I am excited to have Dr. Doni Wilson back on the show today! She was with me once before in episode 142. Dr. Doni is a naturopathic doctor, certified professional midwife, and the bestselling author of Master Your Stress Reset Your Health. She has been in practice for the last twenty-two years.
Most people think that stress is all bad. However, it only becomes an issue when chronic, long-term, or debilitating. There are many benefits to having the right amount of stress at the right time.
In this episode, Dr. Doni and I take a deep dive into the role of stress and the impact of the stress response, including heart rate variability, the autonomic nervous system, and the role of the vagus nerve. We talk about what happens to our bodies with chronic exposure to stress- specifically around digestion, hormonal imbalances, neurotransmitter changes, and immune response. We discuss the impact of adverse childhood events and trauma, different types of stress, and recovery protocols. We also discuss measuring neurotransmitters and urine and speak about self-compassion and love- especially when dealing with stressful events.
I hope you enjoy today’s conversation! Stay tuned for more!
IN THIS EPISODE YOU WILL LEARN:
Dr. Doni defines the role of stress and talks about our built-in stress response system.
Some people are in a constant state of stress, so their stress-response system never turns off.
What does heart-rate variability represent?
The parasympathetic system is run mostly by the vagus nerve. Dr. Doni explains what the vagus nerve does in the body.
Constant stress causes overstimulation. That results in people not having enough time in the parasympathetic state, and that can cause chronic health issues.
The impact stress has on hormones and neurotransmitters.
The importance of testing hormone levels.
Why can blood work appear normal, even when we are stressed or anxious?
When stressful things happen in middle age, it can overtax the adrenal glands and cause issues. Dr. Doni talks about the importance of testing adrenal levels when recovering from adrenal distress.
Dr. Doni explains what motivated her to write Master Your Stress Reset Your Health.
Why do adrenal and cortisol issues need to be addressed differently depending on the patterns?
The areas in the body that tend to be most affected by chronic stress.
Childhood stress and trauma can impact your long-term health and even affect future generations. Dr. Doni has created a system to address that.
Dr. Doni describes the different stress types and talks about the most common stress types she sees in women.
Prioritizing self-care is vital for stress recovery.
“We are not trying to eliminate the stress-response system. It is healthier to have a healthy stress-response system!”
-Dr. Doni Wilson
Connect with Cynthia Thurlow
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Submit your questions to support@cynthiathurlow.com
Connect with Dr. Doni Wilson
Transcript:
Cynthia: Welcome to Everyday Wellness Podcast. I'm your host, nurse practitioner, Cynthia Thurlow. This podcast is designed to educate, empower and inspire you to achieve your health and wellness goals. My goal and intent are to provide you with the best content and conversations from leaders in the health and wellness industry each week and impact over a million lives.
Today, I’d the opportunity to connect with Dr. Doni Wilson. She was a previous guest on Episode 142. She is a naturopathic doctor Certified Professional Midwife, and the best-selling author of Master Your Stress, Reset Your Health. We dove deep into the role of stress, the impact of the stress response including heart rate variability, the autonomic nervous system, and the role of the vagus nerve. What happens to our bodies in terms of chronic exposure to stress, specifically digestion, hormonal imbalances, neurotransmitter changes and immune response, the impact of adverse childhood events and trauma, the different types of stress types, as well as recovery protocols.
We did speak at length about measuring neurotransmitters in the urine, and she really identified one particular company that she likes to utilize. And lastly, we spoke about self-compassion and love, especially when we're dealing with stressful events in our lives. I hope you will enjoy this conversation, and you definitely want to check out her book, Master Your Stress, Reset Your Health.
Well, Dr. Doni, it's so exciting to have you back. I’d told listeners that I was bringing you back again. And it's such an exciting time for you with your new book, Master Your Stress, Reset Your Health. So, let's start off the conversation really defining what is the role of stress, because, I think, for a lot of people, they think stress is all bad and I remind people that there's a lot of benefits to stress in our lives. It's when it becomes chronic, long term, debilitating, and we'll talk about that as well.
Dr. Doni: Absolutely, the thing is that, I mean, we're humans sometimes we have to remember that [laughs] and we have a built-in stress response system that's meant to protect us. If the siren goes off or the alarm goes off in some cases, we want our body to respond and help us get out of danger. We're not trying to eliminate the stress response system. Actually, it's healthier to have a healthy stress response system. That's the whole point of doing heart rate variability. Heart rate variability tells us that we have a healthy stress response and stress recovery happening.
