Hello, Hello, welcome to high on energy TV. This is episode two. I'm super, super excited. You're here and I'm really, really excited to talk about. Today's topic is iodine deficiency, the cause of your fatigue. So I'm Kendra Perry. I'm your host and I cannot wait to bring you more energy and this topic today is very, very important. Okay. We know that a lot of us are struggling with low energy. That's probably why you're tuning in for this episode because your energy is a bit sub-par or even worse. It's barely even there. You're rating it like a two or three out of 10 and you're wondering, well, what the fuck? Why do I feel so shitty? And it's a really good question because there are a lot of things that can play into fatigue, but this deficiency, iodine deficiency is actually one of the major causes of fatigue and it's one of the most common deficiencies that I am seeing in my clients.
Once we correct this deficiency, it has a big results. I've seen big results and the people I work with, but also in myself. This is a huge part of why I was able to reverse my debilitating fatigue and get out of that fatigue ditch. Okay. So let's start by talking about what is iodine. So when you think of iodine, you might be thinking of iodine that's in your first aid kit, right? Because I think a lot of us, you know, we maybe use iodine to disinfect wounds, but we're not really fully aware of how important of a role it plays in our bodies and in our diet. So let's talk about some of the things that iodine is important for. So number one, detox. Iodine is a very powerful detoxifier. It helps you detox. So we need iodine in order to detox, especially certain metals like excess copper and mercury. So we need iodine for that. We also need iodine to have healthy thyroid hormone production. So T4 and T3, those are your thyroid hormones. Those are actually made from iodine. Okay. T3 is three molecules of iodine and T4 is four. So if we want to have healthy thyroid production and hormone production, we actually need to have good levels of iodine and this is a big deal because we know that when our thyroid isn't working, we have a lot of fatigue, but we also struggle with weight gain. We tend to be very cold. You might have insomnia and they'd have low stomach acid. You might have cold hands and feet and have a really hard time keeping your body temperature strong. There's a lot of things that can happen when your thyroid is under functioning. And I actually believe a lot of thyroid issues are, have an underlying iodine deficiency. There's a lot of things that play into thyroid health, but definitely iodine deficiency is huge. Okay. So when it comes to thyroid hormone or thyroid health, you really want to be considering your iodine levels.
So we also need iodine for energy. That has to do with how it's involved with the thyroid hormone, like we discussed before. There are receptors in every single cell in your entire body for iodine. And, so you will not have good cellular energy organ energy overall if you don't have good iodine levels. We also need iodine for intelligence and brain health. So when it comes to developing children or developing babies in the womb, in that first trimester, a lot of the intelligence and brain function is built and if the woman who is producing that baby, if she is iodine deficient, but it's going to affect the intelligence and brainhealth of that developing baby. So it's very important and it's also important for our own brain health. People with iodine deficiency tend to have a lot of brain fog. They tend to feel very foggy because they don't have enough production actually have that healthy, sharp, clarifying brain health. The other thing that iodine does is it's a very potent antimicrobial, so it's antiviral, antiparasitic, antibacterial and antifungal. So it does help us fight off infections. So that's a big way, a reason why it's in your first aid kit, right, because you're rubbing it on your little cut and it's helped. It's helping prevent infection. So it's very anti microbial as well. So pretty important stuff. Iodine is a very important mineral and like I said, pretty deficient in the population today.
So let's talk a little bit about some of the ways a person may get deficient. So you know, the obvious answer to this is low dietary intake. So definitely in North America, I mean we don't consume as much iodine as people who are living in Asia. So in Asia people might actually be consuming on average about 12.5 milligrams a day. Where as in the United States and Canada we're getting a mere fraction of this. And the recommended daily allowance for iodine is excessively lowly crazy, crazy low. It's only 150 micrograms. So when you compare a 150 micrograms to 12.5 milligrams in Asia, I mean people who live in Asia are consuming almost a 100 times as much iodine as we are. So I don't understand why our rda for iodine is so crazy low because it's barely enough to give you proper function. It's enough to prevent goiter and to prevent disease. But it's not actually enough to give you energy to promote thyroid health and give you all those benefits that we discussed them beginning of this video. And in a lot of cases in North America, we do tend to have very iodine deficient soil. So unless you live near the ocean and you're consuming a lot of sea vegetables and kelp and fish and spending a lot of time in the ocean, there's a good chance you're just not getting enough iodine into your diet. Okay.
