, it's a lot easier.

Acknowledge this because my understanding from what you were talking about earlier about functional medicine, you have to gather data about the person.

Yes.

Right. So not everyone, it's not a, a one magic bullet will save you from the werewolf that's chasing you cuz it's your own specific werewolf hunting you down.

That's a good example. And back to cortisol, if that was happening, you're constantly in this state of trying to get to safety, right? Yeah.

Uh, so how does someone, I guess in general, like what would be steps to start to— I just complete one. All I can think about is werewolves now. I don't know why I said that.

Like, how do I get safe?

We're trying to widen the banks. Maybe we're trying to just ride the river quicker and get through it. Like that's escape it. That's a strategy too. What are the general mechanisms or How do we confidently do that? Right.

Yeah.

And, and without speaking to specifics, that's why I wanted to call that out. Cuz I know, again, like this is general.

It's very bio-individual. So you definitely have to identify what's going on with you. I'm a big advocate of test, don't guess. There's a lot of advanced lab testing that can help you understand exactly what's going on inside your body. And then what we wanna do from there is really we wanna remove those stressors. Okay. We want to remove the ones that we can remove, like the toxins. That's a big one. It's an easy one. We can't get rid of all toxins, right? I'm an 80/20 girl. I'm not way on the extreme anywhere. So we want to also improve your body's ability to process toxins. So for instance, if you're not well hydrated, you can be— because there's always going to be toxins in the environment, right? You can't eat all organic food and do all those things. But if you're not well hydrated, then that's one of your main detoxification pathways is peeing. The other one is pooping. So if you're not pooping, a lot of times clients come to me and they're like, I poop every couple days, or I don't know, I don't really check. That is a big way to remove toxins from the body. Also perspiring as well too, sweating. Our skin is our biggest organ. So sweating, those are simple things that you can add in your life that you're like, okay, I'm processing toxins, right? You may need to do more intense toxins that are detoxes that have binders and things in them that actually pull mold out depending on what's, what you're going on, but you need to be pooping, peeing, and sweating. Okay. Yeah. So yes, very important. The trifecta, poop, pee, and sweat. Very important. You wanna be able to remove the things that You can remove that's in your control. And then also make sure that you're nourishing your body with the things that it needs. That one about the dessert for breakfast, we're joking about it, but just starting your day out with a savory breakfast can help so much. First of all, it doesn't spike your cortisol. So if your body's like, I'm starving, or I'm going on this sugar rush, that's stressful for your body and it's going to impact your work and how you show up midday trying to create some content.

Right.

Right? So starting that morning out with savory breakfast, which is going to include protein, some good fats, and some fiber. Okay. It will also help keep you full as well. And my breakfast, a lot of times this morning I had, I had eggs, it had cheese on it. I had some gluten-free sourdough bread with it and some breakfast meat, right? That's a more traditional breakfast, but I had some complex carbs in there. I had protein, good fats. But a lot of times I'll have like chicken and rice and beans and some veggies for breakfast. I may have a protein shake, but then I add in some really good fats with it as well too, or some avocados, things that's really going to balance my blood sugar in the morning. And that just helps me so much with being able to focus and have the energy that I need to be able to get through the day. That's a big one.

Okay. So watch the blood sugar, especially in Yes. My typical breakfast is either Greek yogurt with some granola and like flaxseed protein.

Yeah.

I also like to do eggs quite a lot.

Another thing that is very helpful in the morning is starting your morning, cuz we wake up dehydrated, starting your morning with a warm glass of lemon water. So warm is gentle and then adding some lemon in there or lime, just half a lemon or lime, squeeze that in there. That really helps to wake up your digestive system. It helps to get the enzymes in your liver going. So it's good for detoxification. It's also really good for energy as well too. So even if you just start the morning with 16 ounces, you're like, oh, I'm already like a quarter of the way there getting that hydration in. So starting the morning with those 2 things, some warm lemon water, and then shortly after having a good savory breakfast, it also sets you up good for the rest of the day because You'll notice a lot of those cravings for the foods that aren't so nourishing for us tend to go away.

Yeah, I found that. I also have noticed too, I'm not sure if you know anything about, I notice on days that I try to wait at least an hour and a half after I wake up before having my first cup versus zombie walk to the coffee machine and grind everything and get it all set up, that I end up being less anxious throughout the day. Other than it being anecdotal, is there, do you know if there's any research behind that or?

