The Stress Cycle And Why You Are Stuck In It

Stress Is Not Just Mental It Is Biological 

Most people think of stress as something that lives in the mind. A busy schedule. A tough conversation. A long to do list. But stress is not just a thought process. It is a full body response. 

When your brain perceives a threat whether real or emotional your nervous system activates a cascade of physiological changes. Your heart rate increases. Hormones like cortisol and adrenaline are released. Your body prepares to fight flee or freeze. 

This is not a flaw. It is a survival mechanism. The problem is not the stress itself. The problem is what happens after. 

Transcript

Recording Started

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to Wellness Wednesday, everybody. We are extremely excited that you're here. I love these Wellness Wednesdays, these podcast episodes, because I learn something new every single time that I learned something new every single time that we are on here with a new expert. We created Wellness Wednesday like three years ago because we believe that everybody needs to bring new wellness technology or new wellness information to the masses, right? That sometimes it's not readily available or there's so much that it's absolutely chaotic, right? And you put chaos if you think the wellness space is kind of loud, there's all these differing opinions, you don't know who to listen to, it's coming at you from every direction, right? And so we wanted to get experts together to talk about what is an important health topic that people want to learn about, what's really important to people, and give us things that make sense, that they're using, that's working for other people, and that's why we're here. My name is Shauna Mucklow from the middle of Nebraska. I have been a wellness lawyer for about 10 years, but it didn't start out like that. I'm just telling you. About, you know, I'm from the Midwest. I'm from Nebraska. And I think that we just believe that what we what was on store shelves is what we should eat. And, you know, we didn't have a ton of knowledge coming at us in education. And we just did what we did and hope for the best. And I decided when I was, my doctor called me up and said, listen, I've run across the future of wellness, and I think you're gonna want to learn a little bit more about this. All of a sudden, it made me really start being really intrigued about being proactive in my health. Write the word proactive in the chat if you're like me too, because I knew if I didn't change something, I'd end up on the same paths as my parents, and they were on multiple multiple medications for different things later in life. And I just didn't want that path for myself. And so if that's you, I'm so happy you're here. We're gonna talk to one of my good friends, Dr. Jess, who is a chiropractor up in South Dakota and has so much knowledge. Just wait, she's one of the best educators I've ever heard on all things wellness. She's just a wealth of knowledge and really easy to listen to. So I'm so happy that you're here with us, Jess. And we are gonna be talking about an important topic that she hears about every single day. Stress. Write the word stress if you're like, yes, I know what that means. I feel it. And we're gonna dive into that topic today. But just tell us a little bit more about you and why you are considered such an expert.