And then on top of that, there are a lot of things that actually compete with iodine absorption in our body and very easily make us deficient. So it's the halide chemical. So this is going to include things like chlorine, chloramine, bromine, and fluoride. So these are a group of chemicals or metals and actually compete with iodine at the receptor level. So if you're getting exposed to these things, they can actually push iodine off of the receptor and then bind to the receptors. So even if you then consume iodine, you know, maybe after this video you're like, oh, I need to think about my iron levels. I'm going to go buy some Kelp, I'm going to go get some sea vegetables and, start consuming more iodine, but if you have these halides attached to your receptors then that iodine just kind of bounces off and gets excreted rather than binding to the receptor and getting absorbed into the system. And this is the thing, if you are drinking tap water or if you ever have in your recent life you are getting a Shitload of halides, right? Because if you're drinking city or municipal water, it's disinfected with chlorine. It also has chloramine in it. And depending on where you live in the world, there may be fluoride as well. So a lot of us are consuming these chemicals in the form of our water every single day, multiple times a day. And that is making us iodine deficient. So drinking, tap water is a big no, no. You can't drink it. It's, I mean, it's not only going to affect your iodine levels, but it's going to bring all kinds of other toxins into your world. And, you know, it's funny because when I talk to people, you know, people were like, oh, well we have really clean water, like our city apparently has the cleanest water, like I don't even know what that means. It's like complete and total bullshit because there are so many chemicals and crap in municipal and city water, sure, maybe it's clean of parasites or bacterial organisms or feces because they disinfected with chlorine. But most, I mean, all municipal and city waters, they're not filtering for metals. They're not filtering for glyphosate. They're not not filtering for residue or runoff from agriculture, like pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, they're not filtering for what's the word I'm looking for? Drug residues. So this is another big one. So a lot of people are taking prescription drugs. They pee out what's left of that prescription job into the toilet that goes back into the water system. And that actually goes back into the water drinking system. So nobody is filtering for these things. And chlorine is toxic. Chloramine is toxic. Fluoride is especially toxic. So there's this big piece of tap water that, I mean most people around the world are drinking and this is making us incredibly iodine deficient, even if we are consuming good healthy sources of iodine, okay.
Bromine is another one. And so maybe you're like, oh, well I drink spring water or among creek water or, you know, I filter my water, I make sure those things aren't in it. Well, you know, you gotta look at like your car, your furniture, your mattress, because these things tend to have bromine added to them and they do off gas and we actually absorb them into our lungs. Nonorganic strawberries are sprayed with bromine, bromine used in a lot of breads as a levener so helps bread rise. So a lot of us are still getting exposed to those things as well. And these make us iodine deficient, and as it's really problematic. So when you start getting iodine deficient, that's when hypo thyroid starts to pop up. You start having thyroid issues, the course that is going to play into your energy levels. Not having proper iodine levels actually can promote Hashimoto's. And this, you know, people don't get this because there's a lot of fearmongering out there around iodine and people are going to say, are going to tell you you're going to find this on the Internet that people are saying, oh, well if you take iodine with Hashimoto's, it's like adding fuel to the fire and it's going to make Hashimoto's worse. Well, there's actually a lot of research that points towards iodine deficiency being one of the primary causes of Hashimoto's and I can tell you that I use and iodine protocol with all my clients with Hashimoto's and hypothyroid and they're getting results. Okay. It's not making their thyroid issues worse. So there is a lot of fearmongering around it probably because it's a very poorly understood mineral and a lot of people don't understand that, you can't just willy nilly go out and take iodine. There's a whole protocol that comes with it that needs to be customized for you. So you do need to be working with an iodine literate practitioner to be doing iodine therapy safely.
So I mentioned in the beginning it's really, really important for estrogen hormone metabolism. So it can lead to that buildup of damaging estrogens, it promotes the 16 OH pathway. So that's one of the metabolites that your estrogen gets turned into, and this is the metabolite that actually leads to a lot of tumor growth. So that can cause things like fibroids, endometriosis, and it can promote fibrous cystic breast disease. Very, very common. This is a symptom I see all the time, and these people desperately need iodine. Your energy levels will drop. You will gain weight. It's really hard to maintain a healthy weight when you were iodine deficient. You get that resistant weight loss were like, no matter what you do, you can't lose weight. You're like eating healthy, you're exercising, you're fasting, and you're just stuck. You're not getting anywhere with your weight. That can indicate an iodine issue as well. I mentioned the brain fog. It can make your brain feel really, really foggy. Really, yeah, just fuzzy. I'm like, you're walking around in a tunnel. That's a very typical iodine deficiency symptom. Like I mentioned, poor, poor detox, so it can be lead to the buildup of certain metals and toxins in the body because you're not able to detox properly, and then there are a lot of studies that are associated with thyroid, ovarian, and breast cancer, so it can definitely have that and it will will lead to the buildup of copper and mercury in your body because you actually need iodine to detoxify those things. Okay.
