How Humans Heal

#178 Conscious Communication for Couples with Dr. Jessica Higgins 0

Weekly Wellness Wisdom Newsletter: HTTPS://DOCTORDONI.COM/WWW

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Additional Resources:

If you want to work on your gut health and microbiome you may want to sign up for my Heal Leaky Gut Program (https://doctordoni.com/leaky-gut-program) where I teach you how to heal leaky gut with my proven protocol.

If you’re interested in learning more about my approach to healing HPV you can find my new HPV Recovery Guide here (https://doctordoni.com/ddpp/hpv-guide/).

If you are tired of this virus and are really committed to erasing it from your life forever, you can sign up for my Say Goodbye to HPV 12-Week Program here (https://drdoni.lpages.co/hpv-12-week-program/).

You can also sign up for my Stress Warrior Program here (https://doctordoni.com/stress-program).

Also, if you want to learn more about how to recover from stress so that you can get back to feeling your best, you may want to read my book Master Your Stress Reset Your Health (https://doctordoni.com/master-your-stress/). In the book, I also share the quiz I developed to help you identify how stress has affected you specifically by knowing your Stress Type. You can also take this Stress Type Quiz online (https://doctordoni.com/quiz/stress-quiz/)

For the most comprehensive support, even with the most difficult health issues (physical or mental), it is best to meet with me one-on-one, which is available to you no matter where you are in the world (via phone or zoom). You can set up a one-on-one appointment with me here (https://doctordoni.com/work-with-me/)

Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are product links and affiliate links and if you go through them to make a purchase I will earn a commission at no cost to you. Keep in mind that I link these companies and their products because of their quality and not because of the commission I receive from your purchases. The decision is yours, and whether or not you decide to buy something is completely up to you.

Download this Episode

Sep 21, 2023

In today’s episode I'm interviewing Dr. Jessica Higgins. Jessica is a Licensed Psychologist and Licensed Professional Counselor. She holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and a M.A. in Counseling Psychology. She is also a certified Dream Builder Coach and Life Mastery Consultant.

Jessica offers an integrative and comprehensive blend of psychology and coaching. She specializes in helping couples shift and transform their ways of relating, guiding them on a path from confusion and heartache to clarity and authentic connection.

She is also the founder and creator of Connected Couple, a comprehensive, research-based, transformational, relationship program. This program helps couples at any stage in their relationship or marriage.

Today we talk about how to achieve new levels of success, meaning, and aliveness in our relationships.

From a very young age Jessica had an inclination towards people, and by the time she was in junior high she knew she wanted to become a psychologist. A few years later, after going through her own relationship struggles, she started to go deeper in her own personal journey and felt very inspired and motivated to help people have access to more relationship principles that cultivate lasting love and long-term intimacy.

Healthy Relationships Have Health Benefits

Studies show that being in a healthy relationship or having a companion in life can actually improve our longevity.

Attachment is the emotional connection that we form as infants with our main caregivers. According to this attachment theory, the healthier the bonding and relationship we had with them the better our relationships with other people will be throughout our lives.

There are also FMRI studies that show how someone holding the hand of a loved one, like a significant partner, will experience less pain, so there's a sense of resilience when we can have that partnership. There is also evidence of better recovery rates in hospitals when people have significant partners with them. There are so many benefits physiologically and psychologically that we experience from being partnered. From cradle to grave we are wired to need this bonding. It is as necessary as breathing - we need connection.

How Relationships and Intimacy Can Trigger Past Trauma

We all have an attachment system, meaning the way that we are going to think about others in the world and how people are going to respond to us. It is affected by whether we feel safe and

our needs are met. It's intellectual, so our mental thinking and our beliefs, but it’s also physiological, like our nervous system, as well as emotional.

So, it's really this whole triad in the working model and that gets developed at a very young age. Zero to three are the formative years and it's the relational imprint of you. This comes through the patterning of how people responded to us, if our caregivers were responsive, if they showed up for us when we cried, if they were attuned and available, etc. Or maybe they were overwhelmed or under unfortunate circumstances if there's been abuse in the family lineage.

So, if we fast forward, people can have insecure attachment tendencies in adulthood if they didn't get exposure to consistent care givers in childhood. One of the ways this may show up is by being protective. They turn away from relationships, rely on themselves, and not reach out to others for help. When caregiving was inconsistent, another possibility is to be more anxious in relationships and doing more double checking for connection, such as saying “Are we still good, is everything stable, are you still with me?” That’s a hypervigilance tendency.

For both of these attachment styles, the studies and medical findings show that there's a lot of activation. It doesn't look like it on the outside. It can look a little indifferent, but what's happening inside the person is the heart rates increases and all the physiological symptoms of stress. So, it doesn't feel relaxed and calm and secure when connecting with another person.

It’s interesting to notice that these activation responses don’t occur with all relationships. It tends to occur in our most intimate relationships. The nervous system sees our close relationships as necessary for survival, so one might say the nervous system is going to respond similarly to being chased by a bear.

The nervous system might get triggered just as much if, for example, your husband is giving you a look and is upset with you and having an issue with you. So, that threat happens when we are deeply committed, and we get vulnerable, and if the stakes are higher, like having children together. Whatever it is that intensifies that connection is going to affect our nervous system and our attachment system gets more activated. That’s when those previous insecurities might emerge and we might be surprised by them.

Stages of Intimacy

There are various stages in the development of intimacy. The first stage is the romance stage or even referred to as the honeymoon stage, and it's highly fueled by neurochemicals, like dopamine and oxytocin. They get us in that super excited high and we tend to over romanticize, and project and imagine who they are, but we really don't really know them yet.

After 9 to 18 months we enter into the second stage, which is the power struggle stage. This is the place where we are like, “oh, that's how you do that?” or feeling the upset of the differences. At this stage we’re working on how we understand each other, how we learn what we're both feeling, and how we can work together. But oftentimes many of us don't know how to do conflict very well. Conflict feels threatening, and all these things are emerging, and it can be difficult to sift through.