SPEAKER_01 2:42

Okay, so well, thank you for the intro. I'm as uh Shauna said, I'm a chiropractor in South Dakota, in the middle of nowhere, South Dakota. And I uh I have been intentionally curious, always adding tools to my tool belt um for quite some time. So I've been practicing chiropractic for 18 years now. Oh yeah. Yeah, it goes fast. And I also do acupuncture and an allergy elimination technique called NAET. I have all sorts of tools in my house and in my office, in addition to my my three big ones that I just named. And I am I am also certified in in a technique called quantum leap technique. So all the things natural. I'm always looking for ways to improve health naturally. And how I became an expert in this area would be one of those, actually, one of those like New Year's things. Like we're we're kind of in April now. You're kind of past that first quarter where people made the resolutions, they dropped off, they maybe started something new, and now kind of here they all in this like little, like they're actually kind of ready now to do something. But it was in that January time frame, and I was just kind of looking at like, you know, what do I want that year to look like? And at that time I had four little kids, a busy husband. He's a he's a farmer, as you probably figured out, living in the middle of nowhere South Dakota. But he's a farmer, super busy, and uh waiting list practice. And I had that feeling of like, man, like if this is successful, like show me something else, God. Like, show me something better than this. I I felt like what my family got from me, my husband, my kids, was kind of what was left over after I was done practicing. And I was burning like both ends of the clock, getting up early to get in the workout in, to get all the things done while the kids were asleep before and after, right? All of the hats that you moms wear and dads do, and just that multiple hat syndromes. So stress was something I, you know, personally have experienced as long as well as helping patients deal with too. So this prayer time in this uh resolution thing, I was like, God, just show me something better. And I and at the time I was taking a lot of supplements sold only through physicians that I had researched or had been offered by someone and then researched, but mostly sold to physicians only. And yet my hair was falling out like crazy. I had rashes on my neck and my arm. I had acne that I didn't even have as a teenager. I had spent, you know, most of the last decade either pregnant or breastfeeding. And it wasn't immediately after our fourth baby, it was a little ways after that. And, you know, all my labs were showing normal. Anybody told been told their stuff was normal and yet things just didn't feel right. Like I just always felt tired. And, you know, then you go to ask somebody and they're like, oh yeah, well, they're tired too. Like it's just normal. Everybody's to everybody's tired, everybody. That's just a normal thing. This is just what it's like to be whatever your age is. Anybody ever told you that? Like, you know, like this, this is just what happens when you're 30, or that's just happens when you're 40, or this is just how it feels to be 60. You know, everybody has this idea that what the way they feel is just the way it is. You know what I'm saying? Um I know what you're saying. Yeah, so all the stuff was there, and I'm just like, oh God, like just show me a better way. And in in May that year, I was introduced to a test to something called activation. And it took me a little bit to actually look at the studies. And then when I looked at it, it took me a minute to even believe it could be true. And then once I once I really saw the studies, I thought, wow, God, like if this is real, I am going to bless a lot of people with activation. And and I have. And it it's a beautiful, beautiful tool, something I had never seen, transformed my health in a short period of time. All those things that I talked about, my hair was the first thing. My my next appointment with my hairdresser, she was like, What are you doing? You have hair growing everywhere on your head where women cannot grow hair. And I'm like, Yay! You know, I was sleeping through the night, waking up before my alarm. I had energy to finish my day. I just felt like I was showing up in all the ways that I showed up as a better version of myself. And then I've been able to see other people have that same thing. And, you know, there's a there's a another doctor who who once said to me, like, you know, your level of health is gonna be based on your level of activation. Like, no matter what you're doing right now, when you get activated, your life is gonna be entirely different. And I I can totally say that that has been the case for me and everyone I've been able to share this with.

SPEAKER_00 7:45

So that's we I love it. Okay, so not only it are is she trained like professionally in all these modalities to help people and help people in their health, but you've also had your own personal experience, which I think is really powerful because you understand what people are going through. And so I I mean, I was much of the same, right? I was 36 years old when I was introduced to this concept of activation. And I was like, I guess I just thought it was normal. I just wrote it off to like, that's what tired, busy moms are supposed to feel like. They're supposed to fall asleep at nine o'clock. They're supposed to wake up with a mild headache every day. They're supposed to have low energy, they're supposed to have brain fog, right? And then as I began to get activated and really pay attention and change some ways I approach in my health, I was like, whoa, that ain't normal because I don't feel like that anymore. So we are so excited for y'all to hear a little bit more about this. But um, let's talk about stress, like in general. Like there's lots of different types of stress, Jess. Will you kind of explain like your philosophy on that and what stresses do you?