The issue is that in our day to day lives, we just end up under lots and lots and lots more stress. So, I was thinking it's like our body is going into stress response so often that the body essentially is like, “Ah, let's not turn it off because it's probably going to get triggered again in five minutes. Let's just leave it on.” So, then the body leaves on the stress response system, like constantly so much so that I don't think we even realize it's still on. It becomes normal to be constantly in a stress response and so people will say, “Well, I don't know if I'm stressed, it feels normal to me.” But it's actually very likely you’e in a constant stress response that's probably never turning off. It's just constant.
Cynthia: Well, I'm glad that you talked about HRV because this is something, I wear an Oura Ring. I talk about this all the time that for me even post-surgery it was amazing to see the net impact of the stress of surgery, even though I felt fine. My HRV has been off for the past two weeks, like completely off. And I recognize it's all a reflection of the stress that my body underwent and acute stress. For the benefit of listeners, what is heart rate variability? Because really to me it's finding a balance between the autonomic nervous system, so you have the parasympathetic and the sympathetic, and why it's so important because you've alluded to this, this chronic habitual sympathetic dominant nervous system that most of us are kind of living in our normal lives. Like we're so overstimulated, we're overstressed. The last two years have really proven to many of us that we're a little overstressed. When we talk about HRV, when we talk about heart rate variability, what does that really represent to you?
Dr. Doni: Heart rate variability is if you think because normally, we think of our heart rate is just a boom, just a regular single beat. But when you look really closely, it actually has some variability in that heart rate. What they figured out is that variability in the beat actually shows us how well our system is going from sympathetic to parasympathetic.
It's amazing to me actually that they figured this out. I'm so grateful for whoever figured this out because it means that we can do a test in the moment. We can be wearing a device that helps us see how well is our body going from fight or flight, which is the sympathetic nervous system what we think of as fight or flight that adrenaline, make your blood pump, get your muscles moving, your brain moving, so you can get out of danger system, which is again it reminds us we're human first of all and it reminds us that our bodies are meant to protect us and we need it, but we also need our body to switch into parasympathetic because the parasympathetic is where we're going to be digesting our food and rest. Rest and digest is a classic, being able to sleep, being able to calm our heart rate and do what I call anti-stress. We need a stress response and we want to choose things in our lives that might be stressful, like being a parent, or having a job or a business, or helping other people, it's going to have some stress but we also need the counterbalance of anti-stress. And that happens with the parasympathetic nervous system.
Parasympathetic is run mostly by the vagus nerve. So, this vagus nerve is the longest nerve in the body from the brain to the stomach and it goes a lot of other places, too. It's innervating our heart, our lungs. So, it's usually we think of it as it's doing the stuff we don't usually have to think about. We don't have to think about breathing. Luckily, our body keeps breathing and our heart keeps beating. It's not like with a bicep curl, we have to say, “Okay, arms, do a bicep curl.” With our heart and our lungs, it keeps going on its own, that's part of the parasympathetic nervous system and the vagus nerve. But it's like, when we're under this constant stress because of as you mentioned overstimulation, we got one more text message, another email, we've got bright lights at different times of day when our brain really should be exposed to darkness. It's just so much to do that we're not having enough time in that parasympathetic state.
Then, of course, our digestion is not going to work well. How are we going to digest our food if we're never in a rest and digest state? How is our ovaries going to function or our pancreas or thyroid? How's it going to function right if we're constantly in a stress response? And our nervous system is going to be constantly in an adrenalized stimulated state versus having a balance of calming. It just helps us realize, sometimes I say, it's like driving a car with wheels out of balance. You're driving down the road, and everything's like wobbly and you can't steer right. [laughs] That's what it feels like. We're driving our cars with our wheels all out of balance. [laughs] And it becomes normal. We're like, “Oh, this is just the way it always is.” But it doesn't have to be that way. And we don't really want to be driving our human vehicle out of balance because over time that's what then creates chronic symptoms and chronic health issues from autoimmunity to chronic anxiety and insomnia to weight gain, to chronic digestive symptoms, heart disease, diabetes, you name it, dementia. That's because we've been driving our car with the wheels out of balance for a long time.
