Practicing Self-Care to Manage Stress Hormones + Calm Anxiety

Does it feel like your stress levels dialed up a few notches during the past few years? If you’re wondering how to get out of stress mode and calm anxiety, you won’t want to miss my interview with resident stress expert, Dr. Doni Wilson.

Dr. Doni is a naturopathic doctor, certified professional midwife, certified nutrition specialist, and author of Master Your Stress, Reset Your Health: The Personalized Program to Calm Anxiety, Boost Energy, and Beat Burnout. One thing she’s discovered in her practice: Everything comes back to stress. If you haven’t learned how to manage stress, you're not going to be able to heal your metabolism, lose weight, have great energy, and feel your best.

Here, you’ll learn why balancing stress hormones is not a one-size-fits-all solution, the critical key that makes all the difference in your recovery, Dr. Doni’s definition of self-care (and how to implement it right now), and why stress recovery happens in 3 phases.

For more than 20 years, Dr. Doni has helped thousands of patients overcome health challenges, achieve wellness, and move from stress and anxiety to thriving and doing what they love with ease. Here, she teaches us why implementing daily self-care and making small incremental changes are critical to getting you closer to managing stress, calming anxiety, and creating balance.

You won’t want to miss this empowering, information-packed episode.

Freebies From Today’s Episode

Click Here To Read Transcript


ATHE_Transcript_Ep 421_Dr. Doni Wilson
JJ Virgin: [00:00:00] All right. So this last two years has been a doozy for stress. Let's be honest. So I thought, you know what? I'm going to bring my friend, Dr. Doni Wilson on she is like my resident stress expert and she has an amazing new book out master. Reset your health and also a free stress reset that she's giving out that you can get at JJvirgin.com/stressreset.
But let me tell you a little bit about her and why I wanted to bring her on. And we're going to talk about this today. Like if you are working on having more energy, losing weight De-aging, Everything comes back to stress. And if you've not really dealt with this, you're not going to be able to heal your metabolism, lose the weight, have great energy.
The list goes on and on and on. And I share a story of my own personal stress journey that will make you laugh in [00:01:00] this interview. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about Dr. Doni, and then we will dive in. So Dr. Doni Wilson is naturopathic doctor. She's a natural health expert, a certified professional midwive, certified nutrition specialist, and author of the stress remedy.
She graduated from Bastyr university in 2000 and she created her stress recovery protocol to solve her migraines and other health challenges. For more than 20 years, she's helped thousands of patients overcome health challenges and achieve wellness. By using specific strategies that address the whole body and ultimately resolve the underlying causes of distress.
She loves teaching patients to know what they need to move from stress to thriving live well and do what they love with ease. Dr. Doni brings awareness to the impact of stress on our health and to the strategies and solutions for stress recovery through the media and at public and professional events.
And you can find. And other resources, her podcast, How Humans heal herself care program and our online store at doctordoni.com. And that is spelled out D O C [00:02:00] T O R doni dot com. And again, we're going to have her seven-day stress reset for free at jjvirgin.com/stressreset. So I will be right back with Dr.
Doni and we will dig into how stress is impacting you, how you can figure out what type of stress type you are, and then what you can do about it, which is most important at all. I'll be right back.
Welcome to the show, Dr. Doni Wilson. Can't believe it's taken us so long to get you here.
Dr. Doni Wilson: I am so happy to be here. Thank
JJ Virgin: you JJ. Well you were played hard to get, you know,
and it's funny when I think of. Who to, to work with when we really dig into stress and what it can do to your body, you are the go-to. And what you don't know is I've been really obsessed lately. Because especially after this [00:03:00] last two years, like talk about people becoming more and more stressed and really not having quantifiable ways to discern if they are and then to, to deal with it.
And then you put that together with what's really happened in terms of. Weight gain over the last couple of years. And I know people think it's people are home and they're eating more, but you know, there is definitely a huge correlation with increased stress and weight. So that is what I'm looking forward to digging into with you today, because I think people don't get that and you know, case in point, this is the craziest thing.
