Latest / Cortisol Coach / Chronic Fatigue, Brain Fog, and Inflammation | Why Autoimmune Disease Is on the Rise in Women Over 40 with Dr. Leland Stillman

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Chronic Fatigue, Brain Fog, and Inflammation | Why Autoimmune Disease Is on the Rise in Women Over 40 with Dr. Leland Stillman · Cortisol Coach

0:04
Welcome to the Cortisol Coach Podcast. If you're exhausted, gaining weight,
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losing your hair, your anxiety is through the roof, or the depression and emotional
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overwhelm have completely consumed your life, or maybe you're not showing up
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as the wife and mom you want to be.
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You've spent years never feeling good enough, taking care of everyone else while
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you quietly fell apart, and your body has been keeping score of every single bit of it.
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The chronic stress, hormonal shifts, perimenopause, menopause,
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whatever season you're in, cortisol is making all of it worse.
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And until you heal the root, nothing changes.
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But this show here is about to change that.
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I'm your host, Christine Marie, Holy Spirit-led Biblical Mindset Coach,
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and I have helped thousands of women heal their hormones and cortisol levels.
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Every week, I bring you leading experts, doctors, and coaches who will help
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you heal your body, mind emotions and your spirit so that you can step into
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every kingdom purpose that God has planned for your life so go grab your cup
1:02
of coffee and let's jump in.
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Today's guest is going to challenge every single thing that you've been told
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about chronic illness. Dr. Leland Stillman is a physician who did something
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that most physicians won't do.
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He walked away from the conventional system not because he gave up on medicine,
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but because he refused to give up on patients.
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After earning his medical degree from the University of Virginia and completing
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his residency at Maine Medical Center, he saw the same story over and over again.
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Women were struggling with fatigue, autoimmune issues, and these chronic symptoms
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that kept leading to labs, prescriptions, and never getting the full answer.
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I'm sure you are resonating with this right now.
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And the one thing he did was he built a practice around one question.
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What is actually causing this?
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Today, he works with patients all over the world through integrative and functional
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medicine, nutrition, environmental medicine, personalized care that truly heals
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and treats the root, not just the symptom.
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He has become a trusted voice on autoimmune disease, chronic illness,
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and metabolic health. And his brand new book, I'm so excited for you to grab
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this, The End of Autoimmunity, is out right now.
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It explains why autoimmune disease is exploding in our generation and will truly
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give you a framework on how to restore your health naturally.
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If you've ever been told that your labs are normal, but you know something is
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off, today's conversation is for you.
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Dr. Stillman, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure
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to be here. Can you take us back? Tell us more about you.
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What led you to this? Well, I grew up in a family where we used a lot of natural
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and integrated medicine, my mom in particular, and then my dad was more of a
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conventionally minded guy. He got his flu shots and his COVID boosters right
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up to the very end when he passed. It's 86.
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And I remember being fascinated by medicine, particularly, you know,
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I remember, this is so funny that I'm remembering this now, but I remember this,
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my mom had been giving me melatonin to help me sleep. I don't know why I was
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having problems sleeping, but I was.
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And my dad and my mom came into my room and we had this conversation about,
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we're not going to use the melatonin anymore because it hasn't been studied in children.
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And I was like, I don't know what's going on here, but I feel like there's some
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kind of conflict between the two of them.
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They did end up getting divorced and maybe that was a bigger part of that.
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I don't know. But that was the kind of tension and conflict around medicine
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that we had in our house growing up. And I just remember thinking,
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well, this is fascinating because I don't know why, but I was fascinated by
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the body, my body, other people's bodies.
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Why are people the way that they are? How do they really work?
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What's good for them? What's bad for them? So that is where this all sort of
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came from in my childhood. And then I ended up gravitating towards a mentor
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in my teenage years who was a naturopath.
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Very self-trained, you know, just sort of learned on his own, started seeing people.
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And I was exposed to him to all kinds of different ideas from the integrative
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natural world. Many of them good, lots of them bad or just not correct.
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Sometimes it's not so much that it's wrong, it's that it's like the map isn't quite right.
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You know, your map doesn't need to be 100% accurate for you to get to where you're trying to go.
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And I think that's where a lot of the confusion arises. And I'm,
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for some reason, just fascinated by that.