Navigating The Complexity of Conflict

One of the biggest traps we can fall into is when we might have certain expectations that aren’t being communicated clearly.

So, for instance, say there's a heated discussion. Partner A grew up in a family where there was a sense of connection. During a disagreement, it might get a little charged or people might yell but they all know they love each other so they're going to repair to get to a better place. Then there is Partner B, whose family is a group where they’re not going to say anything hurtful and they're not going to speak in any tone that has any ounce of upset. They might pause before talking to be more regulated, or sometimes maybe they don't come back, and they don't talk about things at all.

We have to recognize these very different orientations to know how to address a conflict. There are 7 to 8 irreconcilable differences that every couple has. That could be ‘the spender’ and ‘the saver’, ‘the planner’ and ‘the spontaneous one’, it could be ‘the social one’ and ‘the introvert’, or it could be ‘the one that's on time’ and ‘the one that's always late’. We have to be able to see all these differences when we're living life together and be willing to works towards communicating our needs and trust our partner will do the same.

How to Be More Curious When Conflict Feels Like Criticism

The core of most disagreements is that people don't feel heard, and then they aren’t feeling like they're able to collaborate and work together for a win-win.

It is very common for us to describe the thing that we do not like and hope that our partner will be able to interpret and understand what we are feeling and needing. But that's a lot of decoding that most of us do not know how to do. If it's not a clear signal most people are not going to give what you’re asking of them.

It's not an easy thing to access, but if we can slow down and say “I wonder what he/she is feeling” or “I wonder what he/she needs right now?” because it's not about him/her criticizing me, it's about there's something happening for him/her that he/she wants and I’m not actually hearing it. So, we could prompt our partner to uncover what might really be at the core of it with questions like, “Well what's this about?” or “Can you tell me about what you're wanting?” or “How does this have value for you?” and then hopefully this will reveal the real feeling underneath the perceived criticism.

When we express the feeling that is driving our usual first commentary, our partner – if they are the right partner -- will want to show up for that. No one is interested in showing up for a negative critique, but if we can understand what the other person needs, we can then pivot

towards that. That's where the win-win starts to come in, but that's hard to get at when we don't slow down and identify and reveal, and then start to work with those deeper layers.

Regulating Your Body can Have a Huge Impact on Having Regulated Relationships

If we can support the nervous system to feel more regulated, then we can have access to have more productive conversations.

Also, if there's past experiences or trauma and we haven't experienced safety in these types of conversations, then it makes perfect sense that there's going to be a lot of activation around perceived conflict.

There's a concept in psychology and neuroscience where our nervous systems are constantly harmonizing and picking up information from the people around us. So, if the tone of voice changes or the facial expressions and nonverbals being perceived, we might not know why, but we'll feel the agitation of that before we have an intellectual understanding of why. We could just start to feel things ratcheting up and we might not even have a real awareness around what's really happening. That’s where the importance of slowing down comes in, even to allow the nervous system to get regulated before we get into those conversations.

How to Deescalate and Find Clarity

Jessica finds it is helpful to create a new cycle together because that's going to create more safety and more connection in the communication. Oftentimes we're aware of the secondary emotions, the tendencies of how we might perceive our partner, but that doesn't get at the deeper layer of what is actually happening and the core of why we reacted that way. And so, we really have to work on slowing down to get to understand the deeper layer.

When we can get to a place to just say “Oh, I’m acting this way because I feel nervous or scared” and here's what I'm thinking, here's where I want to go, or here's what's happening internally for me.

Historically, couples wait too long to access therapy as support. But you don’t have to start there. If the conflict is at a low level, if the charge on a scale from 1 to 10 is like a 3 or 4, start with journaling to unpack these difficult emotions. Keep digging deeper. The first layer will most likely be writing about why you believe you are in the right, but then you should keep writing. Why did it make you feel like that? Did it remind you of something else? If you would like to get a good journal and start doing this this you can find one here.

Often times even just by having this unfiltered space where no one else but us can dictate what is going on, we can start to soften. This is because we are making ourselves feel heard and starting to come closer to the truth of why we are reacting in a certain way. And once you get closer and practice more with peeling back those layers and getting to that vulnerability that you were hiding, you can see yourself more clearly, and that maybe you were acting out of fear. Then the next step is learning to share that vulnerability with your partner.

When your partner responds kindly and openly to your vulnerability is when real intimacy can be built. If the charge is higher on the scale, and there is also a backlog of problems, that’s when it’s probably time to seek additional support.

How Can We Change Patterns Individually to Get Unstuck Together

If we realize we want to make a change in our own lives, but we shy away from that change or delay on these types of conversations, while it might feel less conflictual in the moment, it can cause more difficulty in the long term.

There's a term in psychology called differentiating in which we can hold on to ourselves when our partner is doing something different or even disagrees with what we’re doing, and we can tolerate some of that discomfort and it can actually be highly attractive. So, we should look at change as something that has the potential to be very positive not just for the individual, but for the relationship as well.

When you are hiding yourself for the perceived continuation of the relationship, that can start to resemble something closer to enmeshment or codependence. In healthy interdependence, we do rely on each other, but we can also nurture and listen to our own development and our growth.

If we can do a little preparation before these conversations that we know might cause some defensiveness or tension, and if we can understand what we're needing or what that deeper request is or desire or what's not working, then we will most likely have much more productive and understanding conversations with our partners.

If we can make a reveal of vulnerability and/or a request in a vulnerable way, those conversations are going to happen in a much more productive and efficient way.

The Importance of Unconditional Positive Regard for Yourself

Our attachments exist on a spectrum. We are not purely anxious or avoidant. So, it can take time and difficulties in relationships before we are ready and have the history to see where we need healing.

As you start to get more curious about yourself, you can start to accept what your own patterns are. As you practice this more, you can realize when you are starting to act on a recurring pattern and choose to change it. That decision to change is a scary step into vulnerability, and what you have to remind yourself in those moments, is that no matter what happens with this person, you will always have your own back.

Even if that person doesn’t choose you after you show them vulnerability, that’s okay because you are showing up for that part of yourself that's scared and feeling anxious about being rejected or abandoned. You can say to yourself “I hear you, I see you, I got you.”

