This Podcast Is... Uncalled For - Monica McKitterick

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

Today we talk with Monica McKitterick, a health and wellness expert in central Texas.  Our discussion includes the health benefits of getting enough sleep, reducing stress, and our shared love of Duke basketball (she's a Duke grad).

Check the mic will go in live. Stories told they rise and dive. Topics fresh with every spin. You won't guess what's coming in. Every week and new surprise. Minds away. Never lies. Conversations bold and free.

Everybody, welcome to the podcast. I have another interesting guest with me today. So please go and introduce yourself. Sure. I like the word interesting. I'll take that. My name is Monica McKedric. I'm a family nurse practitioner, and I own a direct primary care office in central Texas. Direct primary care is a membership style medical office. So it's much like Netflix for your doctor or affordable concierge. I've been doing that for about six and a half years. And recently also published a book and an online course that is for health care providers looking to get into the same sort of. direct care space. So happy to be here. Yeah, happy, happy here. So one thing I found out about you when you contacted me about doing the podcast was that you are a Duke University grad. I am. I am. I'm a big blue devil fan. So it does tie kind of sort of into how the podcast guy's name in the first place. So a little backstory. My first podcast,

was a political podcast called Sunflower Brew. Sunfire because we're in the Sunflower States in Kansas. I'm in the Kansas City area. And brew because we would always drink craft beers during our recordings. And we had a habit of taking photos with our guests. And one of these photos, I happened to be wearing a Duke University hoodie. And one of my political friends who happened to. to be a University of Kansas fan said that's what it sure is on called for.

Yeah, Kansas fans don't tend to like Duke fans very much. I think Kansas fans hate Duke fans more than vice versa. But I think that's just because they don't have anybody else to hate where Duke fans have Carolina to hate. And so, yeah, it's interesting when I meet Kansas people, they're like, oh, Duke. And I'm like, oh, I don't really mind Kansas, actually. I mean, there was like a game or two where things didn't go quite as we wanted.

But, you know, we won't talk about. And also for full disclosure, I'm a University of Missouri, Kansas City grad, which is the closest division one school to KU. I would like to see us make the tournaments once in my life. But until then, go Duke. I like it. primarily because Mike Shashefsky and I are, we're fellow Polacks and all that.

And I've always respected him as a coach and everything. Yeah. Coach K is pretty great. I actually got the honor to meet the man twice. And he's a good guy. Awesome. Awesome. So health concierge, if I'm hearing you correctly.

Yeah, close to. So the difference between a direct primary care office and a Concierge medicine is oftentimes cost. So direct to primary care is typically cheaper under $100 a month where concierge is usually in the $1,200 to $2,000 to $1,000 range. And so concierge doctors tend to take even less patients than direct primary care, but they also oftentimes will also bill insurance where direct primary care does not. So similar in terms of the services you get in terms of being able to schedule appointments

and using the text option and all sorts of things, just a difference in the pricing and the structure behind it. Interesting, interesting. I'm fortunate to have to have insurance through the exchange and have my doctors within a certain hospital system that have all sorts of different services, urgent care. That came in handy this past week, actually. Oh, no.

Yeah. So, it's been hot. It's been hot. I got a little dehydrated and had what I would describe as stroke-like symptoms, but it's not a full stroke. Went to my, went to an urgent care. They said nothing much we can do. You got to go to the emergency room. Went to the emergency room, sat there for a couple of hours, getting fluids. And just followed up with my regular doctor a couple of days ago and said, yeah, you're doing all right. But if anything happens, let's know. Yeah. Yeah.

And direct department care is not a replacement for insurance. It's actually a really great supplement too. So a lot of the things that we fix for people is the struggle to get an appointment, the struggle to get somebody to listen to you. Because when you walk into an office as an insurance-based. patient, you are actually not the customer, your insurance company is. And so that provider has to do what your insurance company says, which oftentimes is not exactly the best, right? I went to school for nine years to learn how to take care of people, not have an insurance company tell me how to do it.

And so that's where direct care can come into play with insurance. So I'm not going to take insurance to see you in my office to do any of our office visits, but for things outside the office, So if you have to go to urgent care, the ER, something you need surgery, then that's where that insurance comes into play. So to be honest, it's to have the best of both worlds, which would be like a high deductible plan, which covers all that catastrophic stuff, and then having direct primary care to keep you out of the hospital. So it's a difference between practicing health care and sick care.

