#328 Forget Stress-Free: How to Actually Recover from Stress and Become Resilient to It

The information provided in this podcast is educational and not intended to diagnose or treat medical conditions. Dr. Doni Wilson struggled for decades to solve her numerous health issues and heal her body, but with focused determination, she healed herself. And in doing so, she discovered the Dr. Doni Stress Recovery Protocol. On this show, you're gonna hear from doctors, nutritionists, and experts along with Dr. Doni who will give practical advice and wisdom to help heal your body. This is How Humans Heal.

How do we recover from stress when we're under stress? This is exactly what I'm going to be talking about in this episode of How Humans Heal, including the 5 stress types and how to know which is your stress type, and what does that have to do with your ability to recover from stress and trauma. So I'm so glad you've joined me here for this episode, and I want to be emphasizing that I'm not going to be talking about how to reduce your stress to zero or to be stress-free, because ultimately, as humans, we are going to have some stress exposure. So aiming for stress-free would be impossible and actually could cause you more stress. So I encourage you to release this concept of being stress-free. Now, while we may aim to reduce some of our stress, a lot of times we end up talking about it as trying to manage our stress, but I see that a lot of times as humans we also fail at managing our stress. And so what I'm doing is I'm reframing it to aim for recovering from stress because that is achievable. And I'm going to be teaching you in this episode what I do to help my patients to recover from stress and trauma and become resilient so to stress and trauma, because then we are accepting that this is part of our human experience and that we can take action to support ourselves through it and prevent the effects of stress and trauma in our health and in our life. So how did I start to think about this differently? It happened even back when I was in my naturopathic training and I started researching stress and how stress affects humans, especially how stress affects women who are pregnant or going into labor, and how to support women through the stress of labor. And it was so interesting to me that I— and I learned so much from those women. And then when I graduated and finished my residency, I started to practice in the tri-state area right after 9/11. So all of my patients and myself had gone through an extreme stress and traumatic experience. And so I had this opportunity again to observe and to learn how can I support my patients to recover from stress and trauma. At the same time, I was not only starting to practice as a doctor, but I was also a new mother. And then soon after went through a divorce and was dealing with my own health issues. So I was faced with how could I recover from stress while still under stress. And I just believed that it was possible. And sometimes it's when we believe it's possible, we figure out a way. And that's exactly what I did and what I've done and what I've written about in my books and what I'm here to share with you today. So some of the common misconceptions are people will say to me, well, Can't I just guess that I have high cortisol? In fact, the majority of people, if I ask, do you think your cortisol might be too, you know, an issue, most people will say and guess that they have high cortisol. In fact, in research, we know that not everybody has high cortisol, too high cortisol. There's also a substantial number of people who have cortisol that's too low. And so we can't really guess We need to test. And that's one of my first things that I emphasize is I encourage you, don't just guess because the treatment is different. And I'm going to go into that here in a minute. We need to know exactly what your cortisol levels are so that we give you the right treatment that's going to be effective for you and not just presume that everybody has the same disruption in cortisol. Even if you had the same stress, you could have different cortisol levels than another person. Same with adrenaline levels. Adrenaline levels can also be unique to each person. And no, when we test your cortisol levels, it's not just based on that particular day or even that particular week. A lot of people say to me, well, if I just measure my cortisol today, but I happen to have a stressful day, is that just going to reflect what's currently going on in my life? And is that really going to help us? And I want to help you to understand that when we measure cortisol levels and when I'm measuring cortisol, by the way, I'm encouraging you to measure it in your saliva. And/or urine levels, and we're measuring it at not just one time a day. So it's not just in the morning, for example, which is what might happen if you measure in the blood, right? You go in for a blood draw and you check your cortisol at the time you have your blood drawn. And that can be helpful, but it's very limited in the usefulness. What's much more useful is to measure cortisol in the morning when you wake up, the midday, the evening, and the bedtime, because cortisol is a hormone that naturally should rise in the morning, not too high, but it should be higher in the morning than any other time of day because cortisol helps us set our circadian rhythm and wake us up in the morning. And then it gradually decreases through the day and is lowest at night before we go to sleep. So we need to see your cortisol curve, not just your morning cortisol level. We need to see your cortisol when you wake up, a couple hours later, in the evening, and at bedtime to see how is your body's cortisol response doing. And when we measure that, even if we measure it one day, it's actually reflective not just of that day, it's actually reflective of your cortisol set point. That's how I call it or think about it. Actually, what we know from research is that our bodies actually will create, anticipate what our stress is going to be. And it sets your cortisol response based on what the stress you've been through the past few days, the past weeks, the past months, the past years even. And so you don't— it's not like your body wakes up that morning and decides what cortisol level to give you. It's actually like a thermostat. Your body is anticipating what you've been experiencing and then sets sets your cortisol level based on what's your usual amount of stress, and the same for your adrenaline. So your body's prepared for what it's thinking you may experience today based on what you experienced in the past. And interestingly, because of that, we get used to the stress hormone levels that we have, and we get used to the amount of stress that we're exposed to, and we actually end up choosing similar amount of stressful activities to match our past experience.

