Good Life Project - Aviva Romm: Overcoming Survival Overdrive Syndrome

Episode Date: February 6, 2017

Today’s guest, Dr. Aviva Romm, has been referred to as “the face of natural medicine in the 21st century by Prevention Magazine.”She’s a Yale-trained, board-certified physician with a specialty in women’s health and obstetrics; a midwife and herbalist, and a founding member of the Yale Integrative Medicine Program’s Advisory Board.Dr. Romm practices medicine in New York City and is a nationally sought speaker, author, and consultant. She is also one of the nation’s leaders in botanical medicine and is the author of 7 books on natural medicine.In this week’s episode, we begin with her service-mission to Haiti after the earthquake, then find our way back to explore the key ideas from her groundbreaking new book, The Adrenal Thyroid Revolution. Aviva describes a pervasive yet often undiagnosed condition—Survival Overdrive Syndrome (SOS)—which leads to the feeling of being in perpetual survival mode, overcome by everything from fatigue, overwhelm and brain-fog to pain, disease and even death, when left unaddressed.We also explore how so many of us push beyond what our physiological and psychological systems are adapted to be able to handle healthfully, all in the name of a success that ends up leaving us gutted and exhausted. Critically, she offers ways to identify the symptoms of SOS that can so quickly drain our Vitality Buckets and make our good life feel perpetually beyond reach.And, we talk about the key steps to take to advocate for ourselves, find the right answers and people to help us, and also begin to walk the road back to health ourselves through a series of simple, yet proven lifestyle interventions. Her full recovery protocol is offered in an immensely “doable,” practical and powerful 4-week program in her book.Mentioned in This Episode:Dr. Aviva’s 2014 Good Life Project video episode: Medicine 3.0: What Got Us Here Ain’t Gonna Get Us ThereBe sure to subscribe to our weekly Good Life Updates and listen on iTunes to make sure you never miss an episode!+++THIS WEEK’S PODCAST IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY+++Today’s episode is sponsored by Camp GLP, the ultimate summer-camp for entrepreneurs, makers and world-shakers! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So SOS stands for survival overdrive syndrome, and it was just sort of an accidental term. It's not a real medical term, but as I had so many women in my practice sitting across from me or women emailing me and writing to me on Facebook, I kept hearing this theme, and it was actually a theme of repeated words. Dr. Rahm, Dr. Aviva, Aviva, I feel like I'm chronically stuck in survival mode. I feel like I'm always in the on position. I feel like I'm always just trying to keep up, you know, I'm like, just trying to stay afloat. And it was this sense of really, truly, like life survival being on the line, not in terms of necessarily having

enough food, but feeling that the stress response in them was so over activated, and they couldn't keep up. So what if, you know, all those symptoms that you've kind of been feeling over the years wasn't just all in your head? What if, you know, passing moments of low energy? What if moments of pain, joint pain, inflammation? What if moments of fatigue, stress, anxiety, overwhelm? Moments of your brain just kind of feeling like it's a little foggy and not quite clear. What if those weren't just in your head? What if those weren't things you just had to live with?

What if those weren't things that you could just take a pill to make go away, which very often really doesn't make it go away, just pushes it down the road and makes it worse. What if there was a different story and a different way to look at this, to explore how to make some changes that profoundly change not just the symptomology, but the deeper root causes and the way that you lived your life and really filled your vitality bucket in a lasting, consistent way. That's the conversation I'm having in today's episode with my dear friend, Dr. Aviva Ram, who is a Yale-trained integrative medicine and women's health physician. She's also a midwife and an herbalist. She has

been referred to as the face of natural medicine in the 21st century by Prevention Magazine. And she's got all sorts of other fantastic accolades. But more importantly, she's one of my go-to resources when I really want to understand what's going on with health and mindset on both the practical on the ground level every day. And also what's the research, what's the latest research that's showing the truth about what's going on in the human body and how really to deal with a lot of things and move through things and fix a lot of things and feel better and acknowledge the fact that these are not things that are just a natural part of aging. These are things to just deal with or live with. They're not

just in our head. So much of this is detailed in her new book, The Adrenal Thyroid Revolution, which is fantastic. And I spent a lot of time devouring. We touched down in a bunch of points in that, in this conversation. I happen to have had a beautiful new copy of that book when I sat down with her and I asked her to autograph it. And at the end of this episode, I'm going to tell you how you might be able to get your hands on that copy. So be sure to stay tuned till the end. I'm Jonathan Fields.

This is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

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January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. And then I had an awesome ride over here because my cab driver was from Haiti.

And I love Haitian people. I was there for a month. Right. So we were chatting. What were you there? I was there doing obstetrics. But then when you're there, you end up doing a little of everything. Right.

So I was putting IVs and dehydrated. Was this post-earthquake? It was. Yeah, it was four years ago. So it was about a year and a half post-earthquake. My son went post-earthquake, though. He was there almost for eight months. Oh, wow. What was he doing? Just helping whatever way he could? Yeah, he was pre-med. And he ended up going down just to help and ended up running the Harvard Health program on the ground there. That's amazing. When you drop into an experience like that, had you done anything similar in the past?

No. Is there? Well, that's not quite true. I mean, I've spent time, like I spent a little bit of time at the Lakota Reservation, which is essentially a developing nation within our country. Sadly, it's really the poverty level there is kind of extreme. It was like $3,000 per capita income there, and this is right in the U.S. So I'd been there, but I'd never done active health care work,

and especially not in a country that has suffering on so many levels and potential for violence. And, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It was amazing. I mean, when you first landed and, you know, you made your way out into, quote, the field, tell me about that moment. The first moment was realizing that I need, just bizarrely, like being a New Yorker was an amazing thing to do because I was watching people put their bags down at the airport and other people picking up their bags and then charging them to hand the bag back. So it was like a very quick, okay. It also sounds like Cancun. Yeah. Well, it was a very quick reality check of people are wonderful. People are nice, but there's intense poverty here. So be super mindful of where you are. After that, I was just so in the experience of truly every single second of my life. It was really the most amazing experience ever because every single second of my life, I was sort of automatically and naturally

filled with gratitude. Like, you know, sometimes here, at least for me, I have to sometimes remember to be grateful or remember what I'm grateful for because there are days in the scheme of like living an American life life it can be more challenging there it was like girl you have nothing to worry about you have no complaints you have everything you need and from that place it was easy to just be in constant gratitude and service so as weirdly sort of um happy as that sounds it was kind of blissful in a way like I had no worries and all I had to do was give the whole time and the need was huge and the people there were warm and generous and so appreciative and I really just tried to go in without an agenda but just learn what was needed

not what I thought was needed but to really learn what was needed and what was being asked for and to take a very slow, watchful approach. And that paid off really well. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, one of the questions when I sort of want to hear about people who've had experiences like this, especially because you were talking about a weekend, like you were sort of embedded for a solid chunk of time, is what happens when you come home. Because you can access this state of profound gratitude and just leading with service from the moment you open your eyes to the moment you go to sleep.

And it's mandated by the environment, by the nature of the physical environment that you're in and the extreme demands and your capabilities. You have the ability to solve and serve and help. And I'm always curious what happens when somebody comes home from that on two levels, actually. One is the challenge of reintegration? And then the other is, is there something that you can do to keep touching back into that state when life starts to swirl around you,

you know, on an everyday basis? Yes. So for one, one of the things that really struck me there, and in no way to minimize the level of physical poverty there, but it really struck me that there's lots of kinds of poverty. And when I was there, you wake up in the morning and people are just, bonjour, bonjour, ça va, you know, every day. Bonsoir, bonsoir in the evening.

People walk holding hands. Men walk up the street holding hands. The OB, who was the head of the OB, saw me walking up the street one day and just came up to me and just grabbed my hand. And we walked back up to the hospital together holding hands. The warmth and the eye contact. And as part of the poverty, the lack of the technology there. So people were not walking around looking at their cell phones. They were making eye contact. And for me, I'm that kind of a social connector anyway.

So the first thing that really struck me when I got back here was I got off the airport. We disembarked on the tarmac. So I walked down, and I'd been speaking my own kind of version of trying to speak Creole while I was there. And I got off the airport, and I forgot that we were in Miami. And I looked at the attendant who was helping me down this the town off the tar onto the tarmac and I looked at him and I said ah um merci bonjour you know like as if I was still there saying thank you you know have a good day and he just like looked at me like I was crazy not and I think it wasn't because I was speaking Creole it was because

I was friendly and the minute I walked in the airport, I was back into that social poverty, right? Like people were not looking at each other. People were not smiling. People were, you know, there were 50,000 places you could pick to eat at the Miami airport. And I just came from a place where there was literally people having one meal every two days sometimes. And I was like, wow, this is really not healthy. And I really made a commitment to just continue to be that person who holds doors open and smiles and makes that social contact and never be lost in my phone. So that reminder is sort of constant because I'm really always seeing that poverty here of connection. You know, yeah, I have days where like my tax bill comes and I'm like, oh my goodness, or I'm petty about something or comparing myself to something somebody else doesn't have. And it kind of reminds me, I worked with this oncologist when I was in medical training and he worked with really sick women who were dying and a lot of them young.

And I once said, Dr. Deshpando, what is this like for you? And he said, you know, I spend most of my life remembering that I'm well and what I have and what I'm grateful for. And then he said, sometimes I'm walking to work and it's raining and my darn umbrella won't open and I'm cursing at my umbrella. And then I go back in and I see. So it's just, I think just like staying aware of what's going on in the world is that touch point and just staying in touch with my heart. And yeah. But you know, like everyone, we, I think even the, you know, like the most committed activists, the most committed humanitarians, I mean, maybe not Gandhi, maybe he didn't

do that, but we go in and out of it. Yeah. Yeah. I know. It's because I, I'm so curious, I mean, especially in the world we live in right now, to find moments of connection and to keep reconnecting with a sense of gratitude when it seems like there may be a strong disconnect with that. I feel like we need that.

We need to really prioritize that. Because all the research around just simple gratitude is that it makes a huge difference, which is kind of a nice segue to your current work. Yeah, well, and if I may add to that, there's some also research that shows us that when we are around like-minded and like-meaned people, we tend to not be so aware of what we don't have and what we think we need or we want. And that was a profound experience for me for my own childhood, going from

kind of a low income environment to a more affluent environment when I switched from my local community housing project public school to a private school. And all of a sudden, I was like, wow, I don't have all this stuff. And I think I need all this stuff. And again, not to minimize people who really don't even have food, that's a whole different not having. But I think social media, television, magazines is constantly filling us with something we think we need and don't have. And that creates exactly the segue into this book that we feel like we're always in survival mode, not having what we need. And that creates an incredible amount of unrest. And it's like the opposite of gratitude in a way. Yeah.

So you've coined this term. And by the way, for those who haven't listened to it, Aviva and I taped another. Actually, this is back when we were actually filming. So we'll link to the show notes in our archives. We did a bit of a sort of a longer deep dive into her personal story. So definitely check that out, and you'll learn so much about this amazing person who's sitting across from me. There's a phrase that you've coined, the acronym for it is SOS, which I think so speaks to the state of the sort of Western human condition these days.

Break down, what does it actually stand for? So SOS stands for survival overdrive syndrome. And it was just sort of an accidental term. It's not a real medical term. But as I had so many women in my practice sitting across from me or women emailing me and writing to me on Facebook, I kept hearing this theme. And it was actually a theme of repeated words.

Dr. Rahm, Dr. Aviva, Aviva, I feel like I'm chronically stuck in survival mode. I feel like I'm always in the on position. I feel like I'm always just trying to keep up, you know, I'm like, just trying to stay afloat. And it was this sense of really, truly, like life survival being on the line, not in terms of necessarily having enough food, but feeling that the stress response in them was so over activated, and they couldn't keep up. So I was sharing that with a woman one day. And she said, Yeah, you know, it sounds like survival overdrive is a syndrome. And I was like, huh. And the way my mind plays with words, it was all of a sudden I saw the SOS. And what I also really loved about SOS is that a lot of us, you know, men and women, when we feel like we're struggling, I think we're super hard on ourselves.

Like we see Facebook and everyone else looks like they have their perfect life together. We watch TV and it's like the perfect life. And we don't. None of us have that. Those are like moments and snapshots. And so I think for most of us, we live in such an achievement oriented culture, such a, an obtaining oriented culture, like everything is status and what you were flying over on your rescue pilot path and you saw down on an island SOS burning on the sand because someone set a fire so that they get your attention. You wouldn't think, oh, my goodness, those people on the beach, what's wrong with them? They should have planned better. They should have made more money now and had a better boat to get themselves off that.

They wouldn't beat that person up. They'd go into a compassionate mode and they would try to help. And so part of this idea of SOS is that when we feel overwhelmed, when we feel like we're stuck in this survival mode, and we'll talk about what happens in the body that's so important, that SOS is kind of a reminder to not get angry and beat ourselves up, but to turn on that self-compassion and try to have a context of understanding why we feel that way. It's not that we're not doing enough or being enough

or achieving enough or having enough. It's that we are really, we're not victims of, but we're living in a culture that creates these expectations that are impossible to live up to and affect our health when we do try to live up to them. Yeah. No, I love that. And also, I love the relationship to the signaling definition. Originally, I think that it was like SOS, the original was save our ship. Yeah. So it's a transmission. Maybe even save our souls, I think, was was like SOS, the original was Save Our Ship. Yeah. So it's a transmission. Maybe even Save Our Souls, I think, was it? Something like that.

It was one of those. So effectively, it was somebody raising their hand saying, I'm in extreme crisis, and I'm not going to do this alone. It's a transmission. It's an outreach. It's a signal to anybody who is available to help. It's like I'm standing in a place of vulnerability because if I don't ask for help now, the ship's going down. And so that part of it to me also really spoke to me because it signals a willingness to be vulnerable and to tell others that stuff ain't right and I don't know how to fix it and I need your help.

And that's not an easy thing to do. It's not. And I think, too, we live in a society where we have a pill for every ill. We have a medical solution for every symptom that we have like a pill for every ill. We have like a medical solution for every symptom that we have. And I think we tend to be also really hard on ourselves, especially for high kind of performing people or high achieving people like listen to your show and hang out with me. When we are feeling that vulnerability

or when we're having symptoms that are slowing us down, like fatigue or overwhelm that keeps us sort of procrastinating or actual physical medical symptoms, we tend to think our bodies are betraying us. Or even then, we're not good enough. Our body's not good. We're not strong enough. We're not healthy enough.

We need to do another detox, cleanse, or whatever, as opposed to actually seeing those symptoms also as those signals, right? Even if you think about inflammation, it's little fires that are burning in your body. It's like a signal flare from your body saying, please listen to me. I'm here. I need a little love and I need a little attention. So I don't have to keep sending you these messages louder and louder and louder until they're big symptoms and big medical conditions.

Yeah. So, all right. So deconstruct this a little bit. What, you know, I think a lot of us are sort of familiar with a lot of the symptomology, but you point to, from what I remember, I think there are five major contributors. Yeah. I'd love to talk about each one of them a little bit because I think for me, we've talked about a lot of this stuff over the years. We're old friends.

But seeing them laid out sort of like in almost like a checklist and my head was kind of nodding. I'm like, huh, I still have more work to do. Interesting. Yeah. So we all always have more work to do. And I think part of the book is really about, okay, how can we replenish ourselves? We probably all being human beings, we will all always have some symptom or another that pops up to get our attention.

And we do have some level of planned obsolescence. So the book is not meant to- All the people are finding that in a really big way. You know, the book is not meant to make us have a perfectly healthy life every second of the day, but it's meant to help us identify the big triggers that get in your way of your body, mind, spirit, because it's all one connected, doing the best it can to serve you so you can do your best to serve what you want to serve in the world. So the big underlying kind of mother of root causes, if you will, that I found has a touchstone in every cell of our body, quite literally, is what's called the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. Big fancy word for a stress

response system. It starts in your brain and its job is to perceive everything going on in your world that may not be safe for you. That can be anything from a real danger. You know, we're biologically hardwired. When we see fire, somewhere fire should not be like the trash can in the corner of your office. That's a problem. We need to react and respond. But similarly, it could be somebody had a parent who was emotionally unstable and that parent made certain kinds of facial expressions. And if you have a boss that happens to make those same kinds

of facial expressions, even if it has nothing to do with you, that may trigger you to react internally because in a very primitive way in your brain, that's now cataloged as danger. But there are also a lot of other triggers that happen in our world that get that same stress system activated. Because that stress system is activated not just to sort of like fight or flight, which is what it controls, but also to keep down your inflammation, to activate your immune system so that if there's a foreign invader in the form of a virus or a bacteria or a parasite, it responds. So everything that triggers your body to say something's going on that needs a survival reaction is going to get activated. So things like foods that we eat that may be not great for us individually.

So, you know, an extreme example would be somebody who's really gluten intolerant and they're eating gluten. It's causing certain changes in their gut that cause inflammation. And that inflammation triggers the brain to say, oh, something's not right in here. We need to send out the fire department to put out this fire of inflammation. And that activates that stress response. It can be actual toxins in our food that our body doesn't recognize because we have not evolved. We've evolved over millions of years, but these toxins have only been in our environment for like the last 50 years. And there are 80,000 of them.

There are 80,000 known toxins. That doesn't even include the combinations those make in the environment in our bodies. So our bodies are trying to keep up with this detoxification. And when it reaches overload, that sends out that same sort of alarm signal that gets the body activated, hidden infections that a lot of us get exposed to, or that get reactivated when we're under a lot of stress. So kind of the overall picture of the book is there are a lot of things that can overwhelm our body systems, because we're living in what's called an evolutionary mismatch, right? In the past 50 years, everything from technology to food to environmental toxins has shifted

to an extreme exposure rate for us, but we weren't prepared for that. And it's the same with our 24-7 lifestyle. So all these different five factors are what I talk about in the book that get this survival overdrive syndrome rolling and what you can do to kind of dial it back so you can get back to your own inner peace, but also physical calm, like inflammatory calm, get all that in control. Yeah. And the idea of an evolutionary mismatch is kind of fascinating to me because it's almost like saying, okay, so if these things actually happened over a million years, we might actually be fine because maybe our DNA and our biological and neurological and chemical systems would have adapted for us to continue to thrive in the face

of them. But the fact that so many of them have grown exponentially in an astonishingly short period of time, it's that our systems don't evolve at that same rate of speed. And so it's like the ferocity of the things that might attack us, we haven't adapted fast enough to be able to be okay with those things. And so we're, you know, we're hanging out in New York City right now. And, you know, when you talk about toxins, I think a lot of people think about, okay, well, this is the stuff that you ingest. This is the stuff that, you know, it's the stuff that you sort of, you know, maybe it's the bad habits or the willful behaviors or this or that. When, in fact, you know, living in New York City and walking down the street, there's any number, like there's a concoction of, you know, inhalants that end up in your system just because I've made a choice to live geographically where I live.

Yeah. You know, I think that as human beings, we are just mammals. It's kind of like every species on this planet. I love science because science just geeks me out on how perfect the design really is. And we have this enormous capacity to adapt. It's stunning. It's just really, really stunning how we have so many systems within us that keep us safe and keep us alive. I think the problem is, is when we just keep pushing that adaptability a little bit too far. And I think a lot of us know in our lives when we're doing that, like, like you and I have talked about this, we know,

we've talked about sort of like the 10% that we feel like if we have to push our lives to an unhealthy level where we're not having time to breathe or time to eat well or time with our spouses that we don't need to be in like whatever that top 10% of success is if it means that the other kind of successes are like happening in our life, right? Like, so where are we pushing ourselves past our adaptability? And most of us have the ability to push past that adaptability for short periods of time it's when we keep doing it and we're like constantly pushing and we never take the time to replenish and restore if we do that as human beings if we push and then replenish and restore push and replenish and restore we we actually can adapt and it's the same thing with toxins in the environment in new york right we have kind of like a, I don't know what the expression would be like, like a triple threat,

but not in a good way, right? We're not getting enough rest. We need rest to detoxify. Most of us are not getting just the basic amount of fruits and vegetables or nutrients we need and phytochemicals, these chemicals that are in plants that aren't vitamins and minerals, but that actually help support our natural detoxification systems, which our ancestors got. They ate wild plants, they ate green vegetables, they ate things that had a little bit of a bitter principle to them that made our bodies detoxify. So not only are we getting the exposures that we have a little bit of control of, you know, or no control over basically, but we're also not doing the healthy habits that allow us to adapt. So you can't make a bus not belch out what a bus is going to belch out. I mean, as a society, we can make demands, right? That's how we got lead out of gasoline. That's how we got catalytic converters on cars. So we

actually can do things socially, but one-on-one, those exposures every day are happening. So I think about it, you know, what can we control? The average woman, before she leaves her house in the morning for work, has already put on like 15 different body products on her skin and hair. And each of those 15 products may have as many as 15 or 30 or more unpronounceable synthetic ingredients. So we do have control over that. We have control over what we eat, the quality of what we eat. And we have control over getting enough of the nutrients and phytochemicals

that do support that detoxification and sleep. I mean, how many of us just get five or six hours of sleep a night and think we're just fine. But you can't indefinitely hack your life on Bulletproof or Red Bull. You actually do have to get sleep. And sleep is just like the biggest detoxifier we have. Yeah. I want to circle back to that.

But I don't want to leave behind. It seems like there are a lot of different things, but all roads lead to stress or stress and inflammation. which doesn't necessarily place you in the mainstream of medicine is that removing these things or minimizing stress, that the body itself has an astonishing ability to self-heal a lot of what ails us. It really does. So I want to clarify one thing. I love stress. I know that sounds so counterintuitive, but stress is actually really healthy for us. A little bit of stress gets our adrenaline going. It makes us alert. It makes us

actually feel stimulated. It's kind of that feeling of anticipation and excitement that you have when you're a kid and you're going on like a special event, or even as an adult, when you're anticipating something great. It's also why so many of us perform really well at the last minute, right? Like, there are a lot of people who beat themselves up because they are procrastinators, and they save their studying or their term paper or their book deadline to the last minute. But there's actually a reason we do that. We do that because we get a little bit of stress and that stress motivates us. So that those very hormones that when they, when we get too much of a good thing, when we're getting the right amount are actually fabulous motivators. Same with cortisol. It's a hormone that gets stimulated,

produced by our adrenals when we're under stress. It fights inflammation. It keeps us alert. It really keeps us feeling like, you know, know primed it keeps our immune system primed so a little bit of stress is a healthy thing the opposite of too much stress is not calm and peace it's actually boredom and ennui and malaise boredom and ennui and malaise and being unhappy and unsatisfied and unstimulated in your life can have just as many health consequences as the opposite so So when I'm talking about stress, what I'm really talking about is being stressed out, right? So a little bit of stress, a little bit of excitement, a little bit of motivation, even a little bit of challenge,

pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone is great for growth in a really healthy way. And we have the ability to adapt to that as long as we take breaks, right? As long as we give ourselves permission to pause. But it's when we get to that extreme that we all know, because we all start using language that reflect language is a powerful reflector of what's actually going on in our physiology. And we start saying things like, I'm so stressed out. I can't take it anymore. I'm at my breaking point. I'm at the end of my rope.

I'm getting burnt out. I'm at my breaking point. I'm at the end of my rope. I'm getting burnt out. I'm getting fried. That's when you've crossed over into adaptability, into fatigue and exhaustion. And that's where the danger zone is. So I like that little stress zone. I actually call it the U-zone in the book. And it's when we go from U-zone to danger zone that we want to really, really be careful. So it's that getting stressed out that we have to be super mindful of because that's when we start to drop our good self-care habits too. It's like usually when we're the most stressed out, we start not sleeping. We start eating more junk. We start doing more things that are a little bit more toxic for our bodies.

And we stop doing all the things that would help us move out of that place. Yes, exactly. Which is counterintuitive. I know. I know. It really is. So what's up with that? I've often wondered that because I'm the same way. I mean, you know, when I feel stressed, when I feel like overloaded or overwhelmed, I know. I know what's good for me. I know what to do. I know I should be sitting more. I know I should be going out and moving my body know. I know what's good for me. I know what to do. I know I should be sitting more. I know I should be going out and moving my body more. I know that I should be doubling down on beautiful whole foods and hydrating and really massively paying attention to my sleep habits.

And at the same time, I catch myself going for exactly the opposite in every one of those categories. And I'm like, dude, what are you doing? Like, you're the guy, like, this is not a knowledge thing for you. Like, this is like, what's happening behaviorally. That's, that's making me do that. So there are actually two really interesting reasons that can happen. I'm sure there are many, but the two that I've sort of identified have been playing with and digging deeper into the science behind and also the behavioral science around. So one thing is that when you are a high achieving person, that's an amazing thing. Like you have tons to contribute to the world. A lot of us, and I see this especially in women, but I'm sure it's true in men too. A lot of us, it's like a double-edged sword of why we're high achievers, right? So for example, you can be a social activist, you can be an academician, you can be a writer, whatever it is that you do, and you can do it

really well because part of you has a deep love and passion for that work. But most of us at some point in our lives had survival modes that we went into. So I can speak for myself, for example, for me to get out of a very stressful childhood environment, I had, I didn't have to be but high achieving became a very clear pathway out. I got great scholarships to schools that took me out of my neighborhood. I got a lot of praise, a lot of validation. And that was like, it was literally life-saving for me, right? So that pattern, that survival pattern of high achieving became really important in my life. But at some point in my life, I realized that I had crossed from adaptive to maladaptive, right? Like I was still pushing myself at times when I didn't have to push myself anymore. So for a healthy person,

when we know we're tired, what we should allow ourselves to do is rest. But sometimes we have these what I call hungry ghosts that we think are chasing us, right? Hungry ghosts from our past that say, well, if I rest right now, let's say you came from an economically deprived environment, your story in your head might be, if I rest right now, I'm going to be right back into that poverty. Or if I don't say yes to everything I'm asked for, if you came from an environment where you had to be the peacekeeper in your family or the people pleaser to keep somebody happy or somebody safe, you don't know how to say no, and you keep taking on more and more. So I think part of it is actually just looking deep at what our motivations are for when we're not taking care of ourselves. And when we're

pushing ourselves past that point, when we know it, right, like, you know, it, you're still doing it. What's driving me and that may not be the case for you. It certainly was for me. And it's for a lot of women. The other thing is that when you start to get into overwhelm, so when you've gone from stress to stressed out, your body goes into an automatic survival mode. It actually sort of preempts you from cutting that survival mode off because it's like, I'm the primitive survival mode here, I know better than you do what you need. And I'm going to keep you safe at your better, you know, against your better judgment. And what are the things that keep us sort of primitively safe while making sure that our brain is getting enough sugar, for example.

So when we get stuck in that survival mode, what do we crave sugar and carbs. And then guess what happens when we're all in that stressed out mental mode do we crave? Sugar and carbs. And then guess what happens? When we're all in that stressed out mental mode, we eat those sugar and carbs and it starts to pack on belly fat. And what does that belly fat do? It is actually sending chemical messages to your brain. Ah, I've got enough food. There's enough sugar. She's not in survival mode. There's no famine coming. So you can calm down now. So we're actually self-medicating the stress with the things that our brain thinks it needs on a very primitive level. Similarly, one of the things that happens when you get exposed to these stress hormones for long enough, and I'm talking like not really hours or days, but weeks and months at a time

or longer, is it starts to put you into a reactionary mode. And it actually sabotages your frontal cortex, that front part of your brain, that allows you to have executive functioning, which is decision making and willpower. Right, self-regulation. Exactly. Your self-regulation goes out the window. So you're saying to yourself, right, your talking brain, your thinking brain is saying to yourself, I know I should do this, I know I should do that. But now you're in survival mode, like you're just primitive on the prowl for what is going to keep you alive. And you get, you literally

get stuck in a loop. And the book is about finding the things that we can do that break that cycle. And it may be different for different people. So for me, it may be just remembering to stop and do some deep breathing because I already have, like I kind of already lived the diet lifestyle and the non-toxin lifestyle. But for me, the toxin actually might be my own stress habits. But for someone else, it may actually be, they have a lot of changes in their gut microbiome because they had 20 years of antibiotics five times a year, which is very common for Americans. And now their gut microbiome is they had 20 years of antibiotics five times a year, which is very common for Americans. And now their gut microbiome is actually sending chemical toxin messages to their brain

that something's not right. So for that person, fixing the microbiome might be the first step and maybe easier than fixing those old stress patterns. Yeah, this is actually an area that I'm deeply fascinated by. And it sounds like the research is still really early here, but I know that you've been geeking out on this a lot, too. So the idea that you have critters in your intestine, you know, that, you know, the microbiome, it, you know, the gut biome, it's kind of becoming this really hot topic these days of exploration and how it can, you know, cause so much within our body physiologically and biologically. It can lead to inflammation and pain and disease and all of this stuff,

and that the makeup of the bacteria in your intestine actually have a huge effect on that stuff. The leap that I find really fascinating, that it seems like there's research going on around now, is the leap that the makeup of the bacteria in your gut can actually control your behavior, your state of mind, your mood. That is a much bigger leap, I think, for folks to think that, okay, you know, so this is actually controlling my thoughts and my feelings. Like what's happening in my intestines is controlling my thoughts, my feelings, my behavior, my emotions. It's so amazing. So if you think about it as like critters and we kind of sort of anthropomorphize those critters,

like we sort of start to imagine them as little cartoon critters or bugs in there that are somehow controlling us like with puppet strings, it starts to feel really far-fetched. You're like, that is so not happening. But if you think about it this way- So I should change my visual because I kind of like- I actually want to get t-shirts made up. Sitting around tables, smoking cigars, playing cards. I want to get t-shirts that say my microbiome made me do it or my microbiome made me eat it. But what's happening is a couple of things.

One is most of our nervous system or a very large part of our nervous system is actually centered in the gut lining. So the gut has now started to be called the second brain, not because there's some sort of like magical weird connection, but literally our nervous system is so deeply wired in there. And whatever is happening in your nervous system in your gut is getting transmitted to your nervous system in your brain through this giant nerve that passes through our body called the vagus nerve. And it's just like this amazing connection that happens. And what's happening is a couple of things. In your gut, you have 3 trillion different organisms, bacteria, gut, bacteria, viruses, yeast, all kinds of things. And they, just like we all do, produce gases and chemicals. And those gases and chemicals that are produced by different organisms in your gut send signals.

They're chemicals that are actually binding to the nervous system receptors. And they're sending a literal electrical impulse or a literal chemical signal up to your brain. So let's say you eat tons of processed food and tons of sugar in your diet. That is going to cause certain microorganisms to grow because they like that. Anyone who's made bread knows to make yeast rise,

you have to feed it sugar. So certain organisms grow on certain foods. Different organisms grow, for example, if you're a vegetarian and or eat tons of vegetables. This has been really well studied. So what we eat, just for example, determines what grows in there. And then different organisms actually speak different chemical languages. So let's say you eat tons of sugar and you have lots of yeast overgrowing in your intestinal system. That yeast is in there actually when it gets hungry, sending out chemical messages, I'm a little hangry in here and I'm going to make you crave that muffin. It's literally sending a message to your brain that makes you

want more sugar and it makes the taste of sugar become more palatable to you so it's like this whole neural network that's happening also different organisms produce chemicals that can kind of cause local irritation and that local irritation can cause different proteins and molecules that are supposed to stay in your intestine to that are supposed to stay in your intestine that are supposed to be eliminated actually cross over into your immune system also. And then your immune system starts to produce other toxins and other chemicals. So for example, you ever like before you've gotten the flu or a cold,

you have a few days where you feel kind of maybe blue or emotional or tired and you don't know why. And then you get sick and you're like, that explains it all. It's those chemicals that your body's producing that actually get across your brain barrier into your brain and can start to make you feel depressed or anxious or irritable or tired.

It's all connected. It's very cool and fun. Yeah, I mean... Unless you're experiencing it. Right. It might not be so. But just to know that there's a different pathway, because I remember reading there

was some, I guess there's some research going on. Obviously, you're the one who knows the details of this. I think it was around the treatment of anxiety and depression with probiotics. Yeah. And the efficacy was really compelling. Yeah, there's actually a whole new field of science and a whole new field of pharmaceutical research that's happening, like conventional pharmaceutical research, and it's called psychobiotics. And it's exactly what it sounds like, the way different microbiome agents that we can take affect our psyche or

our mind and mood. So one study that was really well publicized was done at one of the big California medical schools. And it was working with women who had anxiety and simply just giving them an active culture yogurt twice a day. And the results were astonishing. I mean, women had their anxiety resolved just based on adding in some lactobacillus and bifidobacterium strains into their diet every day. And it just shifts what's going on in your gut, which shifts what's going on in your mind. It's really amazing. Yeah, it is amazing. And it also just speaks to, you know, the role of what we feed ourselves, not just in disease prevention, but in also sort of like optimal, functional, emotional mindset wellness. It's so true. And you know, as we're talking, it's really making me think about how many people are struggling with anxiety and depression, which is huge now.

And I don't want to minimize or dismiss the spiritual, emotional or very real life experiences that people I'm just living in these times is causing people a lot of anxiety. At the same time, we have a lot of people trying to fix their anxiety and depression with supplements or ayahuasca ceremonies or trips to spas that cost them a lot of money or antidepressants. I mean, just amongst women now, one in four women is on an antidepressant. And the astonishing number of people on addictive benzo anti-anxiety medications would blow your mind. Kids are on these and they have a huge impact on addiction and cognitive health. When we could actually try to add some organic yogurt if we tolerate dairy or add a

probiotic and see if that doesn't help itself. So we get so fixated on fixing the mind, and that's really important, and I think spiritual and mental and emotional health is so critical. And it goes both ways, right? There's amazing studies that look at what happens in your stress levels. Like even just one hour of stress, like extreme stress, people study people's poop. They actually do. And they look at the changes that being under extreme stress for an hour or a day or a week has and you get massive changes in the microbiome

if it's an hour or a few hours those changes tend to revert themselves because the body is incredibly self-healing but when you have those changes lasting for days and weeks and months they can actually become permanent changes so you know you can fix and heal your gut to some extent by if the emotional stress of your life is overwhelming or the mental stress by healing that, but you can also sometimes heal them both bidirectional. The channel goes both ways, which really speaks to sort of a, you know, an all inclusive approach. It's not like, okay, let's just do this one thing. It's like, let's look at the whole, so get everything as a system. You know, it's funny, we've had all these conversations over the years about all different elements of it. And you have kind of a really nice distillation,

what you call your five R's. And we've kind of touched on them. But because I want to make sure that we don't miss something here in the conversation. Can we can we go through those in a little more detail? So I wanted to create a program, first of all, for people that were overwhelmed, which meant you had to keep it simple. Right, we don't need to add complexity. We don't need more work to do. No, we don't. Oh, so you want me to do more. Right.

And at the same time, you know, I want to acknowledge that making lifestyle changes is not the easiest thing to do. I mean, you and I just talked about how we know, and sometimes we keep banging our head against that same wall, right? So I created a program based around these sort of five R concepts is essentially what I do in my medical practice. The first one is to reframe. And reframe is simply a mind simply, but it's a mindset change. And it's around everything from sleep and making sure we're getting more sleep to actually starting to look at what some of the negative self-talk we have. I mean, just to give you an example, 90% of all women in the United States have one I-hate-my-body thought every single day. And those aren't women with eating disorders.

Those are average women. When you have an eating disorder, you can multiply that by about 400 times. So the thoughts that we have, how do we start to become cognizant of them so that they're not, like we're not feeding ourselves toxic thoughts all day. The things that we do have control over. Again, I mentioned sleep, learning how to sleep, how to get better sleep when your sleep is disturbed, but also how much sleep we need. We can't. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

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Skimp on that. Before we move on to that, though, there's something I don't want to skip over. And the word you just used is we need to be cognizant. And that's like a whole separate thing because it's almost like before we can actually do something, before we can reframe, before we can catch ourselves saying, I hate my body or I hate my this or I hate my job or this relationship is killing me or whatever it is. We need to somehow cultivate the ability to know when we're saying that. And my sense is that most of us don't have that sort of meta-awareness. Yeah. What I did in the book, and then also I have a companion journal to really help women who want to take a deeper dive into sort of that sort of self-awareness aspect of it. For me, there's just this idea that we can hit a pause button, right? Certainly, we can't be aware of thoughts that we're not aware that we're having. But the more you start to become aware of

the thoughts that you are having that you can catch, and you start to quiet those down, then you hear the next layer of noise. And then, and we're all going to keep hearing layers of noise, but can we get some of those layers off so we can have a little bit more inner peace, right? There's enough stress out there in the world without all the stress that we're constantly putting on ourselves in our own heads. So when we catch ourselves doing a habit that we're trying to do, what I ask in the book is give yourself what I call just this 10 golden seconds to pause, just hit the pause button 10 seconds, and just kind of catch yourself and stop. And you don't even have to be, you know, like, you don't have to go lay on a sofa and think about your childhood and your mom to know why you're having the thoughts. It's more just,

how am I feeling right now? And one of the big tools that I use in the book, and I use in my practice, and I use in my own life is becoming more body aware. So many of us are living outside of our bodies in so many ways, obviously not literally, but we're very rarely actually just taking time to dial in how we're physically feeling. And if you're feeling physically agitated, if you're feeling exhausted, if you're overwhelmed, if you're irritable, this can be a clue to when you're out of alignment with your kind of your own self. And often your thought process is out of alignment at that moment too. So if you can just kind of feel how you feel in your body, you know, feel your feet on the ground, wherever

you are, even right now, feel your feet on the ground, deepen your breath a little bit, feel your belly rise, feel your belly sink as you breathe. That can start to shift your mind. And even just doing that can shift your brain out of that stress or sympathetic drive into what we call more parasympathetic mode. Once you start to feel what that inner peace or relaxation feels like, you can find it faster the next time. And then your mind over time does naturally start to quiet down. It's not for most of us, I think, something that happens overnight. It's something, for most of us, I think something that happens overnight. It's something we cultivate. But then you become more aware of your thoughts because you know what peaceful thoughts feel like and you know what agitated thoughts feel like. And it's definitely a process.

It is. We've had a longstanding seated practice, mindfulness practice. And what's interesting is that you're never supposed to judge the quality of your practice. You're not supposed to come off the mat and say, wow, that meditation really sucked. Yeah, a lot of us do, though. If we're really perfectionists. I just did this reset and women were judging

whether they were relaxing well enough. And I'm like, no, no, no. And then I'm like, oh, now I'm judging myself for like judging my meditation and I'm an idiot. It creates like this, you It creates this crazy spiral. But what I have learned is that I use a timer. So every X number of minutes, there's a chime that goes off just to sort of kind of give me a sense of the passage of time. And then a final bell sound so I know when it's over so I don't have to watch a clock or anything like that and what's interesting to me what I've what I've learned over time is that counterintuitively you

would think the quicker it goes and the easier it is sort of like the the you know the better I've been able to just drop into that state and access it but what I've learned is the exact opposite actually is that as a general rule, if I hear the opening chime, and then I don't hear any of the intermediate sort of I have a little singing bowl thing that and the next thing I hear is like the three little bells as the closing time 25 minutes later, I am under a lot of stress, because I haven't even been able to be sort of baseline aware of when those subtle little intermediate sort of sounds come to me. I've completely missed all of them

because I'm so lost in stories and in thought and in spinning, and I don't even notice it until 25 minutes later. And, I mean, I've been practicing for years now. But what I've learned is that rather than judging, when that happens to me, instead of saying, wow, that was a great sit, like it went so fast. You know, the signal to me is, huh, what's actually going on with me right now? Because I should, you know, like not should, but I wasn't present and aware of my breath and of the environment around me during that particular moment. And I was really not present. So what else is going around me in my life right now? And how's that affecting me? And do I need to do something about this today?

I love that. I really do. Because as I was saying earlier, we can live so outside of ourselves, but some of us can also live too far in our own experience. Yeah, and that's my thing. study all these like survival skills, like cool things like how to forage for food and how to make hides and how to like skin a roadkill and get to meet like crazy stuff. And as part of that training, one of the activities we often had to do was to just sit very quietly and not pay attention to our breath, not not anything but to find how many different sounds you could hear right so like you're just sitting and all of a sudden you're like whoa i was so lost in my own inner crap that i didn't notice there were like four different birds singing right now or the sound of like oh there's a truck there's oh that sounds like a truck backing up oh

there's somebody honking oh i can actually hear my neighbor through the wall. And you suddenly realize that you've been lost in your own little bubble. And I think it, one, it relieves a sense of isolation, but it also can break the habit of those thoughts. And that's such a powerful thing to do. And, you know, it's kind of like, I think it's like a Buddhist expression, you know, when you're, what is it? I think Thich Nhat Hanh said it about washing dishes. Like when you're washing the dishes, wash the dishes. When you're eating, eat.

It's like when you're walking, walk. And to be so engaged in the activity that we're doing, like feeling our feet on the ground or feeling your hands washing the dishes or when you take a shower. And I think it's a great activity for people who are intimidated by meditation or don't really feel like, yeah, meditation is way more than sitting on a cushion and being quiet. But if you're not kind of feeling that, this is a whole other way to expand your awareness and get out of your own stressful thought patterns. Yeah, no, I think it can be really helpful. It's funny, years ago, I did a sort of a weekend intensive training in Shambhala meditation. And it actually wasn't just sitting all day long.

They would alternate between increasingly longer bouts of, like, you would sit and watch your breath for 15 minutes. And then everybody in the room would get up, and it was like a little Buddhist meditation conga line, and we would walk. And the idea was really to be mindful of every step, be mindful of the sense of the heel and then the arch and then the ball of your foot and what's going on around you. And I think we really can access it in a lot of different ways. And I think it's also interesting to create the practice of accessing it in different ways, in different environments, in different places. Physically, like seated, breath-based, movement-based. Because I think it does, my experience has been that it does, the different modalities have a different effect on me.

For me too. And also it's like we can get so lost in our own experience and forget to connect with the world around us. So how many of us have eaten a meal in the last few days and we actually realized we never tasted our food? I see it in my practice. I'll have a woman come in and I'll say, because I'm trying to do a food journal assessment, so what did you eat for dinner last night?

And it's like, I don't actually remember tasting my food, right? We just like, we eat so fast. Or in everything, it can be anything from going to a movie to lovemaking, like where we're not present with what we're experiencing. We're stuck in our own self-judgment or our own stories. I think really, I love for me just getting really present in my body and getting present in the experience of my world around me and like less worrying about what's going on for me and more thinking about, well, what's going on for you?

Did I remember what my friend was wearing after I just had dinner with them for two hours at a restaurant? Did I remember what they were talking about? Was I thinking about my own stuff at the whole time? Now that makes a lot of sense. And I think we're all on the road of trying to keep touching back in and being aware. I want to make sure we covered the five R's. So the first one is reframe.

And that's the mind-body-emotional connection. And it's also looking at some of the habits that we have that we self-impose that really drive us crazy and push us too far as women. So some of the things I mentioned earlier, but the ones I touch on most in the book are perfectionism and how we can get stuck in that pattern of saying yes to too many things. And all of a sudden, we've got a million things on our plate that we're trying to do better and better and better all the time. And we're overwhelmed and exhausted. Or fear of missing out.

FOMO, the great acronym I learned from my kids. And being a good girl. And all these ways that these patterns can cause us to get into emotional or psychological overwhelm. The next is the reboot. And the reboot is about, you know, when your computer, like you've got too many programs open and it goes into a spin and you just have to shut it down and reboot it to get it, like to do your will anymore.

The reboot is about food. And when we have too much information coming in from our food, whether it's foods that we're intolerant of, toxins, et cetera, that can be going on with our food, how do we sort of hit the pause button on that, take out the things that might be triggers for us so that we can quiet down that information overload and reboot on a really simple diet? And for me, I am big on non-restricting. One of the things about restricting is that it is exactly what drives survival mode.

We're primitively hardwired to be highly aware of any risk of famine. So the minute we start restricting our food, restricting our calories, that survival mode that we're trying to quiet down goes into red alert. And so this is about how do you actually work with what your body is supposed to sort of be doing biologically, evolutionarily. Okay, so I have to throw this out there then because one of the really hot things these days is variations on fasting. Intermittent fasting, yeah. Yeah, or straight up fasting. I mean, sort of like, you know, what's your sort of take on that?

So there are therapeutic diets, right, when we're sick and we're trying to get well. There are ways to limit what we're taking in for a little while so we can get really clear on what that information that food is giving to our bodies is doing in our bodies and then there's sort of like real life right and how we live when we're repaired and that's more about staying replenished so a couple things fasting can be a really powerful way to give your body just a hot minute of reset. Like, I'm going to take out all this information overload that's coming in from food. I'm going to let my body be quiet for a minute. I'm going to go into like major rest and digest mode here just for a minute. And for a day or two, that can be fabulous. Not if you're pregnant or not if you're already really depleted. But for a lot of us, it can be really a great reset. With intermittent fasting, it can work for some people with some health conditions, but over time, it's not a maintenance diet. It's a therapeutic diet. It's something we do to heal when we have a big medical or health situation going on. But ultimately, our bodies actually

do need food. Our bodies need to be nour, and our bodies need a certain amount of a wide variety of nutrients, for most people, actually, surprisingly, including healthy carbohydrates, which help tell that cortisol in your body, hey, everything's okay, she's got the food and nourishment her brain needs, which is glucose, which comes from carbs, to stay safe. Interestingly, if we pay attention to more like what would be our natural circadian rhythms, so the 24-hour rhythms that we have evolved to have since our time began on the planet as human beings, those are built around light and day cycles. So our ancestors really wouldn't have eaten late at night. They would have already been food put away, tucked in, somewhere that the lions aren't going to get. And we'd be going to bed when it gets dark. And then

we'd wake up when it got light. We'd do all our morning things that need to be done. Then we'd light the morning fire and make food. So if you think about that, let's say you didn't eat from about six o'clock in the evening until six o'clock the next morning, you're actually naturally getting a 12-hour intermittent fast every single day. And that's one of the things I talk about in the book is how to give your body a rest from food, but then also how to use food to nourish your body to stay in that normal, healthy circadian rhythm. Yeah. It's interesting too, because there's one of the justifications I've heard for, I've heard a lot of different sort of benefits of fasting. But one of the justifications I've heard also is that there's a hermetic response from fasting and that your body, you know, it is an additional stress on your system.

And that, like you said, a small amount of stress can actually train your body in good ways and train your systems in good ways. My question is always, does that also assume that there isn't already a fairly high level of sustained baseline stress that you're piling it onto? And if there is, can that tiny amount of added stress and the hermetic effect that it creates actually become really strongly negative. It can, and it seems to be especially the case for women. So studies have looked at women who are doing food restricting and doing calorie restricting and particularly doing carbohydrate restricting, and it does actually over time. So we can do it for a couple of weeks, even a month at a time, and we usually are just fine. But after that amount of time, it usually does

actually start to activate the stress response more and add fuel to the fire, not reverse it. So for example, we know that women who eat some form of a healthy carbohydrate, so a whole grain or something like a sweet potato or starchy winter squash, have more of a healthy cortisol level in the evening, which allows them to fall asleep more easily, have fewer sugar and carb cravings, actually lose or regulate their weight to their healthy weight, and have less inflammation and a less activated or over activated immune response. So the studies are there. But for people who do get benefited, it's usually for a short time. And definitely a lot of people are looking at the differences in men's physiology and women's physiology. So it seems to be men can sustain it longer than women can at a healthy pace.

You know, and we look at traditional cultures, right? We look at one of my best friends, her husband is from Ethiopia. And he moved here a few years ago to the States. He still follows more of a traditional Ethiopian diet, which isn't just the foods. But two days a week, or I think it's two or three days a week, he completely takes all meat and all dairy out of his diet. So his diet is vegetarian several days of the week. One month of the year, twice a year, he takes out certain foods from his diet. So in a sense, and that's not the only,

many cultures have that. I mean, we think about Lent, we think about Jewish culture having days like Yom Kippur, we think about Ramadan. These are all traditional cultures that have had some form of fasting built in, but it's not usually something that people are doing every

single day. It's not a lifestyle. It's periodic, right. And it often was based on food availability and factors that aren't affecting us right now. And that's a big piece also is that when you're triggering your body to get into the habit of regularly thinking that there's not enough food, what happens when you do eat is that your body tends to store those calories in preparation for the next fast. So there's a whole phenomenon that happens in our bodies called, it's based on what's called feast or famine. So primitively, we would have, and many cultures have had times of the year where food is more abundant, and then times of the year that are just naturally leaner.

And we see this in a culture that still exists in its more traditional ways in the United States called the Pima Indians. And they have like 80% diabetes and obesity now because traditionally in their society, there were these periods of very lean times and periods of more abundance. So genetically, they have sort of an extreme version of what we all have, which is this ability or propensity to hold on to extra calories when we do get them. And what happens is then we store them in two forms, belly fat and cholesterol. And it totally messes with our blood sugar and our insulin regulation. So we're hardwired to do that. So when we start messing with it, we can end up with situations that we don't expect.

And, you know, for people who are, you know, I always say, look, listen to your own body. That's what it always comes down. And again, it's like back to being body centered. We have to pay attention to how we are feeling, not what health experts say is the next latest craze. Because there's always going to be the next latest craze because there's always going to be the next latest craze based on some ancient something that just got discovered right there's i heard there was like a nordic diet based on some um you know like paleo man that was found and frozen in a cave and what was in his stomach i'm like really come on that well

how does that apply to right now think dialing into really how we're feeling and staying in touch, not with how somebody tells us we should feel, but how is that working for you? And that may be great one month and it may not be great the next month. So we have to be adaptable. Yeah. So it's not just I'm locked in and I'm good for life. It's like,

no, you're constantly sort of constantly paying attention. Exactly. And it changes at different ages, different life cycles. Imagine even seasonality probably. Absolutely. Seasonality, what's going on in the external demands of our life at any given time.

Right. The third R. Okay. So the next step is to repair. And this is when we're actually looking at the physical symptoms and physical systems that we have that can get disrupted when we get stuck in this survival overdrive syndrome. So what I have in the book is a set of questionnaires that you can do so that you can figure out which of your systems are most disrupted, or I honestly just recommend going through the whole program because that's the easiest way to do it,

and most of us can use a little bit of tweaking in each of our different systems. But the ones that get most out of order are usually our gut, our immune system, and our detoxification systems. So that's what we work on here through what foods can nourish those systems, what foods might be disrupting those systems, what little lifestyle tweaks that we can make to get those systems back on track, and then the herbs and supplements that really have the best evidence of effectiveness and safety behind them that can help reset those systems. the herbs and supplements that really have the best evidence of effectiveness and safety behind them that can help reset those systems. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts

that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required.

Charge time and actual results will vary. glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. Then from there, we go into recharging. And that's where we focus specifically on the adrenals and the thyroid, which are organs that basically are controlling our energy and our metabolism

and that are taking a huge hit for a lot of women right now. So we know that at least 30 million women in the United States are diagnosed with a thyroid problem, and at least 50% more have one that don't know it. It's a lot of people out there. And the adrenals in the book are really a metaphor for what I'm talking about, this overwhelm. It's not just the adrenals, but it's that whole stress response system. So I talk about what testing is really appropriate, how to do this without testing if you can, but for the thyroid, we definitely need some specific tests. If you think you have a thyroid problem going on, there are questionnaires in the book to help you sort

through that. And then what to do if you do actually have a thyroid problem, do you need medication or do you not? And then for adrenals, what can we do? And by the time you've gotten to that part of the book, you've kind of already been doing all the resets. And now we're doing the fine tuning with the herbs, supplements, and if you need them for thyroid hormone supplement. And then the fifth stage is replenish. And that's really how do we live with this going forward? And again, that's the difference between what's therapeutic, like what gets you well, and then what keeps you well. And so the replenish is really a philosophy on how to live life so that we're mostly keeping our energy level above the empty line on the gas tank. I mean, so many of us are so busy, kind of like putting on everyone else's oxygen mask

first. And women are especially notorious for doing that without taking ourselves, taking care of ourselves as well. So it's kind of elevating this idea that it's actually not only okay to take care of yourself, but better for everyone around you and the world if you do too. Yeah. I'm behind all that for women and men. But yeah, it's interesting because there are, it's interesting that, you know, and we've had conversations about this, that there are – and I've become much more aware over the years that there is a – women and men are not the same. Obviously, I've been aware of that for a long time.

But the program works for men just as well. Yeah, yeah. Actually, it's written for women because that's what I do. But so many – the biggest question I get from women is, can this work for my partner too? Right, yeah. And that's the bigger – a lot more inputs and soft inputs into the state of their well-being and their mental and emotional and physical well-being or lack thereof, where my experience has been guys tend to be a little more blunt force oriented. And maybe that's a big generalization. I'm not that person. It's so funny because I'm a little more blunt force and my husband is so gentle. It's so funny. Yeah.