Unfortunately, our system is very sick care focused where we don't actually do things until you already are sick. And the direct care side is much more preventative and running tests before. things happen to try to prevent heart attacks and strokes and diabetes and all those lovely things. Yeah. Yeah. So I've had the fortune of having a number of health experts on just this past calendar

year talking about all different aspects of what we're discussing. It comes in. A lot of his diet and exercise. Oh, yes. From what I'm hearing. Yeah, you know, I like to say my four pillars of health are, sleep, stress, nutrition, and body movement. It all boils down to that.

So something like 80% of health care issues, chronic health care problems, are caused by stress. And unfortunately, we live in a society that is full of it. And so if you have a health care provider who has not said those four words to you, then you probably need a new one. But just my opinion. Right. Right. And too is correct.

My doctor is a pretty good doctor to have these, uh, discuss. questions with. That's great. So I don't think we talked, we talked about to diet and exercise on the podcast. I don't think we talked much about sleep and stress all that much. Yeah. So if there's one thing I can tell you to do to make yourself a healthier person, it is to go to bed.

So unfortunately, we live in a society where we stay up way too late and we get up way too early. And so the average person, as much as people will fight me on this, the average person needs seven to nine hours of sleep a night. And that is like restful in bed, eyes closed. Not I'm in bed and looking at my phone or watching TV. It's eyes closed and I'm actually resting. So when we sleep is when our body goes through apoptosis, which is where we get rid of all the bad cells and create the new cells. It's also when hormones are produced. So especially for For men, testosterone, for women, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, as well as cortisol, which is our stress hormone, as well as insulin.

They're all produced at night while we sleep. And so when we are cutting our body short of sleeping, we are just aging ourselves like none other. And I'm guilty. In my 20s, I used to say sleep is overrated. I'll sleep when I'm dead. Totally. Like, not true.

And so especially when you're younger, you can kind of get away with that. But as we start to age, it's even harder and harder. but I will tell you if you want to stay young and healthy, getting at least seven hours of sleep at night will make a world of difference. There's a lot of people that struggle with sleep, but you have to really give it effort, right? Like just going and laying down is not going to do the job.

You need a ritual. You need the, I wash my face, I brush my teeth, I do these things, I read a book, I turn off the screens, like blue light is a real thing. And so making sure that you set your, up for success is really a key. And we see a lot of women as they get into that paring menopausal world, start having sleeping problems. They specifically, they wake up between 2 and 4 a.m. And it's oftentimes a decline in progesterone, which is one of their sex hormones that's just not

talked about nearly as much as estrogen. And so any ladies out there that are listening to this that are over the age of 35 and find themselves waking up between 2 and 4 in the morning and can't go back to sleep, go talk to your provider about progesterone. I've made a lot of, more friends with women by giving them progester than anything else. And I'm really fun. I mean, I make friends easily. But that is a key to life is sleeping. And to be fair, I don't think we have them a female listeners in that age. That's okay. I bet there's some dudes out there who are with a woman who keeps waking up in the middle of the night and she's real cranky all day long. So go tell you. I am not one of those men, but that, okay, good enough.

I've been chronically single, okay. You know, that's okay, too. Yeah. All right. So that's asleep. Any thoughts on the stress side of things so that we can touch on that? Yeah. My first bit of information is moved to another country where they aren't so busy.

I hear you there that so much craziness happened in our country. And especially down in Texas, there's a lot of craziness happening. There's always craziness in Texas because sometimes I should know my mother was from Texas actually soon. Yeah. Yeah. I've only been here for six years. And so I'm still getting used to the Texas sized ideas, egos and everything else that

goes with that. But yeah, so we in the U.S., we want to make everything bigger, stronger, faster, and better yesterday. And so we stress ourselves out over everything. We also want to be the best at everything. We want to be the best dad, the best boss, the best employee, the best soccer player, whatever your things are, right? And so we stress ourselves out about them. And we don't ever give ourselves time to just sit and reset. So decreasing stress in your job. If you can do that, great, awesome.