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Then he said, look, you should go to conventional medical school.
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You should get a conventional medical degree. And I did because I was very ambitious
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and I really did love the science, the nitty gritty.
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I loved things like organic chemistry in college. Then I just decided,
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well, I want to know what's really working.
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And clearly these drugs and surgeries have value, but they also have a lot of
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limitations. And I think a lot of their benefit is grossly oversold and overhyped to the public.
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And there's obviously value in natural and integrated medicine from herbs to
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vitamins, minerals, hormones, you name it. Things found in nature have a lot
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of therapeutic value. So that was that's how it all started.
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Do you work with both women and men? Oh, yeah.
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What is your kids and kids? Amazing. And what is your approach when they first come to you?
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Tell us a little bit more about working with you and what that looks like.
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Yeah. So I think the most important thing when you're first starting to work
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with someone is really getting to know them on a very, I think,
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deep level. You have to understand people's why.
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Why not just, you know, what is there in medicine is called the chief complaint.
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You know, it's sort of like at the top of the chart, the top of the note.
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What's the chief complaint? I don't like framing it as a complaint.
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I think that sets a negative tone for the whole interaction.
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I like to ask patients the first question in their consult is,
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what's your top priority today?
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Because sometimes it's something really out of left field, like,
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well, I just really want to understand this lab or this finding that we haven't been able to explain.
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I want to get clarity on this or that element of my care.
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Usually it's some variation on the theme of I want to clear path and map forward
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out of my current state of health into a better state of health.
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And it's usually more specific than that. But I think you've got to understand,
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you know, who are you trying to be that you can't be right now because of your illness?
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You know, you're stressed, you're anxious, you're sleeping poorly.
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How is that causing you to show up in your daily life for other people and yourself?
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And what would it do for you if you could show up as a different person?
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And what kind of person is that person? Are they more kind, loving,
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tenderhearted, thoughtful, clever, smart?
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You know, what are you trying to be that you're not able to be right now?
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What's the fullest expression of yourself? I think that can kind of start to
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sound a little bit hokey and woo, but I really do think that's what it's all about.
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You know, the grandma wants to get on the floor and play with her grandkids.
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And that hip or knee just really, just really ruins that moment for her.
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You know, the mom wants to be able to be emotionally available and loving and
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kind and comforting to her children, her husband, her friends and family.
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And, you know, you just can't do that when you're strung out and your hair is
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on fire and you're freaked out and you're tense and you end up saying and doing
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things you You don't like yourself for doing.
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So I think that's the number one thing for me in working with patients is where are we?
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Where are we going? And why are we trying to get there? Because if you don't
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have that kind of framework around the whole interaction, then I think you kind
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of get lost in just sort of chasing numbers. Like this number's not right.
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You know, your sleep score's not good. Your HRV's low.
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Yes, there's value to that, but why do we want it to be normal?
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Why do we want it to be optimal?
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We want quality. We want quantity of life. And that actually means a different thing to everybody.
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And getting to know that I think is deeply important. And then you've got to
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set what I look at as sort of the foundation for health.
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Because the reality is that, you know, in our modern world, you know,
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if you're drinking things that are not serving you metabolically,
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physically, immunologically, you're drinking soda, you're drinking too much
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coffee, tea, soda, juice.
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And it's not that these things are bad per se, but there's a limit to what the
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body can tolerate. And it depends on your age, your state of health.
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I mean, I've got patients who are allergic to caffeine, allergic to coffee.
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I mean, I get that some people drink coffee every day. I used to drink four,
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five, six cups, and I loved it.
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Now I have one or two cups a week, if that. You have to figure out where are they trying to go.
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You have to set that foundation for diet, lifestyle, nutrition,
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and little things like mindset.
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You know, we shouldn't speak ill of ourselves. I mean, I think speaking ill,
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I just sort of, I'm putting this together literally right now.
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Speaking ill of yourself. What an interesting turn of phrase that is.
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Are you making yourself, can you
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make yourself sick by speaking ill of yourself? I think you can. I agree.
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All these little things, you know, there's no silver bullet,
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but you have all these little things you can put together to help people heal.
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And that's what it looks like working with us is we have this foundational bottom-up approach.
