Your Body on Stress: The Long-Term Impacts of Sympathetic Dominance

She texted me on a Saturday and she said sorry for the text on a Saturday, but I can't be more thrilled with my hair analysis test. I'm so excited to see my improvements. My mold, radon, parasites, and adrenals are so much better. I'd love to do a testimonial for the Guetzi Academy in Prova Health. If you need someone else to do one, I truly feel like you and Dr. Wright saved my life. Thank you so much. I'll forever be grateful for knowing you. Welcome to the Guetzi Health Podcast where science meets soul and healing becomes a reality. I'm Jeanique Rover, your guide on this transformative journey to reclaiming your health, vitality, and freedom. This season we're diving deep into the order of healing, starting with mindset and working through the layers of what it truly means to heal. Each episode is designed to empower you with tools, knowledge, and hope, so you can become the self-healing advocate you were meant to be. For more resources, reclases, and downloadable quizzes and guides, visit myguetzihelt.com. Let's rewrite the future one step, one insight, and one courage choice at a time. Now, let's get Guetzi. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Guetzi Health Podcast. I have, by far, one of my most favorite guests on the podcast. Again, I feel like it's reunion because you and I have been podcasted in like six months. It's been a long, long, it's probably been closer to eight months. So, Dr. Wright, welcome back. You've had quite the journey. There's a reason why you guys heard probably from the podcast last week, why I took a break from podcasting, but you guys don't know why Dr. Wright took a break from podcasting because you've had quite the journey. Do you want to tell listeners a little bit about that? Saying I've had a break from life wouldn't quite cover it. I overstimulated myself and I took on a little too much, and at the same time, I had some, we'll just call them intestinal adventures of the biliary kind. Everybody has weakness. And so, if you think your body is different than everybody else because you have a weakness one place, you're no different. All of us have weaknesses somewhere. And for most of my life, like when I was dating my wife, I was having gallbladder attacks. I had some gallstones. My doctor said, "Hey, you need to get that out." Being kind of cranky and attached to it, I decided I didn't want to get it out. I didn't find the reason to get it out just because there were stones there. Why do you have to take it out just because there were stones? Surely there has to be a way to get those stones out. Fast forward, 25 years, I started getting some interesting symptoms, some weird pains. And I started getting, basically, I couldn't eat anything. Any time I ate anything, I would get sick and throw up. For some anatomy, for all those of your listeners you don't know anatomy, which I hope is most of them, shouldn't study anatomy for fun unless you're weird like me. You've got the liver, it drains in, and then up until the right, you've got the gallbladder, which is more of a facility to store bile. And so, if you eat something with that in it, your body can then give you the appropriate dose of bile to help you digest that bile. Bile is like soap. It helps water and fat mix together so that you can digest the fat so you eat. And so then the tube goes down and connects with the pancreatic duct. They come into a y, and then they empty into the small intestine. And so, mine was blocked before it connected with the pancreatic duct. And so, my pancreas were still working fine, but when I would eat and my body would try to make more bile, it wouldn't empty. And so, then I was getting some symptoms from that. So, you know, this was a Friday night. And so, they said, "Well, we can have a gastroenterologist here by tomorrow, but in order to see him, you have to spend the night in the hospital." So, I could see him the next day. He went in and found it. And while he was going in to remove the gallbladder, or not remove the gallbladder, but remove the stones, he wasn't looking at the stomach, but on his way through the stomach, he saw a small portion of the stomach, and there were like five or six small ulcers there, which I did not feel, did not know they were there. And I was really able to remove the gallstone. And then he said, "I'd like you on a clear diet for the next couple of weeks just to kind of help your body heal," which I appreciated. That was good advice. And then I did a whole bunch of other stuff, including hyperbaric, a bunch of other supplements to help my digestive check heal. And then he put a stint in to allow all the rest of the stones to leave. Four weeks later, I went into, we're a second procedure to get the stint out. And I was fine. There was still one stone in my gallbladder that did not get removed. And so, my diet, and then I started getting more jaundice again, and more and more and more jaundice, until at one point where my billy-rubin levels were about 20 times higher than they should be. I want to interject here. You were so sick. And there were times where you would come in, and Kennedy would call me, and it's like, Dr. Wright doesn't look good today. Can we send him home? And it's like, yes. The fact that you still try to show up for your patients every single day, when you were going through this, we've had conversations around this, and you were like, we've always been so compassionate towards our patients, but you're like, this just builds way more empathy for what our patients go through. You just went through this for a few months. People go through this for years. And so it was so sweet that even in the face of adversity, you were always like, this is just building more compassion. I really understand my patients more now. And you were laying in between patients on your exam table, taking breaks and stuff. You did not feel good. Like, you were so, so sick. On that note, though, let's talk about your whole story was basically what's stress to your body. So I want to talk today about the science of when we are, because the month of January is mindset. And mindset encompasses, you know, nervous system dysregulation, cortisol, stress, sympathetic dominance versus the parasympathetic state. And so I want listeners to kind of be taken on a journey with you on when you are in a chronic stress response, when you are in sympathetic dominance, which is fight or flight. These are the things that are happening inside of your body, which is why when people come to pay you and me, when they come to a clinic, when they do that $15,000 treatment at another clinic, or, you know, when they're paying for this course and that course that's like $20,000, and they're not getting better, it's because they're not considering this step of the healing process. Because, you know, when you are in a sympathetic dominance state, which is fight or flight, and you have high cortisol and you have high adrenaline, you are creating like hundreds of thousands, if not millions of, of micro fires in your body. And then you expect a supplement and you expect a treatment to douse all of that just so that your brain can recreate those fires again. And so this is why people have that two steps forward, two steps back, healing journey, where they're like, I'm stuck, I feel like I'm on a medical medical miracle round. Every doctor says they have the answer. And yet I improve for a little bit, but then I go back to square one. And then I improve for a little bit, and then I go back to square one, or I'm even worse because the program was so hard that it stressed me out so much. And now I'm even worse than I was when I started it. And so the reason why this is your journey, the reason why you're stuck in this medical miracle round is because doctors don't have time to talk to you about mindset. They don't have time to coach you and train you and help you integrate calming your nervous system down, getting your cortisol down, bringing your stress down. But yet this is