You will know you are with the right person if these signals or bids of vulnerability are met with a softening and a reciprocal tenderness.

Vulnerability is a Risk, But the Reward Can be Beautiful Beyond Measure

If you are parenting and you are taking the opportunity to work on these tough and sometimes scary emotions, you will be modeling these steps that are critical for authentic connection and bonds. Children in turn get to see that and it can shift their future relationships and their experience as a human.

Being vulnerable is the same as being brave, and can have a ripple effect into future generations, positively affecting the way people build relationships in the future.

In neuropsychology there’s this idea that we have to ‘name it to tame it’, so even just recognizing the intensity of the emotion and giving space for it (even if it's not resolved right at that moment) will help us start to regulate, and then we're in a much better position to deal with it. But if we're not willing to name it, a lot of things can happen and we will do all types of things to hide, to avoid, and to suppress.

A lot of injuries happen in relationship and so when we have the tools for healing, it has profound impact on cultivating repair and resilience and health and all the good things.

If you want to reach out to Dr. Jessica and learn more about how she can help you, please make sure to check out her website’s Shifting Criticism guide: https://drjessicahiggins.lpages.co/shifting-criticism-for-connected-communication/.

She is also on social media as @drjessicahiggins (Instagram) and @EmpoweredRelationship (Facebook). You can also check out her Empowered Relationship Podcast.

If you want to learn more about how stress and trauma affect us, and how to heal so that you can be better and more present in your relationships, you may want to read my book Master Your Stress Reset Your Health.

In the book, I describe what I refer to as SelfC.A.R.E. based on your Stress Type. C stands for Clean Eating, A for adequate sleep, R for recovery activities, and E for exercise. I share the research behind how C.A.R.E. works in a daily routine to help us process stress and overcome trauma.

To know your Stress Type, which is your unique cortisol and adrenaline levels based on how stresses have affected your adrenal function, you can take the quiz I developed. You can find the Stress Type® Quiz in the book and on my website.

Then, if you’re ready to start rebalancing your cortisol and neurotransmitters, to help your adrenals reset after stress exposure, you can start by ordering this home test kit. And you can also sign up for my Stress Warrior Online Program to guide you here.

If you’re interested in a safe and effective body, mind and spirit detoxification that will actually make you feel better and that you can do without affecting your daily routine, you can check out my New 14-Day Detox Program here. In the Detox Program I teach you to connect with yourself, and use mind-body tools, such as biofeedback, to process emotions.

For the most comprehensive support, even with the most difficult health issues (physical or mental), it is best to meet with me one-on-one, which is available to you no matter where you are in the world (via phone or zoom). You can set up a one-on-one appointment with me here.

We're here to help you!

Connect with Dr. Doni:

#177 Becoming Resilient to Stress by Implementing SelfC.A.R.E. 0

Weekly Wellness Wisdom Newsletter: HTTPS://DOCTORDONI.COM/WWW

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Additional Resources:

If you want to work on your gut health and microbiome you may want to sign up for my Heal Leaky Gut Program (https://doctordoni.com/leaky-gut-program) where I teach you how to heal leaky gut with my proven protocol.

If you’re interested in learning more about my approach to healing HPV you can find my new HPV Recovery Guide here (https://doctordoni.com/ddpp/hpv-guide/).

If you are tired of this virus and are really committed to erasing it from your life forever, you can sign up for my Say Goodbye to HPV 12-Week Program here (https://drdoni.lpages.co/hpv-12-week-program/).

You can also sign up for my Stress Warrior Program here (https://doctordoni.com/stress-program).

Also, if you want to learn more about how to recover from stress so that you can get back to feeling your best, you may want to read my book Master Your Stress Reset Your Health (https://doctordoni.com/master-your-stress/). In the book, I also share the quiz I developed to help you identify how stress has affected you specifically by knowing your Stress Type. You can also take this Stress Type Quiz online (https://doctordoni.com/quiz/stress-quiz/)

For the most comprehensive support, even with the most difficult health issues (physical or mental), it is best to meet with me one-on-one, which is available to you no matter where you are in the world (via phone or zoom). You can set up a one-on-one appointment with me here (https://doctordoni.com/work-with-me/)

Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are product links and affiliate links and if you go through them to make a purchase I will earn a commission at no cost to you. Keep in mind that I link these companies and their products because of their quality and not because of the commission I receive from your purchases. The decision is yours, and whether or not you decide to buy something is completely up to you.

Download this Episode

Sep 14, 2023

In this episode we're going to be talking about something that I consider to be the foundation of health and healing. This is what I refer to as C.A.R.E.™ or sometimes we refer to it as SelfC.A.R.E. I'm going to be describing what it is and the method that I use with my patients because it's one of the simplest things we can do for our health. In fact, it's so simple that we often overlook it.

It's when we start paying attention to C.A.R.E. that we can really create a major change in our health. This is true whether you're dealing with fatigue, anxiety, depression, burnout, menstrual cycle related symptoms, fertility issues, digestive issues, hormonal issues, autoimmunity, allergies, sleep issues, infections of all different types (skin infections, sinus infections, bladder infections, viral infections like EBV, HPV and even long COVID symptoms). They all improve with these foundational steps.

You can start working on your C.A.R.E. today. It’s not about perfection, it's about connecting with yourself, listening to your body, and getting to know what your body needs from you in order to heal. This is an individualized approach to your specific body needs (it's not one-size-fits-all). I will give you the guidelines here and then I want you think about how you can implement C.A.R.E. as an individual.

What is C.A.R.E.?

Self-care involves activities that I have been reading and writing about over the years. Specifically, what does it mean to take good care of ourselves and our bodies. And one day I realized that these activities fit this acronym C.A.R.E.

These are activities that you can do on a daily basis. The C stands for Clean Eating or eating in a way that matches your physiology and supports your health. The A is for Adequate Sleep. Just like eating, sleeping is essential for us to be able to recharge and reset. The R stands for Recovery Activities. This is a whole menu of possible activities that help us counterbalance stress. And E is for Exercise. We all need to exercise at our own pace to match what our body is able to do and benefit from it.