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What are we going to change to get you from where you are to where you want to be?
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We do things one, two, three things at a time. We put these plans together.
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We set them in motion. We see how you respond. Then we change our approach from there.
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And we kind of layer habits on until you're in this lifestyle you love and you're
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on a supplement protocol that works for you and your labs look good.
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And, you know, it's sort of, all right, see you in six months,
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see you next year. Call me when you need me. That's the goal.
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All our patients and our membership. Well, and this is one of the reasons I
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was so excited to have you on the show is because I truly believe when you ask
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yourself, what's the cost?
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What is the cost of not stepping into a full life?
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And I do believe everything you said, speaking death over your body,
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your body and your brain will just adjust to whatever you are saying.
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Your brain's job is to keep you safe and comfortable, period. End of story.
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And so these phrases like, why am I so dumb? What's wrong with me?
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Why am I so fat? Right. Why am I so overweight?
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Why do I always feel tired? These phrases literally are telling your body,
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let's adjust. Let's get into that state. Right. Labels.
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I am tired. I am a diabetic. I am overweight. Whoa.
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Whoa. You're in the process of losing weight. You're having some challenges
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with your blood sugar that you're working through. Right.
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Well, and it's amazing how, I mean, and that's why placebos work, right?
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Yes. Because your brain believes it's working and our bodies are meant to heal us.
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They're meant to do and become our best selves so that we can make an impact in this world.
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Why do you believe that so many
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women in their 40s are now developing autoimmune? What a great question.
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You said 40s, so we're going to actually really dig into that.
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First of all, we get away with a lot in our 20s and 30s. And I'm coming to the
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tail end of my 30s, so I'm learning this more and more every day.
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We get away with a lot in our 20s and 30s because our hormones are naturally at high levels.
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And these are the ages and stages of life where we're the most resilient,
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we're the most tough, we're the most resilient. And we're able to cope with
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all the stress and chaos that life throws at us.
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As you round that bend into your 40s, hormone levels start to really drop.
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And you've also had these years and years of stress because you're supposed
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to have stress when you're in your 20s and 30s.
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You're supposed to have the family and the kids and be, you know,
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climbing the ladder at job, not necessarily the corporate ladder.
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But, you know, even if you're in a small business, you're supposed to go from
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you open the door or you answer the phone or you man the front desk,
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you move up to maybe you manage another employee.
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Maybe you're a practitioner. Maybe you're doing the day to day of the of the
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workplace, whatever your workplace may be, right? Or you become skilled at a
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trade or a profession, right?
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And, you know, you're going through that stress process that then,
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you know, turns you into someone with a few years under your belt,
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some experience, many more and different abilities than you had before.
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And if you're not careful, you'll have worn down your nutritional reserves.
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You'll have adopted habits and lifestyle choices that may have served you in
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the short term, like using coffee to stay awake on the night shift is normal and appropriate.
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But boy, do you burn through your body's reserves, your minerals,
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your vitamins, your vitality in a way when you do that.
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And so you end up with this sort of collection of habits that have worked to
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help achieve your goals that you set for yourself, but you're also in a position
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where they may not be serving you and they may be undermining your health long-term.
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And so you have to look at those foundational habits. What are we doing day-to-day
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that is driving perhaps our illness?
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Because that's where it's gonna be. You've gotta look at those things.
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You'll also see that people have spent a long time accumulating toxins.
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Sometimes they're not even from them. Like we'll see mercury in patients that
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must be from mom, like her mercury amalgam fillings or the vaccines she got.
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Those heavy metals may have come down to her children, mercury in particular
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in women who are 40, because 40, that would be 1986 now.
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And so 86 is about the time when we move from mercury-containing vaccines heavily
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to aluminum-containing vaccines.
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And so we'll see in the Gen Xers, older millennials, and certainly the baby
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boomers, way more lead, way more mercury.
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Now, mercury has been very well studied as a trigger and a contributor to autoimmunity,
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even in small trace quantities.
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So even the amount that mom or dad or grandma had in their mercury amalgam fillings
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can create a lot of illness.
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And mom will pass on a lot of mercury to baby.
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So all that mercury from those earlier generations, I'm convinced,
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has driven a ton of the autoimmunity in young people.
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Now, even in people who don't have that kind of exposure, and this is just one,
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mercury is just one example. There's so many chemicals in this that are implicated
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in the rise of autoimmunity. There's dioxins and PCBs and phthalates, and I could go on.
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But, you know, Mercury is coming down on the east coast.
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Of the United States and the west coast of the United States about 100 tons
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a year from industrial activity in Asia coming down on the west coast being
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carried across the Pacific by the prevailing winds and on the east coast from
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industrial and agricultural activity in Africa.
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And so you have this scenario where all these environmental toxins are building
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up, building up, building up. I mean, a couple hundred years ago,
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nobody knew that you had to, or nobody really needed to avoid,
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say, tuna, particularly pregnant
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women, didn't need to avoid tuna because tuna was not full of mercury.
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Well, I don't know how many billions or trillions of tons of fossil fuels burned into the atmosphere.
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Later, we've got mercury levels in the environment that create this picture
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of massive mercury levels in, tuna swordfish, sea bass, shark,
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king mackerel, other high mercury carnivorous fish, high up the food chain fish.
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And you've got this picture where just having a tuna melt once a week meaningfully
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alters your destiny with these tiny concentrations of mercury.
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You don't wind up in the ER after your tuna melt, but you do wind up with these
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chronic degenerative illnesses because over time, those small quantities of
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mercury every day, every week, every month accumulating do drive this illness.
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So that's what's happening is the world is dealing with an epidemic of autoimmunity,
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particularly in this age range, because of this confluence of factors that have
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come together. And, you know, as I said, mercury is one example.
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There are so many other little things that we could, you know,
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threads we could pick out of this web to pull on, to unravel why any given patient
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winds up with an autoimmune condition.
15:14
Well, I know for me, having the testing done, you know, and realizing that my
15:19
body was struggling with glyphosate.
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Yes. And I feel like, you know, and it wasn't,
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a coincidence that my four food allergies were the most heavily pesticided foods. Absolutely.
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And my favorite foods.
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And then you have a body that is contaminated and overwhelmed.
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And I'm getting, you know, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia at 20 something.
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And it turns out it was actually just an allergy to cane sugar,
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which is a very heavily pesticided food.
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Yeah And so when you look at the pieces and you go to the root Which is why
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I love what you do so much When you look at the root You can remove these labels,
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And go to the source and heal the body.
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What would you say the number one concern or complaint is that women come to you with?
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Maybe it's a feeling, maybe it's a struggle What would that be? Is it a typical?
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Cool. If I had to give you one word, it would be fatigue. Okay.
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But I think I sometimes zero in on the top three, which are sort of trio that I often repeat.
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I say we help tired, foggy, inflamed people reclaim their health.
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And that's, those are the three things people come to me with.
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And it's not just those things, but they're tired, they're foggy,
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they have brain fog, and they are inflamed.
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They have pain, swelling, inflammation, and this manifests in many different
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ways, you know, because inflammation, when I think about this,
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I always go back to my basic, you know, medical school training.
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There's redness, there's an increase in temperature, there's an increase in
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the size, there's swelling, and there can be a change in color of the overlying skin.
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And so, you know, people will come in, you know, my ankles are swollen,
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this, that, or the other time, or all the time.
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I'm bloated. You know, I have all this pain, irritation, distension.
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I got back pain. I've got sciatica. I've got, and it has all these different
17:20
names and different presentations. But those are the three things that people
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come to me to try to solve. And when somebody comes in with a diagnosis of fibromyalgia,
17:28
I think we can really help this person.
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Because I have to say, you know, why I got into autoimmunity is the people who
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found me were people who had chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia.
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And so I just had a lot of exposure to the presentation, the illness,
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what it means, what it responds to, what these people struggle with,
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and then what the diet and lifestyle out of that look like because they are foundational.
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You do use occasionally medications, more often supplements to remediate the
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toxic exposures the person has had, as well as the nutritional deficiencies they've developed.
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Let alone things like light therapy, which I'm a huge advocate for.
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So those are the top things that I help people with. But it also,
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you know, I must say, like, it also runs the gamut into very rare and obscure
18:11
autoimmune conditions.
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We've got some very unusual cases in the practice of pretty rare things that,
18:18
you know, even as a general internist, which is what I trained as,
18:22
I would see them maybe, I don't know, every five years, every 10 years or hear about a case.
18:27
I get a lot of those cases now. Right. When somebody comes to work with you,
18:31
is there a typical framework, like a timeline of how long they can,
18:37
you know, I'm going to expect to work with you for this long? Yeah.
18:40
Yeah. So we generally work with people for increments of different quarters.
18:43
It's like right now where we are offering a three-month and a six-month engagement.
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And I mentioned it, I make it clear that that may change. I don't know when
18:52
you're listening to this in the future.
18:54
But we want to have at least a quarter to go over your diet,
18:58
your lifestyle, your daily routine, get the testing done.
19:03
And then see how you respond, because we have a number of different things that
19:05
we'll do for four or six weeks at a time.
19:08
Different protocols we'll use, depending upon your case and presentation,
19:12
that we know in aggregate are going to work.
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It's just we've got to figure out which one's right for you and why and how
19:17
do you tolerate it and that kind of thing.
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So we like to work with people in quarterly engagements. That's the start.
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And really what we're looking for is to make what I call significant durable
19:27
progress, which in my book means 50% to 90% better in three to six months.
19:32
And we have a strong track record of delivering on that. It's 95% of people
19:36
who during a program or membership based on our 2025 data state that they saw
19:41
a 50% or greater improvement during their time with us.
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And that's with zero being where when they started and 10 being where they'd like to be.
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And I always ask the question that way because I want to know how well are we.
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Helping people achieve their goals. So, you know, if you're 50% of the way to
19:59
where you want to be, that's a good start.
20:02
You know, you're 80, 90% of the way there.
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Now we're just talking about optimization, dialing things in,
20:09
fixing whatever little things are.
20:11
And the truth is no one ever, no one, no one comes back to me.
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Well, rarely do people come back to me and say that they're at a hundred percent.
20:17
I think that's partly because we tend to attract sort of a self-critical crowd.
20:21
And I also think that people tend to forget how sick they are.
20:24
Like I had this happen the other week, I asked a patient that question.
20:27
And she said to me, well, you know, before when you asked me this question,
20:31
I told you I was at like a six.
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But now looking back, I think I was really at that point, I was at a three.
20:36
And now I'm at a six. I was like, aha.
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We found that you had a whole extra 40% up here that you'd forgotten about that
20:42
you didn't even realize was possible.
20:44
So we hear that a lot. So we start there because we really want to do things in an intensive way.
20:51
We want to really get great results fast. Now, then you get to a sort of,
20:54
I'm feeling really good.
20:56
I don't need coaching calls. I don't need as much support through chat portal.
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And then we just have a simple monthly membership fee that allows you to still access the clinic.
21:05
And I really love how we set it up because what I did was I created a very deep
21:10
discount on supplements that we know work and that are very effective for our members.
21:14
And we also have a weekly Q&A that people get access to, and you can actually
21:17
get access to the whole library of our Q&A. And this is really cool.
21:20
We're about to roll out the AI, Dr. Stillman.
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So you can ask the AI what I think about anything.
21:26
And it's drawing on over a year and a half of Q&As, two books, hundreds of articles.
21:34
I don't know how many minutes of podcasts. There's over a million words in my AI model.
21:37
It's one of the most robust out there in integrative and functional medicine.
21:40
And so you get access to all that as a member of the practice,
21:43
which means that you just always have good answers that are not just random
21:47
slop from whatever AI model you happen to have or whatever, I don't know.
21:52
We get patients coming in now who are using AI and it's really fascinating.
21:56
It will come up with these very sophisticated sounding protocols.
22:00
But, you know, there's a reason they're coming to us. It's not working.
22:06
Right. So it's been pretty fascinating watching that evolve.
22:10
Well, I know for me, along my journey, it was a lot of this is your diagnoses.
22:16
This is your medication.
22:18
And then you have to really weigh, well, every medication has side effects. Yes.
22:24
And then they're really just muting and subduing symptoms that your body's screaming
22:31
out that it has a problem.
22:33
I know. So then you're taking medications for the side effects of these medications,
22:40
and not really ever addressing the root, which goes back to, again, what's the cost?
22:47
Yes. So your book, I would love to hear a little bit more about your book and,
22:53
who the book is specifically designed for.
22:56
Yeah, I wrote the book as, how would I describe it?
23:00
I knew I was writing to the patients who were seeking me out. They tend to be.
23:04
Women, I would say 35 to 65. We have plenty of patients younger than that.
23:08
Some patients older than that.
23:10
They tend to be highly conscientious, motivated people.
23:14
They really want to be living life to the fullest. And when they can't,
23:18
they're very frustrated by it.
23:20
It might be that they can't climb 10,000 foot peaks. They have to take the car.
23:25
It might be that they can't hold their breath underwater for as long as they
23:30
would like. They might want to gain muscle. They might want to lose fat.
23:34
Usually it's, I've got some combination of symptoms that are holding me back
23:38
in life, and I want to solve them.
23:39
And so I said, well, what information would I most want these people to have?
23:44
If I could give them one book, and in between the two covers of that book was
23:48
going to be the information that was going to get them the most progress and
23:52
best shape their view for success, what would I put in that book?
23:57
And I frankly hadn't put all this together before I started writing the book over a year ago.
24:02
But I really did, as I wrote it, realize that this came down to what I now call
24:07
our framework, which I view as five distinct key pieces. So there's principles.
24:14
I came to appreciate this more and more, not just over the course of my practice,
24:19
but even as I wrote the book, I just kept seeing the people who come in with
24:22
the most positive mindset and attitude, the least negative language and thinking,
24:27
they get the best results.
24:29
And even, you know, I think about some of the patients who get the worst results.
24:33
Some of them are just mean.
24:35
I mean, the way they would treat my staff was just so pulsive.
24:40
It's part of why we don't just sign up everyone. We really want to make sure
24:44
we're the right practice, the right fit for you.
24:46
And just yesterday, Amy, our coach, was saying, you know, some of the people
24:49
who emailed me as a result of one of our most recent, like, emails that went
24:53
out, something that was in there upset some of them. And they're so rude.
24:57
I would never want to work with them. We literally see this coming back to them as bad results.
25:03
And so you've got to have the right principles. You have to have the right attitude.
25:06
You have to believe the right things to heal your body.
25:10
Terrible, negative beliefs will make everything else that you do irrelevant.
25:15
And I can't tell you how many people I've seen. They've spent so much money,
25:17
so much time, so much energy.
25:19
But their mindset is just poisonous.
25:22
I'm convinced it's poisoning their body. So you've got to start with principles. Yeah.
25:26
And then within principles, you got to like think through like,
25:28
how are we going to approach this? It's kind of strategy instead of tactics.
25:32
And then the next chapter is essentials. What do you absolutely have to do every day to be healthy?
25:36
You know, you can't just engage with modern technology, life,
25:41
process food and get away with it.
25:43
This stuff is so divorced from nature. And I called it the essentials because
25:47
I really think it's about what's essential to our beings.
25:51
Like, what does it mean to be a human being? What is our fundamental relationship with nature?
25:55
You got to have these essential habits down not all of them not 100 of the time
26:00
but in general right then you
26:01
you have to avoid certain hazards because there's just some things that,
26:06
if they are present in your life they are just going to make you sick and there's
26:10
very little i've found that i can do about some of these things we just have
26:13
to eliminate them or mitigate them or or minimize them.
26:16
And then there's diagnostics people really need a framework for how do you how
26:21
do you approach testing.
26:22
There's so much testing we can order today. And I'm happy to get more testing,
26:27
but we also have to be mindful of how much time do we have for the testing and
26:31
how is it actually going to change what we're going to do.
26:33
And at a certain point, you're just wasting time and money on labs.
26:36
And then you've also got to make sure you interpret them correctly because there's
26:39
so much that goes into interpreting labs correctly. There's so much.
26:44
So many little things that change my thinking based on labs from what time of
26:49
day the lab was drawn to who the patient is and what their typical bedtime is
26:54
to, you know, when did they last eat?
26:55
I mean, little things like that that might not seem important that sometimes
26:58
are in edge cases or are always important and need to be properly delineated.
27:04
And then therapeutics is the
27:06
last piece of the framework, which is obviously, what are we going to use?
27:09
Call it whatever you want. Supplements, medications, lifestyle changes,
27:13
biohacks, light therapy, energy medicine.