the most important domino in your healing process. A guy named Honest Elliott, he's the one who created basically coin the term stress. If you think of stress, like you say, as fight or flight, fight or flight is also or stress response, the sympathetic nervous system is also designed. You've got fun and freebies as well. And this response is designed to get you out of a life-threatening situation. So you're being chased by bear. It wants to have you for lunch. You've got one of four choices. Usually your body chooses that for you, rather than you making decision. And it's right in the center core of your brain called the mammalian brain, which is the place that helps you respond, so you don't have to make a conscious decision. You know, if you think of, I, you know, somebody just pulled that in front of me. I need to stop, stop on the gas or stop on the brake. You know, that takes your fraction of a second to do that. There's reaction to him. And it's not very fast, but the fight or flight response, the sympathetic nervous system is almost instantaneous so that you have what you need to be able to not die. I say it like that because if somebody walks in, when your kid comes in and says, you know, drops this bomb on you that you weren't expecting, you go into the, I'm going to die, response of your body, but there's nothing lethal there. It's not going to harm you. And so you're not worried that I'm going to die today because the bear is going to eat me. You're just, okay, I'm going to rise to the occasion to help my child with this thing that he just, you know, he's got to deal with. The problem is, and so that is all designed around. It is, it's supposed to be a burst. It's supposed to be a short-term episode because if you're running away from the bear, if you don't survive the afternoon, nothing else matters. So you're not thinking about lunch. You know, you're not thinking about am being amorous with your girlfriend or spouse. You know, you're not thinking about all these other things that are in a different part of the body. You're thinking about, I must survive this right now. And it should be short-term. You're not going to be running away from a bear all day today. You're going to be running away from that bear for minutes, probably not hours. So when you've got all these stresses that are happening, let's say you're a single mom, and you're trying to function with your children as well as make enough money to feed them, well, now you're going to be getting the wolf is out the door every single moment of every single day. Oh, and by the way, the wolf's at the door at night too, you are now living in that chronic state of stress. So I was sick. That was a chronic state of stress because my body was inflamed because of the illness. And so anything that puts your body into that response can put you in the state of stress. It can be illness, it can be chronic pain, it can be mental emotional meaning. You think you know something, but it's a lie, and you believe that lie. And so you're doing it like, you know, you're sure that pop tarts are the best breakfast for you because that's the way you were brought out. And so you're eating this pop tarts, but they're full of garbage. I'm picking up pop tarts because that was a thing that came to mind, but there's lots of things that we are sure are true. And we do them, but where there's a dichotomy, we're not getting, we're getting the lie, which is creating a stress response. Can I give an example of that? Like because I think like something that most people can relate to is, and this starts from young, right? Like our brains are so malleable when we are young. And I'm going to kind of backtrack how many people come into your office and they're like, I'm not stressed, but you're looking at all the signs in the symptoms and you're hearing about their life. And it's like, they are so stressed and it's so unconscious, they don't even know because it feels normal to them. It feels natural to be in this high-end state of a rousal. And that normally starts in childhood. So if you grew up in a family where your parents yelled a lot, or you had really mean teachers, that was my case where I had horrible teachers, like they were so abusive to children. This was in South Africa. I also grew up in a third world country that had one of the highest crime rates in the world. So my brain was so primed to look for danger all the time. So if you grew up in a stressful household or yet a sibling that was really, really stressful, or you had, let's say a dad that shouted a lot and hated his job and would come back and yell at the children and your brain is now being malleable in a state where it is primed to always be in a hyper arousal, fight or flight, fond, freeze response. And that is now your baseline. A lot of people are like, oh no, I don't feel stressed, but their baseline is stressed. Their baseline is normal and but that is the stress response. The kicker is, is you don't feel stressed, but your body is going through this hyper state of arousal. And that is not sustainable. You're not designed to run away from a bear every moment of every day for years. And so yes, there are those freaks of nature. I say that with love, who can do stuff that hurts them their entire life. Like George Burns, he lived to what 100 years old, 100 plus years old. And he said, man, if I'd known I was going to live this long, I would have taken a bit of care of myself. He smoked a cigar and a hard alcohol every single day. And so like, well, how long would he have lived if he had not been doing those things? And so, you know, you have all those other people that are high end athletes, and they go up and catch the, you know, catch the fly, catch the football, whatever. And they hit the ground under dead because of some other weird genetic thing. Those are the freaks of nature that on both sides, you know, we can't quantify or qualify that. For the rest of us, that is not sustainable. And so what ends up happening is at first, and this is all, if anybody wants to go and do a deep dive in this really interesting stuff, Hansele A spelled S-E-L-L-Y-E, S-E-L-Y-E. Anyway, Hansele A put it to he said, "There's three phases of adrenal, mal-adaption syndrome." And we call it adrenal fatigue. We call it adrenal exhaustion because it's really easy to say. But effectively, your body adapts to what you're doing to it. And at first, you get better. You feel better. You have more energy. You have a clear mind. You can accomplish way more than the average person. What ends up happening is you get stuck in that and your body starts to do what happens with type two diabetes where you become desensitized to that. And so now you're making it, but you're not getting the bang. And your body goes, "I cannot physically produce this hormone, the cortisol, because it's an expensive thing metabolically to make." So what happens is, is you can't make quite as much. And so then you start getting bursts of either too much or too little. If you get too much, we start calling that anxiety. And you get the anxiety symptoms from epinephrine, which is the first fast fighter flight response. That's the, I'm jumping off a cliff and I'm going to get excited about that. That's the epinephrine or the adrenalin burst. You start making more of that ed inappropriate times because you don't have the cortisol to deal with it. So you get anxious or you get the exact opposite. Something goes bump. One of the kids comes in with that same bomb that you didn't know about. And you cannot tolerate it. You can't handle it. You don't even have enough energy to blow up. You just shut down. And you go, "I can't deal with this right now." And so what happens is, is your body's making inappropriate amounts of hormones, either too much or too little, those go where they need to do to signal the body, what it needs to do to respond appropriately, at least what the body's thinking is appropriate to that, which isn't socially acceptable in whatever way it is. And so now you have either too much epinephrine