SPEAKER_01 8:50

Yeah, totally. So, I mean, I obviously as a chiropractor, there's just, you know, that's what we're looking for is to remove that that nervous system stress in your body. And and when we talk about it in the in the nervous system, we we talk about the sympathetic nervous system, right? Your fight, flight, or freeze response. That is literally the rushing mom's syndrome, right? Like that's going from here to here to here to here to here to here. Like it's not okay to take a break because you got things to get done, right? And uh, and then there's the the parasympathetic nervous system, which is our quiet and our calm and our our feminine, our our reserved side. And we need this balance of both. We need some of both. So when I think about stress, I think about what state can you create in your body that creates ease? And when we look at ease in the body, it just is a different feeling than dis-ease, right? Disease. So when we stay in that constant stress, like it's good for us to have stress, like bits of stress here and there are necessary for us to grow and to develop. Think about a muscle. Like, if you want to get stronger muscles, you're gonna have to stress them a little bit, right? If you want to grow in your personal development, you're gonna have to stretch a little bit. Like there's some of that stress that we we do have that is absolutely necessary in our bodies. But what's a problem for us is when we get stuck in that, when we just we have so few moments of ease that we often even forget to breathe. And so that's that's to me stress. There's there are totally different kinds of stress that add to that stress. I look at just the, you know, our perception or our emotional or a mental view, that lens through which we're looking at the world can affect us. But then we've got, we've got, when we talk chiropractic, we talk about toxins, trauma, and thoughts, the the three T's. So I'm just gonna kind of keep it super simple, talking to you about things that you probably can relate to. So that's your your thoughts, like, man, life is hard. This sucks, da-da-da-da-da-da. Like that kind of stuff, that'll stress you out. I mean, think of how much easier it is when you look at where the world like life is simple than life is hard. So different, right? But then we've got toxins, things we're putting in and on our bodies. And if you live where we do, whoa, whoa, whoa, like in the United States, that is, because it's different. And every toxic load is different in every area, even of the United States. But our toxic exposure has so has gone up so exponentially. Like the things your grandparents were exposed to is not what your kids are going to be exposed to. We have just this massive amount of toxic load. And it's not just in our environments, right? It's on our, it's in our foods, it's in our water, it's in our air. It's all the things that you require to live, right? And then, and then we've got traumas, things that happen to us, things we physically do to our body. And I'm not just talking about like a car accident or like a major fall. We're also talking about, you know, the workouts, the the weekend warrior activities, you know, like hoe in that garden till it's done, you know, stuff like that. We just have these minor traumas and things that happen. So stress, we all have it, right? It's just a matter of what we're doing or how we're able to process it or and or view it and and still be able to find places and times of ease within it.

SPEAKER_00 12:21

It's so interesting because you think about, you know, I told you 10 years I've been on this mission of like, okay, how do I create? I guess that's a great way to play it. Think about it. How do I create more ease, more moments of ease in my life so that I can be preventative instead of reactive, right? And so, like, that's what I I believe that all of us want to create. That's why you're probably here because you want the knowledge. Knowledge is power. How do I create more ease, not only my everyday life, but my week and my month and my year? And that's what we're striving for, right? And so I I love this conversation. So tell us, okay, we know like stress, stress where it's kind of coming from from the outside, three T's, right? We all we got that. It's simple soup. Thanks for keeping it simple, by the way. And that was perfect. But now, what are ways besides like obviously chiropractic, tick at the top of one of the top of the list, because it definitely starts to ease the nervous system. We if you don't know that, that's one of the beautiful things about chiropractic that I adore about it. And but what are some other ways that you tell your patients that there, I mean, there's a lot of different ways, but what are some of your favorite ways that they could create more ease, less stress in their life?

SPEAKER_01 13:39

Well, I mean, and definitely the adjustment is a huge thing because you're literally able to impact that on-off switch in our body, basically, of like we want the power on for some more parasympathetic response and that, and then power down that sympathetic response, just give that body more ease. And then we got to look at basic things. We got to look at those sources of the three Ts. What can you actually change? You know, sometimes it is just looking at the toxic things you're putting in your body and reconsidering like, are you putting in actual real whole food that God created? Or are you putting in synthetic process stuff? Your body has to figure out what the heck to do with it, right? And and then, so those are some basic things. What are we eating? What are we drinking? And you know, the very first thing you got to think about is light. And we were just talking about this with the blue light blacking glasses. You know, people once upon a time, they would wake up with the sun, they would go to sleep with the sun, they would get sun all throughout the day, and they rarely had exposure to icky lighting. And blue lighting was blue light, it was just like a rare, rare thing for you talked about we're we're living in a world our great our great grandparents didn't.

SPEAKER_00 14:47

That's an example right there.