As a practitioner I am always observing and looking for patterns amongst my patients. This is how I was able to identify C.A.R.E. was common in patients that were successful at recovering from stress, improving their health, and maintaining their resiliency to stress over time. This is also the foundation of naturopathic medicine.

I will also share with you how to individualize your C.A.R.E. based on your Stress Type, which is how your body is uniquely affected by stress. I talk about all of this in detail in my latest book: Master Your Stress Reset Your Health. In the book you will find hundreds of references related to C.A.R.E., which researchers have been studying for decades.

Clean Eating

Clean eating is about eating in a way to support your health. I was originally trained as a nutritionist, so I see food as medicine. Our bodies need macro nutrients (protein, carbohydrates and fats) as well as micronutrients and vitamins and minerals to function and survive. And we need to get these things from our food because our bodies can’t produce them. So, it's a matter of really honoring food as this source of nutrition and life for us instead of just eating mindlessly. We want to start eating mindfully and choose our food with intention and gratitude.

The simplest way to start eating a healthy diet is to make sure you are having a relatively equal percentage or balance of protein, carbs, and fat. I see a lot of diets out there where they go a little bit too extreme with macronutrients, like the ketogenic diet that's very high in fat or the carnivore diet that's very high in protein. These diets can actually make us feel worse because they are extreme. Even a plant-based diet can make us feel worse. There are times when more extreme diets are appropriate, but I really encourage you to work with a practitioner who can help you so that you don't find yourself feeling worse following a certain diet.

We must make sure we are getting enough nutrients from our diet. Anytime we go to an extreme with our bodies we can create more stress. What our bodies need is predictability, consistency, and stability so that's what we want to create with our eating. We want to have predictable meals that are the amount of food that we can easily digest. It is when we digest our food that we absorb the nutrients. So, we want to have consistency in the amount and the timing of our meals. Usually our bodies do well when we feed them in 3 to 4 hours intervals throughout the day. If we go too long between meals it can disrupt your digestion and create stress responses.

I also find that it is best to stop eating at least a couple of hours before we go to bed. This means you would have at least 10 hours without eating if you are sleeping adequately. There can be some health benefits to temporarily or occasionally extending your overnight fast to between 12 and 16 hours but it's really important to modify your daily activities and make sure your body's ready for that so I don't encourage it or recommend it for everyone from the beginning. The first thing we want to do is eat to balance our blood sugar and create predictability in our body, so that our stress response can calm down.

If we go back to macro nutrients, I find that it’s best to make sure that you have at least 20 grams of protein and no more than 20 grams of carbs with every meal. Protein can be found in animal products (beef, chicken, fish, turkey, etc.) and also in legumes (beans, chickpeas, lentils, peas, etc.). And then we want to have some carbs from healthy high fiber sources like vegetables and fruits. Then you have the healthy fats in things like avocados, nuts and olive oil (for high temperatures use avocado or grapeseed oil instead) for salads and salad dressing.

We also want to be feeding our gut bacteria, but we don't want to over feed them either. Whatever we eat and whatever we digest is going to determine what is feeding our gut bacteria. If we eat too large of a meal or we're under too much stress and we are not digesting our food well, that undigested food is going to over feed our gut bacteria. When our gut bacteria are overfed is when you start to notice bloating and gas and bowel changes and all kinds of other symptoms. It is also possible to overfeed our good bacteria by having a large quantity of fruit and vegetables in a single meal. It's much better to space our meals and to pay attention to our bodies signals on how much food can you have at one sitting that you can digest well.

Digesting well also has to do with mindful eating. To set aside time to eat, to take breaths to signal your Vagus nerve that it's time to eat, to chew your food well, to have a calm environment for eating, etc. This way you're allowing your digestive signaling to happen, to get the best ability to digest your food. You can support your digestion with digestive enzymes that make it easier for our bodies to process food and absorb all the nutrients. You can get a good supplement for this here.

Clean eating also has to do with eating organic whole foods, avoiding processed foods, avoiding pesticides on your food and any other kinds of artificial sweeteners, fillers, preservatives that are just not necessary and even toxic. It is best to eat whole foods that we cook ourselves or maybe go to restaurants where they are paying attention to making sure we're not eating things that our bodies don’t need and that are bad for our health.

If you are under a lot of stress and you are constantly suffering from bloating, gas, abdominal pain, constipation, or diarrhea you may have developed leaky gut. If you have leaky gut and food is leaking through your intestinal lining and it's triggering an inflammatory response that food is no longer a healthy food for you. It is now an inflammatory food. The most common inflammatory foods are dairy and gluten, but it can happen with things like eggs, almonds, bananas and many other foods. So, it is better to assess for leaky gut and food sensitivities, and to identify the highest reactive inflammatory foods. Then we can go through a process of healing the leaky gut and so you can get back to eating a wider variety of foods. If you want to know your food sensitivities, you can order a home test here.

Adequate Sleep

We need at least 7 hours of sleep. One of the first things that happens when we don't get enough sleep is our immune function decreases. When we're sleeping a lot of good stuff happens. Our immune system is helping to protect us from infections, it's helping ourselves to repair, there's a process called glymphatics which is a process of clean out in our brain. All this is not happening if we don't get enough sleep.

We need to look at both quantity and quality of sleep. Also, we need to look at our circadian rhythm. Are you sleeping when it is dark outside? Maybe you have to work a night shift that

affects your circadian rhythm. This increases our risk of different health issues so it's important to know and to support your body through that.

We sleep in cycles of about 90 minutes. We go through a process of deepening our sleep as time passes until we reach the deepest sleep stage. We spend a percentage of time in each sleep stage and then it starts over again. It's best to be able to complete several sleep cycles in a row because each time we create the subsequent sleep cycle we spend more time in the REM sleep stage and the studies show that when we're in this deep sleep stage is when our brains and bodies get the most rest and repair.