flooding the body, which is looking now like anxiety instead of excitement. And or cortisol, which now is making you fat, because there are two drugs that I could give people that will make them fat. Number one is cortisol, hydrocortisone, and or insulin. But cortisol then goes to the tissues. Here's some biochemistry for you. Basically, the cortisol circulates and it signals to the body, "Hey, something bad's about to happen. We need epinephrine adrenaline and we need cortisol." And so what ends up happening is, you know, this was just the door slammed on the other side of the house, but you make more cortisol and more epinephrons, you go into an anxiety attack, your body floods, the cortisol signals the body to make, to bring sugar into circulation. So you have really fast, easy usable energy. So now a whole bunch of sugar comes into your body, into your bloodstream. Well, guess what? Now the insulin comes in, you make more insulin to send that sugar into the cell so it can get used. So you're fine, right? But this was just somebody slamming the door. And so you have all this sugar that comes into the blood. You don't use it. And over the long term, what happens to the cortisol? The body goes, "Well, I can't make that cortisol very well anymore. So you start getting tired." But what's worse is, you're also making a whole heap load of insulin. Now your body is going to be start being desensitized to that. You make more sugar and you're going, "Oh, I'm going to, I need more sugar so they have more energy." So you eat more sugar and you eat more ins. And then you make more insulin. And over the course of decades, now you start becoming insulin resistant. I want to pause you right here because we often say like cortisol is an inflammatory response. What you just described is cortisol is actually not inflammatory. The process in which it provokes is actually the inflammatory response. The signal that it sends to the cells to release the sugar into the bloodstream, which is an inflammatory response to make more insulin, which is an inflammatory response, which is what you, I love the term that you use biologically. What did you say biochemically expensive, right? It's biochemically expensive. It costs your body an enormous amount of energy to do this. But now not only is it costing a lot of energy to do this, but it's creating an inflammatory response, which is going to cost even more biochemical energy to put that fire out if you have the reserves, if you actually have the energy to do that. Because like you said, if it's just a door slamming, you have this quick response and it goes away. But if you have a stressful job that you are sitting at eight hours a day, that you're going home and you're ruminating about for the other 16 hours a day. And then you're back at that job. Now it's not just a door slamming and a response ending. It is a response that is constantly going throughout your day for 24 hours a day. And over a long period of time, you stop sleeping. How many people listening to this podcast right now have sleep problems? You should be able to put your head on your pillow and go to sleep within five to eight minutes, right? How many people their brains are so wired to be hyper vigilant, to ruminate, to explore all the most dangerous things about their jobs and their relationships and the people that they hate that their brain is in this hyperdrive of cortisol and adrenaline and blood sugar. And so they can't sleep. And now their blood sugar is high. And they're waking up with these high blood sugar counts. And they're walking around with these high blood sugar counts and these high insulin counts and this high inflammation and what that's like what that's doing to their body. It's it's a whole thing, right? And this is all because of the perception of threat. This is all because you have are marinating in stress day in and day out. What's really cool, I had a nurse practitioner tell me that she wore a continuous blood glucose monitor to monitor her weight because she's trying to get pregnant. And she said, yes, my my blood sugar would go up with like, you know, starchy foods and starch, like she said, but the thing that made my blood sugar spike and stay elevated for 24 to 48 hours was an argument with my spouse. Isn't that insane that the stress over an argument was more detrimental to her biological body and chemistry than peak was or the potato or the fruit or something like that. So we cannot, we cannot get rid of mindset. We cannot get rid of like, oh, I'm going to heal without managing my cortisol without managing my stress because that's actually not healing. That's avoidance. That's it. That's trying to band aid. That's putting a band aid on a festering wound that is passing, not being cleaned out. You can't ignore it. It's just going to get more and more infected. So you can't ignore stress. It's just going to create more and more fires in your body through this process that Dr. Wright basically spoke about. Well, and let's talk about what is a stress. I mean, we talk about certainly if you're working a dead end job, that's going to be stressful for you. And while you might be able to do that for a means to an end, doing that till your end is going to be harder for you. But the reality is, is anything that puts your body into that state is going to be a stressful situation. So what are some of the stressors? You know, certainly people go, well, I'm not under stress. Well, they're thinking about the psychological stress of a stressful job or something like that. But what are stressfuls? Pain is a stress. False beliefs are stress. Bad relationships are a stress. And these aren't things that we necessarily think are stressful because we live in them. You know, let's say if somebody has a really bad relationship with their father, they might think, well, that's just normal, right? Well, if you're saying right at the end, then maybe it is normal. Maybe there's not normal. And yes, that's your normal, but it may or may not be normal for the human race. That's a stress. A toxic environment. If you're living in a moldy house, every breath you take is putting stress on your body. It's an indirect stress, but it's still there and it's still driving the system. You know, or if you have radon in your home, you know, in the in Utah, a third of the homes in Utah have radon. Basically, all of the homes in the upper half of the United States are at risk for a radon depending on the area and so on. And so for your listeners, you can go online and go, is there radon in my area? And it's one of those things that isn't necessarily discussed. Some states are better than others. But if you have radon in your house, you're breathing a radioactive gas as the second leading cause of lung cancer. Well, but it's also going to suppress your immune system because it has an effect on your thyroid and the rest of your tissue. Radiation slows down the mitochondria. Is that an issue? I don't know, but you know, something to look for. It financial problems. That's going to be a stress and that's one that often people will recognize will like, we're not poor, we're just broke. I like to think of it as a broke thing as opposed to a poor thing. Poor is a is a mental issue, not a state of being. If you have a chronic infection, that's a stress on your body. I want to talk about that because this is the majority of people that we see where they they have like a stressful upbringing or stressful job or stressful mate. Like they have marinated and stressed hormones for decades, right? Like these are not people that are like, oh, I had a few bad days and now I have this chronic illness. It's people that have been marinating in stress for decades. What happens is, you know, we just described to you a chemical cascade of inflammation that damages your body, but what we haven't spoken about and the implications of that on your immune system. Because when cortisol goes up, when adrenaline goes up, guess what isn't being signaled properly? Your white blood cells, your immune system. So now