135: The Fertility Formula: Inflammation, Hormones & Hope with Dr. Natalie Crawford

So it is not just say I'm going to do this thing to try and get pregnant, but if you set yourself up to feel your best, live your best, be in your best health, you are going to have an easier time navigating the challenges that might be in front of you. Fertility and infertility can be one of those things. But absolutely, you said at the very beginning of the episode, you have to get so sick to be diagnosed with something. That is how the medical system is made. That by the time these little cellular changes result in disease, it is often too late to be able to reverse the process. But before that happens, you can make a huge change in your own health and your hormonal health. By listening to the Conscious Fertility Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition and either yourself or others. Console your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guest or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to Conscious Fertility, the show that listens to all of your fertility questions so that you can move from fear and suffering to peace of mind and joy. My name is Lauren Brown. I'm a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. I'm on a mission to explore all the paths to peak fertility and joyful living. It's time to learn how to be and receive so that you can create life on purpose. I am literally, figuratively, very excited to have Dr. Natalie Crawford on the Conscious Fertility Podcast. Many of you know that I look for those that really have evidence-informed basis to support you and growing your families. I really want that credibility factor. We talk about all the options available to you and Dr. Natalie Crawford is that individual. I want to share a little bit about her background because it is impressive and also so you can kind of relax into the information. We're going to discuss and share because you can trust it with confidence because of her background in training. So she is a medical doctor who's board certified in both obstetrics and gynecology and reproduction and immunology and fertility. So she's what some people call the IVF doc, although I'll tell you that's not her go-to thing all the time. She's co-founder of IVFertility. That's her boutique fertility practice in Austin, Texas. Dr. Crawford is also the CEO and co-founder of Pinnacle, a professional network of women in medicine. So you can start to see she's really big into education. She's completed her undergraduate at Auburn University. That's where she obtained a degree in nutrition science. Holy crap, how many doctors learn nutrition science? Already following that with Natalie as the park. She went to medical school at the University of Texas Medical Branch. As we mentioned, she's an OBGYN. She did her residency at University of Texas Southwestern and she's an REI. That's the term for IVF doc where she did her fellowship at the University of North Carolina. Go Tardewales. Concurrently, at the same time, obtaining a master of science and clinical research. Dr. Crawford is a digital, digital health educator on social media and YouTube and also the host of the podcast as a woman, fertility hormones and beyond. She has over 5 million downloads. She has a book out. Finally, all the things that people get to see when and on online, she put this down into a book and that takes a lot of effort and work. Her book is called Fertility Formula. I love this because I'm a math guy. I used to be an accountant. So I like formulations for Tilly Formula, taking control of your reproductive future. I want to let you know that that is being released in April of 2026. I pre-ordered it. I think she's got some free things she's going to share with you if you pre-order it. If you listen to this and it's April 2026 and beyond, you can just go buy it. But if it's before that, please do pre-order it if you haven't already. So Natalie, unlike many physicians, you actually have a whole body approach. You infuse lifestyle and functional medicine. Obviously bringing in science back based facts to help people conceive and really get to learn about their bodies. You also have personal experiences. One thing to have the education. There's one thing to have clinical experience. You have something that's also unique. You were a patient basically of reproductive health. Are you willing to share a little bit about your background and your story? Yeah, absolutely. And just thank you so much for having me here today. It's a huge honor and I'm really excited for this conversation. I have the unique position to during my medical training. So during the end of my OB/GYN residency and at the beginning of my infertility fellowship, having multiple pregnancy losses. And I was pretty standard as far as didn't have any health problems before this. Was preventing pregnancy, figured I would stop my birth control pill. We get pregnant. The biggest question of my life before that was when should we have kids trying to balance it in medical training. And when I started to have pregnancy loss after pregnancy loss, I really had a rude awakening what it's like to be a patient to go into feel like there must be something wrong with you, but to have every doctor be very dismissive, to say everything's fine. Just keep trying. Just relax. I heard all the things that we know in the infertility community that my patients have heard. And I started to realize that despite having expertise in this field, I had so many questions about what I should be doing and what was normal. Was my loodial phase normal. Were there foods that I shouldn't be eating? What about exercise and sleep? And my OB/GYNs didn't have the answers to those questions. And in fellowship, nobody did either. And that really spurred me to really approach how I was going to practice medicine differently. Both from I've been there and I tell every patient who's going through a pregnancy loss. I've been in your shoes. It's the worst thing. I don't hide my story because it has changed my approach. I know what it feels like to feel isolated and to feel really alone, to question yourself and identity, which is a huge piece of if you always thought you'd be a parent. And suddenly this may not happen for you to have these questions about what does your future look like and for it to feel just like an out of control process. But in fellowship, you know, you read off my nice accolades. I did get a masters of clinical research and most people in REI fellowships, so it is three years. You do a year and a half of clinical work and a year and a half of research. And most everybody does IVF research or basic science research. And that's pretty standard. And I remember I was going through my losses at this time. We didn't know what was going on. And I went up to my fellowship director and said, I don't want to do basic science research. I've done that in the past. Like I want to get answers to the questions I have. The questions are patients have. I want to do clinical projects. And they said, well, if you're going to do that, you've got to get more expertise in it and get a masters. And I said, sign me up because I want to be able to evaluate studies and see what's good and what's bad. And all of my fellowship research centered around natural fertility and the ludial phase and ovarian reserve and environmental toxins and vitamin D levels and mental health and fertility and really thinking about what question do I have my patients must have that question too. And let's go and try to answer it. And that's why I always say, even though I do see IVF every day, I see patients with IVF and I try to help them get pregnant. This idea that your natural fertility and IVF care are siloed off kind of once you've gotten to IVF, none of the holistic stuff, none of your lifestyle factors matter. I think it's a huge disservice that our field has propagated because we know, you know, Egan's Bermqual, I can only work with the Egan's Bermquality I get when it comes to the lab. That means I've got to do my very best at picking the right protocol for your situation. But as patients, empowering them to know what's happening in their body, know what questions to ask, be able to make decisions that are right for them, but also to control all the factors that do impact your Egan's Bermqualve along the way. So you can move with confidence knowing the decisions you've made are right for you that you're doing everything that you can. And certainly