And you don't know this? I don't think because it, it happened after we were together. We were together at a Dr. Joe Dispenza event in June. Last year, which was June, was that 20, 20, 20, 21, June, 2021. That was my second Dr. Joe event. I went the first time, April 20, 21. Then I went June 20, 21. Then I went in September and then I went again in [00:04:00] January and in September something weird happened and it took me a while to really get into meditation.
But when I really did, I lost five pounds and I knew it was from that because everything else was totally controlled. I mean, I know, you know, how I eat, how I exercise, I run my labs, I'm always monitoring, measuring. And so it was the only shift and it was finally my body and I realized I'd finally gotten out of flight or fight.
And in fact, the big joke with Dr. Joe, I was sitting at dinner with him and I said, I've lost five pounds, like basically sitting on my butt meditating. And now Dr. Joe, if you don't know this, if you're listening, he talks about being nobody, nowhere, no thing. And so he goes, yeah, it's the no thing diet.
The nothing diet. So that's our joke. I actually got him this book that says the nothing diet by Dr. Jones Despinza. I love that we're [00:05:00] going to get into this. Cause I think people don't realize how mission critical right now. I have a client I'm working one-on-one with and my big thing with her is, and tell you handle this stress.
Like we aren't going to get anywhere. So let's talk about stress, like how we look at it, you know, the key hormones of cortisol and looking at adrenaline. So I'm gonna just throw it over to you to start unpacking.
Dr. Doni Wilson: Absolutely. And I, I know Joe Dispenza has made huge changes in my life too. I, I, I can't say enough about it.
And I think it, it really opens up this world of meditation beyond what we normally think of. And I like that example just to bring us back to this concept of stress, because sometimes people, you know, we tend to dismiss stress, even though now with the pandemic, we're more aware that. And most times we're aware that things like meditation can help, but the key is like, then what are you going to do?
How are you supposed to integrate that into your daily life? And how is even [00:06:00] before that, how was stress really affecting each of us individually? Because we assume that we all have high cortisol and high adrenaline. Right? It's when I ask most people about stress, they're like, oh yeah, I probably have high.
And the thing that I've found, and this is 22 years in practice, helping people with analyzing their stress and how to recover from it is that we're not all the same. We don't all have high cortisol. In fact, I would say less than 50% of people have high cortisol all day, it could be high cortisol part of the day.
It could be low cortisol. It could be high adrenaline or low adrenaline. And to me, what it is, is understanding sort of the fingerprint of. For each of us, what does your fingerprint look like? How does stress show up for you in terms of your stress hormones? And I love how you were talking about fight or flight, which is in in my new book, I talk about that as stress mode, right?
So when we go into stress mode, we land in our [00:07:00] unique stress pattern, which is going to be higher, low cortisol, and higher, low adrenaline at various times a day. And to know your Stress, your stress pattern is going to make all the difference in your recovery because the treatment, even the way you meditate and the time you meditate is going to be different, depending on how stress shows up for you.
JJ Virgin: So how would someone even know like where to start, what they're looking at? Like, like right off the bat, you know, you talked about cortisol and people saying my cortisol isn't high, first of all, what is cortisol? And how would you know. If you were having an issue.
Dr. Doni Wilson: So cortisol is our main stress hormone, but it's also, I think of the cortisol as our supervisor hormone of our whole bodies, because cortisol, it's not that it's either there or not.
We actually need. All day, every day. It's what wakes up us up in the morning. It increases in the morning. It gives us energy and it [00:08:00] gradually decreases through the day. And so it's lowest. When we go to sleep, when a stress happens, it responds and sends signals throughout our body to. Help us respond to the stress.
And then when the stress finishes, which is, you know, this is the thing is a lot of times our stress doesn't finish. We keep having stress. So cortisol also communicates with our digestion. It communicates with all the other hormones in the body, like the thyroid and. Insulin and so on. Cortisol also communicates with our immune system and our nervous system.