you have all this damage in your body and you have an immune system that is now dampered down. It's actually become less intelligent and less active. So now you have a dumbed down immune system that allows viruses to come through. That allows bacteria to come through. A lot of people that are dealing with lime actually didn't realize they probably had lime for years, if not decades. But what happened was their immune system was weakened so much that their white blood cells couldn't keep it at bay anymore. And that's the same for viruses, like Epstein bars, Cytolomegalovirus, you know, herpes type one and two. Like these outbreaks happen and they run the show because your immune system was either diminished because of inflammation. So it decreased the numbers because your body couldn't get the biological currency to replenish or it was dumbed down because cortisol and adrenaline literally signal your white blood cells to slow down and stop working. When cortisol is biochemically, if we're talking about the drug version of cortisol, it's hydrocortisone. How often do we get a rash and we go get ourselves from hydrocortisone treatment or cream and rub it on there. And so while cortisol is anti-inflammatory, it's a great drug and I actually prescribe it from time to time when somebody's adrenals are shot to help them heal faster. But it is also immunosuppressive. So think of it like this. Every parent knows when they take their kid to the pediatrician sick, because I've heard this countless times, the kid looks fine in front of me. And they're like, "Mot, well, you didn't see them last night, they were awful last night." And that's because the rhythm of cortisol is high in the morning, which is immunosuppressive, meaning it slows the immune system down so you're not having an overt sickness. But as the day goes down, your cortisol search to diminish until at night, it should be low so that you can fall asleep and have a good night sleep. But the fact of the matter is, that's when your immune system really kicks in because you don't have that tamping down of the immune system from the cortisol that was high in the morning. And I've seen people who their rhythm was exactly opposite. They are exhausted in the morning and then they got a spike of cortisol at night, which means there's no way they're sleeping that night. And it doesn't matter what you give them, you have to fix the adrenal system and put it back into the normal circadian rhythm so that they can sleep at night and be awake during the day. It's interesting. We had Dr. Josh Red come do a training for the coaches at Prova Health. And he's like, he says, an adrenal issue is actually a brain issue. And you have to support the brain. Like, you can feed the adrenals, but you actually have to support the brain, because one, we have been signaling the brain to be in this hyper-responsive mode. And so, yeah, of course, our cortisol rhythm is going to change. And so he's like, you actually have to bring the brain back into balance in order to signal the adrenals to work properly and release cortisol and release their hormones in the proper patterns. I want to quickly touch on, we briefly spoke about mitochondria, but I want to talk about mitochondria and I want to talk about gut because when we have high cortisol, when we have high adrenaline, when we have all of these inflamed signals in the body, it actually damages the mitochondria. And if you don't know what mitochondria are, they are the powerhouses to every single cell in your body. It's like think of every single cell as a toy that requires batteries. The mitochondria are the batteries that power the toys, right? So if you take the battery out, the toy doesn't work. If you destroy, if you damage, if you age your mitochondria, your cells, which are basically your tissues, are going to work slower, less effectively. They are not going to replenish themselves or detox themselves or replicate themselves in what's the word I'm liking for? In a timely manner for you to feel optimal. And so over time, your cells slow down and start getting damaged and start aging. And so what do we want to do? We want to decrease cortisol. We want to decrease adrenaline. We want to decrease insulin and blood sugar. So we stop damaging the mitochondria, which in turn turns the cells back on and helps them heal themselves and detox themselves and replicate in a healthy manner. So make sure that you are extremely, extremely careful with your stress so that you're not damaging your mitochondria. I always describe them as these little fairies that are very sensitive, right? They're very moody. If you're stressed, they get damaged. If you're in artificial lighting, they get damaged. You have to put them in the right environment for them to work optimally for you. So protect your mitochondria. I want to talk now about the gut because Dr. Wright, as you and I were talking before this podcast, we could do like a three hour podcast on stress and how that affects your gut. And as most listeners here know, your gut is the root system to your body. Like just think of like a tree and its root system. If a tree is healthy, you know it has a healthy, extensive root system that is absorbing minerals from the soil, absorbing water, and replenishing this tree. And so if the roots are dying, if they are damaged, if they are rotting, then you're going to have a tree that dies. And it's the exact same thing with your gut. So if your gut is not working optimally, it is not going to be like the root system that absorbs all the vitamins and minerals that gives your body the biochemical currency to replenish itself and heal itself and fight off infections. And so when we are in this sympathetic dominant state, and I have a free class on this guys, like go to the show notes, click on the link, watch the very first class of my digestion restoration course, where I go into sympathetic dominance and how that affects your gut. And this is why you have gut issues, which leads to immune issues and autoimmune issues. But when we are in sympathetic dominance, there is this domino effect that shuts down all your digestive processes, that shuts down hydrochloric acid, which allows you to absorb your vitamins and minerals. So now you are stressed and you're eating a meal, but you're only absorbing like 50% of it. That would be the equivalent of you working 30 days in a month and getting a paycheck, but you're only really paid 50% of your paycheck. It makes no sense. Like you're working hard for that full paycheck, but you're only getting 50% of it. Like that's the same with when you are stressed and you eat a meal that is nutrient dense, but you're only absorbing half the nutrients, right? So I don't know about you, but I've had so many people that are like, I am eating the perfect diet and I am the sickest I've ever been. And I'm like, yeah, that's because your cortisol is high. That's because you're in sympathetic dominance. That's because your gut isn't actually absorbing what you're eating. A lot of people say you are what you eat, but that's not true. You are what you orb. Yeah, you are what you absorb. You are what you absorb. So you actually have to bring your stress down in order to absorb your food. So please, is there anything that you want to add to that? So medically speaking, if I give you a steroid, part of the one of the standards of care for giving steroids is to also give you an acid blocker, because we know that if we give you acid, we give you steroids, it's going to suppress your amines, your digestion enough, but you're going to start getting acid reflux. So it's very common that if I give you a steroid as a drug to stop you from dying because of a hot immune disease, whatever, that we also give you an acid so that you don't go get an additional set of symptoms. If you don't sit and rest and digest when you eat, you're not going to absorb it, and you are what you absorb is exactly right. Now, it's it's and so the steroids also, cortisol also slows down digestion. Because remember, if you're running