When it starts to get dark our bodies start producing a hormone called melatonin. Melatonin is a hormone that's signaling all kinds of repair in our bodies. If we don't have enough melatonin our risk of developing health issues will increase, so we need to let our bodies produce this hormone by turning off all lights when it’s time for bed.

There is this concept called sleep hygiene. I talk about this in my latest book Master Your Stress Reset Your Health and in my Blog too. I think about sleep hygiene in terms of our five senses.

For sight we have to analyze if there is enough darkness in our room when we sleep. Maybe you need to get blackout curtains or cover any other lights like phones or chargers or alarm clocks that may be generating light through the night. Also it is best to avoid any late night light exposure, especially blue light exposure from electronic devices because this is signaling the brain that it's not time to sleep yet and this is going to inhibit your melatonin. Also, take a look in your bedroom and see if there is clutter as there's studies that show having a cluttered bedroom can affect our sleep.

For smell I think of dust. Take a look in your bedroom and see if it needs to be cleaned. Is there dust in there that could affect your breathing while you sleep. Dust can also be the source of allergies so for a good night sleep it is best to have a clean bedroom.

For hearing we want to be paying attention to any noise that can disrupt our sleep. There are also certain sounds that can benefit our sleep. If you're having trouble sleeping you can actually use sounds like white noise or pink noise to help with calming your nervous system.

For touch think about the fabrics and materials you are in touch with when you sleep. Maybe you need softer sheets or a new mattress. Also, I always recommend buying organic sheets, blankets, pillows, and mattress. We have to make sure we have a comfortable environment for a better sleep. This includes the temperature in your room. We sleep better when there’s a slight lower temperature in the room. You can still be under a blanket but it’s better for quality sleep if the room temperature is around 67 to 69 degrees Fahrenheit.

For taste we go back to eating. Making sure we don’t eat 2 hours before bed and making sure our last meal is not too large. It's a matter of keeping your blood sugar balanced so you don't want to eat too many carbs too close to bed because you're going to have a spike in your blood

sugar and when your blood sugar drops it can wake you up. I wrote a whole separate book called Natural Insomnia Solutions where I go into the detail about how to help with sleep issues so if you're struggling with sleep, I recommend you definitely get that book and work through it. You'll see a big difference in your sleep.

Recovery Activities

There is a long list of recovery activities that help our bodies recover from stress. I am going to talk about some of the most common here. Research shows that these activities can help bring cortisol and adrenaline levels back to optimal, and that's exactly what we want. We are constantly exposed to plenty of activities that disrupt our cortisol and adrenaline levels. What we lack is activities that help correct and counterbalance those effects, so I encourage you to look at this almost like a menu and choose what interests you.

It's about choosing something that you're curious about. Maybe there are things you do already that you can continue to do, or there are things that you've been thinking about doing but you can’t find the time. If this is the case, I encourage you to say, “OK it's time to bring some recovery activities into each and every day”.

I want to start with gratitude. Anytime we practice gratitude and just allow ourselves to feel grateful for the things that are happening in our lives, people in our lives, pets in our lives, experiences, etc. When we go into a state of gratitude it increases our anti stress hormones like oxytocin, and this helps us to recover from stress. It can be as simple as journaling about what you feel grateful for or thinking about it before bed or when you wake up in the morning. If you would like to start journaling to practice gratitude you can get your SelfC.A.R.E. notebook here.

Sometimes just being in quiet can help us reset from stress. We are so used to having a TV on, the radio on, people talking to us, etc. We're just used to constantly having something going on and so it takes intention to stop and set aside some quiet time for ourselves. It's amazing what can happen when you have that quiet time, so I recommend you create that for yourself.

Meditation and mindfulness are also great for stress recovery. There is so much research on the health benefits from these activities. Some people can be kind of afraid or confused about how to do meditation, so I encourage you to just start simple. You can start with 5 minutes. Meditation is really about becoming more aware of your thoughts and becoming the observer in your own body. So much of the time we're just immediately responding to sounds and triggers and what's going on and what's next that we lose track of our ability to be the observer of our own experience.

I think about it as simply taking a couple minutes to just breathe and allow yourself to notice the sounds, the feelings in your body and your thoughts but without reacting, just be with them. It’s about a greater awareness for our thoughts and our feelings and our body in each moment. Meditation and mindfulness can make an amazing difference with healing not only our nervous system and our brain but our whole body.

Breathwork or any kind of deep breathing can have a huge impact on stress recovery. There are a lot of books and videos out there on how to use breathwork for healing. Also, Yoga has a lot of research on how yoga can help us recover from stress. And Yoga involves mindfulness, breathwork and movement. Very intentional movements and positions of the body that help us just be present.

Spending time with pets has also been shown to increase the release of oxytocin which is an anti-stress hormone and we start to go into stress recovery mode. Also, spending time in nature has shown a positive impact on stress recovery. Even if you're looking at pictures of nature without even going outside. I really encourage you as much as you can to get outside first thing in the morning. Just a 5-10 minute walk is enough. Then in the middle of the day another 5-10 minutes just to be able to observe nature. Now you're combining mindfulness with your time in nature to observe the plants and the sounds and the colors and the smells. Our human bodies respond to all of these things, and they help us recover from stress.

Listening to music or playing an instrument, singing, dancing, spending time with our friends and family, laughter, sex and intimacy, reaching out and just talking to someone who you care about or working with a therapist and being able to talk about your experience as a human in your life are all activities that can help us recover from stress and trauma. There are also many plant substances that help us recover from stress, including psychedelic medicines.

Find more information on many of these forms of stress recovery in episodes of How Humans Heal.

Exercise

Exercise is one of the activities that has the greatest ability to improve our resilience to stress. When we are exercising, we're preparing our body for stress exposure both in terms of creating a healthy response to stress and a healthy recovery from stress. That's one of the reasons why it's so important to find ways to integrate exercise into your life and into your daily routine. On the other hand, we have to make sure we don't overdo it because if we go too intense or for too long, we end up increasing our cortisol levels and that works against us in terms of our health. So, it's important to exercise but to listen to your body and to be aware of what's the right amount and intensity for you and even what time of day is best for you to exercise.