a lot of this ties back to getting a nutrition degree. I was always fascinated by it and then shocked by how little medicine emphasized the foods we put in our body and the state of our body as I went through my own training. And we are luckily seeing, I think, a tied change in medicine, but it's taken a really long time. Yeah, and people like you are helping with that tie change. So thank you. So you did not your fellowship. Like you said, most people when they do their research will focus on the IVF research and you looked into natural fertility. And I want to just unpack that part where you said, you know, you do IVF is a great tool, right? Helps lots of people get pregnant. But what I heard is you get to work with the building blocks, the sperm and the egg and the uterine cavity. And if they're poor, then there's a chance the outcome is going to be poor. And if they're the building blocks, the Egan sperm quality at their potential peak potential, there's a better chance of IVF succeeding. Absolutely. And if somebody's listening, they've gone through IVF and they know friends who have, there's so many rate limiting steps when it comes to how many eggs you have and your age and things that you cannot change along the way. But I've seen so many people get told, oh, you must just have that quality. Yeah, there's nothing to say. These are the things you should do about that or what we should do. And I wish more people would never hear that that they could go into this knowing that they were bringing the best quality the table they can. But I also always say, if I could, if I could put myself out of business, that would be ideal. If everybody, if I could help more people get pregnant without needing IVF, that'd be amazing. It's never going to be everybody because there are things, like you said, that IVF does, that will always be the amazing part of the technology. People who have no fallopian tubes or damaged tubes, severe male factor, genetic diseases, there are circumstances where IVF will always be needed. But by focusing on a whole body approach, you're going going to be able to walk that road a lot easier. So you had your book available for preorder like nine months before it was available. We all know what that means nine months. Like you said, it's not lost on you pre conception. Then when people are looking to optimize their fertility, do they do it the two weeks before they're going to try and conceive ovulation? Do they do it just before they start the IVF cycle? Or also is there signs behind how much time you may want to give it in an ideal world as pre conception care to help you reach your peak fertility potential, egg and sperm quality? What would you recommend timing wise? Hey, from the moment you're hearing this is going to be the best because your exerence side your body, your whole life, some of these process take a wild change your cellular function. But on a physiologic level, if we want to be more minute about it, we'll say for somebody from sperm standpoint, life cycle of a sperm is about three months, 72 days in creation, 18 days to kind of come out. So I like to see sperm changes three to six months of optimizing lifestyle before you want to get pregnant. When it comes to the egg, it appears that the lifespan of an egg getting chosen will say out of the vault where I like to envision all eggs are stored into being available to be chosen as a dominant follicle. That whole process is about 300 days, but the 60 days prior to that is probably when the egg is most susceptible to the world around it. And I think that that's helpful to hear too that, okay, well, I did this bad, quote unquote, bad thing all these years. What's the point of making the change now? And I would say the point is that when the egg becomes closer to the surface of the ovary, it is more susceptible to the world around you. So start now, make these changes, start tracking your cycle, listening to your own hormone clues, but it's not too late to undo perhaps decisions that were less wise of us in our younger years. And I think that messaging gets lost a lot when we do think about the fact that the egg is inside the body, our whole life, we get into the damages done. There's no need to focus on that. And I'd just say, no, that's actually not true. Focusing on it now is really important. So how is your approach? And I know this is again, a shadow to your book in the fertility formula. You lay this out, but some of us don't have the book yet because it's the time of the recording. It's not published. But what happens when somebody comes to you and they go, I'm 35. I heard it 35. I have turned on the advanced, matured age or somebody is it four or three? Is it kind of like, well, just do the IVF and we'll hope for the best? Or is there, are they able to advocate and be proactive to increase their chances of conceiving naturally or through ART like IVF? One of the key themes through the book is that every decision is individualized. So there's no one circumstance that's going to be right for everybody. Similarly, when you only hear one option, that's usually not a good approach. But you can't make an informed decision if you don't have all the data and a lot of times, especially in IVF care. What has happened is people get to this place. They get told IVF's the only option. They don't get explained what it is, what's going on in their body, what they should be doing. And it feels even more overwhelming. So I make sure we get a great history. I'm always doing a deep dive root cause. What can we get to the bottom of what's going on here? Does that impact what we are? But honestly, a lot of times it's what are our family goals and what is our circumstance? Because sometimes IVF is the right answer and IVF is not a failure. That doesn't mean we don't do other things along the way. I think to speak to you in my perfect world, I would change the entire fertility industry. I understand it exists based on we screen people once they have quote, unquote, failed, meaning you have to try to get pregnant. If you're under age 35 for a year, then you get to come in and get checked up. If you're over age 35, at least six months. And I really wish this was not the approach, right? This was the initial approach when the rate of infertility was and one out of eight or less, thinking that not a lot of people are going to have this. So there's no use in public health screening people if they weren't going to have a problem. But we live in a different world today and the rate of infertility is increasing. The rate of male infertility is increasing. And I wish we could approach more proactive screening so that people could go in to their family planning journey with a more goal oriented mindset instead of what I did, right? I ignored it. And then suddenly it was like, Oh, let's get pregnant. What do we do now? And what does that mean? That means understanding if you have a partner, you know, semen analysis, ant because it can take three to six months to improve sperm quality. So why do that? Why not find that information out after you've been trying already for a year and then three to six months to try to make it better? Find that information out much earlier. Ovarian reserve. If you're running out of eggs, it doesn't mean you can't get pregnant. But we do know you often have a longer time to pregnancy. You obviously are going to have a huge impact on your time to menopause, but also for the number of eggs we can get for IVF. And depending on where you are, you might want to be more aggressive to get to this pregnancy based on that information. But also I say, that's your body giving us a big red flag that something is wrong. And then also thinking about learning to cycle track and understanding what cycle tracking is. Many people hear me say that. And they think, I'm marking day number one down on my app. So my cycle is fine. But truly when it comes to your menstrual cycle, understanding the difference and your follicular and luteal phase, understanding if your luteal phase is natural is regular. I'm a huge luteal phase nerd because that's what I did on my thesis work on is really understanding the luteal phase. And what we see is that changes in the luteal phase are the first sign of ovulatory dysfunction. You very well might still be having regular cycles, but the luteal phase is getting shorter. So when that is starting to happen, if you're just marking your day one, you're not going to be aware of this. So it's education. So the