Isn't that interesting?

So we actually are subconsciously choosing some amount of stress in our lives that matches the stress we were exposed to even earlier in life, even from childhood. And that actually can make you start to think, wait a minute, if I want to change the amount of stress I'm experiencing in my life, that means I'm going to have to change my behaviors, my routines, my anticipation of stress. And that is, is absolutely possible, but it is going to require that you have some awareness to choose differently moving forward. It also means that we're going to need to reset your body's levels, because if your body still has whatever your current cortisol and adrenaline levels are, your body's going to try to match, continue matching that. And so it's going to tend to push you to, to choose more stress in order to match your current stress hormone levels. So what we need to do is we need to aim to first test your levels. We need to test your cortisol and adrenaline levels. Then we can use natural approaches I'll talk about here in a minute to re-optimize your cortisol and adrenaline levels. And we at the same time need to change your routine and your behaviors and your, and your lifestyle and your choices, your awareness of what's going on around you so that you can going forward shift the amount of stress that you're choosing to match your new healthier cortisol and adrenaline levels. And that's a process over time that I guide patients through. So when we measure your cortisol and adrenaline levels, we can actually see what is your set point and that set point, I call it your stress type, just like your blood type. And even it's like your fingerprint. It's that unique to you is your stress type or your stress hormone pattern. And it's based on your genetics. Genetics actually plays a role in this as well as, as I mentioned, your stress, past stress exposure, even back to your childhood stress and trauma exposure. Even your parents' stress and trauma exposure influences your body's unique pattern of stress response. And so by measuring that level in this moment, now we can understand what your body, all those influences and where it's left your cortisol and adrenaline levels today. And it's unique to you. As I said, cortisol is normally higher in the morning and gradually decreasing through the day. So some people, cortisol might be a little too high in the morning, maybe it's too high all day long, maybe it's just too high in the morning and then it drops low, maybe it's too low in the morning and then it goes high in the evening or, or high at night. So there's so many possibilities, especially when you consider adrenaline levels. Adrenaline levels can also be either too high or too low, and those are our two main stress hormones that determine our, our stress set point and our stress response. And so These can be measured. Cortisol, again, can be measured in— at home in saliva or urine, and adrenaline can be measured in urine at home as well. And so once we get this information, then we know what your body stress type is, your stress response pattern, and then we can take steps to bring it back to optimal because we know what optimal levels are. And we know that when people have more optimal cortisol levels, they have better energy, mood, focus, sleep, but they also have better digestion, better immune function, better hormone levels, better nervous system function, and all of that relates to your susceptibility to all different health issues, including high-risk HPV virus, cancer caused by high-risk HPV virus, let alone many, many other health issues, you name it, from autoimmunity to anxiety to fatigue to heart disease issues to weight gain to skin issues to, um, fertility issues to dementia. All— everything relates back to your cortisol levels. And so if we can measure your cortisol levels, and we can even measure your adrenaline levels, and then we can work toward optimizing them, that means we can help your body to not only erase the effect of stress from earlier in your life and beyond, but we can also then prevent health issues in your future.

Having optimal cortisol and adrenaline levels is essential for health and longevity. And yet the stress in the present and in the past can affect our cortisol and adrenaline levels, causing them to be too high or too low.