SPEAKER_01 14:49

Exactly. And but we our mitochondria, our cells run on light. And so I always I like to think, you know, think of yourself like a plant. And when you start with that, like with a plant, what's a plant need? It needs, it needs light, right? It needs air, it needs water, it needs soil and nutrients, basic things. You need those things too. So if we're gonna get out of stress, we got to look at basic requirements of the body. So those are those are some things when we think about humans that way, it makes perfect sense, right? We're gonna need those basic building blocks. So that's one of the things. Chiropractic, all the basic things and air, breathing. Golly ge, you can do so much with breath. Even three slow breaths will totally transform your minute, which will then transform just a little bit longer than that, and just a little bit longer than that. So I like to remind people to breathe. If you've not looked into breath work, five minutes of breath work would change your entire day. Guarantee it. It's free too. So free and easy to do. Other things I like to use, I love, I love red light therapy. Again, going back to that light thing. We got to look at the things that work that actually support our cells. And activation, what I love about activation, probably my absolute favorite thing, I actually call it the chiropractor's BFF. And it's because it supports the chiropractic adjustment from the inside out and really impacts the stress pathways and cuts your stress in a third. Literally taking one tablet and drinking one shot of liquid collagen. That's the chiropractor's BFF, supports the body from the inside out.

SPEAKER_00 16:29

So it's so fantastic to think about that, Jess, because you when I started diving into more of this information, right? I started realizing like I I thought of stress really like a surface level stress. You know what I mean? Like really the like kind of the thoughts, right? Surface level stress. Oh my gosh, I'm so like there's so str life is so stressful, right? And that can like start harming the body. But when I started realizing, like you said, that there's like this stress response system, and when that gets out of whack, that can really like really affect your immune system, right? That can really affect your immune system and how it triggers, which then leads to autoimmune disorders. There's also things in our cells. There's something called oxidative stress in our cells that can bog down our cells. And when you think about your cells that run the body, honestly, we have a saying here at Wellness Wednesday to be well fixed the cell, right? Like, and it's that simple that you can gunk up your cells with different kinds of stress. So let's dive into that activation. You mentioned the chiropractor's BFF. When you think, okay, these are the two products she just mentioned. We're gonna dive a little bit deeper, but let's talk really quick. Activation, what the heck does that mean?

SPEAKER_01 17:42

Yes, what does that mean? And so probably one of my favorite questions is like people have heard of activation when it comes to their bank card, and that's about it, right? But I like to think about supplementation like we got a glass, and with supplementation, we are just going to pour something into the glass to fill it up. And with activation, it's like having a self-filling cup. The cup just fills up when it needs to fill up on its own. And what happens with activation is we take something and it turns on the genes inside of our cell. So it starts a pathway. It's like giving the signal to the cell, like, hey, we need more of this. We need to do this job. And with those two specifically, one of them, the tablet, the NRF2, it turns on that pathway, which is the most potent detoxification pathway in the body. So instead of just taking antioxidants like we would with supplementation, take drinking, you know, filling up, pouring into that cup, instead of pouring into the cup, we start making our own antioxidant enzymes, things like glutathione, catalase, and superoxide dismutase, things you may have heard of, or maybe this is your first time, but those are the most powerful scavengers in our body. They go after this damaging stuff in our cells, and they they attack them, they attach to them and neutralize them, so they can't damage our cells even further. So it's making antioxidants instead of taking the antioxidants. And then with the collagen, it's a similar thing. You're instead of just pouring collagen in, which is what almost every collagen on the market does, they just supplement collagen. This one it supplements collagen too. It does pour in a little bit of 10 different peptides. Most have one to three. But what's cool about this collagen is it turns on the genes so that we start making our own collagen. And it also downregulates a gene that degrades our collagen. So we don't break down the collagen that we currently have as much. And that is a huge, huge thing when you can impact the genes so that you start making collagen again. So you stop breaking it down as quickly. And when you have the two together, there's like a whole nother synergy to that.

SPEAKER_00 20:07

It's absolutely crazy because when I'm hearing you talk about like the make antioxidants because it's like the scavenger of all the bad, like that's what antioxidants do. It's so funny. So I did not ever put it together. Antioxidants, ox like, think about oxidation, right? Oxidation is built up by bad stuff. Thinking oxidation, like I think of oxidation as rusting, right? Like, so oxidation in our cells, bad, bad, bad. Antioxidants take away that oxidation. I'm like, why did I never put two and two together that way? Like, you know, it just clicked in my brain a couple years ago.