For example, we know that with exercise there's strength training which is anaerobic exercise and cardio which is aerobic exercise, and we need both. They both help us to become resilient to stress and recover from stress. You can choose from so many different activities but it's important to choose activities that match your body, your current activity level and also your interest. I encourage you to choose something you enjoy and that you like to do so it is easier to integrate into your daily routine.

If you are just about to start to exercise, I recommend you start small, you can start with 5 minutes a day, then work up to 10 or 15 minutes a day. The study showed that we can get the benefits from exercise even in short periods of time, and then you can potentially repeat that in a couple different times in a day to add more time to your exercise routine.

For those of you with joint hypermobility like me it's important to be really cautious with exercise and not overdo it because you're more likely to get injured than the average person. Even if it's Yoga you might have to do a little bit less than other people. One of my favorites is Pilates because it's helping me to gain strength and correct my body posture and position for my joints, which I find to be really helpful for the symptoms of joint hypermobility.

Again, the important thing with exercise is to know where you're starting, there's no reason to try to push yourself beyond what feels good to you. Always listen to your body during and after exercising. If you feel too tired and exhausted that means you overdid it. Also, make sure you're staying hydrated and that you have enough protein and enough sleep for your body to be able to recover.

Implementing SelfC.A.R.E. According to Your Stress Type

Your stress type is how your body is affected by stress, specifically related to cortisol and adrenaline levels. What I found in my research is that we don't all react to stress in the same way. We don't all have high cortisol and high adrenaline. So, it's important to know what's happening with your cortisol and adrenaline levels because your cortisol and adrenaline levels will influence what's the best C.A.R.E. for you.

What I find is when you fine tune your C.A.R.E. based on your stress type you're going to benefit even more from it. To find out your stress type you can do the stress type quiz right on my website. You can also find the stress type quiz in the book Master Your Stress, Reset Your Health.

It's a quiz that you can do in less than two minutes, and it shows you what is your stress type out of the five most common stress types: stress magnet that tends to have high cortisol and adrenaline at some point or all day, sluggish and stressed who has high cortisol with low adrenaline, tired and wired that has the high adrenaline with low cortisol, the night owl who is like a stress magnet but they have high cortisol and or adrenaline at night, and blah and blue that has low cortisol low adrenaline all day or part of the day.

Once we know your stress type, we can then use nutrients and herbs to bring your cortisol and adrenaline back to optimal. C.A.R.E. helps you get your cortisol adrenaline back to optimal and it helps you keep your cortisol and adrenaline at optimal going forward. To me the ultimate goal is for a good health is resiliency, is our ability to be exposed to stress and still do things we love, whether that's traveling or different sports or activities or being a parent or grandparent or building a business or project. We want you to be able to do these activities while being resilient to stress so that it doesn't have a negative impact on your life.

If you want to learn more about how stress and trauma have affected you and how C.A.R.E. can help you recover so that you can get back to feeling your best, you may want to read my book Master Your Stress Reset Your Health.

If you’re ready to start rebalancing your cortisol and neurotransmitters, to help your adrenals reset after stress exposure, you can start by ordering this home test kit. And you can also sign up for my Stress Warrior Online Program to guide you here.

If you want to work on your gut health and microbiome you may want to sign up for my Heal Leaky Gut Program where I teach you how to heal leaky gut with my proven protocol. Keep in mind that 50% of people with leaky gut, have zero symptoms, so the only way to know for sure is to do the food sensitivity panel I recommend.

If you’re interested in a safe and effective body, mind and spirit detoxification that will actually make you feel better and that you can do without affecting your daily routine, you can check out my 14-Day Detox Program here. The Detox Program includes a gluten-free, dairy-free meal plan, along with a protein shake (the protein shake is included), as well as videos to guide you every step of the way. This detox program includes a plant based or bone broth based protein powder. One of the key things we do in the 14-day detox is help you to understand how to integrate C.A.R.E. into your life so you can then continue on that path going forward so you can be your own best health advocate.

If you are interested in how C.A.R.E. can help you fend off HPV, you can find my HPV Recovery Guide here. If you would like more help getting HPV to negative, and are really committed to erasing it from your life forever, you can sign up for the upcoming 5 Days to Heal HPV Workshop here (We start Monday September 18th at 7PM Eastern Time) or my Say Goodbye to HPV 12-Week Program here.

If you would like to start journaling as a recovery activity you can get your SelfC.A.R.E. notebook here. This is the perfect tool to keep track of your C.A.R.E. as you're working on integrating it and fine tuning it to really create a self-care routine that's going to work well for you over time.

You can also subscribe to my newsletter, where you'll receive a newsletter from me every Thursday with the latest episode and additional resources and tools for your success with achieving optimal health.

For the most comprehensive support, even with the most difficult health issues (physical or mental), it is best to meet with me one-on-one, which is available to you no matter where you are in the world (via phone or zoom). You can set up a one-on-one appointment with me here.

Be sure you sign up and subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode of How Humans Heal. I love having you here with me and I would love to hear from you on other topics you'd like to learn more about.

We're here to help you!

Connect with Dr. Doni:

#176 Natural Alternatives to Pharmaceuticals with Dr. Lindsey Elmore 0

Weekly Wellness Wisdom Newsletter: HTTPS://DOCTORDONI.COM/WWW

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Additional Resources:

If you want to work on your gut health and microbiome you may want to sign up for my Heal Leaky Gut Program (https://doctordoni.com/leaky-gut-program) where I teach you how to heal leaky gut with my proven protocol.

If you’re interested in learning more about my approach to healing HPV you can find my new HPV Recovery Guide here (https://doctordoni.com/ddpp/hpv-guide/).

If you are tired of this virus and are really committed to erasing it from your life forever, you can sign up for my Say Goodbye to HPV 12-Week Program here (https://drdoni.lpages.co/hpv-12-week-program/).

You can also sign up for my Stress Warrior Program here (https://doctordoni.com/stress-program).