27:16
There's all these different modalities. We got to pick and choose what we're going to use.
27:20
And I try to arrange them in a way where we're starting with the foundations,
27:25
things that I see getting the best results fastest for people going from there
27:29
up what I call the therapeutic tree, which is, you know, because I look at it
27:32
as it's not just my responsibility.
27:34
To sort of outline some very complicated, sometimes impractical,
27:38
even crazy program of care.
27:40
It's my responsibility to guide patients through different therapies.
27:46
Not necessarily one at a time, but at the right speed. So I'm not overwhelming them.
27:50
I'm not overwhelming their body. You know, the body has a finite capacity to
27:54
respond, which is part of why we like to work with people for long periods of
27:58
time is that you can't get to know everything about a person's physiology in two weeks.
28:04
You don't know how they're going to respond to everything. It takes time to
28:07
implement all this. It takes time for the body to heal. I sometimes liken it
28:10
to baking a cake and you can't just take a cake and throw it in the oven on broil.
28:14
It would turn out crispy on the outside and gooey on the inside You've got to
28:18
just let it sit there at 300 whatever for however long you need to,
28:23
Or it's just not going to taste the same If you were to speak to the woman that
28:27
is chronically stressed and feels that
28:31
she is not living her best life right now She knows there's more for her out
28:35
there What would be the first thing that you would tell her or what would be
28:39
the next best step that she could take?
28:41
I think the most important thing for people to do who feel chronically stressed
28:45
and overwhelmed is to really get deeply in touch with who they are and what
28:51
they're here to do, because.
28:54
There's an infinite number of things for us to do.
28:57
There's an infinite number of responsibilities for us to take on.
29:00
But at the end of the day, you have to ask yourself, I can't do all of this.
29:04
And I certainly can't do all of it well.
29:06
So what do I need to do? And how long do I need to do it for?
29:10
So I'm not saying you should back out or flake or bail on commitments.
29:14
But, you know, if I have a mom who wants to lose weight, let's say.
29:17
And she is, and you know, I'm thinking of a real case right now.
29:21
She's a wife, mom dealing with
29:24
home renovations, and then they decided to adopt some foster children.
29:30
Well, if she also goes on and serves on the church something committee and the
29:36
parent teacher association, well, look, you got to pick some of these things.
29:40
You got to, and this is where, you know, I think this is why it's such an important
29:43
conversation to have with yourself. Who are you?
29:46
I mean, naturally as children, we take on the identity of our parents.
29:49
Over life, we tend to take on the identity of people around us, society, authority.
29:55
It's not so much that we maybe lack a sense of self as we don't necessarily
30:00
take the time to develop it.
30:02
And I think that, I mean, I've gone through this process. I continue to go through it.
30:06
I really think it's about getting in touch with, you know, who am I?
30:10
Like, and I think this is sort of an odd thing, but it's like, why do I like what I like?
30:15
Like why do i like steak what is it about it,
30:19
why do i like salt why do i like why do i love my wife like why do you i think
30:25
you can say well i just i don't know i just do,
30:28
but when you really start to ask these questions of yourself not necessarily
30:31
in an intellectual way like i'm not trying to like i don't think we need to
30:35
make this a hyper intellectual exercise right.
30:39
But if it's like why am I trying to be a member of the PTA?
30:41
Why am I trying? Why am I doing this?
30:45
What is the purpose? Is there someone else better to do this than me?
30:48
I think that's where you'll start to find, okay, these are the things I can load off my plate.
30:53
Because stress is such a vast word. So many different types of stress.
30:59
At the end of the day, if you feel stressed, if you feel overwhelmed,
31:03
It's a sign that you've got too much going on for you right now.
31:07
We either have to just eliminate some of these responsibilities,
31:10
which you may have taken on, not because you were meant to take them on,
31:13
but because someone else told you you were meant to take them on.
31:16
You're expected to do this.
31:18
And those expectations may not have been realistic. I'm thinking of a real case
31:21
right now where this woman was saying, like, I need to do this.
31:24
I need to do that. And I said, you know, you needed to take a nap then because your body was tired.
31:30
And, you know, you are not meeting the need of your body to rest when you go
31:35
out and do those other things.