So let's talk about testing for iodine. So blood testing for iodine isn't going to work. Urine testing for iodine doesn't really work either because it doesn't really tell us what's going on with the iodine. Like if you have high iodine levels in your urine, is it high because you have enough or is it high because your body's excreting it because the receptors are blocked with halides. The best tests for iodine is probably iodine loading test. So basically this just involves you taking high doses of iodine. And then seeing how much is getting excreted in the urine and you know, if your, if your receptors are saturated with iodine and then it just gets dumped in the urine so should actually have technically, if you have good iodine levels, you should actually have high excretion in the urine and that means like your iodine status is pretty good. But if you have really high uptake of iodine and it tells you that you're deficient because those receptors can only take up iodine when they have space on the receptors and what we want is full receptor saturation of iodine. But the problem with this test is you may excrete a lot of iodine if you have a lot of halide chemicals attached to your receptors. So you know, it, it's not always, a definitive test. The way that I like to determine iodine deficiency is actually with hair trace mineral analysis or each HTMA testing. So technically there is no iodine marker on the HTMA panel because it's actually not excreted through the hair. It is primarily excreted through the urine. But all the minerals have a relationship with each other so I can look at the, the minerals that have the most tightly wound relationship to iodine and determine if there's an iodine deficiency. And then of course looking at symptoms, people's symptoms as well, because you know, if people have endometriosis, if they have fibrous cystic breasts disease, if they have fibroids like severe estrogen issues, they have Hashimoto's, hypo thyroid, I'm probably going to want to put them on an iodine protocol, but I can actually look at the potassium levels of lithium, siledium, calcium and copper, and when I look at those, I can actually look at them and determine is someone's iodine deficient. Because typically people who are iodine deficient, they have really low potassium and really little lithium levels, very hard for the body to absorb and hold onto those minerals without good iodine status. Also, iodine deficiency, tends to cause the buildup of calcium that actually in effect slows the thyroids. You end up with this really high calcium on hair mineral analysis and you may end up with copper toxicity, so there may be high copper or hidden copper on the hair mineral analysis tasks and there may be low selenium levels as well. You also may see a buildup of aluminum because iodine deficiency can affect the aluminum levels and mercury as well. So I don't directly measure iodine. I look at the person, I look at hair trace mineral analysis or HTMA testing. And then based on that, I determine if somebody needs iodine. If someone needs an iodine protocol.
So this is not this video, this is not the ticket to go out and start just willy nilly taking iodine. I really don't recommend doing that because if you don't do it properly, you can just waste your money or you could actually cause your body some stress. So you need to do the iodine protocol properly. So you do want to be working with an iodine literate practitioner like me and someone who runs hair mineral analysis because you want to make sure that you only take iodine. Well, also supporting the other minerals that need supporting, but I want to give you guys some good take home actionable tips, things that you can do right now to support your iodine status. So we talked about sea vegetables, really great way to do that. Sea vegetables, kelp, Nori, dulse, that sort of thing. Just making sure you're getting it from a really good quality organic source. The other thing to do is to filter your tap and shower water. Okay. Because if you ever hope to have good iodine status, you need to stop exposing yourself to halides that are competing with iodine. So I always recommend that people actually start with your shower water because the halides, especially chlorine, chloramine, fluoride, which are typically in municipal city water, they have really low vapor point, so that means that they vaporize, you know, at pretty low temperatures. So if you're having a hot shower, those halides are turning into gases and you're actually absorbing them through your skin and you're absorbing them directly into your lungs. This is actually a massive cause of respiratory issues and asthma. Okay. So I do recommend starting with a showerhead filter, which is great because they're relatively cheap. I like Berkey B e r k e y and Pure Effects Filters. It's like $80. It's not an expensive filter and you just put it on your shower. Once you've done that and you can afford it, I recommend getting a filter for your tap water. I personally use Pure Effects. I like it because I can actually attach it to my tap because I don't like having to fill up a canister because I'm lazy and I don't have fucking time for that. So I like to attach it to my filter. If you don't have fluoride in your water, you can get the compact version, which is the lowest price point. So what you can do is you can pull up your city's water report and just see if they put fluoride into the water. And if they don't, you can go with the compact. But if you do have fluoride in your water, you need to upgrade and go with the ultra. So it's more expensive, but you know, you're getting that fluoride out of your water. We've talked about kelp taking the nature's way, kelp capsules, you can take as much as five to six capsules a day, which is, a few milligrams of iodine. So really good if you couple that with food, you're going to get close to more of that kind of Asian intake of kelp of iodine, which is really important. Plus the Kelp has a lot of other minerals in it, all the cofactors for iodine. So it's a really good, awesome support for iodine if you aren't ready to work with a practitioner and go on a, an iodine protocol.