So that's why I call it like a main supervisor. It affects everything. And so you really want your cortisol to be in this nice, healthy curve of high in the morning, gradually decreasing through the day. But when we're exposed to a lot of stress and not. Stress recovery. That's when this cortisol loses, loses that pattern, it's going too high or too low at different times a day.
And then when it does that, it's going to affect everything else is going to affect your digestion, your insulin, your immune system, your [00:09:00] nervous system. And when that happens, that's JJ, how it leads to this tendency toward weight gain, right? Because if it's disrupting insulin, for example, now our blood sugar levels are thrown off and we're more likely to have weight gain, or if it throws off thyroid,
that's another potential cause of weight gain. So it's, it's when the thyroid is not where it should be, then it throws everything else off and leads to the symptoms. So the symptoms could be. For some people it's fatigue, sometimes it's depression or anxiety. Sometimes it's sleep issues. Sometimes it's weight gain or joint pain.
It can really show up in a lot of different areas of the body, depending on the levels and whether they're high or low,
JJ Virgin: but then you go to a, like if you go to a traditional doctor and you send out for lab tests, first of all, it's not even included. And if it is included, it's a single blood spot. Exactly.
So I'm looking at what you just said, where you looked at. And it was interesting. One of the biggest things that I've [00:10:00] seen with cortisol with stress is that people who are eating healthy and get, you know, all of a sudden their blood sugar is higher than it should be, even though, you know, insulin's good, triglycerides are good.
So, you know, it's not. Dietary thing, you know, it's a stress thing, but if, if someone weren't knowing how to look at these things, you might see a blood sugar of 90, you know, they don't check a cortisol, they look at a TSH and maybe it's, you know, 2.5 and they think everything is cool. What, how does someone know that this is an issue for them beyond their symptoms?
And those symptoms could be, you know, the challenge with those symptoms is those symptoms could be other things too. How would someone get a clear diagnosis that this.
Dr. Doni Wilson: And it's true. It's not, it's not going to be checked at the standard doctor's office. Even if you go to an endocrinologist, they may not even look at this because what we're really talking about is a.
Well, we may call a functional imbalance of cortisol. So it's not at an extreme, we're not talking [00:11:00] like Cushing's disease or Addison's disease where the adrenal glands completely stop working. We're talking about an non-optimal level that still leads to health issues and symptoms. And so the way to test it is usually with, I test it with urine or saliva, because I want to know what your cortisol is when you wake up in the morning and then a couple hours later.
And then later in the day, like usually before dinner and then before bed, so that we can see the pattern and that we can see it at different times a day, cortisol is not supposed to be the same all the time. It needs to have follow this pattern. So we need to measure it at different times of day, which you could do with a blood test, but now you're having to have your blood drawn multiple times a day.
So it's better to do, we can measure it in saliva. So you're spitting in a tube, or you can do a urine, like a dried urine sample. And now we could get so much more information, but these you don't generally considered specialty tests that are out of pocket. But to me, they're, to me, they're essential for everyone.
Like [00:12:00] this is essential information. This is a stress test that we should all have to know this information about ourselves and what then, then with that information, you can know best how to help get your cortisol back in sync. Again, if it's otherwise, people will guess, right, JJ, they might guess, oh, I'm going to take this adrenal product.
But some of the herbs in those adrenal products could either raise the cortisol more or lower the cortisol or both in the same product. It's not going to be
JJ Virgin: efficient. Right. So you would handle this. There there's a couple different situations you'd be looking at. You could have someone who's all high on their curve.
And what I found when I used to see a lot of people one-on-one is the people who are all high. They didn't come in. Yeah, they were like running and they were like, you know, until they started to notice that they were getting some belly fat and it wouldn't come off. And then all of a [00:13:00] sudden they started to get tired.
Yes and tired and wired. And I'd love you to talk about that. And then they really got tired of the cortisol, started to get really low and then you'd start to see them. But the initial part where it started to lift up, they were like, yee haw let's go, let's roll with it. So if you could talk about, cause I know, you know, there's a very different treatment when someone's high versus when someone's low.
And so the first step is to get tested. But the other piece of that too, is what's going on with adrenaline? How do you know what's going on there? Like how do you know if you're, if you're getting into the tired and wired stage and what's going on with DHA, how do you, how you look at those two things and then what do you do for those different phases?
Dr. Doni Wilson: So cortisol is made by our adrenal glands, which are, is above the kidneys and the adrenal glands also make, as you're mentioning, they make DHEA, which is another hormone and they make adrenaline and adrenaline a lot of times we think of as a fight or flight, right? It's that quick, your heart's [00:14:00] racing, your mind's racing, gonna get you out of stress, but for some of us when we're exposed to stress all the time, and also some of our genetics come in to this.
Genetics also are partially determining how does our cortisol respond? How does our adrenaline respond? So address, I feel like it's essential to know your adrenaline and DHEA, because if we only know the cortisol, we only know part of the. Part of the information. We only have part of the puzzle.
We're not able to solve the puzzle unless we have the other pieces. So adrenalin we can measure in urine. And I find that makes a huge difference in research and in practice that I've done, when I can see a person's adrenaline levels now. I can see, oh, here's their pattern. They maybe they have high cortisol and high adrenaline.
I call that the stress magnet, like you're saying the stress magnet oftentimes is those are often people who are say working in the financial district, or maybe they are, maybe they have a, a woman who has a job during the day. And then is mom and parenting at nice night having like [00:15:00] a double shift, so to speak, you know,
Well, a lot of moms, it's like you're working all day and all night and it's, and so you, you're just kind of going, going, going, and you, you start to lose track of, because it's, you have to right? And it's normal. And so then you can get into that high cortisol, high adrenaline or it could be high cortisol, low adrenaline.
And as you mentioned, classically, when we talk about adrenals and what happens to them when is we think about it as phases, where people can kind of go through high levels and then maybe imbalanced levels and then low levels. What I've found JJ is. That's really from a physiology perspective, from a clinician's perspective, what's more helpful for me is to look at it from a cross-sectional view.
Essentially. I want to know where you are at this moment in time and because that's, then how I can help you most is like, where are you at [00:16:00] this moment? Are you having all high levels or some high and low or some all low. And then the thing from a clinical perspective is once we identify where you are in terms of how stress is affecting your adrenal function, we need to know how does that person recover?
And the recovery from stress. I don't feel like well established. And so I've over the years established a you know, developed a protocol to have effectively help people recover from wherever they are with their stress, whether you have high or low cortisol adrenaline, or DHEA, we need to know from that point in time, how do we help you really recover?
Because to me, that's the optimal. We want your adrenal glands to be able to get. Optimal functioning and resiliency. We don't want you to just be constantly stuck in this state of depletion and stress.
JJ Virgin: So I want to get into some of the things you can do to recover. We're going to take a short break.
So hang with me and we will be right back.[00:17:00]
All right, so let's talk recovery. But before that, you know, I'm listening to this. And one of the things that strikes me is that probably the single most important time someone should be focusing on this is probably someone right around their forties. Yeah. If right as they're going into perimenopause, because a woman going into peri-menopause who has got adrenal issues is like set up to, to have a real struggle.
Right.
Dr. Doni Wilson: It's very true because now there's another hormone flux happening. Now we have estrogen and progesterone and testosterone fluctuating, and even DHEA, even more so it's like, I think of it, like if you're on a, out on a lake or the ocean, right. And you have. Usually stress has some waves that we're dealing with and we can use our stress management to help us with these waves.
But when you add perimenopause, now the [00:18:00] waves are getting bigger and it's like, how am I going to keep myself on balance and feeling good and thriving when all of these hormones are fluctuating. So I agree with you. It's a very important.
JJ Virgin: Okay. So if someone wasn't able to do a test and these tests how expensive it is, is it to do a test?
Cause they can do it from their house. It's just spit or urine. What do these things usually cost?
Dr. Doni Wilson: I would say between three and $400. All
JJ Virgin: right. And if you couldn't do a test, are there still things that you can do?
Dr. Doni Wilson: Absolutely. Oh yeah, they're definitely, I mean, one is in, in my new book, I outlined and the name of your book
JJ Virgin: is for everybody.
Show your book,
Dr. Doni Wilson: okay. It's master your stress, master your stress, reset your health. In the book I guide you through understanding based on your symptoms and what's happening in your body and your day-to-day experience, what is, what is likely your stress pattern? [00:19:00] And then what I do is I guide you through how to recover from stress based on that stress
JJ Virgin: pattern.
Awesome. What are some key things? And then, so there's an assessment they can take in the book, which is great because even if you do do the testing, you want to be able to really identify in real time in the moment because you're not going to be testing every day, what could be going on. So it lets you connect those dots.
That's fantastic. So what are some of the things that people can be doing right now? Like someone listening, obviously, first thing is to get your book and we're also going to talk about a great stress reset. You're giving everyone what are some things that are. Kind of universal, whether you've got, you know, a dysregulation you're high, you're low, what are some key things that can really help them and especially just, you know, optimize your adrenal function and make sure it stays that way.
Dr. Doni Wilson: Well, I think about it in the book, I talk about it. Self care. And I think a lot of people have now an idea of [00:20:00] what self care is. But what I do is I break it down so that the C stands for clean eating. So there's a piece of it where we want to help you with some dietary changes that are going to help you recover from stress based on your stress pattern.
And then a is for adequate sleep. I know you love to talk about getting adequate sleep. So that's the a in care and the R is for recovery. This is where the meditation would come in, but there's an endless number of recovery activities to choose from. And then E is for exercise. And here again is the thing is through all of this.
I mean, even though some of these things sound like such a good thing, even exercise is a good thing, but we have to really understand based on your stress pattern and where you're starting from sometimes. There's such a thing as too much of a good thing. Like too much exercise can actually raise your cortisol and could make things worse.
Even, you know, too long of a fast can raise your cortisol and, and cause more stress on your system. So I really like to [00:21:00] emphasize knowing your stress pattern and then implementing based on that. So. Ending up, stressing yourself out more while you're trying to help yourself recover from stress. Do you see what I mean?
Yes.
JJ Virgin: And I think that, you know, one of the things that I see is someone's stressed out. They, and you explain this like stress can then impact your thyroid. Of course we know it impacts your sleep and all of a sudden they start gaining weight. So their response to that is. To then really start doing hard exercise.
That's going to then further deplete their adrenals, then further impact their thyroid then further. And so it just becomes this, this whole cycle. So someone who's got some adrenal dysregulation, which I think is most people, I don't really know how you go through life. If you're not, unless you've really dialed this in.
And I remember the first time I did an adrenal test, I only did it because a lab director was like, you have to do this. [00:22:00] And I was like, I'm not doing it. And man, I was in the whole adrenal exhaustion. And what happened first Doni is I would get myself back. And then I would do it again
and then I would do it again. Then I'd retest. I'd go I did it again. You know, I get myself totally healthy. And then I go, bam. I found, I was like, you know, maybe don't do that. Like you can't. And I think that there's just a situation where we just feel like we have to push ourselves beyond what we really should be doing.
Just, you know, case in point you talked about like, There's still a thing with women where we're working now, most, most women are working and have kids, so they have like multiple jobs.
Dr. Doni Wilson: Exactly exactly. And it's, and we, we do, we think we're supposed to be these kinds of like super women, super, you know, do everything as if that's, that's an [00:23:00] expectation.
And then we end up being hard on ourselves. If we don't feel good doing it, like we're feeling more anxious, so we're feeling more tired or we crash and we get into that burnout or exhaustion we're like, then we're kind of like, oh my gosh, what did I do to myself again? And it's. What I do in the book as I try to just help you to really bring in this, like self-acceptance and compassion about that, and to really help transform so that we can transform the way we were talking to ourselves, that self criticism, so that we can really shift into a whole different pattern and become more aware on a day to day.
What we're choosing and how we're choosing for ourselves, prioritizing ourselves and prioritizing ourself care so that we're more likely to stay in that resiliency mode instead of falling back into the burnout mode. But each time, I mean, believe me, I've done it to myself, too JJ. I mean, I've landed in exhaustion many times too.
That's how I learned how to recover. Right. Having it [00:24:00] happen to me and I, each time I learned something new, right. We learn each time we learn. Okay. If I can just, you know, create my self care routine in such a way where I can, you know, take better care of myself and try to prevent that from happening. And if it happens, then I learn the next time and do it differently.
JJ Virgin: Yes. And not feel guilty about taking that time out for yourself. It's so important, but super important. And for someone who's listening, who is kind of going, all right, I'm going to, I'm going to go get the book, figure out which stress type I am. But let's say that someone is at that point where they are feeling pretty exhausted.
How quickly can they turn that around?
Dr. Doni Wilson: I love that question and it can, it can vary. I've had people who were feeling better even within a week, definitely within three weeks. And you know, who've come back to me and said in three weeks later saying, I feel like I'm 10 years younger. Right? Because you feel like you recovered from the way the stress has been [00:25:00] affecting you.
And for some people, it takes a little bit longer, you know, I, I always feel like you have to go your. It's more important to match your body's pace and to let the healing happen. And I, I talk about in the book as well, that there's three phases of recovery. We don't want to expect that you're going to be able to recover in one phase.
It's very important to first. Get out of stress mode. When I call get out of stress mode and to let yourself in that process, you know, be patient with it and say, okay, how do, what do I need to do to get that stress mode to turn off almost like a light switch, the light switch is stuck on and we got to get that light switch.
And that sometimes that takes a week. Sometimes that takes a
JJ Virgin: couple months. Well, and it's probably like, it probably is much more of a dimmer switch than an on-off. Right?
Dr. Doni Wilson: So as the dimmer switch turns off the stress mode, then once the stress mode's off, then we can do a lot of rebalancing. Now we much, we're going to be much more effective.
Rebalancing all the different hormones in the body, rebalancing your [00:26:00] metabolism, rebalance your microbiome, rebalance, you know, the neurotransmitters like serotonin, you mentioned earlier, you, you know, we have to rebalance everything. That's a phase two. And then phase three is how do we learn to maintain it over time?
So to know that it's a three phase process. And so then you kind of have the. Because otherwise people feel like they're walking down this journey all in the dark by themselves. And I don't, I don't want that for you. I want you to feel like you have some lights on the path to recovery from stress.
JJ Virgin: This is so key.
And I just want to emphasize this one more time, because one of the things that I've been really looking at lately is we've got to flip the conversation around weight in that. I think people still think that, oh, I need to get healthy. So I'll lose weight. And the reality is that you won't lose weight until you get healthy.
And if you really look at it, probably one of the single biggest things that we have a threat in, in this is a modern day threat. [00:27:00] This is not a threat of a thousand years ago. A thousand years ago, we would have. Stress that we either survived or died from. So either, you know, the lion ate us or they didn't, or the famine got us, or it didn't, but there wasn't this chronic long-term stress of light being too light all the time where you couldn't sleep and too much work to do.
And people pinging you all the time and then all the EMF's and toxins and everything else. This is. For us. And it's probably the biggest threat that we have. And when you look at all of the things that it does, you know, if you're under stress, it is going to disrupt your sleep. Well, we know if you're not sleeping well, you're at risk for obesity.
If you're under stress, you're going to lower your serotonin. You're going to crave more sugar. You're going to be hungrier because you're not sleeping well. If you're under stress, your blood sugar gets dysregulated. If you're under stress, you're more catabolic. You break down muscle. If you don't have muscle, your metabolism is going to be in trouble.
It's also going to affect your insulin sensitivity. If you're under stress, it starts to [00:28:00] dysregulate your, all of your other hormones, your testosterone, your progesterone. In fact, I was looking at that latest research where men's testosterone is supposed to decline around age 57. It's now like 10 years younger because of all the stress.
If you're under stress, it changes your whole gut microbiome. It sets you up for you've got lower stomach acid. You can't digest your protein as well. So you're more frail. You've got higher risk for SIBO and candida. So you just kind of unpack the whole thing and go. If you are not addressing your stress.
And if you've been under stress for, you know, years, which is most likely, you're not going to fix it overnight, you gonna fix it over time. But if you're not addressing this and you're trying to fix all these other things, you know, maybe you're doing more intermittent, fasting and weight training, but you're not addressing your stress.
It's not going to work. So this is really step one. For everything for fixing your sleep for fixing your belly fat for fixing your mood for everything. So [00:29:00] I'm super excited that you're giving your seven-day stress reset because everybody needs this and you're doing it for free. So there's no excuse now for not getting this.
And you'll get this jjvirgin.com/stressreset. So tell us about that. What is what they're going to get and do and what it will do to help them.
Dr. Doni Wilson: I'm helping you implement care that I was talking about the self care. And we started with the 'cause it. Thank you so much first for summarizing that again, JJ.
I appreciate that to say like, wow. When you start to think about it, stress is playing such a huge role. And, and I love when I see my patients that I work with, start to. See the benefits of that, where all of these things start to come back into balance again, and they start to feel better and they're like feeling better in ways they didn't, they weren't even thinking of, they might've been thinking of their weight, but really.
If we take the attention, set that aside for a minute and pay attention to realigning everything in our bodies, the [00:30:00] weight is going to go away. This is what I see with patients, right. The way it just goes away, because the body's all aligned now though hormones and neurotransmitters and microbiome, everything you mentioned.
And so in the seven-day stress reset, I start you down the path because I, again, one of the things we know is about homeostasis, right? Homeostasis is our body's sort of innate ability to keep things on balance, but when we're under stress, we, that homeostasis shifts out of balance and we need to get it back to center, almost like a carriage return on an old typewriter.
We need to bring that homeostasis back to alignment and center and to do that. We need to make changes, but if we make too big of changes at once, there's something also called hormesis, right. Hormesis is when we make small adaptive changes where our body starts to adapt and shift. But if we make too much of a change, if we make even too much dietary change or we, we think, oh, I need to start exercising and you [00:31:00] start running for an hour.
Right. Or you, you, you think, oh, I need. I start to start changing my diet and you make every kind of change at once. If you make too much of a change. Creating too much stress and it's what we call falling off the wagon. Right. Then we're right back where we started from again. So instead we need to make small incremental changes, just enough to utilize the hormesis, to bring us back to an optimal homeostasis.
And that's what I guide you to do in a seven-day stress reset. How do we make small incremental changes that will get you closer and closer to your healthy center?
JJ Virgin: Awesome. And even though it's going to take time, you'll have a good jumpstart with seven days. So again, that's JJvirgin.com/stressreset.
And you'll have information on your book there as well.
Dr. Doni Wilson: Absolutely. Absolutely. I cannot wait for everyone to start to learn about this and implement it and look forward to hearing from.
JJ Virgin: Yay. Well, thank you so much. [00:32:00] It's so awesome to have you on and I'm sorry, it took so long to get you
Dr. Doni Wilson: it's so worth the wait.
Thank you, JJ.
JJ Virgin: For more info on this and other health topics I cover or to rate and review, find me on Instagram, Facebook and my website, JJvirgin.com. And don't forget to subscribe to my show. So you won't miss a single episode. Go to subscribetojj.com. Thanks again for being with me this week.

 

Hide Transcript