book is going through the basic formula too. So number one, it's education. You got to learn these basic facts about your body. And this is what I wish everybody would do earlier. Right. Before you want to get pregnant, you stop that contraception well in advance. You learn how to track your cycles. You get some preliminary testing done. It's helping you know, say, what are the red flags warning signs within my own body? When should I go see a doctor? What could these be? What question should I ask? And then thinking about how do you craft a fertility treatment plan that's not a one size fits all? Oh, that's just the way we do it at this practice. But really in line with what's going on within your body and your goals and your circumstance so that you know that's the right decision for you. But regardless of any of those things, we know that a major player in infertility right now, as we said earlier, is against sperm quality. And a lot of what is harming us as infertility rates are increasing. So sperm, cancer decreasing. More women have low ovarian reserve. Miscarriage rates are increasing. A lot of this is because we live in a really pro inflammatory world. So just trying to say I'm going to avoid inflammation is part of the puzzle. But for many things, we have to make a very purposeful change or choice to set up our life and our day to try to decrease inflammation and what it does. I would say inflammation is going to come in an interfere with how your brain is going to interpret your other hormones. Therefore, it interferes with hormones signaling. But egg quality when we talk about this is both the genetic normalcy of your eggs, largely tied to your age, but also the metabolic health of your eggs. And we know women over age 38 who have infertility have more abnormally shaped mitochondria than women who don't have infertility. And we know that there's more evidence of, you know, high inflammatory markers and women who have infertility, especially as they are getting older compared to their peers who don't. So the idea that egg quality is just age is an oversimplification. And I think that feels very overwhelming. If I was 43 and somebody said, egg quality is just age, you feel like, well, there's nothing I can do. And it's a more empowering approach to be honest with people and say, you're smart enough to understand this. Age is a piece of the puzzle. We can't change it. We got to work with it. Secondarily, though, the metabolic health, how your egg divides the first three days of embryo life for all determined on the egg. So how do we make that egg health better? And a lot of that is within your control. And I find that that is empowering to people to say, can't help that I'm 43, but let me know that I'm controlling these other factors. And it's that that really switches the mindset to being, I'm going to be more proactive about this and in the perfect world. We'd learn all those things in our 20s and set up our life to be in this way. Most of the time so that when we do stay up all night studying or go drink with our friends or have cake or do all these random things, your body is meant to handle an inflammatory load and go back to homeostasis. But when you're chronically inflamed and it sees it all the time, that same will say piece of cake can send you over the edge because your body doesn't have the reserves to handle that. And of course, I'm simplifying this just to generalize to people. But I would say it's not one choice. It's going to make it a break it for you. But really this mentality that the some of the decisions matter and that should allow you to really start looking at how you structure your day and your life and the choices you make and make them for your hormonal health. Both now when you want to get pregnant and for your longevity as well. All right. You guys, I hope you got this set to a speed one not one point three or one point four and you're not scrolling because Dr. Nally just gave you so many pearls. And we're going to unpack some of that. Where have you been all my life? I got a most Austin text. This is great. First of all, you think like a Chinese medicine doctor, this treatment individualized and looking at signs in the body as messengers because sometimes the lab tests that we have in orthodox conventional medicine for it to show up out of range, you're sick already. You're really sick, right? And there are subtle signs that the body will tell you that the labs won't that there's something out of balance. Like even certain inflammatory markers won't show up in the blood, but you can feel it in sense of the body. So I got to share my little cartoon one day and Ari, I liked this. So tell me if you like this. This was one of my the integrated fertility symposiums that I shared. One of the docs said that luteal phase defect went out in the 80s, because in my clinic, we're Chinese medicine doctors in naturopaths. So we care if your luteal phase is under 12 days. - 100%. I care too. - You agree, okay. And we care if there's a lot of spotting in your luteal phase. And they said we don't care. Back then they weren't using letters all, it was just clomad, we can fix it with clomad. And here's what I said to them, I go, this is why we care. If the egg is inside the follicle and they are one, yin-yang together. And then at the time of ovulation, there's a separation. The egg goes into the two and the follicle stays behind on the ovary and becomes the corpus luteum and is producing the progesterone. If it does not have the stamina to produce progesterone to keep the lining, so it's low progesterone or short as in you have a short cycle, theoretically then that follicle, which is nourishing the egg for those 120 plus days leg up to ovulation, was an optimal. So although I can't check easily if there's good egg quality 'cause that would destroy the egg, it's too invasive, I can look at body signs. For example, spotting a short luteal phase could give me a sense of that follicle is not at its optimal health, which makes me think then the egg may not have reached its peak for too little potential. Does that make sense to you the way I think of that? - Well, I love it and I'm just over here happy because I always say the same thing, the follicles, the foundation for the corpus luteum. So if you are not ovulating at the right time, which is a communication between the brain and the ovary and so many factors can come and interfere with this, you're not gonna have a good foundation to make progesterone. And I'm just gonna love you so much because a lot of my colleagues will say, yes, luteal phases, she's don't matter, x, y, z. And again, I did all my research in it, so I'm a strong believer in the luteal phase and its importance, but also they'll just draw a blood progesterone level in the luteal phase and act like that is a good representation of the strength of the luteal phase. But when you did your little cartoon in your hand, pulsed because it makes progesterone impulses from the luteal phase, I made my heart so happy because we know LH comes from the brain impulses, stimulating the corpus luteum impulses and progesterone levels are going to fluctuate. So based on back to the one single blood test can't always give you the answer, looking at the clinical characteristics. When are you actually ovulating? When are you starting your next period? Is that 11 days or less? That seems abnormal and why? Getting to the why. And just throwing progesterone on somebody in the luteal phase also, maybe it's better than nothing, but you're not addressing the root cause, you're not helping get a better egg. So so often in medicine, we're just looking at the one data point in front of us. And even as patients, we look at the one data point and we want something to fix that data point and we don't step back and say, but what is this telling us understanding how our body works and how do we work backwards to what is causing this and in the ideal world, we want to fix it there because that's what's really going to help us. And so now we, I want to talk about the inflammation aspect that you talked about and how this can interfere with the health of the egg in the sperm and implantation. From my preparation for our interview, when you shared about you had four miscarriages, I think in your research that you did, you started to, hopefully you'll tie that in that you started realizing there's inflammation. Some people actually will have a autoimmune condition which we know there's inflammation. Some