away from that bear, your next meal is irrelevant if you don't survive the afternoon. So therefore, if you come home in your stressed or you are eating on the run or you're eating at your desk at work, you're not going to absorb that as efficiently as if you go someplace and sit and relax and do some deep breathing and actually focus on chewing and enjoying your meal so that you can finish it, you're going to digest it a lot better. And then you can go back to work. There's another thing that happens to when you are stressed when your brain is releasing all of these chemicals throughout your body to create this inflamed response is that your microbiome actually releases something called zonulin. And when you actually release too much of it, it actually damages your gut barrier. And so it damages, it destroys other bacteria, but it also damages your intestinal lining. And so again, if you want to produce less zonulin, you want to bring your stress down so that your gut doesn't become leaky, so that your microbiome doesn't become dysbiotic. Is there anything you want to add to that? That's just one of the mechanisms that we have studied and know for sure what happens. But again, we only know about 8% of the microbiome. There's probably hundreds, if not thousands of processes of increased cortisol and increased dysbiosis in the microbiome. What do you want to do? Have anything else you want to add to that? Our microbiome in this country is harder, not as good. I was in a meeting with Zach Busch, he's really done a lot of great work. And he said there was an African tribe where a bunch of do-goaters took a bunch of antibiotics to protect them from all the bad stuff that they thought that they needed to protect against. And this tribe didn't know what to do with them, so they sat around to fire one day and just took all the pills. All these antibiotics and when it happened, it was nothing. Their microbiome was so strong, so fortified, so resilient that the antibiotics didn't really mess with their microbiome. Getting that microbiome is up and running and functioning properly is a major player in people getting well. It really is. And so we know that your diet helps nurture the microbiome, but so does managing your stress. Exercise actually helps nurture the microbiome. So all of these things that everybody knows, there is a biological process and chain reaction that happens when we are taking care of ourselves, exercising, decreasing our stress, resting more. Make sure you are sleeping. Make sure that you are doing everything you need to to make sure your body is healing. 80% of feeling happens when you're sleeping. So if you're not sleeping, you have a massive problem. And the reason why you're not sleeping is because your brain has been hard white, like your brain has been wired to be in a fight or flight response all day and all night. And that's obviously very, very damaging. Dr. Wright, do you want to tell us what happens to the liver? Detox processes, metabolic processes, biochemical processes that are happening when we are stressed. Like how does that affect our liver? Cortisol kind of is like a flogging thing to the liver, because it's telling the liver, you've got to do this right now or else. And so it's going to create, I mean, the cortisol is an anti-inflammatory by just by nature. But the cortisol also is forcing the liver to release glycogen, which is one of the primary sources of sugar. And so it's a stressful situation for the liver to do that, although that's what it's designed to do. One of its many jobs, it's not a, I'm going to say it's not a comfortable event. And so the liver does it, but it also, then you've got the insulin, which is also creating an issue in the liver, which is, you know, if you didn't need all the sugar, or if you didn't use up all that sugar that you just made to run away from the proverbial bear, then effectively what happens is the body is going to take that sugar and go, well, we didn't use this. So let's store it. Well, let's be more efficient about it. Let's store it, and so it stores it as fat. And then that fat infiltrates into the liver and gets it all clogged up. We call that a fatty liver syndrome. And that clogs the liver, making it less reliable, less able to manage things. And, you know, I don't like to use worst-case scenarios. But ultimately, worst-case scenario, the fatty liver syndrome is cirrhosis called liver failure. And that doesn't happen in most people, but it does happen in enough that we know about it. And we're watching for it. So eventually, all that chronic stress is going to be damaged if not lethal to the liver. But I mean, that takes years and years and years and years. And certainly you can get off the, you can get off the treadmill, stop being stressed, stop eating junk food. You know, it's easy to say, but little harder to deal. I think you created a great point of like, yes, diet can lead to fatty liver disease, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, but stress can as well. You know, I think I've seen so many people that have such curbside, I put in air quotes, curbside appeal, where they look healthy on the outside. But then I look at their liver markers and I'm like, oh, this doesn't look good. And then I look at their blood sugar and their insulin. I'm like, oh, that's why it doesn't look good. Dr. Wright, tell us a little bit about, we spoke about adrenals and kind of going through the order of healing. So we spoke about adrenals in the beginning and we know that obviously adrenals are an intricate part of the HPA axis of stress, right? Hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenal process. We won't go into the HPA stuff. You kind of went into it earlier. So let's talk about other hormones, like thyroid and sex hormones. When we are in this chronic stress response, what is happening to these other hormone centers in our body? So think of the thyroid as like your cruise control. If you're driving down, you know, we're in a northern Newtile. Let's say we're on a road trip to Vegas. We will want to put on our cruise control. And the thyroid is kind of like the cruise control. And so you set your cruise control at a good solid amount so that you can get there and occasionally you need to break and occasionally you need to step on the gas. So if you're, you know, if the speed limit is 85 of going down to Vegas, which in sections it is, you set your cruise control at 80 miles an hour, just in case, just to be safe, you're probably feeling fine. But if you set your cruise control at 65 miles an hour, which is still technically legal, you're not going to feel very good and you're going to be jumping on the stress, which is the gas pedal, which is the cortisol and the adrenal function more often, which means if your thyroid is a little sluggish, that can spill over into an adrenal problem. But here's the thing is, is if your thyroid is fine and you are having an adrenal overload, the body's going to go, well, you know, thyroid is a cruise control. And if something goes bump, who cares if the cruise control is broken? But if the, if the bear is chasing us, we need to deal with that bear. And that's more important than the cruise control. So if you have chronic stress, what will happen is the adrenals will actually suppress thyroid function. Now, this is a normal natural function. This is just part of how our bodies work. It's a compensatory mechanism so that we don't have the cruise control amping us up and the, and the adrenals of the gas pedal amping us up. But under chronic stress, the body will suppress the thyroid function in favor of the life threatening stress that was just happening. So that's kind of how stress is going to play a role with the thyroid. When it comes to the sex hormones, all sex hormones, let me refaze, all fat soluble hormones are made from the same place. They're all made from cholesterol. Cholesterol, again, is a metabolically expensive, meaning it costs a lot of energy to make cholesterol molecule. Obviously, if you can eat it, that's