Cynthia: I think we just get that becomes our new normal. I love that you touched on the vagus nerve, because in cardiology, we talk a lot about the vagus nerve. And for anyone that's listening, we can stimulate the vagus nerve just by taking like box breathing, is the best example I can give. Before I do talks, I do a lot of box breathing; it helps slow your heart rate. But a lot of my patients in cardiology would pass out because they would stimulate their vagus nerve when they pooped or when they urinated. And so, it became this running joke we would make, post-micturition syncope, post-defecation syncope, passing out, but this is such an important nerve. It innervates our entire body and much to your point it helps provide that balance that we're looking for.
For anyone that's listening, the past two years has really demonstrated for many of us how well we're coping with chronic stress. There's no one who hasn't had more stress over the past two years. And I love that we started the conversation on the stress response talking about the vagus nerve. But let's talk about some of the hormones, like cortisol and epinephrine and our adrenals and the neurotransmitters. And the neurotransmitters I think are the most fascinating, like things that we can do to upregulate inhibitory versus excitatory hormones or neurotransmitters and how that can impact our stress response as well.
Dr. Doni: Definitely. Yes, there's this fight or flight system, the sympathetic, parasympathetic, that's our initial stress response. And then there's what's called the HPA axis, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. And this is where our brain is talking to our adrenal glands which are down above the kidneys. And the adrenal glands do a lot of stuff. They really do.
They make cortisol, they make adrenaline too, and they make DHEA and they also manage our blood pressure. They do a lot. But we tend to forget about them. And they don't really show up in standard bloodwork. So, if you're like, “But my blood work was normal.” Well, the adrenal glands are not really in that bloodwork. When we do standard bloodwork, we're looking for a CBC. So, we would see if you have anemia or an infection. And if we look at a complete metabolic panel, we're looking at kidney and liver function. If you don't have anemia, or an infection, or kidney or liver failure, your blood work is probably normal. The only time the blood work is abnormal, probably then it's an emergency, you should go to the emergency room. There's a lot that doesn't show in the standard bloodwork.
I just want to remind people that because a lot of times people are, like, “Well, my blood work’s normal, I don't feel well, I'm tired, I'm anxious. I'm not sleeping well. Why isn't it showing in my blood work? Why is my usual doctor saying everything's fine, or this is just aging or this is just perimenopause?” It's like get used to it. And I’d be like, “No, don't just get used to it. It's that we are not doing the right testing. We need to be looking at testing that's going to actually show us how your adrenal glands are holding up.” Even if we do a fasting cortisol in the blood work, like you could do a blood test in the morning for cortisol levels. And even then, the range is really broad. So much of the time, it still is normal, it's only going to show if it's extremely off track.
To understand the adrenals, first of all I would say like-- and we can tell talk more about this cortisol how it affects us. But I just want to throw out there that probably the reason you haven't been hearing about it is because it's not going to show in the standard bloodwork, we need to do more functional specialty testing of, and we can measure cortisol at different times a day in urine and saliva. And I know you talk about this a lot. But I agree with you, we need to be doing either urine or saliva morning, midday, evening, bedtime because cortisol is not a hormone that's same all day. Our healthy cortisol should be increasing in the morning, they help us wake up and tell us it's morning and daytime, and then gradually decreasing through the day, so that its lowest before we're going to go to sleep.
See, this is the thing, Cynthia, as I’ve been measuring humans-- my cortisol level and adrenaline level and human cortisol and adrenaline level thousands of patients for over two decades. This has just been my interest and my focus for over two decades, I've been in practice for 22 years. So, this isn't just something I came up with last year, this is what I study, this is what I do. And what I found is that it's so important to measure because we're not all the same. Like you talked about, we all have stress exposure, especially with the pandemic but that doesn't mean that our cortisol and adrenaline is the same for all of us.
Some of us that cortisol and adrenaline will get stuck. Like we're talking about, we get stuck in a survival mode or stress mode. Some of us, our cortisol gets stuck too high at certain times a day and some of us, the cortisol gets stuck too low at certain times a day, or some of us might even have a combination of the two. But the only way we'll know is to measure it. If we're guessing, we don't really know what's going on. When I put it out there, like how many people, even in your audience, how many people would guess your cortisol is too high? And I think a lot of people, like more than 75% assume it's too high. But actually, when I look at the research, and I look at the studies of all the patients I've looked at, it's not more than 75% that have high cortisol. It's more like maybe 50% have high cortisol certain times a day, and the other 50% have too low at certain times a day.