The thing is that we're not all affected by stress in the same way.

So over the past two decades, I've been researching and discovering how to help my patients recover from stress, and I've identified the 5 stress types, which are the 5 common patterns of disruption in cortisol and adrenaline levels. The reason why this is so important is because the treatment is different. When cortisol is too high, we use different herbs, nutrients, and other modalities to bring levels back to optimal than if the levels are too low. So that's why I, through research, developed the stress Stress Type Quiz, which allows you in under 2 minutes to discover what likely your cortisol and adrenaline levels are, so then you can make decisions about which herbs, nutrients, and other healing activities to choose to help optimize your cortisol and adrenaline again and improve your health now and into the future. Just go to stresstypequiz.com where you you can take the quiz and take it from there.

And so to me, measuring cortisol levels throughout the day as well as adrenaline levels is the key missing piece of most cases I see. Most people have not had this test done, and even if a person has had their cortisol levels done, most often they've not had it done in this specific way. And even if they've measured cortisol, most times practitioners haven't addressed those levels appropriately to help you re-optimize the and they probably didn't measure your adrenaline alongside the cortisol. And so if so, I celebrate you and you've been working with an amazing practitioner who's helping you get the information you need. But I would say majority of people I talk to have not had these testing done because it's not part of the standard care at this point in time. This is testing that can be done at specialty labs. It's usually an out-of-pocket test, but it's so worth several hundred dollars to find out the impact of stress exposure and trauma exposure on your biology, on your stress response system, to know where your thermostat is set, so then you can take steps to change it. So let me just give you an example of, and talk you through the 5 stress types and how the treatment's different, right? Because we can use, research exists, we can use diet changes, we can use lifestyle changes, we can use stress recovery activities, we can use nutrients, we can use herbs, we can use mushrooms. There's so many things we can use— meditation, music, mindfulness. There's a really long list of things we can use to help get your cortisol levels back to optimal, and a lot of them are gonna be unique based on your stress type. So that means that if your cortisol is high, you're gonna want to choose activities and nutrients and herbs, for example, or supplements that help bring cortisol back down to optimal. Whereas if your cortisol is too low, you're going to want to use supplements and, and activities that are going to bring your cortisol back up to optimal. You see what I mean? And they're completely different activities and completely different supplements. So if you just guess, you might actually be taking the wrong supplement. And for that matter, you might be taking it at the wrong time of day. If your cortisol is high in the morning, We're going to take the supplement to lower cortisol in the morning or at night before bed so that it doesn't go up in the morning. But if your cortisol is high in the afternoon, we're going to need to move that dose to the afternoon. And this is also why knowing your levels at certain times of day really makes it so essential and so imperative and so transformative to your health, because now you can actually take precise ingredients and doses for your specific scenario without guessing, you actually start to see and feel a difference right away. So what are the 5 stress types? The first one I call the stress magnet, and the stress magnet has both high cortisol and high adrenaline. Now, sometimes a stress magnet may have high cortisol, high adrenaline all day long, or they may have high stress, high cortisol, high adrenaline just at a certain time of day, like the morning. So if you have high cortisol, high adrenaline levels— and when I say adrenaline, I'm referring to norepinephrine and epinephrine— then that would be considered the stress magnet. And the reason I named them is because then you can more easily follow the appropriate approach, right? Then you can say, oh, I'm a stress magnet, I'm going to follow the treatment protocol for a stress magnet. If your cortisol and/or adrenaline is high at night, like before bed, that is the night owl stress type. And so you're going to be following this specific supplement and protocol for a night owl who needs help to reset their cortisol and/or adrenaline at night. Now, if you have high cortisol with low adrenaline, right, it's kind of lopsided, high cortisol, low adrenaline. I refer to that as the sluggish and stressed type. And you're going to be helping to bring your cortisol to optimal. But then we're going to— instead of lowering your adrenaline, we need to raise your adrenaline. And so we're going to need different supplements to raise adrenaline without pushing your cortisol higher. Then if it's the opposite, if you have low cortisol with high adrenaline, here again, we're going to need supplements that help to raise your cortisol that's too low while lowering your adrenaline that's too high. And so we need different ingredients, different nutrients, different herbs, and a different approach to your daily routine as well. And the