favorable, right? Well, in our culture, we think that cholesterol is evil and terrible and no good and very bad. But all of these hormones, so you've got estrogen, you've got progesterone, you've got DHA, you've got pregnant antelone, you've got cortisol, you've got cortisone, and then all the other subgroups like dihydrotestosterone, estriol, you know, I've got all these hormones. All of them are part of the cascade that comes from cholesterol. And there's lots of maps that you can download. They'll tell you, you know, how to make it and how your body's working. But ultimately, your body goes from cholesterol to progesterone or pregnant antelone. There are about two steps away from each other and then goes three different directions. One is to deal with blood pressure with salt, one goes to sugar, that's cortisol and cortisol and one goes to sex hormones, estrogen and testosterone. Progesterone is a precursor to those three, depending on what's going on. So one thing that'll happen with the sex hormones is if you have a lot of stress, your body is going to rob from the other sides to make more cortisol so that you can survive the afternoon. And so what happens with the sex hormones? They start diminishing. In men, we start getting man boobs, we start growing big bellies because we have too much estrogen and we're out of balance from the testosterone. We start getting heavier usually around the middle. When in, your bodies are way more sensitive, you're way more high performance than us guys. I think about guys is kind of a, you know, Chevy truck. You kick our tires and give us gas oil and water and we're fine. Right. Your barrels are more like your, you know, prairie. You're a lot more finely tuned. And if you kick the tires on that, you might get a bump. Everything's got to be perfect for your bodies to work optimally. And so what happens is you start getting menstrual irregularities, you start getting abnormal amounts of the wrong hormones. So you start getting excessive, your body goes, well, I need to make more cortisol, but I also need the sex hormones as well. So you start getting out of balance and you start getting into excessive testosterone, which gives you, you know, facial hair or chest hair, which isn't good for you girls. You don't like that at all. No, we don't. Or you start getting weight in places you didn't want. Or you start getting moody or you start getting exhausted or you start getting more anxiety or you start not sleeping very well. And you start getting symptoms all over the place and your hair is no longer regular. Either it's too much or too little, meaning every, it comes every 15 days, whether you want it in or not, or come every six months, whether you tried to fix it or not. And then when it comes, it'll come as kind of a hint of flow or sometimes it'll come every 28 days like clockwork and you be hemorrhaging for five to seven days. And now you're going anemic because of other things. And so it just messes with hormones. And depending on nutrient deficiencies, again, a stress, then your body is going to go to wherever weaknesses are as well. And then you get all out of whack. It's not fun. And the majority of people that are listening to this podcast are experiencing that right now. So I want everyone to, you know, Dr. Wright, you're the brains. I'm going to try and simplify it in a metaphor. Think of cortisol produced by the adrenals and thyroid and sex hormones pretend that thyroid and sex hormones are sitting on one side of a teetototter and adrenaline and cortisol is on the other side. If cortisol goes up on the teetototter, thyroid and sex hormones go down. So we want to keep the teetotter balanced like perfectly straight in a horizontal line. Again, if that cortisol goes up, if adrenaline goes up, like everything is going to go down. I want to circle back to thyroid because cortisol is elevated. It actually inhibits the enzyme five prime iodinease, which is responsible for converting T4 to T3 in the liver. And so like, again, this is why you don't feel good is because it all comes back down to cortisol. It all comes back down to stress. Like you're literally blocking your body's ability to convert T4 to a functional form of thyroid hormone T3 so that it can turn on yourself so that it can turn on your metabolism so that it can tell your mitochondria to make energy in your cells. Thyroid hormone is literally the on switch for your mitochondria. So you could have all this mitochondria that's just waiting to be told to make energy, but it can only make energy when the thyroid hormone comes into the cell and turns on the mitochondria. And it says, okay, light switch on, start making energy, right? That's why we're so tired. That's why we can't get out of bed. That's why our brains literally turn off. That's why our sex hormones go down. That's why our healing slows down. It's because we are literally blocking our body's ability to produce the thyroid hormone that makes our mitochondria turn on. And so, again, it is your stress. This is why you are stuck healing. This is why you are not getting anywhere with the supplements and the programs and all the things. It's because cerebrally you know that stress is bad for you, but you're actually not embodying and you're not you don't have the ability to really use that information to help you slow down your nervous system to help you get out of fight or fight. You're not integrating all the information that you're learning. People fail to practice the simple things necessary to slow down and regulate their nervous system. One last thing I want to talk about before we wrap this up is in the order of healing very last this brain. A lot of people were like, well, why is mindset number one, but brain is like stone cold last? Well, that's because when I put brain in there, what I actually meant was the physical tissue integrity of the brain, right? And so this is what I mean by that. When your cortisol is up, your oxygen delivery to your brain tissue actually doesn't get delivered optimally. So your brain literally starts starving and the cells start dying. So you want to bring your stress down so you can have proper oxygen exchange to your brain. But another thing that people didn't realize, and I think this is what happens to a lot of people without them even being conscious of it and without doctors even being conscious of it. There was a study that I read a few years ago when I was in the crucible of my brain, I call it my brain melt. It's when my brain stopped working, my nervous system became completely shot. I saw myself deteriorate literally within weeks and I was like, why is this happening? And I read a study, it's amazing that I was actually able to read it. But I read a study that mentioned that chronic stress is akin to concussion syndrome. So when you have elevated cortisol, there is this inflammatory cascade, which we've spoken about, that damages the astrocytes in your brain. What do astrocytes do, Dr. Wright? Think of those are your blood brain barrier. It basically bring nutrition from the blood and diffuse it into cells. So you're literally destroying the thing that helps your cells in your brain heal. You're destroying your brain's mechanism of regenerating and healing and blocking out bad things and feeding itself. And so when you have chronic stress, you literally create brain damage. And that's a terrifying thing because brain damage leads to brain fog. It leads to an inability to think and function and signal your body optimally for proper health. And so that's why at Provo Health, we have not only Dr. Wright to kind of be, I don't want to call you the captain because you're kind of the co-captain in people's healing plan. So you have someone like Dr. Wright that is a co-captain that can find all of the fires in your body. But then people oftentimes when they are managing their stress, they're balancing their hormones, they're controlling their inflammation, they have to often utilize things like hyperbaric and neurofeedback to heal the damage that has actually been