SPEAKER_01 20:44

It's like, it's oxidation is the fire. Yeah, absolutely. For real. So basic. That's it. It's so basic.

SPEAKER_00 20:54

And we've all heard about, I mean, like, I remember hearing about you need to eat your antioxidants, you need to take your antioxidants. And when people get sick, they go grab emergency because it's a great antioxidant, right? Pour them and pourmen, pourmen to help our body. How powerful do you think it is that somebody figured out a formula to turn on your body's own antioxidant production? How powerful do you think that this product is, Jess, in your opinion?

SPEAKER_01 21:22

That is the one product that I have yet to find a human on the face first that could not benefit from taking it. It's 18 times more effective than taking the components separately. It's got low, low sub-therapeutic dosing. So even the youngest of person can take it. I have recommended as young as to a two less than two year old, one of my very best friends, little guy. And we saw incredible changes in what he had going on as well. So really powerful product. The guy that developed that product also won a Nobel Prize for discovering. An antioxidant enzyme. I mean, there is so much solid research on that. When you get done researching that, if you don't have like chills and just this desire to share it with other people, like I wonder if you have a pulse because it's so stinking incredible.

SPEAKER_00 22:19

It still is. It really is incredible. I, and I don't know that anything could be more simple. Not only is it powerful, it's one little yellow, I don't even have a tablet, but one little yellow tablet that you take every single day. It couldn't be more simple. Turning on this antioxidant factory inside of us, reviving it, because most of ours is slowed down and shut off because we live in this world. Our great grandparents didn't, right? And we and it's just shutting us down, shutting us down. So we're cleaning out that cell, and we are, and when a healthy cell can run a run a body more efficiently, period, right? Oh, for sure. And then you talked about this collagen. So this collagen is is also one of the most simplest and by the way, yummiest thing you could take. It comes in a little bottle. You open it up, you can drink it down every single day. It's like a little best little shot you'd ever take in your day.

SPEAKER_01 23:08

And how powerful is collagen and important is collagen to the body, just so when we talk about protandem as the fire crew, the fire department, I like to think of the collagen like the construction crew. We're coming back in to build things up. We're looking at structure. We're looking at all of our tissue layers. So as a chiropractor, this is where we're looking at like not just joints, but we're looking at joints, bones, cartilage, discs, um, blood vessel lining, gut lining, brain lining, lung lining, skin. Every single lining you can possibly think of in the body has some kind of collagen component. So this is way better than hair, skin, and nails. I mean, that's a huge benefit too. I like that as well. I mean, I like looking younger and things being tighter and higher. Like, that's great too. But just imagine that happening to the inside and the inside in all of your tissues as well. And so, again, like this combo for chiropractors, this is like you have yet to see what an adjustment can be like until you have this combo on board, too. Like just holding your adjustments better, um, you know, because that stress load is down too, um, like cut into a third. That hamster wheel thing that you have going on when you're in stuck in stress, it goes cut gets cut in a third when you take these two together. And your collagen density is going up by double.

SPEAKER_00 24:40

It that it's phenomenal. And I know, I know that you have seen gazillions of different collagens, right? And you've seen the the way that they work in people's body. You put your hands on so many people's bodies, even in a month, right? You know if something's working or something's not pretty quickly just by feeling them and touching them. And you know what I mean? And I know that you've told me that there's nothing that compares to this combo that you've ever seen somebody take. And you would almost say, besides those basic things you talked about, you know, air, water, food, this is so important because no matter what, the toxins in our environment will build up inside of our body and keep us in a stress cycle.

SPEAKER_01 25:22

100%. And then movement. And and one thing cool I love about movement is people think they gotta like join a HIT class or, you know, do some sort of Zumba or something crazy. You know, you do whatever you love doing. Like you just moving your body is huge and beneficial. But I one thing I truly love for people to do is just to walk. 20 minutes of walking for the purpose of walking every single day was found to be as effective as taking two antidepressants simultaneously. And when you when you think about that just for a second, like you don't have to be depressed, you don't have to be on an antidepressant to understand that movement creates a beautiful thing inside of our brain where we start to release more specific chemicals that help us feel good. And when we feel good, we feel less stressed. Our stress goes down, that sympathetic nervous system can calm a little bit again. There's more ease in the body. So movement, huge. You were designed to move. Like you were designed to move.