And the reason why it's so important is the treatment is totally different. To me, it'd be like treating someone as if they have high blood pressure when they actually have low blood pressure. It would be completely wrong treatment, we would never want to do that, right?
Cynthia: I think that's such an important distinction about testing, not guessing. And this is why it's important to work with clinicians who are functionally integrative medicine trained, so that they can help tease out the nuances because you get the best of both worlds. Like if you need bloodwork done, we can order that and if you need functional integrative medicine type testing, and I really like the DUTCH to get a sense of what's going on and work with that test a lot. It's an amazing test. And I always tell people; you want to make sure whomever you're working with has looked at hundreds of them because I'm sure you see this too, people who end up on your doorstep who are working with well-meaning provider. And the first thing I say is if that they've done a test or something else, “What did they tell you?” Because then it gives me a sense of whether or not that person really knew how to interpret this test.
And then I go for my interpretation, and more often than not, people are like, “Oh, I wasn't told any of those things.” Testing is certainly very important. And I know we're going to dive into how to kind of determine where you fall. But I think it's also an important time to actually make sure that we mentioned like stress is a hormetic benefit.
The right amount at the right time is beneficial. However, chronically over time, it can erode our health. And this is a large focus of your book is really talking about making those connections because I think most women as an example, wouldn't make the connection that chronic stress can impact fertility, autoimmunity, your nervous system and dysregulating these neurotransmitters and chemicals, and then even the epigenetics piece, which I love that you wrapped into your book, for a lot of people understand the epigenetics, do you turn a gene on or off? Like you can be born with these SNPs, but you may not necessarily have a problem with them. But what I see and I'm sure this is probably the same for you is, people can kind of cruise through their 20s and 30s and then they get into perimenopause and then they go into menopause. All of a sudden, they don't manage or mitigate their stress quite as effectively.
And before we dive into what shows up for chronic stress in the body, can we just briefly touch on, what has been your experience when you're working with middle age women? Because I feel like whether it's a divorce, whether it's an illness, like I spent 13 days in the hospital, which completely shot my whole body for a while. But sometimes whether you lose a job, you have a major move, something big happens in middle age, and that really can throw your adrenals off, like your adrenals are struggling to keep up with the demands that your body is placing on it.
Dr. Doni: Absolutely. The adrenals, they're really helping us out all day, all the time. I really like to bring awareness to the importance of these adrenal glands. As you're mentioning, they have everything to do with how we feel day to day, and they have everything to do how we're going to feel in the future. So, I put them as like priority number one. And as you mentioned, I too often have patients who come to me because I work with patients both one on one and on online programs.
They come and I'm glad when at least they've seen a practitioner who's paying attention to the effects of stress and even paying attention to the adrenal glands. But every single time, they are given the incorrect treatment, so I get so frustrated for the patients. I'm like, “I'm sorry, this is why I wrote this book Master Your Stress, Reset Your Health is because this is what I've studied and I know that it is so important to address it strategically and correctly so that the person actually can recover and prevent the adrenal issues in the future.”
I think that so often people will say, “Oh, there's something with my adrenals. I'm just going to go to the health food store and buy an adrenal product,” or even a practitioner, they might say, “Well, there's something wrong with your adrenals. So, here's a glandular adrenal product or here's a general cortisol manager product.” But if it's not the right ingredients at the right time of day for you, you could be taking an adrenal product and feel nothing different. So, this is one way to know. If what you're doing for adrenal is working or not, if you're saying to yourself, “I don't even know if this is doing anything,” it's probably not the right treatment [laughs] because when you get the right treatment for your adrenal glands, you are going to have better energy, better focus, better mood, better sleep, you're going to actually feel better. So, if you're not feeling better based on your current treatment, it's probably not the right treatment that Cynthia and I help you because when we do a test, like you mentioned, the DUTCH test is a urine test. You can do it different times a day to actually see your correct cortisol even if you're on a glandular or hydrocortisone, we can see your cortisol levels, and then we can modify your treatment, we can fine tune it.
What I found in my research, Cynthia, is it's so important to also measure epinephrine, and norepinephrine levels. This is otherwise known as adrenaline levels. These can also be measured in urine. And when we have this information, it's like if you were going to try to solve a puzzle, but you're missing a puzzle piece. You're never going to solve the puzzle because you're missing a puzzle piece. So, it's like we have to know the adrenaline levels to really solve for adrenal. By the way, I call it adrenal distress, because to me if we say adrenal exhaustion or adrenal fatigue, it connotates that it's low functioning and that's not always the case either. Again, I want to make sure that I know exactly what type of adrenal distress this person has because then I can guide you down my three-phase recovery protocol helping recover myself too.