Hey, hey everyone and welcome to episode one of high on energy TV. I'm super, super excited to be here. It's been a while since I've done a live video and today of course we are talking about fatigue because that is what high on energy is all about. It's about giving you more energy and getting you out of that fatigue ditch as I'd like to say.
So, as I said, I'm super excited to be here and I want to talk to you about three super common causes of fatigue that I don't really see a lot of practitioners or doctors talking about. And you know, fatigue is really, really common. I would say there's this kind of low energy epidemic these days. It's the most common complaint that I get from clients. People are just always telling me that they're so freaking tired and definitely for me personally, this was something I really struggled with. This is what led me to learn about hair mineral analysis, which I think is one of the most powerful tools for addressing fatigue and getting the body more energy. When I first got into functional medicine, this is like five or six years ago, I had a lot of issues going on. I had a lot of hormonal issues. I had to get issues that was just so much stuff going on. And when I started doing the functional testing, it helped a lot. It helped with my God, it helped with my hormones. It helped with the insomnia that I had at the time, which was super chronic and super hard to deal with, but it didn't really do anything to address the fatigue, at least for me. Like I really couldn't get my fatigue sorted until I actually addressed mineral issues. And that's kind of what we're talking a lot about today because these are the things, minerals and metals, which is what we're going to dig a little bit deeper into in this episode. Are huge drivers of fatigue and it's a little bit more cutting edge. It's a little bit more unheard of. And I don't even see some of the biggest functional medicine doctors in this industry really talking about it. And I think this is a huge mistake, and I think this is the reason why a lot of people aren't getting better. A lot of people are spending a lot of money on functional medicine and functional testing, yet they're not quite getting the results. So I want to dive a little bit deeper into this today.
And you know, before we get started, before I go through these three causes, I first want to address like the basics because there are certain things a lot of people are going to be aware of these, especially if you're further along on your healing journey. There are certain things that you do need to have in place in order to have energy, right? And these are the obvious things, but I do want to address these. I want to make sure that you're thinking of these because if you don't have these things in place, um, it doesn't make sense to go deeper and get a little bit more complex as some of the things we talk about today if you don't even have the basics in place.
So let's talk about the basics. Obviously, if you're going to have energy, you need to learn to sleep properly, right? That's a big deal. Most of us know that, but you know, if you're staying up too late or you're not sleeping enough, you're not getting at least seven to eight hours of sleep a night if you're not going to bed before 11 than that is going to play into your energy levels. Stress is going to play into that. So it was exercise, so his diet and so as water consumption. So those are those basic things and you know, I know you're jumping on with me now if you just jumped on, you're like, okay, like what the heck? Like I thought you said this is stuff that no one is talking about. Like everyone is talking about that. I just want to throw that out there and you know, let you know that if you know, energy is your primary concern. If you're really tired, you always need to make sure that you are reducing stress. You're getting exercise, you are sleeping, you were eating a healthy diet and you're drinking enough water. Okay? Basic things, but let's jump into it.
What are the three super, super common causes of fatigue that not a lot of doctors or even natural pathic doctors are talking about? Okay. I have heard very few practitioners talk about these things, so that's why I'm so passionate about teaching them, but let's talk about one of the number one causes of chronic, unrelenting, debilitating fatigue and that is copper toxicity. And again, not a lot of people know about this. This is a really common issue, especially with women. In the woman that I'm working with. I'm probably like 80 to 90 percent of those women. We are addressing copper toxicity because that is how common it is. Cover toxicity was the primary driver of my own fatigue. Okay. And basically what this refers to is when the body starts retaining copper, for some reason, it gets an excessive amount of copper coming into the body or something starts to happen where the body starts to just increase it's copper retention. And then at some point the body gets so weak that it can no longer metabolize and move copper out of the body. And then that copper starts to accumulate and it basically sets off this huge chain reaction of events in the body that lead to a lot of different, a lot of different issues. But fatigue is a really, really big, big one of these causes of fatigue. So how does one get copper toxic? That is the big question. And there's actually a lot of things in our environment these days that can make someone copper toxic. Okay. One of the biggest causes in women is hormonal birth control use. So they've been on the pill, the patch, the ring, the needle the implant. I might be missing something. I think there's a cervical ring, I may have that, but I'm hormonal birth control does greatly increased the retention of copper. And the reason it does that is because of the synthetic estrogen that is in all hormonal birth control. So estrogen has an interesting relationship with copper and that it greatly increases the retention of copper. So you're on birth control pills for however many years, decades. Like, I mean, some women are on them for 20 years. You were just enhancing your copper retention. Okay. And when it comes to minerals, every mineral has an effect on every other mineral in the body, either directly or indirectly. Some minerals are a synergist, so they help increase the retention of another mineral or some are antagonists. They decrease the absorption of the other minerals so they have an enhancing or an antagonistic effect. And so copper, when you start to retain it excessively like this, it starts to drive all these other mineral issues because copper will deplete your potassium, it will raise calcium, it'll increase the burn rate of magnesium, it will raise sodium, it will deplete zinc, it'll deplete chromium, it will deplete selenium, it will deplete molybdenum. So it has this really interesting effect. So it really messes with all the other minerals in the body. And that's going to set off a whole bunch of events in the body because, you know, minerals are needed for every single process in the body.