SPEAKER_00 26:26

So I I know one of your favorite things is the combination of these two together. And that is because of what it does for people. But there is some research that tells us what it's going to do for people, and you get pretty geeked out and excited about that. Will you explain why you think not only are these products important individually for all the reasons you just stated, but why it, what they do in combination that really does it do exactly what this call is is stop that stress cycle in its tracks.

SPEAKER_01 27:03

Yeah. So, so the the uh the because it is the fire department and the construction crew when you come together, and this is literally what the study shows in really complex terms. So if you're super nerdy and you really love geeking out, whoever invited you here can share that study with you and you can get into all the nitty-gritties because there, there's over 18,000 genes that are impacted by this combination, and uh uh over 400 that were substantially influenced, substantially influenced by the combo. But but but they literally one of the huge pathways is the through the NF Kappa B pathway, which is where stress perpetuation is. That's that hamster wheel, guys. You're stuck in the stress cycle and you just cannot get off. You can't get off, you're just there all the time. And even when you try to be calm, you just get it going. It just keeps going. But when you take this combo, it cuts that pathway down by a third. So you're taking one tablet, drinking one shot of deliciousness, and your stress perception, perpetuation is cut in a third. In a third. I like I don't have a study like that on any of the other things I can recommend to you for stress. I don't. And and I and I've got a lot more than what we've even recommended here. I'm just giving you the basic stuff so you can get started. Because if you don't make lowering your stress a priority, you will have dis-ease in your body. This ease will come from chronic stress, 100%. And that there's just so this is huge, huge, huge, huge from the cellular side, from the inside out. You can literally help yourself to lower that stress and just and and the study is uh is so cool, guys. So many different pathways, so many different cells, immune system immune system cells that are huge as well, relative to oxidation, relative, relative to repairing, relative to recovery, relative to lots of things you don't want to have, lots of things you do not want to have. And I'm telling you that because when you look at those cells, those cell lines get studied, those pathways get studied with conditions, symptoms, disease, things you don't want. And if you have stress forever for long periods of time, chronic stress and dis-ease in your body, you will get this ease. So it's just a huge thing, Sean. So huge. That third less stress and and again, that construction crew thing, when they come together, it's 100% increase in collagen density in eight weeks. Eight weeks.

SPEAKER_00 29:53

They're shocked by their even their own appearance, which you said, like you're not gonna throw that away. Everybody likes to feel, feel, and look younger at the same time. That's an incredible benefit. So I hope tonight what you got from this is we're all living in stress. We all admitted it in the beginning, a version of stress. We just learned about something that uh not only cleans out the cells and like turns on your like construction crew and takes the garbage crew, right? Like takes everything out. But we're also, if you do this in combination, we've simplified your routine, honestly. If you do two things for your health outside of the basics of movement, breathing, air, and good water and good nutrition to the best of your ability, and you put these two on board, you are putting yourself in a situation to have more ease than stress in your life. Like, truly, that's what it is. And I hope that we've simplified it and we've told you enough. And if not, then go look at that study. Go look at that study and read it because every study that I I mean, like I am not a person who's gonna understand all the big words. Like, I don't have the education Dr. Jess does. But when I looked at the study individually and together, I am like holy moly. I need that in my life, and everyone I know needs it too. So thank you, Jess, so much. Everybody give Jess some love. Did I not tell you that Dr. Jess makes everything simple to understand? I love listening her to her educate. She's not only a wealth of knowledge, she's so easy to listen to. So, Jess, I know you're busy. Thank you for giving us all your time tonight. We appreciate you so much. And everybody, you can find this episode of Wellness Wednesday on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. And be looking for our and make sure to hit save and then you'll get a notification on the podcast of our next episode as soon as it releases. Every week we are talking to a no new health expert on a new health topic to continue to up level the knowledge so that everybody can be more reactive in their health or proactive in their health instead of reactive. So thank you all so much. Blessings to you. Thanks for joining us. Thank you.