fifth stress type is called the blah and blue stress type, which tends to have both low cortisol and low adrenaline. And here again, we're going to use different approach, different protocol for the blah and blue type to help the adrenal glands to recover and be able to make more cortisol and adrenaline naturally. Whenever possible so that we can get your stress response hormones functioning at optimal again, even if you've been under a lot of stress and, and, and even if it's been going on for a long time. See, this is the thing, is there's misconceptions about stress response. There's a misconception that it's only when you've been under a lot of stress a long time that your cortisol and adrenaline would go low. But that's not always the case. Sometimes I see children whose Cortisol and adrenaline's low. And it's not that they've been under high amount of stress for decades. It's actually could be that a child is experiencing low cortisol, low adrenaline. And so I want to take away that misconception that it has to do with age or length of time. That's why we need to be measuring these levels so that we can see, oh, this person has low cortisol, their adrenals need help. To recover. And it's also a myth that the adrenals can't recover. They can recover. I've helped thousands of patients to recover their adrenal function. Adrenal glands can make cortisol and adrenaline, and they can, they can recover using appropriate protocol and approach to help them to recover their functioning. And then again, by doing that, we are erasing the impact of the prior stress and allowing the person to get back to optimal functioning, because ultimately Ultimately, as humans, we're going to be exposed to stress. Ultimately, as humans, we have a built-in stress response system. We have a sympathetic nervous system. We have adrenal glands that make these hormones. We have a body and our brain that perceives our environment and our stress. And so once we accept that, that's what we, what we are and what we are experiencing in our physiology, we can actually give our bodies what they need in order to help us continually recover from stress and, and even become resilient to stress. That's what I mean by resilient to stress is now that you know your body and you say, you know, your body tends to be a stress magnet. So your body may tend toward high cortisol every time you're under stress. Well, then, you know, if I'm under stress, I need to take a supplement that helps reset my cortisol level or I need to do activities that help optimize my cortisol back down. Versus if you're someone who tends to be blah and blue, you're gonna have a different approach in your day-to-day life and when you're under more stress. So I hope this helps you to understand this concept, the importance of knowing your cortisol and adrenaline levels, the importance of following a protocol that's specific for your body, and the the potential for having optimal cortisol and adrenaline and optimal health going forward in your life. I can tell you it's made such a difference in my health and my life and to thousands of patients that I've been helping for over 26 years. So I'm so glad you're listening in. If you would like to learn more, then I welcome you to— first of all, you can start by doing my free stress type quiz. I developed an online quiz based on on all of this information I've just been sharing with you. So you can— takes you less than 5 minutes to do the stress type quiz, and it helps you to see what is likely your current stress type. By the way, it's possible to have more than one stress type. Sometimes I see that a person has a combination. You might be stress magnet at certain times a day and blonde blue at certain times a day. So sometimes the quiz is limited in that it's going to tell you likely one of your stress types. If you really want to know specifically your stress type, I encourage you to work with a practitioner like me who specializes in this area so that I can order for you salivary or urinary cortisol levels at different times a day and urinary adrenaline levels and then be able to guide you very specifically. If you would like to read all the research and understand the stress types and, and also understand the protocols for each of the stress types, then I encourage you to get my book, The Master Your Stress, Reset Your Health book, which you can get at Amazon in paperback print copy, or you can get audiobook or a digital book and help you to understand how the stress that you've been exposed to could be impacting your health now and what you can do to take steps to, to change that, to, to change your future, to eliminate the risk of health issues by optimizing your ability to, to constantly be recovering from stress day in and day out, each and every day. That's my goal. I each day am aware of what is my stress response, what is my stress recovery plan, and how am I doing, and do I need more help to recover from stress in this particular day. And I just love this topic so much, so I'm glad you're listening in. I welcome you to comment down below and let me know if you have questions, and feel free to reach out if you would like more help to recover from stress. And please, if you're new, I want to welcome you and encourage you to subscribe to my channel as well as to How Humans Heal so that you don't miss the next episode. Thanks again and talk to you soon.

Thanks for listening to How Humans Heal. If you liked this episode Leave a rating and a review, and for more resources, visit drdoni.com.