And then the thing about this copper toxicity is the reason why it gets to a state where it's actually toxic is because the body can't metabolize it and utilize it. So the body is storing it and it's toxic, but the body can't utilize it. So it's also deficient. And copper is actually one of the primary minerals that is used in the energy cycle. So when your body is making ATP, which is cellular energy, ATP is basically the gas or the fuel that you put into your body that allows it to function optimally. So with copper deficiency, then you don't have good energy production. And one of the most common things I see with copper toxicity is this really profound fatigue. And you've probably, you may have heard me speak of the copper ditch. I see that Jamie's on with me. I know she has heard me talk about the copper ditch, but I call it the copper ditch because when I had copper toxicity, that is how I felt like I was in the ditch. I could see out of the ditch, but I didn't have the energy to get out of the ditch. It's like I drank all night long and it was so drunk I was in the ditch, but you actually, it's not fun like you actually can't get out of it and you're just watching the world go by around you. And so it causes this really profound fatigue. It's really, really hard to deal with. Nothing seems to shift it. And it's because don't have bioavailable copper to utilize in the energy cycle. So this is interesting. But the primary cause copper deficiency is actually copper toxicity and it's because of that bio available, bio unavailable copper.
So if you have been on birth control pills or some sort of hormonal birth control at some point in your life, even if it was 10 years ago, even if it was only for a few years, this could have set off the sequence of events to put you in a place where your body got really weak and can no longer detox copper. Because the thing of a copper is when you increase that retention. Initially it really stimulates adrenal function and so adrenals are actually responsible for metabolizing copper. So the adrenals are pumping, copper stimulating them, they're pumping, you moved that copper out and it's not a big as, as big of an issue, but over time is you consistently stimulate adrenals. They do start to slow down. The metabolism starts to slow down and once adrenal function is low, you no longer can move copper out of the body. And that's when it really starts to accumulate. So that's why like if you were on the birth control pill for say, like four years, 10 years ago, that four years of this greatly enhanced copper retention could have, could have burned out your adrenals, could have lowered that function to the point where 10 years later your body is still struggling to have good adrenal function. And therefore that copper that you accumulated 10 years ago when you were on the pill or whatever, is potentially still causing an issue today. Okay? So I always add that into my assessment of a client is like, okay, so these are everything I'm looking at on your hair mineral analysis. That might be pointing the finger towards copper, but you know, what is the history? Have you been on hormonal birth control? The same goes for the copper Iud, despite what you are being told about the copper iud. It does greatly enhance copper retention. You may not see it in the blood because again, if adrenal function is poor, then it's not going to be moved out and metabolized anyways. But copper toxicity is a big one. It needs to be addressed. A lot of women are struggling with it. And I mean cover doesn't only cause fatigue, it causes a lot of issues, other issues as well, including mental health issues, including anxiety, depression, constipation, crazy insomnia, the kind of kind of just makes you want to crawl out of your skin. It's a big deal and it can take time to detox. And the best way to address it is by running a hair mineral analysis, because if your adrenal function is slow, we can't force your body to detox copper, we actually need to raise adrenal function and we need to raise energetic potential in the body so that the body can actually even begin to detox that. So we can do that with hair mineral analysis testing. Okay. So that's number one.
Number two is another mineral and it's a deficiency. And this is iodine deficiency. And this is another extremely common deficiency that actually is a little bit controversial. There's a lot of practitioners out there that tell you to stay away from Ini that iodine can harm your thyroid. I don't really agree with these. I think, you know, when you're doing iodine therapy, you need to be careful. You need to do the cofactors, you need to do it properly. And if you don't do proper do it appropriately, there is a risk that you could cause some damage. But if you do it properly, it can be a very powerful, protocol. And the reason is because there are receptors for iodine in every single cell in the body. So your thyroid hormone, t3, t4, is actually made from iodine, iodine molecules. It's like three iodine molecules, which is t3 and t4 is four. So that is what your thyroid hormone is made of and your thyroid hormone is responsible for regulating the entire body's metabolism. So if you have low thyroid function that maybe it's being caused by iodine deficiency because your body actually doesn't have what it needs to produce thyroid hormone or to make thyroid hormone, then you're not going to have good energy, right? You're really gonna struggle to have good energy and you know, unless you are, you know, you're living in Asia and you eat a lot of sea vegetables and seafood or you're not living on the coast. A lot of people just don't get enough iodine naturally in their diet. And you know, when we look at say Asian cultures, like they're consuming quite a bit of iodine, like on average they might consume 12.5 milligrams of iodine a day. And what's interesting is the recommended daily allowance for iodine in the US is 150 micrograms. So the Japanese people and Asian people, I mean they're consuming almost a hundred times the recommended daily allowance for iodine in the US, yet they're still healthy and I would challenge even healthier than US people. So there is a lot of fear mongering around iodine and I don't think there's much merit to it.