I had been through burnout multiple times and I was like enough already. I've had to figure this out so many times, and I've been told the wrong treatment so many times. I've finally had to figure out how to get my body recovered from adrenal distress. So now that's why I'm so passionate about sharing this message and saying it's possible. It's not only possible, but I want to guide you to get to the point where you know what your body needs on a daily basis based on if you have a surgery. Or, last week my father had a stroke, and so I'm going through this stress of going into care for my parent and how to help him with a stroke recovery while also keeping up with my patients and my book and everything. And it's like, how am I going to be able to keep doing what I do, but not end up burned out again. So, I use exactly the tools that I teach in the book in order to do that.
Cynthia: Well, I think it's so important. I love that you mentioned the concept of bio-individuality and I have a woman that I'm thinking of right now who rarely do I start with glandular products when I'm looking at a DUTCH that's a little wonky. And in her instance, I did and appropriately but what was interesting was that she had such low cortisol levels we had talked about, we're going to buffer this for a little while, but it was so stimulating. I think she had gone through so many years of being so depleted. Her adrenals being so depleted that just providing a glandular product was too stimulating. And so, I said, “Okay, let's try half.” We got down to a quarter of a pill, and now she's fine. And so, I said, “Okay, this is where we need to be.” But I think you really bring up a good point that we have to address adrenal and cortisol issues differently depending on the patterns that we see.
When we're under chronic stress over time, what are the most common symptoms that will show up for you, or I really should rephrase that and say, not necessarily symptoms, but what are the most common diagnoses you see associated with these chronic stress issues?
Dr. Doni: Here's how I think about that. And this is based on reviewing hundreds of research articles. The way my brain works is I look for patterns because I then can use those patterns with patients going forward. So, it's four major systems that are going to be affected by this chronic stress.
One is a digestion. Anyone listening-- the common diagnoses classically would be like IBS. We know IBS is caused by stress. We also know stomach ulcers are highly associated with stress. But maybe a person doesn't get all the way to stomach ulcers. Maybe they just have heartburn or reflux or gas and bloating or what might get diagnosed as SIBO or dysbiosis or constipation or diarrhea or even inflammatory bowel disease. It's anywhere in that spectrum of, we're just not digesting our food well. It's going to be more inflammatory because these are undigested proteins and we have more intestinal permeability because we know stress causes damage to the intestinal cells. So, we end up with leaky gut, and we end up with imbalanced bacteria because the food's not getting digested well, and we know stress itself disrupts gut bacteria. So, it becomes this perfect storm in the digestive tract of inflammation, food sensitivities, imbalanced gut bacteria, and it's going to get diagnosed in some fashion based on that. [laughs]
A lot of times it shows up with digestive issues. That's the first area. The second area is, it's going to disrupt all the other hormones in the body. So, it could show up as low thyroid or hyperthyroid. It could show up as insulin and glucose issues. Like you mentioned, your blood sugar. I think you told me that before your blood sugars were higher, you're trying to get your blood sugars back after the surgery. Yeah, our insulin and our blood sugars are going to get thrown off by stress. But so are all the other hormones in the body. You name it, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, ghrelin. I mean, you could just name all the different hormones that get affected by stress.
So, it might not show up with all of those for every person. But if you're like, “Wait a minute, why is my thyroid not right and my blood sugars are higher and my digestion is off?” Your body's trying to tell you that stress playing a role and we need to start addressing it. So, that's the second area is all the other hormones in the body.
The third is neurotransmitters, and I'm so glad you've been mentioning them already because I love to talk about neurotransmitters. I've been helping patients with amino acid therapy to rebalance neurotransmitters for 20 years. I've been doing urinary neurotransmitter testing for that period of time as well. And this is not common. This is not something I learned about in medical school. This is not something most practitioners learn about. But it's something that I became specialized in because I saw how much it helped me and how much it helps my patients.