of them will have autoimmune light, meaning the lab say you don't have it, but all your signs and symptoms say you do. And so when you were sharing looking at the signs and symptoms of the body, take a good history, that history of your, you know, are you sleeping? Do you get high histamine? You're always like having reactions, sleep. And then the cycle in Chinese medicine, a healthy cycle has minimal to no PMS, minimal to no pain, no clotting, average, regularity is more important, but at least 26 days, less than 35, those are the things for a healthy cycle. I want to highlight this, 'cause in Chinese medicine, somebody that has PMS or spotting or pain, we often are told from their doctor that's normal. And normal means basically you're being dismissed everybody, normal means. - Or your average, but it doesn't mean that it's optimal or that it's how it's supposed to be. - That's the key. Normal means a lot of people have it and you won't die from it. We don't need to send you to the hospital to get triage. It doesn't mean healthy. So I'm talking healthy cycle. We want you to believe between three and seven days, less than three days in Chinese medicine would be considered too short. More than seven days in Chinese medicine would be considered too long. Just how, you know, a couple thousand years ago, how they define what would be a healthy cycle. And when we see any female that is still menstruating, we're going to reproductive years, we always look at hermential cycle 'cause it gives us so much information about the health of the organism being the female in front of us. So I get the sense that you look at all these signs besides labs, you take a good history and I get curious about the patients. And this was your experience with your miscarriages 'cause they were saying, were you called on explain then at the beginning? - Yeah, so, okay, I'm gonna try not to ramble 'cause I want to fit everything in. First, I agree completely and I tell patients the same thing. We'll use autoimmune diseases a good example. You're going to live in a state of chronic inflammation for a decade before your body's sick enough to get antibody levels high enough for a doctor to be able to look at blood work and say, you have XYZ because that's how these blood cut-off are meant. That doesn't mean that nothing is wrong with you just because somebody says, oh, those things are normal. It really means that we have not given people the advocacy to say what should be optimal, what am I feeling and that these signs are red flags that something more is going on. And a huge part is trying to educate women on knowing what optimal is so they can start to investigate these warning signs that your body gives you. And very often, yes, the menstrual cycle is a great vital sign. Fertility itself is a health marker, meaning women who have infertility have a higher risk of having a heart attack, a stroke, diabetes, metabolic disease even cancer and dying early. And that's a very scary stat to blur it out here. And what I say is it's not that infertility causes any of those things, but it's a failure of the field to recognize that what might be contributing to infertility is setting women off on a different pathway that is contributing to these other things, such as chronic inflammation, which is truly the heart of all disease. - I just got to add, and guys, you two, just so you know. - Same, yes, yes, absolutely. - You have stuff, you're the canary in the mind. If your sperm is not great, then you also are at risk of cardiovascular, skin, mental, emotional. So it takes two to make it be. I just want to make, 'cause we're always, we're talking with the female, but I just want to remind the guys that it's also a canary in the mind for you too, that if you're having issues with your sperm quality, it's also a sign that there's other things going on. - Absolutely, and the same thing we use, we also use hormones so female centric maladies, but men have hormones too, and everybody, your hormones control how your body works, and if your hormones aren't working right, you're set up on a pathway that is not going to be conducive with long-term health. - Okay, for my story, yes. I started to say I've had so many pregnancy losses, I'm now in fellowship, I have to decide to do my own research project, get started on this natural fertility path, and realizing that I didn't believe this narrative, that everything was just fine, and I just have bad luck. And when I started to research a variety of different things, I kept seeing in the literature, inflammation, inflammation, comes to short loodial phase, inflammation. Oh, when it came to low ovarian reserve, inflammation, but this was something that we didn't really talk about, unless it was on the disease process pathway. So, oh, in endometriosis, there's inflammation, but nobody was talking about it, although it speckled all through the literature. And I really am a very nerdy, so started to geek out and say, well, how do you know if you have inflammation, is it just blood tests, and what symptoms might your body have? And I became my own in-of-one experiment, where I said, okay, and everybody says, there's nothing I can do. Everybody says at this point, IVF is the next step. Well, I'm the IVF fellow, so I can't do IVF right now, because I'm the one doing it. So we're gonna have to wait until this time period in my own training, that's a zone issue, but anyways, I have to wait until this time period in my training, where I can go through this. So what am I going to do in the NRM? I'm gonna start to try to decrease the inflammation within my own body, and start paying attention to the clues that my body's giving me, and see if that will make any difference. So started to modify my diet. If this made me feel, you know, a variety of chronic inflammation symptoms, if I felt bloated, fatigue, lower energy, harder time concentrating, the problem is, especially. Can we repeat that again? Just 'cause people are gonna wait, like some of them are wanting to know, what are some of the signs in some that you have chronic systemic inflammation? I heard fatigue. Fatigue, low energy, difficulty sleeping, feeling bloated, both gaining or losing weight, but more commonly gaining weight, mild headache, you know, there's any type of GI distress. There's so many, and I have a whole. - Rain fog. - Rain fog is, that was one of the worst ones. And just feeling like you're not this right, right, saying like, I don't feel like myself. I feel like something is off. And we, gaslight ourselves after we get gaslit so many times to be told, know you're fine. You start to think that is the new normal, but I think it's very important to step back and say, I know how I feel when I'm my best, a change from your normal, your best, to your baseline, that's one of the most concerning things for me. And so these symptoms that do get dismissed, that is your body telling you something is wrong. And so in my own Natalie experiment, I started changing, you know, the foods that I was eating, looking at, does this cause me to have inflammation or not? So I did really prioritizing sleep. when I could, in better sleep practices, changing how I exercise, I'm a start changing, how I'm treating my body, and paying attention to the foods that I'm eating a lot, making a very whole food, plant-forward diet, cutting out processed foods, and for me personally, I cut out gluten at the time, and started tracking my cycle, and realized I had a short loodial phase, and started cutting out these things and got better, and I ended up getting pregnant after making all of these changes before we ever needed to do IVF, and carried that pregnancy, and she's my daughter, and then got pregnant quite quickly after I gave birth with her with my son, because we were still living in this same focus, because I also felt so much better. I always say, "I want to stop drinking or take these other things out," and the inflammation goes down, "You're gonna wake back up to yourself and say, "Wow, I really was feeling bad." I didn't even recognize it as bad as it was, because I had to adjust to what I was given every day, and a decade later, I was diagnosed with celiac disease. But at the time, everything was fine, nothing was wrong, and again, I call it the preclinical phase, where your body's giving you all the warning signs. The recurrent pregnancy loss was mine, and yet I wasn't "sick enough" to flag positive on certain antibodies or get to this diagnosis. Also, I wasn't