I think iodine is very important. I think we can consume a ton of iodine in our diet and not be consuming toxic levels of iodine. And I think a lot of people will benefit from an iodine protocol, because a lot of people are iodine deficient, not only because they're not getting it from food, but because there's certain chemicals in our environment that actually compete with iodine on the receptors. So, if you are drinking tap water, if you have fluoride in your water, if you have chlorine or cloramine in your water, then you are probably iodine deficient. Or if you know, at any point in your life you were drinking this type of water, you were probably iodine deficient and it's because those are the halide metals. So chlorine, chloramine, fluoride, also bromine, which is not typically in water, but it's in mattresses, new furniture, new cars. It's sprayed on non organic strawberries. It's in bread as a, as a leven in bread, so a lot of us get exposed to bromine as well, but they actually compete with iodine on the receptors. They can actually just push the iodine right off of the receptor and then bind to that receptor. And if your iodine receptor cells are all, just kind of clogged with Halides with chlorine and fluoride, you can consume iodine and it will literally just bounce off the receptor because those receptors are blocked. Okay. And so this is a big problem because a lot of people are drinking tap water. They're drinking city municipal water that is treated with chlorine. You know, a lot of people are sleeping on mattresses that are off gassing bromine. They have new cars, they have new houses, they have new furniture that are off gassing these halide chemicals.
So that's a really big way that people get iodine deficient. It's not only because they have lack of consumption because they're not spending time in the ocean or eating veggies or animals from the sea, but also because on a regular basis, I mean we are consuming these chemicals on top of that. A lot of us are actually breathing them in and actually absorbing them through our skin in the form of shower water. So they have a really low vapor point. So when they get heated they actually vaporize and then they just, you know, get into your skin. You absorb them into your lungs. That's why these things can actually cause a lot of lung issues and asthma issues. So if you don't have good iodine, then you're going to struggle with fatigue. And I've actually found the iodine protocol to be one of the most beneficial protocols for fatigue. And this isn't a free ticket, a free pass to go and start taking iodine willy nilly. You don't want to be taking high doses of iodine without taking the proper steps and taking the proper cofactors and working with an iodine literate practitioner just because you could potentially mess things up, but you can take some steps to improve your iodine levels just through food, by consuming lots of sea vegetables, algae products. I love marine phytoplankton. Oceans Alive, marine phytoplankton. This is a really good source of iodine or you can take kelp capsules. I like nature's way because, I trust them to not be contaminated, but you can actually start consuming more iodine. And then one of the biggest things you can do is you can filter your tap and shower water to stop exposing yourself to those really nasty chemicals. Okay.
So that's number two. That's iodine deficiency. And then finally I want to talk about heavy metal toxicity. So to this day I've worked with hundreds of clients. I've yet to see a, a case of profound fatigue that did not also include some sort of heavy metal toxicity. Okay. So, basically, we all get exposed to metals. They are in our environment unfortunately. Industry uses them, right? A lot of industry manufacturing, coal, you know, different mills. I mean a lot of these industries are putting a lot of metals into our environment and then on top of that, like they're in a lot of the products that we use everyday. No one is actually safe from metals like we, we do get exposed to them constantly and what metals do, so they can compete with minerals for binding sites so they can actually. Because like if you, like, if we kind of get nerdy about science here and we think about the periodic table, what minerals and metals are all on the periodic table and that means that they have similarities. So certain minerals actually resemble metals. They have similar properties, and so metals can come into the body and because they're heavier they can actually push these minerals off of binding sites, off of enzyme sites. And sort of displace them so they can actually cause your body to dump minerals. And then, excuse me, if you, are mineral deficient, which a lot of us are, your body is just way more likely to hold onto metals because metals can actually perform similar tasks as minerals. If your body is lacking the minerals.
So a really good example is calcium and lead, so calcium and lead have very similar properties. And if your body is very deficient in calcium, your body can actually use lead in place of calcium to make bone. And yes, lead makes brittle, shitty bone, but it's better than nothing and your body needs to use something so your body will actually utilize that lead. And the best way to get your body to detox that lead is actually to restore calcium levels. So when it comes to metal detox, yes, metals are a massive part of your fatigue. If you're struggling with fatigue, I guarantee you have some sort of metal issue, but this is not a free pass to go out and start doing aggressive, heavy metal detox or doing something like culation therapy which pulls metals through the kidneys aggressively and can actually make someone very sick.
So if you have a lot of fatigue and you suspect metals and I, I almost guarantee there's going to be metals there. Again, the best way to do this, like with iodine deficiency, like with copper, is to run a hair mineral analysis, but there are steps you can take to enhance metal detox. So one of my favorite strategies is near or not near any infrared sauna, infrared sauna, or just a sauna in general. Infrared is a little bit better because you can stay in it longer. It doesn't like heat your skin and make it hard to breathe. But honestly in the end, any sauna will do, sweating it out is a really great strategy to help with heavy metal detox. And then there's actually two products that you can use together. This is very gentle. This is very safe. Anyone can do this, you can use something called bio-sil, which is just silicone, which helps kind of stir up and mobilise metals but very gently, you want to get the drops and you're probably going to be a little bit confused because it's marketed for skin, nails and hair, but it actually is a heavy metal immobiliser. Start with one drop. If you can get to 10, that's great, but it can cause a lot of fatigue in the way that it stores up metals. So we'll just start with one, and you would always want to take a binder with that. And my favorite binder is econugenics practicel C. So this is modified citrus pectin. It will bind to metals but it will not bind to minerals. So most binders out there, bind everything and that's actually super problematic because they will displace your minerals as well. But the modified citrus pectin does not do this, said modified in a way so that it does not affect mineral balance. I only recommend the ECO neurogenics not because I have a relationship with this company, but because they have actually proven their process. And proven that their method with a lot of research, there are a lot of companies out there that say they have modified citrus pectin but they actually don't do it properly. And the result is it will also bind to minerals. So the practicel C is awesome. You do that with bio-sil and that with sauna therapy and that is a pretty awesome a light heavy metals detox that you can do to help boost your energy levels. Okay.
So let's just do a quick recap of the three super common causes of fatigue that your doctor or natural path has never told you about. Probably because they've never heard of it. Number one is copper toxicity. Number two is iodine deficiency and number three is heavy metal toxicity. So if you are struggling with fatigue that is not responding to sleep, stress reduction, exercise, healthy diet, water consumption, drinking enough water, then you really want to consider these three things, because there is a good chance that at least one, if not two, if not all three of these things is playing into your energy levels.
So yes, if you've had your gallbladder removed. What that means is your body makes bile, but it has no place to store it, concentrated and secrete it from. So that means that the bile kinda just drips from the liver, it can be a bit aggravating to the intestine, but what it means is that you need to take something to stimulate bile with every meal because you have no way to store it for later. So your body just makes bile and it dumps it. There's no storage facility. So I would take bitters. I love digestive bitters. If you're in Canada, I love Canadian bitters from St Francis. If you were in the states, I like quick silver scientific Dr Shades, bitters, number nine. These are really good bitters. So you'd want to take that with every meal. I would also probably add in some bile salts or some bile acid factors. I liked jarrow formulas, bile acid factors. I would take one to two of those with every meal with the bitters. And you may also want to look into something, a unikey makes the bile builder and that's actually a really great product, but you want to be making sure I wouldn't take any of those outside of meals. You'd always want to take them with meals because you know, if you're stimulating bile outside of your meal, your meal is just gonna get dripped into your intestines. He only want to be stimulating it when you're eating. And unfortunately without a gallbladder, you do need to take those things with every meal for the rest of your life. Or you're not going to absorb fat, you're not going to be able to detoxify, you're not going to be able to clear hormones. So you're going to end up with a whole host of issues, when you don't have a gallbladder.
Kristina: It literally counts down to minutes since your vacation. So you can just add in when you're most recent vacation has been and then keep track of it because as providers, that's one of the things that we often forget to do.
Kristina: We're so busy taking care of other people and hello, we need to walk our talk and do this.
Kristina: So there's a vacation clock, there's also a section called burnout and there's a whole burnout scale that you can do, and one of the tools in this. This is why there's so much to this one app. That's why I'm like, it's just phenomenal. I talk about this in presentations I give across the US and internationally and literally people are pulling out their phones and downloading it because it's, there's so much in it. So there's something called the pro-qual, and that's the professional quality of life scale. And it's really nice to have this as a measure. It's a nice measure. It's a self-report. It's about 26 questions, and as you fill it out and then scores it for you and you get three scores, you get a compassion satisfaction score, a burnout score, and a secondary traumatic stress score.