Also, if you want to learn more about how to recover from stress so that you can get back to feeling your best, you may want to read my book Master Your Stress Reset Your Health (https://doctordoni.com/master-your-stress/). In the book, I also share the quiz I developed to help you identify how stress has affected you specifically by knowing your Stress Type. You can also take this Stress Type Quiz online (https://doctordoni.com/quiz/stress-quiz/)

For the most comprehensive support, even with the most difficult health issues (physical or mental), it is best to meet with me one-on-one, which is available to you no matter where you are in the world (via phone or zoom). You can set up a one-on-one appointment with me here (https://doctordoni.com/work-with-me/)

Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are product links and affiliate links and if you go through them to make a purchase I will earn a commission at no cost to you. Keep in mind that I link these companies and their products because of their quality and not because of the commission I receive from your purchases. The decision is yours, and whether or not you decide to buy something is completely up to you.

Download this Episode

Sep 7, 2023

In today’s episode I want to introduce you to Dr. Lindsey Elmore. She is a pharmacist (PharmD) and wellness expert. She's also a speaker, author and podcast host. She specializes in helping women to take full ownership of their health from wellness in the physical body, to stability in mental health, to robustness of spirit, to freedom in finances.

Today we talk about what options there are for people who may want to try a more holistic approach for their health instead of the medications that pharmaceutical companies produce and commercialize.

After suffering from an injury to her anterior cruciate ligament, Lindsey ended up attending an acupuncture session which opened this whole new world of homeopathic and holistic medicine for her. She then started accumulating knowledge about traditional Chinese medicine, started going to integrative medicine forums, hanging out with shamans, and learning more about indigenous medicines.

Lindsey eventually got a reputation of knowing as much about alternative medicine as western medicine. She became very practical about the integration of the two because she believes that to embrace natural medicine does not mean to deny western medicine as they are not mutually exclusive.

Do Pharmacists Get Training on Natural Approaches vs Drugs?

So, pharmacognosy is the study of plants as medicine and if you back up 150 years, a pharmacist was nothing more than someone who was there to put the medicines together using herbs and natural substances from plants that proved to work for certain illnesses. They understood the application of plants as medicine.

In our modern world this is not so much the case. Now you have to go out in search of it and that is because the division between western and alternative medicine became very bold after the Flexner Report came out about 100 years ago. They basically dismissed any kind of medicine practice and even schools that were not based in drugs and surgery.

Nowadays, if a doctor does only prescriptions, it is most likely because they don’t know any better.

There is no medicine out there, even the over-the-counter ones or supplements, that does not have any side effects. Over the counter medications can cause significant harm and have major drug interactions so be sure to know your medicines and know your pharmacist. Your pharmacist should be able to talk to you about your medications and to teach you about the safety of those medications and the alternatives out there.

There are so many alternatives to prescription drugs and surgery out there that are less invasive and have less harmful side effects. It is the responsibility of your health care provider to let you know what they are.

How To Navigate This World of Alternatives to Conventional Medicine and Drugs

You can start with anything you would like to try to get healthier. Sleep 20 more minutes each day, get up and get your circadian rhythm kicked off by going out into the sun first thing in the morning, lifting weights, eat one plant based meal, increase your water consumption, meditate, etc.

Lindsey names eight root causes of disease: stress, toxins, allergens, infections, dysbiosis, nutrient excesses and deficiencies, sedentarism, lack of sleep and then there’s the sociogenomics. One place to start is with stress. There's no disease that stress does not make worse and no disease that stress does not cause and so it's really important that we figure out how to mitigate our stress by intentionally crafting safety for ourselves.

The harder situation comes when you’ve been doing everything that you’re supposed to do to feel good, but something is still wrong and that's when you start getting into things like lab tests, blood work, allergen testing, hormones, or maybe some more sophisticated interventions like imaging, but we have to start with the basics.

Going back to stress, it’s not about having zero stress. Some amount of stress is necessary and even healthy. It's about how do we help ourselves recover from all the stresses and toxins that we're exposed to. We need to start simple with lifestyle changes that can allow for that space of recovery.

What About Choosing the Right Probiotics and Rebalancing the Microbiome?

One of the most popular ways to feel better and healthier recently is getting the right probiotics and addressing the microbiome. There's so much research now helping us understand how important these hundred trillion bacteria living in our gut are to our health.

The microbiome is so critically important, we cannot live without our microbiome. Our microbiome helps us to metabolize foods, extract energy from complex and digestible sugars, they also ferment our dietary carbohydrates and fibers to produce what are called post biotics, it uses our food to produce vitamins, it helps with mineral absorption, and they also metabolize our bile acid which helps us to regulate our cholesterol levels.

The microbiome has this huge metabolic function. It also has a protective function where it creates layers for our immune system to be educated as well as to provide a barrier function for bad bacteria to be kept away from our system.

Our microbiome can also help us turn genes on and off. It strengthens the gut barrier, it changes fat deposition, it influences our growth, it influences changes in the body.

We also have this really important system called the gut-brain axis. We have this interplay between good bacteria and bad bacteria, good viruses and bad viruses that are just part of how we educate and train our immune system. The gut-brain axis modulates our response to stress, mood behavior, it governs our food cravings, it manages our circadian rhythm, etc. The gut-brain axis plays a very important role on our mental health. The microbiome is critically important for brain development in early life, and it also helps with the education and regulation of the immune system.

Between birth and age 3 the microbiome goes through a maturation process and this maturation process is very important. This is why it’s critical not to over sanitize our children because this leads to allergies, chronic disease, immune disorders, etc. Early in life the microbiome is teaching the immune system how to operate correctly, then later in life the microbiome and the immune system continue to communicate, and this is what helps to balance out pro and anti-inflammatory responses.

We are getting more and more sophisticated in our knowledge of different strains of bacteria and what they do in our bodies. We can look for a specific strain that reduces cortisol or one that helps with constipation or one that helps with digestion. We get to be very specific about what's the intended end point for what we hope to happen by taking a specific supplement.