But there are definitely some ways that you can decrease stress on your own. And that can be through body movement. It can be through yoga, meditation. I'm terrible at meditating, but there are some really great apps out there that can help you with some guided meditation sort of things. Just sitting down and turning your phone off. So I now have a rule that my phone gets put away at 7 p.m. Because I will straight up doom scroll all day long. Like social media just keeps your brain moving. And especially when we read comments and we get stressed out and people are stupid.

Like, tell you, people have this now unlimited way to just express their opinions. And sometimes you don't agree with them. And that's okay, but just turn it off. So making sure that you take time to be quiet, just sit quietly and not stress yourselves out. But yes, if you have too much stress in life, A, you're going to get real old, real fast. But also, your stress hormone will also make you gain weight. And then that leaves you hold on a whole other rabbit hole of the world. So even if it's five minutes of just sitting, even if it's in the restroom, right?

Like so many people now take their phones into the restroom. Like leave it outside and just like sit for a minute and just relax. So yeah, self-care is not a selfish thing. We all should be doing it. All right. All right. Where's on those apps that you had talked about? That's a A.m. A.m. A. A.m. A. F that you recommend. Yeah. So one of my favorite is called yoga. So yoga,

needra is a type of restful yoga where you just sit in a chair or lay down. But it, it's mindful. So it will tell you different parts of your body to focus on. And so instead of just, like, sitting there and letting your mind wander, because that's what happens to me. It actually keeps you focused on things. And so I find it's very helpful, not only if I am, if I am stressed out, but also if I'm trying to fall asleep and I'm struggling, it will help me from thinking about all those things I need to do and help me just really sit down and relax. There's also a lot of apps out there that will turn your phone off. That's probably the best one. So go find one of those that makes you turn your phone off at a certain hour and actually listen to it. but I will tell you, I think our constant use of our computers in our hand is not helping our

stress situation. So just turn it off. Turn off your notifications as well. You don't need your email on your phone because guess what's really hard to respond to on an email? Right? Yeah. Wait till it's on your computer. You don't need to read your email. It'll be fine. Turns out there was a time when you couldn't be reached at any moment. And unless you're like an emergency room physician or, you know, a cardiologist, I'm going to say your emails are not life and death. Like they can wait until you get back to your computer. So stop using your phone is probably the number one way or move to another country where, you know, things are a little slower. All right. Yeah. Good advice. Any other advice that you haven't mentioned yet that could be applied to

reducing stress, getting enough sleep and all the stuff to help us get more healthy. And I think we'll go and close with that. Yeah, I would say one of the things that has really helped me is truly defining what success means to me. So I think so many of us are chasing quote unquote success and that is a number, a revenue number, a number of hours I've worked, some sort of of thing that likely was put in your mind by someone else, right? And so I ran into this as I was growing my clinics. I was like, I'm going to grow 10 more clinics and do all the things. And I literally made myself physically ill.

And so I had to really step back and really think about what success means to me. And success means to me spending time with my family and not being super stressed out and not having to go to all these events without wanting to, right? And so I would say you really need to pay attention to what you define as success and worth because those two things should not be tied to a number. They should be tied to a lifestyle. And if you're not living that lifestyle, then you need to rethink how you're going to get there. And that will naturally just make life a little easier. So it's probably my best piece of advice is really define what success means to you and not what you think it should mean basically.

off of what everyone else thinks. All right. All right. I think that's a great way to close. So thank you for coming on. We can talk a little more after I turn the mic off and everything. And for everyone listening, thank you so much for listening. And we will talk again soon.

This podcast is Uncalled for. It is hosted, produced, and edited by myself, Mike, Sharnevsky. Our opening music is the, this podcast is uncalled for a theme. Created cursi of suno.com. SUNO dot com. Our outro music is Sleep Seeds by Graham Bull. Licensed under Creative Commons attribution license. You can find his music and a lot of the other music we use for the podcast at free music archive. and thank you to Micah for appearing today. Let's go to geese. Please support the podcast and purchase our exclusive uncalled for merchandise, t-shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, stickers, and so much more. Go to www.com.comfacepress.com slash uncalled for pod.

Thank you so much for listening. We will see you next time.