So, definitely stress and cortisol and adrenaline it disrupts our neurotransmitters. We tend to get depleted in serotonin, which, of course is mostly made in our digestion. We already talked about what an issue stress is for our digestion. So, then it's kind of like well, of course, we're not going to have good serotonin production, and GABA production gets depleted too and then dopamine levels can go either too high or too low depending on your genetics. So, it becomes just completely imbalanced neurotransmitter situation and I can see it when I measure it in the urine and what I do is I guide and I write about this in the book too. I teach you about what it looks like. And then it's even possible to rebalance your neurotransmitters using nutrients.
We so much often think if it's a neurotransmitter, it's in our nervous system, and the only option is a medication. Well, no, I want people to know that is not true. You can rebalance your neurotransmitters by addressing your stress, healing your gut, and using amino acid therapy is completely possible. So that's the third area is the neurotransmitters.
The fourth area is the immune system. This is when we start seeing more frequent infections whether that's urinary tract infections recurrent or vaginal infections. Vaginal yeast or we start seeing HPV. Another thing I specialize in is HPV. When I see that I don't hear any other women's health specialist saying, but I see it because I specialize in stress, I see that stress is completely linked to HPV. When I talk to women who are coming up with a positive HPV test, and I say, “Has your life been stressful the past couple of years?” They're like, “Yep,” and they can point exactly, “I just got divorced.” “I just got married.” “I'm a grad student.” “I am going through perimenopause.” “I just came through the pandemic.” In fact, I'm really worried because coming through the pandemic, I'm seeing much higher levels of HPV and abnormal Pap smears.
Anyway, the immune system gets completely hit by stress. We also are more likely to have allergies, so some people are more likely to get urticaria or hives or sinus allergies. Also, we're more likely to get autoimmunity. We know from the research. If we look at what causes autoimmunity, it's stress. This researcher says that, but then there's nothing that says, “And here's what you do about it.” And so, this is where I'm like, “No, there's so much we can do. We can reverse autoimmunity by recovering from stress.”
Cynthia: Well, one thing about autoimmunity that I've found is once you have one autoimmune issue, you are more prone to others. And I think that's significant because we probably in traditional allopathic medicine don't speak about this enough. We just say, “Okay, you have Hashimoto’s, you have celiac, you have alopecia areata, whatever it is that you have.” And then we don't say to people, what could really be at the basis of this is chronic unmitigated stress. Now, I think that's super helpful to give people context.
Now, one thing ironically enough, I was talking to Dr. Sara Gottfried last week, and she was talking about the new book that she's in the process of writing. And of course, I wanted to ask what it was about. And it was talking about the interrelationship between trauma and hormones. So, in the book, you talk about adverse child events. And so that was a conversation we had last week, and I thought this was fascinating. We know the more stress you have as a child, the more impact on long-term health. This is really significant. We have kids over the past two years that are also dealing with unmitigated amounts of additional stress. Whether it's just the stress of not being able to connect with people, or it's the stress of maybe their financial pressures at home, or maybe there are other things that are going on for them.
I want to at least touch on the significance of this, how people can screen for adverse childhood events. And why this is so significant. So it's another layer, like trauma is something that I probably didn't appreciate enough, until I started to realize that trauma is not just the big things, you can have micro traumas throughout your childhood that can impact you just as much if not more than major trauma. Whether it's a divorce, maybe you had a bad breakup, you had an abusive relationship, maybe you were bullied, all of these things can impact our health, not just like at that point in time, but throughout our lifetime.
Dr. Doni: Yes, definitely. I'm so glad that there's more awareness for this term trauma and more of just acceptance that as humans, we do have traumatic and I love how you're saying micro-traumatic experiences, and to not be ashamed of that. A lot of times there was shame and feeling embarrassed to even say that I had trauma experience. And now to be able to say actually this is very, very common. And let's put it out on the table and start working with it and communicating with each other about it so we can heal from this trauma because inevitably if these childhood events and this trauma doesn't get talked about and dealt with, it perpetuates into future generations. So, I think if we're standing up now and saying, “Wait a minute. It stops here with me. I am not going to allow this to continue for the next generations, I'm willing to do whatever it takes to heal it for me so that we can change this pattern,” because this is actually ultimately when we say epigenetics that's what we're saying. We're saying that when we're exposed to stress and trauma at any time in our lives from childhood and even stress from our parents and our grandparents, affects our genetic expression in this lifetime.