done in their brain. There's a reason why mindset is number one and brain is stone cold glass because it's so important to protect, to have a brain that not only is signaled properly but is also protected and uplifted by all the other processes throughout the order of healing. So if you have high stress, you create brain damage. If you have low mitochondrial function, you have less optimal brain function. If you have a leaky gut, a gut that doesn't work, you have a leaky brain. If you don't have your liver optimizing its processes, you are not getting a brain that is getting nutrition properly. If you don't have your hormones, your adrenals, your thyroid, your sex hormones, working to be neuroprotective, then they're actually creating neurological damage, right? And so you have to, again, just make sure that you're being so conscientious in your healing journey when it comes to incorporating stress management, bringing that sympathetic response down, getting your body used to being in a parasympathetic state. I know it's uncomfortable and this is the thing that is the kicker. You guys actually relaxing feels uncomfortable to your nervous system. I'm going to go into this with a guest. His name is Will Campbell. Look out for that podcast episode. I think it's being released after this one, but we deep dive why it feels so uncomfortable to actually slow down. The truth is, is that it doesn't feel safe because it's not normal. And that's such a mind warp, right? It's like the fact that you are uncomfortable actually being rested, actually feeling calm. That is something that you are going to have to physically go through, like go through the ache of like feeling rested and relaxed. You just have to push through to get to the other side. Like you said, when you were talking about being sick and you were forced to be to rest and you're like, I hated it because I like to be productive. You hate it because it felt unfamiliar to your nervous system and our nervous system craves that which it is familiar with, right? And so that's just some food for thought, you guys, when you are like scratching your head as to why you're not healing because of all these things that we spoke about. It's because stress is truly the root of all evil when it comes to inflammation in your body. And to regulate your nervous system, you're going to have to do really easy things that are actually very uncomfortable, right? Like it's so easy to rest, right? It doesn't cost money. It doesn't take a doctor. It literally just requires discipline in making the conscious decision to create more boundaries, to go on that walk in the morning, to take more breaks, to take deep breaths throughout the day. Like these are easy things that people don't like to do because it just feels too foreign to them. So I want to challenge you to do the easy thing that's actually hard because it feels unfamiliar to your nervous system. Dr. Wright, is there anything that you want to add to my little soapbox of nervous system? I want some take home messages, take home things you can do. And the first set are things that anybody can do. The second set are things that, ideally, if you could come to Prova Health and get something done, that would be ideal. But so first things is the part of the brain that calms down with a fight or flight is the, I'm going to call it the prayer center, but that's also activated by meditation. So if you're a prayer, pray, pray at the point. Don't just pray, wrote prayers. Like actually talk to your, I call him God or Heavenly Father, talk to your deity, talk to the universe, talk to pray in some way or meditate. Both those two things hit the same part of the brain, which helps you slow down or shut off the fight or flight and freeze side. That's the first thing. Second thing is deep breathing. Every time you sit to go to the bathroom, every time you sit to eat, you should sit deep, by the way. Doing some deep breathing will help to lower your stress. My daughter's used the spoon knowledge. If you've got 20 spoons worth of energy that you've got per day and you've got 20 spoons that you're using up per day, if you add deep breathing to that, you'll get to the end of the day. And even though you use 20 spoons worth of energy, you'll still have to have to left. And for the women out there, this is often is going to, if you do it properly long enough, it's going to help your libido testosterone, not so much. It's tower days. Oh, it's going to fix your libido, not so much. I haven't seen that very well. But changing your stress response does. So and doing deep breathing before you eat when you go to the bathroom and if you can find other times to do it as well, take a deep breath as the phone's ringing or take two deep breaths before you answer the phone. That will over long term weeks to months start shifting this response so that you're not getting to the end of the day with nothing left. One of the most powerful tools to heal the brain is hyperburet. Getting oxygen penetrating in large volume into the brain is phenomenal. And I do, I was on therapy. That's pretty good too. But hyperburet is better. Went by getting oxygen to the brain, you're actually augment the cell's ability to function and start growing things like more connections to other places. And I was in the chamber as often as I could stand getting in the chamber when I was sick and it made a big difference. It was a major piece of helping me to get well. But it wasn't like, oh, I did one. I'm good. No, it was like, I need to do it as often as I can do it. And that was another major piece. I remember nagging about that all the time. I'm like, did you get in the hyperburet? No, I'm like, you have to get in, like everyone was nagging you to get in. I got in as often as I could stand it. But, you know, sitting still all of a sudden became a really difficult thing for me. That was another part of the pathology I was dealing with was I couldn't sit, I couldn't rest. So staying in a tube where I couldn't roll over or move or do anything else was like, I got in as often as I could do it. So I feel for people and the reality is you do everything you can do and make sure that you're taking more steps forward than backwards. And we live in a culture that praises people for overachieving. Well, what is an overachiever? By definition, it's 100 plus percent. So if you're at 101 percent, you're an overachiever. And you can do that for a short time. A long term, you're going to crash. It's not a matter of if it's a matter of when. Probably have already. Yeah, you probably already have, and so you need to, you know, it came out of the blue like a scheduled airplane. You could have scheduled it. It was coming. You just couldn't didn't know when it was coming. And so ultimately, don't be an overachiever. Be a high achiever. Be the best that you can be. And if you can't do more, don't beat yourself up that you can't do more. Just recognize that you'd be in the best that you can be and accept that and be happy with that and quit being a travel agent, signing yourself for guilt trip for it. When I want to add to that is neurofeedback. So yes, near your feedback. So when we are in these like we said early in the podcast, like when we have grown up in stressful families and situations or stressful relationships or stressful schools or jobs, our brain patterns, our brain waves literally shift and change and have our brain govern the body to act according to our situation. And it's very hard for the brain to actually switch that in the episode next week with Campbell will like we talk about using deep breath. And I'm so glad that you mentioned that because that whole episode is about breathing because breathing actually turns on the parasympathetic state in a very specific way. So listen for that episode. But it's actually very, very hard and it takes a long time to have your brain waves pattern in a different way that is anti-inflammatory and in a sympathetic state. Neurofeedback can expedite that process. So if you're someone that is like me and it's