even told that was something that could happen that autoimmune disease could cause recurrent pregnancy loss. We talk about that more now, but that really wasn't on the standard list of things we were doing at the time. But this has inspired me to really dive hard into chronic inflammation, insulin resistance, thinking about how these hormonal changes within our body, how our gut health impacts our hormone health, and really refocus how I frame this to both patients, but also the internet and anybody I can get a hold of, because regardless if you're trying to get pregnant now or not, having good hormonal health is essential to feeling your best. And all these things I've rattled off, are choices that you make every day when it comes to, if you're going to exercise and what are you going to do, and how much are you going to sleep? And are you actively trying to combat stress with something? Because we live in the very stressful world, but that's not how our bodies are meant to be. Our bodies are meant to have stress release because there's a bear. So suddenly glucose gets freed from all my cells so I can run from the bear, and then I would come back down to my baseline to that homeostasis or that balance. But instead I get stressed over an email or bad news and all my glucose gets freed up, and I don't run from the bear and I sit there. And that propagates this insulin resistance and this inflammation. And so very often patients will say, "I don't have diabetes, so I don't need to worry about this insulin hormone you're talking about." But we live in a world in modern life, propagates and creates this inflammatory state within your body. And we have to have an active plan to fight against that if we want to be in our best health. And that reflects even down to a cellular level to Agnes Berm quality. I want to go even to a deeper dive on this chronic inflammation, how it impacts your fertility. I love to play with the term, because there is a medical term called inflomaging. I'm guessing. Right? I love that term. And I often say inflomaging is the chronic systemic inflammation that leads to accelerated biological aging. Because we don't want to be biologically old when it comes to anything, especially fertility, which leads to degenerative diseases, premature degenerative diseases, and then I add and premature fertility decline. Does that resonate with you? Accelerated biological aging that leads to degenerative diseases and fertility? I love that you tack on the an fertility decline, because when I try to use this term often for patients who are currently focused on their family building, aging is off here. We're not really that concerned about aging yet. And so it feels hard to get them to make the connection that when your body is aging at a more accelerated pace, the same thing is happening in your ex or your sperm and impacting your ability to conceive. So yes, your definition resonates. And I like it even more than the standard inflammate aging definition. So then how does these metabolic factors and inflammation impact fertility? Like does it interfere with some of our reproductive, or sex hormones? Does it interfere with ovulation, implantation? How is it? It's all of the above through different mechanisms. So let's break them down. First, I have to say that inflammation, it is on the pathway to harm. And it is what directly is harming things, but what causes inflammation? And I think we have to say, what is causing it as a variety of different things and sometimes it's disease state. So there are diseases that cause inflammation that you had no control over having. But secondarily, it could be things, right? Your gut is the first line of defense. There, you know, gut health and what we call a leaky gut or increased intestinal permeability is a part of the way the gut is trying to protect what you're eating from your bloodstream. And if you have less healthy gut, you're going to have more inflammation both directly into your blood. But also, if the things that you are eating are pro-inflammatory, it's going to accelerate that process. So we have part of this, kind of just an example of how inflammation is happening in our body. On a cellular level, inflammation is interfering with multiple different processes and part of it through an insulin resistance pathway and part of it through actual inflammatory factors themselves. So let's kind of go through a few of the different ones. When it comes to the brain, so for both men and women inside your brain you have the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland. And I always say, hypothalamus is central control station. It is hearing the hormone signals from everywhere else, making a decision on what needs to happen, and sending the signal to the pituitary gland to say, "Do this, do that." And then the pituitary gland will send off the appropriate hormone response. By default, when there's so many different players, we have a risk for miscommunication. And inflammation directly interferes with the hypothalamic response to hormone signals. So that inflammation can come from different things. It can come from being overweight. Facils make both estrogen, but also they increase inflammatory factors. It can come directly from insulin resistance itself. It can come from having endometriosis but having high levels of inflammation. That's like static interference on the radio. So if the brain is trying to hear what's going on, high inflammation, static interference, it's gonna have a harder time interpreting the signals. - I wanna just emphasize that. So you have this hypothalamus, pituitary, you're ovarian, adrenal access. And when they're in harmony, you got some great things happening. But inflammation can create that static. So it's causing confusion and it's not being heard properly. And then this just regulates what's going on in the body. Just because you have inflammation, there's static going on. So the body just can hear the signals properly. Thank you. I just wanted to emphasize that. - Exactly. I always use, I like bad analogies. Let's imagine the ovaries are a plane and the brain is literally air traffic control. You know, if they are static on the radio, it is gonna be a lot harder for the pilots to hear what to do. It's gonna be a lot harder for air traffic control to give the appropriate signals. People often, both patients and doctors, feel like this is an all-or-nothing pathway. Well, you are ovulating so it is fine. But the quality of that ovulation, the timing, the queuing is off because of this static interference. So your brain is hearing the estrogen signal from the follicle and sending off a premature LH surge because it has this interference. And so then you're ovulating at an inappropriate time, having a bad corpus luteum, even though you're having regular periods. So very often we say, well, you're still having periods. So brain ovaries, they're doing good. And we have to step back and say, there's levels of dysfunction before the switch is totally turned off. And this is for men and women, right? When you make sperm as a man, and you're making testosterone as well, the testosterone is communicating back to the brain about how much LH and FSH needs to go out because sperm and testosterone are made together. And interference can come in there and block that pathway for lack of a better word. So on a direct level, high inflammatory markers, inflammation from a variety of different causes can cause your hormones to be able to use the trigger word of unbalanced. But unbalanced means not proper communication because hormones are dynamic. They're meant to see a level respond appropriately. And when that system is not working right, it is going to create a hormone imbalance that actually propagates the system to be even worse because we'll say for women, estrogen is anti-inflammatory. And so if you're not making enough estrogen because your ovulation is off, suddenly you're gonna have a harder time fighting against the inflammation and you're gonna create a more pro-inflammatory environment. So we get into a cycle pattern that becomes really, really hard to correct. So hormone imbalance, improper brain and ovary communication, brain adrenal gland as well. That becomes one huge area where inflammation is impacting our fertility and our hormone health across stages of our lifespan. We also see on a minute level when we kind of go back to the cells, I can sperm quality. My bad analogy here is if we imagine that your chromosomes