We now have all of this research and new information about how important the microbes living in our bodies are to our health. There are more and more products being developed to support balancing our microbiome and benefit from it. And the products we choose will depend on what we are looking to achieve, not everybody has high or low cortisol, not everybody has constipation or digestive issues, or anxiety. We're on the path of becoming way more specific when it comes to choosing the right product for the right purpose.

When Taking the Wrong Treatment Makes Things Worse: Bacterial Overgrowth

Small intestinal bacterial overgrowth as well as small intestinal fungal overgrowth is very important to address. Many people are told they have IBS or heartburn and given a medication that doesn’t actually resolve the issue.

When someone has chronic heartburn or gastroesophageal reflux for example, they tend to take antacid medicine, but this medicine is not safe to use for long periods of time because it depletes our bodies from nutrients, it affects bone health, it affects your ability to digest. You actually need acid in your stomach to correctly digest food. So, this is not a real solution to this problem because again with drugs you are not addressing the root cause of the problem; you are just treating the symptoms.

What is typically happening with heartburn is a small intestinal bacterial or small intestinal fungal overgrowth, and as a byproduct of the bacterial/yeast metabolism, they generate hydrogen gas, and this gas is going to be forced to go upwards and will bring with it the gastric juices.

The problem is sometimes people already have an overgrowth of bacteria and they start supplementing with probiotics and prebiotics and they get sicker. It's worse because there were already too many bacteria. What we have to do is work to bring the microbiome into balance so that we have the correct distribution of good and bad bacteria.

If you know you have a small intestine bacterial overgrowth, it’s important first to use a prokinetic to make sure your bowels are moving well. Then use digestive enzymes to make sure you are digesting well. Then you can work on restoring your microbiome.

If you would like to learn more about what you can do to balance your microbiome you can watch Episode #169 of How Humans Heal here.

Naturopathic vs Conventional Medicine Approach and Pharmaceutical Companies Abuse

A good analogy to understand the difference between a naturopathic or functional medicine approach and conventional medicine and drugs is when a western medicine doctor walks into a room that is flooded he says “Oh my gosh the room is flooded, let me mop it up” and a naturopathic doctor or functional medicine practitioner walks into the room and says “Oh no the room is flooded, let me turn off the faucet”. And so, we're trying to look at where the faucet is to turn off versus just mopping the floor because mopping is not going to do anything.

Everybody's looking for magic but what we really need to be looking for is our simple, down to earth, grounded decisions that we make each day that will ultimately lead us to finding the miracle that is being healthy and being well. We have to stop looking for the magic pill.

This whole concept of evidence-based medicine being the only kind of medicine and the only way to inform guidelines and the only way to practice is simply not true. There are so many conflicts of interest between pharmaceutical manufacturers and the evidence they produce. If you send in a paper to the New England Journal of Medicine and they send it out to 10 people for peer review and they send it back and say yes, this is good enough to be published it gets published. The problem is nobody is required to go back to the pharmaceutical manufacturers and actually verify that the data that they presented in the paper is factual.

Take valdecoxib for example. Merck outright knew that valdecoxib was causing massive amounts of heart attacks and they did not care. They lied about the data, got it published in journals and now fast forward we know that thousands of people died from the side effects of it.

We need to have a much higher transparency in evidence-based research if we are going to live in a society where we live and die by treatment guidelines. The people that write the guidelines cannot be the same people that are doing the research for the pharmaceutical companies and manipulating the data in order to say this is what we recommend.

We have to be able to rely on the fact that we are going to get actual tangible information out of pharmaceutical manufacturers or we're simply putting patients at risk for harm.

We don't have governmental oversight of drug pricing, and this generates a problem because pharmaceutical companies can charge whatever they want. And a lot of times the medicine could be a natural substance and then pharmaceutical companies will just add colors and fillers so that they will be able to patent the substance and probably raise the price on it.

There's a lot of ways that these companies go about manipulating patent laws in order to keep drugs on patent. An example of this is the antidepressant citalopram where pharmaceutical companies made a simple chemical manipulation of the extraction to change the name to escitalopram, which is the S-enantiomer of citalopram. Another example is the pain medication oxycontin, where the Sackler family convinced the FDA to allow onto the label that oxycontin was non-addictive and had an effect that lasted 12 hours vs other drugs that lasted less hours.

We have to do the research ourselves; we have to go deep into the factual data before taking any drug. We have to educate ourselves and become more aware and learn more whether through a pharmacist or health care provider before even bringing the substance into our home. We need to be empowered owners of our own health.

If you want to reach out to Dr. Lindsey and learn more about how she can help you, please make sure to check out her website. She is also on social media as @lindseyelmore (Instagram and Facebook) and @doctorlindseyelmore (Pinterest/TikTok).

Her functional medicine wellness platform is called Wellness Made Simple where you can find many resources to improve your health.

If you want to learn more about how stress and trauma affect us, and how to recover so that you can get back to feeling your best, you may want to read my book Master Your Stress Reset Your Health.

In the book, I describe what I refer to as SelfC.A.R.E. based on your Stress Type. C stands for Clean Eating, A for adequate sleep, R for recovery activities, and E for exercise. I share the research behind how C.A.R.E. works in a daily routine to help us process stress.

To know your Stress Type, which is your unique cortisol and adrenaline levels based on how stresses have affected your adrenal function, you can take the quiz I developed. You can find the Stress Type® Quiz in the book and on my website.

Then, if you’re ready to start rebalancing your cortisol and neurotransmitters, to help your adrenals reset after stress exposure, you can start by ordering this home test kit. And you can also sign up for my Stress Warrior Online Program to guide you here.

If you’re interested in a safe and effective body, mind and spirit detoxification that will actually make you feel better and that you can do without affecting your daily routine, you can check out my New 14-Day Detox Program here. In the Detox Program I teach you to connect with yourself, and use mind-body tools, such as biofeedback, to process emotions.

For the most comprehensive support, even with the most difficult health issues (physical or mental), it is best to meet with me one-on-one, which is available to you no matter where you are in the world (via phone or zoom). You can set up a one-on-one appointment with me here.

We're here to help you!

Connect with Dr. Doni: