Latest / Health with Hashimoto’s - Thyroid or Immune Education for Autoimmune Thyroid Disease / 183 // When the News is Heavy, Here are Simple Steps for Stress

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183 // When the News is Heavy, Here are Simple Steps for Stress · Health with Hashimoto’s - Thyroid or Immune Education for Autoimmune Thyroid Disease

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I live in Minnesota. There's a lot of Minnesota stuff in the news lately.
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And here, as well as everywhere else in the country and the world,
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there's just so much stuff going on.
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I feel like people are overwhelmed, they're tired, and they're sick and tired of fighting.
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There's so much drama and stress and legitimate problems. And so today we're
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going back to the basics.
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Just back to the basics. Breathing, relaxing our stress response,
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and then also we're talking about the guts.
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Welcome to the Health with Hashimoto's podcast. This is where you will find
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clarity and simple, sustainable strategies to feel better.
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I want to help you figure out your root causes.
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My name is Esther Yunkin. I am a registered nurse. I spent about 17 years in
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the emergency department and then got sick and tired of putting band-aids on chronic things.
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I went back to school and now I have been in holistic health education for about 10 years.
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I know how exhausting it is to live with fatigue, brain fog,
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and the ups and downs of Hashimoto's, and that is why I'm here.
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I'm here to cut through the confusion and to give you practical steps that support
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your body and calm your immune system so that you can regain your energy and
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feel like yourself again.
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And by the way, I live about an hour south of the Twin Cities.
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We have archery meets for my kids.
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They're in archery right now, and we've had to go through the cities.
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But all the stuff that you see on the news, at least if you're listening to
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this in real time, it is in Minneapolis and that is not where our archery tournaments are.
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So my family and me, we're safe. We're not seeing any of that except for on
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the news like everybody else.
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All right, so first things first, let's take a deep breath.
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You've probably heard me say this before. Put one hand on your chest and one
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hand on your belly if you're not driving, you know, if it's safe to do so.
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If you're in the middle of cooking supper and your hands are all gross,
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don't put a hand on your chest and a hand on your belly.
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But if you can, put one hand on your chest and one hand on your belly and take a deep breath.
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Which hand is moving. Is it the hand on your chest or your shoulders?
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Obviously, you don't have your hand on your shoulders, but you can kind of tell.
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If it is your upper body, your chest and your shoulders that are moving while you take a deep breath,
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it's actually setting a signal via your nervous system to tell every single
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cell in your body that you are stressed and that there's danger.
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It reinforces the stress response.
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If you're breathing with your belly, with your diaphragm, so your diaphragm
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is a really flat muscle that kind of goes underneath your,
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what does go underneath your ribs, and when you use your diaphragm,
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then your lower abdomen pooches out because your diaphragm is,
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you know, pushing things out,
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making space, pulling the air in.
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You think about your breathing and you think it's coming from your lungs.
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It's actually your diaphragm pulling down and pulling the air into your lungs.
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Anyway, when you're breathing with your diaphragm, you're using the other half
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of your nervous system to tell every single cell in your body you're okay, to chill out, to relax.
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So as you listen to this first couple minutes of the Health with Hashimoto's
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podcast. Take some deep breaths with your belly.
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Relax your jaw. Relax your tongue. Relax your neck.
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Relax your forehead. Drop your shoulders.
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Take another deep breath.
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Smile. That actually also helps lower your stress response.
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I think it was Bones or maybe Rizzoli and Isles. I can't remember.
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One of those two shows, I think it was Rizzoli and Isles.
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Both of them are like medical mystery shows that were on, I don't know, back in the 2000s.
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And one of them said that if you put a pencil in between your back teeth,
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if you don't feel like smiling,
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putting that pencil there makes the same muscles go so your brain still thinks
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that you're happy and it relaxes your stress response.
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I'm pretty sure it was Rizzoli and Isles. I don't know what episode it was.
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So if you feel like you can't smile, put a pencil in your mouth and bite down
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on it gently because it will also help lower your stress response.
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Honestly, I haven't fact checked that one. I learned it off of a sitcom.
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Is that what it would be called?
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I don't know, whatever. A situational drama? Whatever.
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I learned it off of TV. A fictional show. Don't know if it's real. It sounds real.
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That's probably a whole other tangent we can go on. Things that sound real, but actually are not.
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But anyway, smile. Relax all of those muscles.
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Take another deep breath. Because things are going to be okay.
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Every single day, I listen to, well, a bunch of podcasts.
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And one of them that I listen to is, it's from 1517 Network.
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And it is called The Christian History Almanac.
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He has, you know, eight-minute episodes about something on this day in history
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related to the church or Christian history.
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It's a fun podcast that I listen to on my drive home from dropping the boys off at their bus stop.
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Every single day at the end of the episode.
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He says, remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and redemption of all things are true.
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Everything is going to be okay. The first time I heard that,
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I was like, you are talking about crazy, horrible things that happened in history.
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Like some of the things that you talk about, it's not okay.
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Some of the things going on in today's world are not okay.
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But that thing that he says every single day?
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Grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true.
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Everything is going to be okay.
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It's not necessarily talking about right here and right now.
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We will have problems. We do have problems.
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There's problems all around the world. But in the end, we, if you are a Bible-believing
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person, you know that Jesus paid the penalty for everybody's sin.
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Anybody who's ever done anything wrong, which is all of us.
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Your consequence has already been paid for.
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Somebody already took that consequence, and you have offered to you forgiveness
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and grace and forgiveness.
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And in the end, everything will be okay. We're going to enjoy heaven with Jesus,
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or he's going to create a new earth.
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No more pain, no more sorrow, no more tears, no more death, no more anything bad.
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As Sally Lloyd-Jones, the author of one of the children's Bibles that I used
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to read to my kids, she writes, everything sad is going to come untrue.
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And isn't that beautiful? Sometimes I feel like we need to remember that,
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especially on weeks where the news is pretty heavy.
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So let's talk about gut health. I don't have an easy, soft transition,
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but just know that all of the stress that you hear and that you carry when you're
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eating, if you are eating in a stressed state.
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It impacts your gut. It impacts how you digest your food.
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Both of those things. And they're not the same thing. So how you digest your
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food is impacted by your current stress level.
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And that is why when I'm working one-on-one with a client, then I encourage
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them to set up times to have some just scheduled.
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Stick it into your routine, deep diaphragmatic breathing.
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And I suggest always to do it before you eat and before you go to bed.
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Because that half of your nervous system that's promoting relaxation,
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we colloquially call it rest and digest.
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So of course, you want to activate that half of your nervous system before you're
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resting, before bedtime, and before you're digesting, before you eat.
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So before you eat today, before you eat tomorrow, take some deep breaths with
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your belly and figure out for you what is the trigger that can help you remember to do that.
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Is it going to be when you sit down? Is it going to be after you give thanks for the food?
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What is it going to be for you to remind you to take some deep breaths,
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relax, relax your jaw, relax your tongue, relax your shoulders,
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relax your neck, relax your forehead, relax your shoulders,
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What is it going to be for you to help you remember to do those things so that you can digest better?
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When you eat your food and you forget to chew it very well, you just,
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you know, it's the three G's.
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Gobble, gulp, and go. We get into that pattern too much as a society.
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We gobble our food. We eat bites that are way too big. And then we gulp. We don't chew.
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We just swallow things way too whole. You know, technically,
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if you want good digestion, you would be chewing your food to applesauce or smoothie consistency.
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We don't do that. We gobble, and then we gulp our food, and then we go.
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So if you do the opposite of those, you're taking care of your digestion.
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When you swallow big chunks of food, especially food that could be sharp.
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You have an increased risk of increasing leaky gut.
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So this is not a guarantee. I'm not saying if you chew and swallow sharp things,
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then your intestines are going to get a hole in them.
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That is absolutely not what I'm saying. It doesn't usually happen hardly ever.
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In fact, I remember hearing in my Anatphiz class back in college,
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there was a prisoner and he swallowed some razor blades,
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thinking that he would have some bleeding internally and he would get to get
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out of the jail for a while or prison, wherever he was.
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And they just did serial x-rays.
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So they did x-rays, you know, every day or every six hours, whatever it was,
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because the razor blades passed through just fine.
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Not sure how he actually passed them out. I'm sure it was painful, but...
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You can, your gut can tolerate sharp things. But when you have sharp food in
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there, it does increase like the battering of your intestines.
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And so if you have leaky gut, it can contribute to making things worse.
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So that's a little bit how stress impacts your digestion.
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It does it in a lot of ways. Obviously, if you're not in rest and digest,
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if you're in fight and flight, your body is preparing to go.
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Your body wants to give all of the resources to your muscles so that you can
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run, you can flee, you can hide, and so your body is not focused on digesting.
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Stress also impacts the actual gut lining.
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So I talked in an episode or two ago about how your gut lining is this long
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tube, and so when you eat your food, it's technically not a part of you until
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it crosses over that barrier.
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The gut lining itself, if you stretch it out, it would be the size of a tennis court.
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And in most places, it's just a cell or two thick. So super, super thin and huge.
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When you are under stress, especially chronic stress, your gut lining thins
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some more and the little spaces between the cells increase.
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We call that leaky gut. Or if you want to be technical, it's intestinal permeability.
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How easily things can pass through.
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When you have Hashimoto's,
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there is a thing called molecular mimicry. And we know about that because of gluten.
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So I've talked about it in other episodes. I'm sure you've heard about it in other places.
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When we eat gluten, especially if we have leaky gut and that gluten crosses
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that permeable layer, your body will say, oh my goodness, this is the stuff we're attacking.
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This is the thyroid that we're attacking. So it mounts more of a response,
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sending you or could send you into an autoimmune flare up.
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Flare, as I said in episode, I don't know, like three or four or five,
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it was one of the early ones. I was like, what is a flare?
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Everybody talks about this as it's common knowledge, but I don't know what a flare is.
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A flare is a worsening, a flaring up of your symptoms. So everybody's flare
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can be a little bit different because everybody's symptoms are a little bit different.
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If you eat gluten and that gluten crosses your gut barrier, your body can be
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like, oh my goodness, we're going to fight this.
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And you could have a worsening flare.
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You could also have that if you eat gluten at all.
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Although people do say, people who are way smarter than me, they say everybody
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who has an autoimmune condition does have leaky gut.
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So what can you do about that. Number one, we just talked for the last,
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you know, 13 minutes about lowering stress.
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We live in a stressful world, but we don't have to be in a stressed state all the time.
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You can do things to lower your stress. You can take five minutes every evening.
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You can write out the things that you're grateful for that day.
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You can take five, ten minutes in the morning, spend some time in prayer and Bible reading.
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If you are not a Christian, you can still do that. I love the Abide app.
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I had an episode about it a while back, and any listener to this podcast can
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get free 30 days of premium for Abide.
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Every single morning, there's these meditations, calming, soothing, biblically focused.
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There's also things about gratitude. There's just so many good things on that.
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Some of the meditation and calming apps are, I just find, spiritually dangerous.
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And so I love that I can recommend Abide if you want a peaceful way to start
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your day or to wind down at night.
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Check that out. I will put the link down in the show notes for the free 30 days.
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All right, so there are things that you can do to lower your stress response.
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But then also, let's talk about improving the gut lining itself.
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I'm going to, in the next episode, I'm going to talk about good,
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better, best options for eating, for your microbiome.
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So in the good, we're going to talk about a foundational daily diet of fermented
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foods, getting probiotics and prebiotics into your diet somehow.
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And this might take a long time for you to work up to.
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You might not like anything fermented, including yogurt, including kefir,
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including kombucha, sauerkraut, homemade pickles, like all of this stuff,
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you're like, oh gross. No.
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It can take a long time to work those into your diet. But that is a good foundation.
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So the good is that foundation of fermented food. And then better,
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getting more probiotics into your diet.
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If you're not getting them at least daily, but ideally at every meal,
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just small amounts, and you want to be supplementing. I'm going to talk about
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the best supplements that I have found on the market.
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And I love that there's always new gut health stuff coming out.
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Right now, I don't know about your social media feed, but my social media feed
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is probably once every, I don't know, quarter, every half a year,
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I get inundated with ads for seed s-e-e-d.
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And they're green. I don't know if you've seen them because,
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you know, ads are very individualized on social media. So if you have seen them, let me know.
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I would love to know if it's just me or if everybody is getting all of these ads all of a sudden.
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Seed is a very good microbiome supplement. They have a couple different types
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and we're going to talk about that next week.
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And then I'm also going to talk about best. Good, better, best.
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And the best one, it activates your gut to make more peptides or to slow down different peptides.
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The one I want to talk about right now specifically is zonulin.
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Zonulin, you might have heard about it. Maybe not. It's okay.
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I'm going to explain it. It is a peptide. So a peptide is like a messenger that your body makes.
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You might have heard a lot about injectable peptides, because that's really
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big in the world of weight loss right now.
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Really, really big. But your body makes peptides.
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As you age and as you encounter different environmental threats,
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you make less peptides, or maybe you make more peptides.
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Less of the good ones, more of the bad ones. Zonulin is one of the bad ones,
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in my estimation, because what zonulin does is it increases leaky gut.
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It increases the spacing between those cells.
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So if we want nice tight gut junctions so that stuff that's not supposed to get into our body.
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Doesn't get into our body, we don't want a lot of zonulin.
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Well, our gut naturally makes some, and in a lot of us, it's increased.
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So if I can take a product that tells my body to create less zonulin,
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then I'm super excited because I know that the downstream effect of zonulin is leaky gut.
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So I can assume that less zonulin, it means that my gut can heal.
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I don't know about you, but I'm working really hard on my gut.
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Really hard. Because it's one of the foundational things that we can do for autoimmune health.
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We want to fix the cell. If you don't fix the cell, you're not going to get well.
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We have to address our cellular health. We also have to address our gut,
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the lining, that leaky gut, and also the microbiome.
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And then we also have to do other things like, you know, sleep and decrease
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our stress, get enough hydration, get enough micronutrients.
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If you're not getting enough selenium, your body cannot convert your T4 to T3.
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I talked about those on, I think, the last episode or maybe two episodes ago.
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Yeah, because the last episode was an amazing interview. Have you listened to Dr.
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Jen Mann yet? If you have not, go back and listen to last week's episode.
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I absolutely loved talking with her and hearing the timeline.
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Quite honestly, I was going to go in another direction with the interview,
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but she had so much good information. I changed tracks and asked her about timeline
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and how she works with people. And I was just fascinated.
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I loved that interview. So I hope you did too.
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Okay. So anyway, back to Zonulin. Your body makes it.
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And you can tell your body to make less. You can also tell your body to make
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more of helpful peptides.
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Of course, you've heard of GLP-1.
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That is a peptide. Did you know that there's also GLP-2?
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It makes sense, right? I mean, if they give it a number one,
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then clearly there's probably a number two.
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I never thought about it. Never thought about it until I heard that you can
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increase how much GLP-2 that your body is making. There's a lot of other peptides, GPP.
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I'm not even going name all of them. I will in the next episode,
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or I'm going to have a guest who can explain them and explain how we can tell our body to heal.
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Every time I say that word, or one of my guests says that word,
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I get a little uncomfortable.
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The word heal. Your body is created to heal.
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Your body knows what health feels like, and your body is always trying to get back there. You're
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Even when your immune system is attacking things, it's usually doing so with good intent.
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There are some very good theories that your thyroid collects a lot of toxins,
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heavy metals and things. We've talked about fluoride.
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We've talked about other things that your thyroid can collect.
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And so there are some theories that have pretty good basis that says one reason
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that your immune system is attacking your thyroid is because it's trying to get out the toxins.
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Your body is always trying to heal. But why does that word kind of get me uncomfortable?
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It's because the government has said you cannot talk about healing.
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That's why at the end of every episode, I say the standard disclaimer that it's
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for informational educational purposes.
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I also say that if I talk about products, they're not intended to diagnose.
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Treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
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I could say heal in there. Because those are some trigger words that the government
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doesn't want us as, you know, anybody outside of a physician saying those words.
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And even if I was a physician, you are not my patient because we don't have a paying relationship.
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Yes, obviously I have holistic health coaching and I would love to help you
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with whatever your challenges are and help you figure out how you can be healthier.
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Help your body do what your body wants to do. And that's always in the show
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notes too, the link to hire me as your holistic health coach.
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But anyway, the word heal, it has a lot of baggage because the government says,
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you know, healing is only for medications.
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We're going to talk about helping your body do what your body is designed to do.
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And next week is all about gut health, good, better, best. I hope to see you then.
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Until then, keep taking nice deep relaxed breathing your breaths relax your
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jaw relax your tongue relax your neck relax your shoulders relax your forehead you've got this.
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This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only.
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Please discuss any changes with your trusted healthcare provider.
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To take your next step, join our school community and explore the courses available
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there. You do not have to figure your health out alone.
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So that is school, S-K-O-O-L dot com, and it is the Health with Hashimoto's community.
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I'll see you next time on the Health with Hashimoto's podcast.