inside your egg, your chromosomes are held in perfect position from the moment you're born until when you ovulate. And so the older you are, the longer the kindergartners have been standing in line and the more likelihood somebody's gotten out of line. That's how I explain age-related anti-plotty. I've asked them to stand here for 43 years like somebody's going to get out of line and some of that you cannot fix even if you are your healthiest self. But if we view inflammation from a genetic factors, we could say inflammation in the ovaries like having puppies in candy. I'm increasing the odds people are getting not a line because I'm providing this distraction or this interference. And then we have what we talked about earlier is the true metabolic function of the egg and the sperm that when inflammation is coming in and is shifting the cellular function, the ovaries themselves can develop insulin resistance as well and change the hormones that they're making. But even on this very minute looking at your egg looking at your sperm, you see a change in both the genetics, so you can worsen your biological age with chronic inflammation from a genetic standpoint. But you can also harm how the egg can function. It's ability to divide, to accept a sperm, to form an embryo normally. Chronic inflammation comes in and interferes with that process. When you have a lot of reactive oxygen species, a lot of these inflammatory markers, the body has these protective mechanisms to think that inflammation is a state of not well-being and is this a good time to get pregnant? And so I always explain some of these checks and balances are because the body sees the red signs, it sees the warning. And so I'm not sure we should get pregnant and it starts to backtrack your ability to do so because the state of your body is not well for lack of a better word. But then we see implantation as well. So we have egg and sperm quality, I guess from functionality, hormone balance. But then we also see implantation and this is probably an area that is extremely sensitive to inflammation and it's a fine balance because implantation of an embryo requires acute inflammation. So your body, when we think about it, that makes sense. This embryo is going to come in and eat away at some of the endometrium and invade and get a good latching with that maternal blood supply. So inflammatory factors are really important in allowing that to happen. And that's why just saying we're going to take this medicine and cut out all inflammation, that's not the answer because you need an proper immune response to allow implantation to happen. But when things are inflamed, you've shifted your ability to have an immune response and that can impact the ability of the embryo to come in and implant. And that's why stepping backwards, so many patients just want this immune treatment on the back end. Well, if we think it's inflammation, if we think something's here, like let's do this high end manipulation of my immune system. And very few people actually need that. What most people actually need is working backwards to try to get their own immune system to function better and to reset this by decreasing chronic inflammation and how our body functions. So stress, how you move, how you sleep, your diet and your environment. How much extra toxins you get, all these things can contribute to your inflammatory condition. So the only one you don't have control over is how many birthdays you've had. Everything else, because that also contributes inflammation, everything else we have some agency over. Yes, 100%. I call this your inflammatory burden, the amount of excess inflammation that we are exposed to, that is a modifiable factor in our health and our fertility. And I think it's important, you said this and you know this, of course, but for your audience to say, insulin is another important hormone that we throw around with inflammation because insulin resistance is so predominant. But I think when we tell people what's really happening, it helps them because there was a study coming out that in women without PCOS that looking at insulin resistance markers, those who had higher levels of insulin resistance had poor IVF outcomes. And so very often we silo this insulin conversation into PCOS or diabetes and we think that it doesn't apply to everybody else. But insulin is that gatekeeper, it's an important hormone to allow glucose or sugar to get from your bloodstream into your cells. And it's the fuel for your cells that your cells need to do all of their actions. And so what happens is if you have a high blood glucose level for a variety of reasons, the food, you eat, improper gut health, high stress levels, as we said, freeze glucose up so it gets into your bloodstream. This insulin stops being able to do the job. The cell starts listening. It's like if a salesman comes to your door every day, you're going to stop answering the door. And you need more insulin to allow the gate to open and the glucose to come in. So you need that salesman banging on the door. So this is what insulin resistance is. The cells start saying, I'm sick of answering the door. I'm not going to. And it takes a higher response. Well high insulin levels themselves in the blood do cause inflammation. They also cause increased fat deposition. So you're going to put weight in places, your visceral fat so your body can store it because your cells are being starved of glucose, even though your blood level is high. And this changes how our hormones are made, obviously, but also on an ovarian level. High levels of insulin in your blood switches the ovarian production to more androgens. And that's in people who have or do not have PCOS. So the reason why we say, okay, dietary change, because that's a direct way that we get higher levels of glucose, lowering your stress and sleep, absolutely, because stress is also freeing this glucose up. When it comes to muscle, this one, building and using skeletal muscle has the Gluford transporter, which allows glucose to get from the bloodstream into the cell without needing insulin. So it's an insulin independent mechanism. So if we think about, my cells are already getting a little resistant, we need to start lowering your blood glucose level. And a lot of this can be, well, building using muscle, maybe not, I hate the word fasting, but sometimes time restricted eating. So having a good period where you're not consuming food, following the daylight hours is a generally good rule of fun, while your body is using up some of that blood glucose. And what you're starting to do is try to get your cells to switch and go back to being more responsive so that it can clear out insulin, supposed to rise and fall and rise and fall. It's supposed to be a chronically elevated situation. But that's just highlighting how these things that might seem benign, like get more sleep. People say, "Oh, as a matter of fact, I don't ever need sleep. I'm just somebody who needs five hours of sleep. That's how I'm wired." But that's not how your body is made. And maybe you can function during the day that way. But you're then setting up your day to have more morning cortisol, baseline higher inflammation levels, baseline higher insulin resistance, because you didn't use up all that blood glucose overnight. And it's going to be extremely hard to achieve good hormone balance for lack of a better word when you're starting out each day in a deficit. So even though some of these changes seem maybe not based in science, they actually are very based in science when you start thinking about how the cells work, how your body functions and communicates, and understanding how the sum of all these decisions adds up and can be either helpful or harmful to your own health and fertility. And there's that wear and tear. So you talked about the biology on a cellular level. You may not be aware of it as the organism, Natalie or the organism, Lauren, but there is accelerated aging happening on a cellular level. And again, I love the wisdom of this medicine I practice, Chinese medicine. Check out this quote before the age of 35, you cheat disease after age 35 disease cheats you. So there it is. You're not aware of this. All that stuff you're doing is so they got it. The biology was happening. I'm doing this. I'm living. I'm just up with you. You pay the toll later. So they said that this is also over a thousand years ago before age 35, you cheat disease, meaning your body is going to deal with it. It's