31:36
So, yes, you may say, I need to do all these things, but you also need to rest.
31:40
So, can we ask questions like, how can I honor my body's need to rest and my
31:45
body's need for self-care, space?
31:49
Sleep, darkness at night, 10-minute walks, healthy food, time to prepare it,
31:55
time to clean up after it, time for quiet, time for celebration.
32:00
How can I honor these needs and also honor these other needs?
32:04
And you may find, I think you will find, that you're going to find,
32:07
you know what, I need to let someone else meet that need. Someone else needs
32:10
to fill that role. And a lot of this may just be, you know, does the church need 15 committees?
32:16
Does the PTA board need 12 members? I don't know.
32:20
But these are the things, this is how we sort it all out. We have these conversations
32:23
about what are my needs? How are they being met? Who am I? What am I here to do?
32:27
And I think that with what I do, I do spend a lot of time talking to patients about that.
32:33
And I also spend a lot of time giving their body back the resources for their
32:37
brain to work out the problem. Because what they'll often come to me with is
32:41
I'm not only overwhelmed, but
32:42
I don't feel like I can solve these problems because my brain is so foggy.
32:46
So we give them back the minerals, the vitamins, the light frequencies.
32:51
The adaptogens, the herbs, whatever it is we're using in order to give the body
32:55
back the bandwidth and the ability to solve these problems. Because I just can't
32:59
tell you how often I hear it.
33:00
And it's not stated this way, but it's this sort of subtext of,
33:04
I don't have the energy or the wherewithal to solve the problems that I have.
33:08
And so I ended up feeling overwhelmed because if you have no bandwidth if you
33:11
have no energy like i i'm thinking of another case this guy he said to me he
33:14
said you know i didn't i didn't realize this was happening to me but,
33:18
i was i was like i would put a to-do list together and i would only do the first
33:22
thing and now i finished the whole thing,
33:25
and i was getting through my afternoons and and just sort of like dreading and
33:29
feeling overwhelmed and and now i'm just like powering through stuff,
33:34
And I, you know, for a period of time, I saw him on every single call every
33:38
week because he was just so happy.
33:41
And he was so eager to learn more about this process and the things that determine
33:44
your body's ability to solve problems, you know, collect information,
33:49
process it, create solutions.
33:52
Because you know if you have an infinite amount of capacity and bandwidth for solving problems.
33:57
Do you have stress you can always find more problems to solve and always take
34:01
on more stress but that's what i find to be the sort of brutal thing that's
34:05
grinding people down 40 50 60,
34:08
i have so much stress because i have so many responsibilities and i don't have
34:12
the bandwidth they used to have to solve the problems and keep up and i gotta
34:15
get that back so i can keep keep honoring these commitments and sometimes that
34:20
means having fewer commitments for a season This is so powerful.
34:23
And if you are listening to this podcast, I want you to go grab the book.
34:28
It is The End of Autoimmunity.
34:30
Follow Dr. Stillman on his Instagram page and get connected.
34:36
Is there any place that you would want them to personally connect with you or
34:40
is Instagram the best? Instagram's maybe the best.
34:43
I love my sub stack, which is drstillmanuncensored.com. I'm pretty active,
34:48
I think, on a variety of different social platforms.
34:50
So if you follow me one place, you'll probably see my stuff.
34:54
You might not. Dr. Stillman Uncensored, subscribing to the email list there
34:57
is the, or our email list elsewhere, you can sign up for that at my website,
35:02
is the best way to keep in touch with me and learn what we're offering,
35:05
how to work with us, and how we can help you.
35:07
Amazing. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today, and I cannot wait
35:11
for our listeners to grab your book and truly connect with you and begin to
35:16
step into the life that God created for them to live. Thank you so much for having me.
35:23
Friend, I am so thankful that you are here today. I pray this episode blessed you big time.
35:28
And if it did, would you do me a favor and leave me a review on Apple Podcasts?
35:32
It helps more women just like you find the show. And it may be the very reason
35:36
that somebody else gets the answers that they need.
35:38
I would also love to connect with you personally on Instagram.
35:41
You can find me by searching cortisol underscore coach.
35:44
That's where I show up every single day. And send me a DM. I would love to connect
35:48
with you. I'll see you next time.