Oh yeah. Coffee is completely hitting on your adrenal glands, norepinephrine, like all of the things that would cause us to be amped up and stressed. So definitely you starting the day out a little gentler is good because I drink coffee. I love coffee, but I don't drink it that often. And one thing you could do just play around with and test is do like half and half. Do half decaf and half regular coffee to see how you're doing, because you don't want to just have your nervous system constantly in this, this overdrive. Because what can happen— think about someone who's diabetic. Glucose goes up, insulin's got to come out and lower it. So glucose goes up from carbs, it goes up from like pasta, chips, sugar. Stress, all of those things. None of those things are inherently bad by themselves, but when glucose is constantly coming out and insulin's got to lower it, it gets harder and harder for insulin to lower it. So people become insulin resistant, and then eventually they become diabetic. And then some people actually need to now inject insulin into their body because things aren't working anymore. Similar things can happen with cortisol, where I've seen people that Their stress hormones have just been in overdrive for so long that when I test them and we're looking at what's going on with their cortisol throughout the day, it's like flatlined. So now they just don't have anything. Coffee does nothing for them, right? So it could be important to— and of course, I don't know all your history or anything like that.

Yeah.

But in general, to just tapering a little bit. And then also what we're doing with caffeine, and this is from someone like my whole story has to do with energy, right? And always going for the cup of coffee is we're covering that check engine light with that coffee, right? Our body's actually tired and we're covering that up and we're like forcing it to stay on, right? And over time, if we keep putting that sticker over that check engine light, the car can take—

I will share this crazy suggestion if you are A coffee drinker every day, quit it for 2 weeks cuz it'll be really terrible that first week. The second week you'd be like, oh, I realized how jittery I am. And then maybe this is bad, but like the first cup of coffee you have after is maybe like top 1 to 3 cups of coffee you'll ever have in your life. It's funny to say that it's a dopamine release. And I think you chase that with coffee or energy drinks or whatnot, but You become immune to how awesome that feels. Like that awareness is really why I can do this over and over again, where I'm like, okay, maybe hold off for a little bit.

That's the exact reason why I don't drink it so much anymore, because it's when I wanna use it, coffee feels amazing. And sometimes I'll drink it maybe a Saturday or some random day. And I'm like, this is why people drink this all the time. This is so good. But you, you're right. It loses that feel-good effect for it. So I like to save it for like when I'm like, ooh, let me really, yeah.

When you wanna see the Matrix, like everything open up. Yes. So good.

Yep.

So, all right. So covered a lot in the terms of the things we can do to widen the banks and to Increase our energy. We've talked about finding a doctor that works for you and can do all the data and crunch all the numbers for you and is interested in that, right? And we talked about morning routines and routines being able to help you prep for when you have to create and to give you that agency over your energy. You start with gratitude so you can show up and feel motivated and willing to To get the work done, talked about delegating. We talked about so many things, all leading back to the belief that you can change how you feel every day. Did I gloss over anything else that we wanted to, to highlight on being the agent for your energy? And—

Yeah, you covered everything. One thing I wanna add to that just came to me was The Emotional Guidance Scale. Have you ever seen that before?

No.

It's created originally by Abraham Hicks, and it basically shows our energy through emotions. So things like fear, anxiety, depression, they're further down on the scale of emotions, but things like joy, gratitude, Love, they're really high. That's where we're very creative, we're open, we're expressive, all of those different types of things. So with the emotional guidance scale, one thing that you can do, you can just Google it and it will show all these scales and spirals. Sometimes we can spiral down and we move into a place of anxiousness or depression or fear. One concept that you can take on is a lot of times we want to jump from feeling depressed or fearful to, I just want to be happy. But we can be a little more gentle with ourselves and say, okay, I'll move from fear to pessimism. Being pessimistic, it's a higher energy vibe than fear, right? Or moving to content. I'm still kind of jumping because I don't have the scale in front of me, but it shows you where you can—

Yeah.

And you can take different steps to move yourself up slowly up the scale, and then you can be more in joy and gratitude and all of those different types of things. And that can be helpful during the day for when life happens and something really frustrates us or disappoints us. I'm a big advocate of allowing ourselves to feel that as well and process that. They say it takes 90 seconds of being with an emotion, like allowing yourself to just feel it, and it will pass because emotions is just like energy in motion. So we have to Mm-hmm. Acknowledging, being able to be with those, but then also to get us out of those funks. So sometimes it is just giving ourself a little grace to slowly move up that emotional scale.

Oh, I love that. And it reminds me too, in a lot of the work I do, I like to remind people that we contain multiple. So you could be dealing with a stressful thing in your life and your energy could be low and you could still be extremely happy that Your child scored a home run that night at the baseball game, right?

Yeah.

And those aren't necess— it's not that you're one or the other. It's like we are both. And it's just what we're focusing on right now. And, and using that emotional scale, rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10, how energetic you're feeling right in this moment. It's part of the coaching I do, but realizing it can be multiple scores, right? You don't ever have one emotion in you at a time. If you look at the movie Inside Out, like there's Oh, it's so good. All those different emotions are there.

All the voices too.

All with their own points of view and all the ways that they're protecting you or advocating for you or helping you navigate life.