young. It can handle it. But don't you worry when you're trying to get pregnant of 40, you'll be reminded of what you did when you're in your 1920s and when you're 75 or 80, if you live that long, your body will let you know what you did earlier on. That's why you want to start in the moment now to start doing these lifestyle checks. And then you're going to start doing these things. index so anybody can download that for free. All the diets, by the way, but the reason they all work is because they all have something in common. No process food, no refined flour, no added sugar, get lots of veggies and fiber. I'll have fiber. And then some say meat, some say no meat, some say carbs, some say no carbs. But what's in common is they all pulled out the major inflammatory high insulin foods. So diet lifestyle acupuncture, urinossum, Texas, I know there's acupuncture there is acupuncture, something that you work with with your patients. Do they get to see acupuncturists? Absolutely. And I always want to be mindful when we talk about, especially patients in infertility and patients going through IVF because I don't want you to ever hear anything I say and feel like you have to spend more money or you have to do something else and let that add to the burden. That being said, acupuncture has so many holistic benefits when it comes to blood flow to inflammation, stress relief, you know, variety of different things how it can work. And I encourage my patients to try it to go find a practitioner, see what the experience is for a lot of people, especially high functioning, high performers who maybe are going through IVF. It's very hard when I say you need to schedule 20 minutes a day to carve out for your own health and try to decrease stress and improve blood flow. It's just very hard to self-regulate that when you have a list of to-do items. And sometimes having an appointment on the book, somebody to hold you accountable, a change in environment like you get when you go to acupuncture can for a lot of people more profoundly impact the anti-inflammatory lifestyle that we are trying to curate. So I think it is a tool in the toolbox. Does everybody have to do it? No. But do I have some patients who it's going to extremely benefit them? Yes. And so I always say it's a great thing to try to see how it impacts your health and see how you feel. If it for whatever reason, if you paid it, like that you don't have to do it. If you don't have financially, you can't do that. That's also okay. So it's not a prescription everybody must do. But more often than not, patients find minutes benefit from it. And, you know, my, per on a personal level, my cousin is a naturopath. And one every time I see him, I'm like, hey, can we do a session? Frank, because he got trained in acupuncture as well in Chinese medicine as part of his training. And, you know, I can speak personally of the benefits for me, but I have patients who sometimes say that it's not the thing for them. And I want to support that truly, that the one thing throughout a lot of this is there's some tenants and some rules about what we need to try to do. We need to try to decrease inflammation, learn to listen to our body signs, and learn what should be optimal/normal so that we can recognize when it's not and know what questions to ask. But our own body signs and decreasing inflammation our own world, we can give, you know, ideas about how this is going to help, but you've got to know how it's impacting you on your own level and learn to listen and make those changes. Because we all are cellularly built a little bit different and we're going to respond different to different situations. As we close, I want to hear your kind of your favorite supplements from top five, but low level laser therapy, something because of its mechanism on inflammation, I use in my practice where we're the early adopters in North America at our clinic. We learned about it in Japan and Denmark. And it has this incredible mechanism, like you talked about the inflammation. I said not too little, not too much. It down regulates the pro cytokines that we don't want inflammatory and up regulates the ones what we need. We've seen this in injuries when somebody has like a back injury, acute injury. If you take an anti-inflammatory like in-sets, it shuts down all inflammation. So you may have no pain temporarily, but it shuts down the inflammation needed for healing. So you're good now, but then you end up with chronic back pain. The low level laser therapy shut down the inflammation that leads that causes all the pain and discomfort, but it does not shut down the inflammation needed for healing. So you get rid of the pain and you also continue to heal. And so on a cellular level, I love low level laser therapy because it's not going to interfere with the ovulation implantation because we need inflammation to live, but it definitely gets down regulates the inflammation that causes the pain and swelling. So are you familiar with the low level laser therapy? Just curious. I honestly am not. And I just wrote it down to be the next thing that I'm going to research and look into because it sounds really promising or exciting about what it potentially could help. Supplements, what are kind of your top supplements that are in general that you find that you're recommending often to patients? All right. Well, by definition, a supplement is supposed to supplement your diet. So in the perfect world, we would get lots of good nutrients from our diet and you know, we would need less supplements. So I still somebody that goal should be less supplementation and more nutrients from diet, but I understand we meet people where they are and sometimes there's a transitional period in that being. I also want to say that there's no one-size-fits-all approach to supplementation, meaning there are things I might recommend if you have PCOS or you have endometriosis that are going to be different than if you just say I'm an average listener. So if your doctor is telling you one thing, there might be a reason and you should always ask why they're recommending that and understand that it needs to be a personalized approach. I just want to add, this is for educational purposes. Dr. Nall is not recommending for you. I always like to say, Dr. Nall is a doctor. She's just not your doctor. If you're trying to get pregnant, we want you to have folic acid. It is important in cell division, but the only thing that's proven to prevent neural tube defects, which is a birth defect of your baby. And you can find folic acid in prenatal vitamins. And this is why you hear people say take a prenatal vitamin. Outside of that, things that are important is I like omega-3 fatty acids. I like vitamin D. I like magnesium. When it comes to fertility, I like coins. I'm Q10. And so those would kind of I have the exact I just I have my little listen front of me. Yeah. I have one on there that you haven't mentioned so far. So I'm going to ask you, in a subtle cystine. Yeah. I was wondering if that was the one you're going to choose. That's my one. And I mean, we have other ones. You know, there's an acetone melatonin. There's probably not. There's so many out there. Inocidyl cystine, obviously, if somebody has PCOS endometriosis because of research, we'll do it. But because we're talking about inflammation and insulin resistance, I always think of endocidyl cystine. It reminds me of the movie I saw years ago called My Big Fat Greek Wedding where the grandpa did Windex and everything, like yet Xima. You had her. So to be it seems like because it helps the liver do detox. It helps regulate inflammation helps regulate the the insulin. If I take it myself, right? Because on a cellular level, it can help with regulate inflammation. I never stay on something eternity. I take breaks. But for that reason, I like NAC because of its general mechanism. Yeah. I add NAC onto any suspected, you know, inflammatory circumstance. So your endo, your PCOS, your unexplained infertility to me is chronic inflammation. And so a lot of my infertility patients end up being on it. Even if I don't have it in my like, quote unquote, like regular average person who may or may not have infertility. But I think it does. It's a very powerful tool. And I think we're going to see the adoption of NAC more like we have co-cutan. You know, 10 years ago, I was telling people to say, "Cook, take co-cutan." And colleagues were saying, "Oh, they don't need that. They don't need that." And now