like I don't know what it feels like to be not stressed. I don't and actually I've actually I've improved a ton. I was doing some self-reflecting of this year because right now it's actually the 31st of December. So I'm so proud of how much I have actually created boundaries like I took off. I didn't do the podcast for six months because I'm like you know what my mental health and my stress response is more important than anything. But if you knew me 10 years ago this was even before Tristan's cancer. I was such a stressed anxious person that people told me I was hard to be around because I was just I had this frenetic chaotic energy within me where I was constantly overthinking and constantly stressed. And if you told me to relax my response would be I don't know what that looks like and I don't know what that feels like. It like the same way that I can't explain to you what an alien looks like because I've never seen one. I've never met one. I've never seen one on the news. So I can't describe to you what it looks like because I have no no data points around that. That's what being common in a calm state was for me. It was like an alien. I didn't know what it looked like. I did not know what it felt like. I knew it existed. But I didn't know how it felt. And so neurofeedback can do that for you. Neurofeedback can help reprogram your brain to stop sending out those fight or fight signals to your body. And what people notice the most people think that they're like, oh, I'm going to be happy all the time. No, happy as an emotion. What you're going to feel is nothing. No charge. So when a child is crying in your house, you're like, oh, I didn't get activated around that. My stomach didn't get into a knot. Or if there is someone that died in like in your circle, like you will be sad, but you won't be distraught, right? Like you won't be thrown into a massive trigger and non-functional for the next few weeks, which is, I'm just giving examples of what our patients have actually told us in our clinic. People notice that they are calm, that there is zero charge, that they are handling stressful situations better than they ever have before. That's what are regulated nervous minutes. It's not happy. It's not joy. It's not elation. It's chill. It's quiet. It's a placid lake with no ripples or waves or tidal waves on it. That is a calm, centered nervous system. And so hyperbare calves, heal the brain. Neurofeedback helps to rewire the brain. Breathing helps rewiring the brain. One thing that I shared on Instagram that I want everyone to do tomorrow is when you wake up in the morning. Let's see you wake up at six to get kids ready and out the door. I want you to wake up at five forty. I want you to go on a walk outside. It's nice and crisp and cold right now. It's wintertime unless you are closer to the equator or in another country. But I want you to get out. I don't want you to put your headphones in your ears. I don't want you to listen to a podcast. I don't want you to call your best friend or your mom or something. I want you to walk outside and I want you to focus on your breathing and I want you to just be in your body and not go through your to-do list, right? You're not doing anything right now. You're being. So I want you to like feel the cold air on your skin. Is it on your face? Is it on your fingers? Can you feel your fingers getting colder? I want you to actually truly embody that. And then I want you to listen for sounds. How many birds are out there? Can you tell the difference of the sounds by the different birds? Can you hear sprinklers or people? Do they have sprinklers right now going? Do you hear a dog barking? Can you hear cars in the freeway like far, far away from your neighborhood? What is happening around you? Can you allow all of your senses, your sights, your smell, your ears, your hearing? Can you allow your body to be in the moment? And then when you're in that moment, I want you to see how it feels in your body. I've actually had tons of people when I spoke about this on Instagram. I've had people say I've started practicing this and it is actually life-changing. They're like I am way more regulated throughout the day. I didn't realize it could be that easy and it can be and they enjoy it. They're like oh my gosh, I love this time with myself. I can't believe how enjoyable it is. My brain wants to go to my to-do list but I bring myself back into the present and in my body. So I want you guys to practice this every single day. Maybe every day feels foreign to your nervous system. So just commit to like one for twice a week until that feels safe and then you can increase the number. But this is a very simple thing that you can do right now to just help your body stay present, help your body stop doing the list, help your brain slow down and be in the present moment and be in your body. So that's the one homework tip that I want to give you guys today. Anything that you want to say, Dr. Wright? Nope. Be healthy. Be well. Be healthy. Be well. Dr. Wright, you are phenomenal. You have helped me with my thyroid. I've got you guys, my thyroiditis and graves came back. So yay. But the only person that I would ever trust with that was you. And you have given me so many amazing tips. My consult with you was so eye-opening. You guys, I want to read a few texts to you guys before we end this podcast because Dr. Wright, you are changing lives. I received this text from a patient of ours and it was just so sweet. She texted me on a Saturday and she said, sorry for the text on a Saturday but I can't be more thrilled with my hair analysis test. I'd love to do a testimonial for the gutsy academy in Prova Health. Thank you so much. So you're changing lives, Dr. Wright. You really are. She has been on the medical mirror around and you gave her a road map and she followed that to a tee. Like she's a different person a year later. Like you did that. And you do that all the time. I have one more that I want to share with listeners before we end this podcast episode. So another person that texts me just recently, she says, what does it mean to be and she says something positive? She tells me this is an antibiotic resistant staff infection that resides deep in the nose. It is very slow growing. However, it can have such an effect on one's health leading to chronic fatigue, hormone imbalances, and so much more. She links it says, I am so positive, yay for answers. And she continues to say, Dr. Wright is definitely on my Christmas list. He's the one who found this. He's calling and enabling spray to do that. Basically, she has said that she's been on a medical mirror around a doctor and doctor and doctor for more than 20 years. She has. And she started working with you. What last year? Like June, Mayer, June. And like within six months, she's finally getting answers. You looked outside of the box, which is amazing. You had her do something called a thermography scan. Is that correct? Yes. And you saw that her face was all lit up. You're like, why is your your face stuck so high? Right. Like, why is it so hot in there? And then you just tested and you super sleuth. You looked outside of the box and you helped her find answers, which I'm guessing 50 doctors missed. You guys, it's so important that you find someone that helps you that again, thinks outside of the box, sees the body as a whole, has more than 25 years worth of experience in this field. Doctor writes your guy. If you guys want to schedule with him, so call for the health at 801-691-1765. He is truly the best of the best. Doctor, we're so grateful to have you on our team. People are so grateful to have you on their team. And I look forward to we're kind of like this. So bring us more. So I'm so glad you're feeling better so that we can do this again. Well, if you're stuck your dad, my mind back. Right? You're like a different person when your brain turns on, right? It's like night and day. So welcome back to today. It's nice to be back. Listeners, we'll catch you next week. Take care. Sounds great. Take care.