In the book, I identify five stress types. And this is how you will uniquely react, respond to stress. What is your body doing with your stress exposure? And this stress type is partially determined by your stress exposure from your parents and your grandparents. Your genetic expression related to how does your cortisol respond when you're stressed? How does your COMT metabolize your adrenaline levels? Is it going to leave you with a high adrenaline or a low adrenaline? Based on your stress exposure and your expression of your genetics.
This is how important it is. I think this is why the research shows that childhood events are associated with health issues, because we know that stress is going to cause all the things I just talked through. It's going to affect these four systems, it's going to cause-- we know it's associated with obesity, heart disease, diabetes, all of the chronic issues that we know of. What I also love people to hear is that just because you had trauma, and just because you had a childhood event, doesn't mean that that's definitely going to cause health issues in your future. You can always choose to make changes today to change your future. That also was very clear in the research.
This is the whole idea with epigenetics is that we're not set in stone already. We can acknowledge the trauma we've experienced. And then we can as a human today say, “I'm choosing to do something about it. I'm going to change my diet. I'm going to make sure I get better sleep. I'm going to get some recovery activities. I'm going to exercise. I'm going to take the right supplement. I'm going to do the tests that I need to do to know how to help my body recover from that stress and trauma, so that I'm decreasing my likelihood of chronic health issues and I’m increasing my longevity.” That's the key. We want to have the best quality of life for as long as we can.
Cynthia: I think that's such an important distinction. You mentioned some very important things. We talk about intergenerational trauma and that does not mean that we will perpetuate those epigenetic changes. I view some family members of mine very compassionately, so what usually goes along with trauma is shame. And much to your point, when you start talking about these things that process of shame kind of gets rewritten, but also understanding like the people in my life that I grew up around who were perhaps not in a healthy mindset or philosophy, I look at them very compassionately because that then does not allow this shroud of shame to be part of that. But I think it's so, so important for people to understand that just because you experienced that as a child or a young adult does not mean that that clouds the rest of your existence. There are so many things we can do proactively.
I love that you've created a system to be able to address those. So, you alluded to these stress types. What are the most common stress types that you see? You've got five mentioned in your book.
Dr. Doni: Yes.
Cynthia: What are the most common ones that you see with your female population?
Dr. Doni: Well, the one that, again, a lot of people assume they're going to be the stress magnet, which is a stress magnet is a high cortisol, high adrenaline. And I'm seeing more of them, Cynthia. I'm seeing more stress magnets in the past year than the past 20 years. And I think it is because we've been under so much more stress with the pandemic that the stress magnet is showing up more. And so that's one where there's high cortisol and high adrenaline at all day long or at least at some point in the day. It's more rare that it's all day by the way. When I see a high cortisol all day those are usually cases of-- now we're talking severe OCD, anorexia that happens when body's under even higher levels of stress, but it does happen. Other times it might just be that they have high cortisol in the morning and then it comes down or just high cortisol in the evening or a little bit of both. That's still, I consider, in a stress magnet.
The opposite of that would be the blah and blue. Blah and blue is when the cortisol is too low at some point in the day. Often, it's that the cortisol is too low in the morning because it should be lower in the evening. [chuckles] But I would say also they tend to have low adrenaline. So, this is again why I think it's so important to measure both cortisol and adrenaline, so that I can really clarify is it just low cortisol because in that case, the treatment is going to be focused on the cortisol. If it's also low adrenaline now we need to address both of those.
Again, this is why it's so important in my stress recovery protocol to know your stress type because it's a totally different path down the stress recovery. First of all, if you have high cortisol at some point a day, then you're going to need to address that first before we address. This reminds me there's the other three stress types, let me tell you that first. There's the tired and wired has high adrenaline with low cortisol. So, it's also possible to have a combination. It's not that they move together, you can have high adrenaline with low cortisol. In that case, we need to address the high adrenaline before we can address the low cortisol, or there's the opposite which is the sluggish and stressed has high cortisol, low adrenaline. We have to address the high cortisol before we address the low adrenaline.
This is why it's so important to know which stress type pattern it is, so that you're doing your treatment protocol correctly. If you're just using a regular adrenal product that might have ashwagandha, which helps lower high cortisol, but it might have some tyrosine which raises low adrenaline. That's only going to work well for the stress type that has high cortisol, low adrenaline. And I wouldn't even just start there, Cynthia. I wouldn't even start with an ashwagandha tyrosine product. What I would do is I would first measure the neurotransmitters because to me no matter what their cortisol is