that's a pretty standard recommendation for fertility patients. As we close, you know, retarmative inflammation, I've been in practice since 2000. And so I used to really focus on that diet in the environment for the inflammatory invasion in the body. Because our podcast is called conscious fertility and beyond, then my body connection for me, that stress, which you talked about when you feel stressed and your body doesn't feel safe, you start to release cortisol and all these stress hormones over time that can lead inflammation, even though there's no survival benefit that you got an email. What's your take on stress and inflammation? Because to me, it was one of those things that I realized was one of the major factors because I may see somebody once or twice a week, but they have this negative dialogue going on. They're on social media. Oh my god, everybody, you know, I call it fake book. Everybody has a great life but me. So how important is feeling safe in your body? How important is the mental emotional health when it comes to oxidative stress inflammation and the metabolic issues like insulin resistance? Hey, this is so important and this is wildly controversial in some ways because you'll hear a lot of people say, I don't want you to be stressed about being stressed and they kind of discredit this one because they don't want patients to quote unquote, you know, blame, blame themselves. The reality is you have some stressors in your life that you cannot avoid, right? There are life circumstances, there's political climates, there are things that happen in the world that are stressful, you have no, you know, agency over. And then there's all the things during the day that, you know, how you respond to things, how you structure your day, the support network you have, who you let into your life. And these things can work on a cellular level to benefit you. So cortisol release, normal biological response changes how your brain releases hormones, it's pro and flammatory, increases insulin resistance, all the things we talked about. And just like on the inflammation scale, whereas acute inflammation, good, like you need a stress response to live, like your body is wired this way. However, it is not meant to see chronic stress or to be stressed all the time. And in fact, if we think back evolutionary, the reasons you would encounter chronic stress were so bad that the body would shift away from reproductive functions because it would be, oh, are we in a famine? Is there a war? And your body goes into self preservation mode. There's no One size fits all remedy for stress. And I think that causes people to ignore this factor because they just want to know what do I need to do. But I always say, we know what it feels like to get the release from cortisol. That feeling and that calm sense of self and presence. And you should, here's what I recommend. And I'd love to hear what you say. Every single day, the world is inflammatory and stressful. And you need a carve out protective time for you. 20 minutes a day of how am I going to reduce cortisol? And it's not your phone. Is it a walk outside, sitting outside, journaling, meditation, mindfulness, the acupuncture appointment, yoga, talking to your friend, going to therapy. There's a variety of things that we could do. There's not one magic thing that needs to be done. But you need a carve out time to seek that release and that cortisol reduction. So your body can start to get more in the responsive state of, I am not living like this every single moment of the day. And I have to say, first from a personal note, that state of mind, when you're in a situation that is stressful, because infertility is stressful, to say, this is happening to me. I have no control over it. It feels very hard. And having a mindset shift to, this is the circumstance I'm in, but I'm going to take control of what I can. I'm going to ask the right questions and advocate for myself and change my lifestyle. That's empowering. And that mindset shift can contribute to how you manage and how you deal with stress, as can community and support in people. And when I went through all my pregnancy losses, I didn't share. And I didn't tell my friends I was pregnant. And then I didn't know how to call them and say, I was pregnant and didn't tell you. And now I'm losing the pregnancy. And then I really didn't know how to do that when it was pregnancy two and three. And let them in on what I had been dealing with. And this creates more isolation. This creates more stress. You feel like you're living two different lives. And even though you don't have to share what is happening to you with the world or the internet, I encourage people to have somebody in their life who they do feel comfortable sharing this with. And it can be your friend. It doesn't have to be your friend. It can be a work colleague, a therapist, your partner. There's a variety of different people who this could be. But let somebody take some of the burden because there are people in your world who probably would show up for you if you give them the chance and they will take some of that stress and burden away. But you've got to open up the door of opportunity because people can't show up if they don't know what you're going through. - For wrapping up here, I got to share, she's got resources. I mean, resources. She is an educator. I think this is why I was drawn to you 'cause I like to educate. - Yeah. - So Natalie just takes it to a whole other level everybody. So first check out her website 'cause you'll find so much. Natalie CrawfordMD.com. It's in the show notes. She offers courses by the way everybody. She's got her YouTube channel. She has her podcast. She has her book, The Fertility Formula. If you're listening to this before of April of 2026, please pre-order it. If it's already April of 2026, then you can order it. And you are doing a promo too. Somebody pre-orders the book. What can they expect from you? - Yeah, I know it's the irony of a fertility book coming out and being available for pre-order nine months before you actually get it in print was not lost on me. And I told my publishers, we gotta do something a little more, especially because I'm talking about this information. But very often people wanna take it to the next step. So if you pre-order the book and on the website, you can put in your order information. And there's two different things that you'll get access to immediately. One is what we're calling the hormone reset. Essentially, we went through how inflammation so impactful, but these things that you can start doing now to start to reverse this. It's a 30 page guy starting to walk you through it through those different five tenants we talked about. And then if you are in the position and maybe you're doing IVF for that subcoming, you do get access to my IVF course, which is gonna help you be a better advocate along the way. What are different protocols? What should I be asking? What do I expect so that you can navigate that process with more education and from a place of knowledge? - Thank you very much. Natalie, this has been awesome. I so appreciate you. - Thank you so much for having me. I've loved it. - I, Dr. Lauren Brown, I'm the host of the Contra-Specialty Podcast. And if you like this episode, we invite you to post comments, like, subscribe, 'cause it's our understanding, it helps other people find this episode as well. - If you're looking for support to grow your family, contact Accubalance Wellness Center. At Accubalance, they help you reach your peak fertility potential through their integrative approach, using low-level laser therapy, fertility acupuncture, and naturopathic medicine. Download the Accubalance Fertility Diet and Dr. Brown's video for mastering manifestation and clearing subconscious blocks. Go to Accubalance.ca, that's acubalance.ca. - Thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of Conscious Fertility, the show that helps you receive life on purpose. Please take a moment to subscribe to the show and join the community of women and men on their path to peak fertility and choosing to live consciously on purpose. I would love to continue this conversation with you, so please direct message me on Instagram at Lauren Brown official. That's Instagram Lauren Brown official. Or you can visit my websites, LaurenBrown.com and Accubalance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious and for a few moments, ring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.