But I agree with you on the whole. Yeah. But the bigger idea is really that there's nothing that we've talked about. I mean, there may be certain very specific storylines that I know have been researched and tend to be, you know, tend to spin more in the heads of different genders. But there is going to be a different yet equivalent storyline spinning in each person's head, which has the same detrimental effect. Absolutely. And the process is equally effective.

It is. It's totally equally effective. And couples doing it together, whatever your gender are, really, you know, that expression, if we want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. And if you do it together and do the plan, you can go fast and far. But when I taught at your camp GLP, was it two years ago, I guess now? I couldn't believe it. It was like an audience of 350 people.

And as many men came up to me after and wrote to me and have even stayed in touch and said, wow, that is exactly me. I'm in survival overdrive. I'm really constantly overwhelmed and not taking care of myself. The real reason I wrote the book Oriented Toward Women is that a lot of the conditions that we have as human beings, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, adrenal problems, thyroid problems, anything that's really related to fatigue, overwhelm, depression, weight, and autoimmunity tend to be much more dismissed by the medical establishment when they occur in women. Just to give you sort of an extreme example, 5,000 more women die a year of a heart attack in the hospital than men. And a couple of the symptoms of heart attack,

other than just overt chest pain, are overwhelming fatigue, not feeling that well, little nausea, some anxiety. And so when women report those symptoms, we tend to be dismissed as it's the modern way of saying it's all in our heads is depression, anxiety, you're just under stress because you're a mom, you know, you've got kids, whatever it is, whereas men actually tend to get a cardiac workup for it. So there are gender biases that are operating in the medical establishment right now that have actually led women, for example, on average to be dismissed or not identified as having an autoimmune disease for as long as five years. So women are going around exhausted, not feeling well, knowing something's wrong,

going to the doctor and literally being told, oh, it's just stress. It's just because you have little kids, just because you're juggling a lot at one time and get disproportionately diagnosed as having anxiety and depression than really looking at what's the underlying cause. And that is why I wrote this book as a voice for women, because it's in this area, particularly, it's very underrepresented. Yeah, no, and that's, I think, so needed and so powerful. It's like a tool almost to take and say, this is real. It is. And I can start to take some control over it. And also maybe, you know, if you start to say, well, and I need help with it, say, no, like, this is not, let's, we need to push this further. Yes, exactly. And that I need, you know, the joke is that men don't ask for directions.

Women equally, if that's even true, but women equally have a really hard time asking for help. You know, we're expected to sort of keep it all together, have it all together, have it together at work, have it together at home, have it together as mothers. And saying, I don't have it all together is not so easy for us. And there's even a lot of mommy judging going on, woman judging going on amongst ourselves. And so a lot of this is being able to say, I do need help. I'm not getting the help in my doctor's office because my doctor really has no clue because my doctor probably wasn't actually, it's not your doctor's an awful person who's just controlled by the pharmaceutical industry. Your doctor really didn't learn this in medical school. This is stuff I learned as a

midwife, as an herbalist, as a geek who reads psychoneuroimmunology journals, and then was able to piece it together with what I learned in medical school. But it's not what doctors are taught. And at the same time, as women, especially, we're so taught from the time we're teeny little girls to be nice, not question authority, play nice, you know, don't make waves. And so you're sitting there in the doctor's office, you know, you don't feel well, your doctor who may be a man or maybe a woman has no idea what's going on. They're overworked and overstressed because they're seeing 40 patients a day. And then says to you, your labs look fine, you're fine. It's probably just anxiety or depression.

And then you don't know how to say, but actually, no, this is new. And I know myself. And this isn't just anxiety or stress or depression. Instead, we internalize it, we take the prescription, we go home, either we don't fill the prescription and live with that confusion of, well, maybe this is just stress, maybe I do need to just breathe more, or we take the prescription. And those can have unintended consequences and side effects. Yeah. It all comes full circle to those two different definitions of SOS, right? Yeah.

One is the syndrome, and the other is it's time. And the syndrome is definitely affecting men as much as it is women. It really, we're all, I think, a little overwhelmed. Yeah. Yeah. No, definitely. And I do feel like the level of baseline stressors

in so many of our lives just because of the uncertain state of the world these days is elevated and rampant. I think it's probably no matter where you fall on the political spectrum, you're going to be feeling that living in the world today. And I think it's probably important to pause for a minute and own the fact that we may be living with a different baseline on a persistent basis and to be vigilant.

And the book is really about the fact that these stressors aren't going to go away anytime soon. So how can we sort out the stressors that we need to own and the ones that we actually don't? I have a friend, I think you know Pilar Gerasimo, and she talks about becoming a social deviant. And what she means by that is really taking back ownership of our lives and saying, yes, this may be a 24-7 world, but this is actually making me sick. So I actually need to turn it off at 10 o'clock at night, and I'm allowed to not look at my electronics for an hour before I go to bed.

And I actually don't have to pick up my phone and look at my text messages before I even barely open my eyes in the morning. I can actually wake up and breathe. And the beautiful thing is that not only does the world not stop, the world gets better because we become more effective people in it. It's also about the fact that we do need to continue to be adapting because the world is changing. It's changing really fast.

So how do we keep our adaptive abilities intact, right? It's not that stress is going to go away. It's that we can't push our adaptive abilities beyond what they need, which is stress, rest, stress, rest. We can't do stress, stress, stress, stress, stress, stress, stress, stress, and expect to not be paying for it with our health. But there are ways that we can meet that evolutionary sort of where we're at by taking care of ourselves in the ways that our bodies and our minds and our spirits sort of are meant to. Yeah. No. So we're hanging out. I love hanging out. Good life project. Went out for that phrase out to live a good life? What comes up?

You know, you asked me this question a few years ago. Did you go back and look at the video? No, it's so funny. I was trying to remember because in the beginning I wasn't asking it and I couldn't remember whether I'd actually, and I forgot to look at the video. I didn't know that you were going to ask me that today, but I do remember what I said. And you know what?

It has not changed for me. It's the same exact thing. It's presence. And, you know, I can even take that deeper now because for me, presence means I am here with you, looking at you in the eyes, and we're reaching all these people together. And I'm not worrying about yesterday. I'm not worrying about later or tomorrow. I'm like here, comfortable, feeling my body right at this moment in this chair. And if I can be present in my own life, if I can be present with the people around me, man, that's a good life to me. You know, that's a really good life

because we're just like, this moment is so good and so juicy. And yeah, so presence is it. If I can be present with my kids when I'm with them, if I can be present with my partner, with my patients, if I'm just like right there sharing the moment and connecting with you, or when I'm alone, if I'm right there dialing into what's going on in my body, in my world, the birds singing around me, it's all good. Thank you. Yeah.

So remember in the beginning, I mentioned that you might be able to get a signed copy of this book. Well, while I was sitting down with Aviva, I had a beautiful new hardcover copy of the book, and she autographed it, and I want to give it away to one lucky listener. How do you make yourself eligible for that? Super simple. There's nothing to buy or sell here. All you do is choose your favorite social media platform. It could be Facebook, could be Instagram, could be the Twitters, could be, you know, whatever you want. And share this episode. If you want to say something cool, something you've learned about it, that's awesome too. But make sure you include the hashtag GLPAviva. That's A-V-I-V-A. And do that by Wednesday, February 8th at, let's call it midnight, Eastern Standard Time, which is where I am, our studio is.

And then we will do a hashtag search and randomly choose somebody. And then I will reach out to you and say, hey, where do you live? And send a beautiful autographed hardcover copy of this book to you. So go share it around and share the ideas, share the conversation. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him!

Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch Series X available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations iPhone XS or later required charge time and actual results will vary.