Yeah.

And it's all good.

All good. Yeah.

Thanks for that though. I'll have to look that up. All right. So with all that said, when is your book going on presale and where can people find it?

It will be available on Amazon. Where you can preorder the book and then it goes live on October 2nd. So it's called Worthy of Rest for the Woman Who's Tired of Being the Strong One. But I've talked to a lot of men and they're like, I need this book too, or I need it to even understand my wife. And it goes into a lot of the different things that we've talked about today. It talks about the body and the stress and all of those things. A lot of times we think of rest as just sleep, but in that book I go into the different types of rest. So there's Sometimes we may need spiritual rest. Sometimes we may need emotional rest where we have things that we may need to grieve or process. We may need sensory rest. We're sitting behind computers all day or bright lights or kids, all of those different types of things. So I talk about that. And then I really go into the identity piece of the things that stop us from allowing ourselves to rest. A lot of those stories running in the background that I'm not enough or things have to be perfect or I'm all alone. Those different stories. And I give tools on how to process and move through those.

Awesome. To tie it into what we're talking about, it's those moments of rest that allow you to take control of your energy.

Yes.

So I'm so glad that we had— all right. With that, I always end my interviews with one final question. What did you love about our discussion?

I love that you said habits. You said habits, but did you say beliefs and influence?

Yep. Yep.

Okay. Yeah. I love that of just like how those are the inputs. And then that's what we output. That's how we're showing up in the world. That's who we are, all of those things. And I had never thought about it in that way. You were like kind of drilling me on the habits. It's like, what are the things that we can do? So I appreciate you doing that. And it changed the way that I thought about that as well, too. These are all inputs. And then this is how we're gonna end up showing up based on What we're putting in, right? And who we're listening to as well.

And who we're listening to.

Yes.

I loved your energy. Thank you for all of— I have a whole sheet of notes.

Awesome.

Luckily this is recorded. I'll relisten to it. But I learned a lot today too. And I loved the, the reminder, just setting your own emotional state with intention, right? That's what a gratitude journal is. It's setting that. It is so important to manage how you feel about yourself and the day.

Yeah. And not just be at the whim Of everything that's happening to us, life is really happening through us.

I really enjoyed this conversation with Dr. Alicia. Again, the reason we can't create after 2 p.m. is mostly due to blood sugar, which is the first of the four things at the top of the episode I mentioned we talk about. So it's the pancakes with syrup, fresh toast, muffins, sugary coffee that causes that spike crash and that. rollercoaster of energy all day. The other 3 things she mentioned are biotoxins like mold and fungus, parasites, all that kind of stuff. And that contributes to not concentrating. So we need to be paying attention to that. We also talked about nutritional deficiencies, protein, good fats, and sleep deficiency are some of the easier things that we can fix when it comes to our energy. And then gut health. 10 times the nerves running from your gut to your brain than the entire peripheral nervous system. It's important to pay attention to what we are putting in. So your breakfast is the biggest lever for your day and your ability to create. And the other 3 things are more of a signal of a physical If 2 o'clock never stole your afternoon away from you again, what would you be able to accomplish? I think having command of your energy is something that I talk about a lot as a high-performance coach. So your ability to generate calm creative energy that when you need it, or that pumped-up energy when you need to perform, whether it's a sport, as a creator, in business, and for your family, it's all extremely important. So Dr. Alicia mentioned that your coffee habit is charging you energy interest. It's the cortisol, it's hitting your adrenal glands. And it's a cover for that check engine light, right? If you have headaches or brain fog, these are all symptoms of something else. And coffee can paper over it, even though I love coffee and probably overuse it myself. Rest is what makes you more creative rather than is the prize for being creative. The more that we allow our minds and bodies to rest, the more creative we are when we need to be. And then half the time, the first sign of an issue or like a heart attack is the actual event. And It's so true that we don't think about our health. We don't think about our creativity until there's a huge problem. And it's from ignoring the little things we can be doing to course correct or the little things that are telling us we need to change in our lives. So one thing for you to do tomorrow is to have that savory breakfast, eggs or protein, some good fats, some fiber. So while we're closing, Dr. Alicia, Basically restated the premise of this show, which is all of these are energy inputs that help you as the creator make things that you love. Also, we'll have the link in the show notes for preorder for the October 2nd release of her book. So that was Dr. Alicia Newsom. And the main takeaway again is to start your day with a savory breakfast, you know, eggs, fat, fiber. Protein, and you'll see that shift at 2:00 PM in the afternoon where you might normally peter out. So Alicia covered the energy side of running outta gas, but there's a second side most creators and experts recognize, and that's the creative burnout cycle. It's when you've been working for like 7 years. The work stops being fun and you check out the video over here about being stuck in the creator burnout cycle. And watch that next. I'm Shawn Buttner and this is Input Output.