Kristina: That gives you your overall pro-qual or your professional quality of life. So we know that as soon as you have, and I'm sort of getting into what we're talking about here, but it's all about the app, so tech and talk at the same time.
Kristina: We have to have some marker, and then we continue to do this and we compare the marker so we can see, are we making progress? Are we doing better? Which one of those particular skills is moving in which direction? Right. And it's all right here. So see down here is the pro-qual. That's, that's the pro-qual. Again, these are demonstrations but each one of them gives you a little rainbow. And it tells you, in this case, apparently, oh this is so bad. It's been 838 days since my last update of the pro-qual. So it keeps you accountable as well.
Christine: Ops.
Kristina: I know, but again this is for demonstration, so I'm aloud.
Kristina: Now it has another section called Resilience Builders and Resilience Killers. And so it's got examples. And so examples of resilience builders are, did you take a short walk?
Kristina: Did you perform at debts? Stretching or isometrics? Things like that, and you can put in your own something that you've identified as a resilience builder. And then when you go to resilience killers, that you're going to love this. Did you skip lunch?
Kristina: Have you eaten junk food? Did you come to work sick today? Right? So it's got all of those different things, and then it brings you back to your dashboard. Now there's also tools. One of these tools that cracks me up is called, 'Remind me why I do this.'
Christine: Hilarious.
Kristina: You also get a graph of your pro-qual results and a graph of your burnout results.
Christine: Mmhmm
Kristina: And then, my, one of my, I would say this is my favorite, but they're all my favorite. There's a section on physical exercise and what it is, it's the directions on how to do various chair yoga poses.
Christine: [inaudible] I love that.
Kristina: Yes. And as you just simply scroll through, it gives you different exercises and I particularly love this. Overall, my approach for all of us as professionals is that we need things that we can do in about two or less.
Kristina: And many of these things we can do either sitting at our desk or literally when we take the bathroom break, right? And often there are so many things about counteracting burnout and working towards resilience that we say, 'oh, I just don't have the time for that.'It's going to, like we think about, 'oh, take me half an hour to get to the gym.'[inaudible]
Christine: Change and...
Kristina: Yeah. So know everything that I'm talking about are things that are free. They're accessible, and they're very brief.
Christine: No excuses people.
Kristina: Right. And oops, lost the headphones I want to listen to. So, so this one is super great. And the one caution, that it's not a caution, the one reminder that I give to people, is if you're going to do one of these exercises, make sure you do both sides because you don't want to just turn to one side and forget to turn to the other side. So do both sides. And then the final area in this particular app is something that's called value cards. They're alphabetical, so at the moment what shows up is idealism.
Christine: Ok.
Kristina: And so it has a little text describing idealism, and if I swipe, then comes up independence…
Christine: Right.
Kristina: at taking care of ourselves. And I'll use this as a teeny segway because do you know that in the most recent studies in the US on physicians and Burnout, over 70 percent of physicians who are surveyed show at least one of the characteristics of burnout.
Christine: Oh my gosh, let's get going on this because my ears are like, what? So I mean, burnout is like this term that's being thrown around all the time. You know? Yeah. Some people who use it very negatively because unfortunately, you know, it's, a lot of people don't really know what it is. They don't know what it manifests likes, there's abuse that is being, you know, I don't know, in Luxemburg in particular, there's lots of people who abuse it and they just get three weeks or three months of work because they claimed to have burnout. So I think it is first of all important to understand what it is and how it manifests, especially either to become aware that you as a practitioner might actually be going down a slippery road or, what I also find uber important, is when we're working with a client and I mean not everyone is qualified to work in that particular area. A lot of us are coaches and I find that it's our duty to know when we've reached our limits, and I find knowing that someone is on their way to a real burnout that's out of our boathouse for most of us. So for me, this is really on the one hand looking at ourselves. You just said how many practitioners are actually well on their way of suffering severe burnout. How to diagnosis or how to get good idea of what this might be going on with my client or when it's time to refer out. So I would love to talk about these areas. I know it is super vast topic, but I know you are the go to person to talk about this, so I cannot wait to soak up your knowledge on this.
Kristina: Oh, thank you. And that's literally one of the things that in my executive coaching I really specialize in because I have the psychological knowledge. So I'm a person who literally others refer to when they get to this place, when things have become too much.
Kristina: And so I love the fact that we're able to think about this. And I'm going to start off with giving you an example of a time that I discovered that I was burnt out and because it happens, it doesn't happen at the same frequency necessarily all the time, and it's not always obvious, and yet it's something we have to pay attention to. So my big personal hashtag is always radical self-care. Because that means, right? Literally paying attention to what's going on and radical self-care for me means things like setting limits and having boundaries and owning your strengths and knowing when to say no and when to say yes to you, things like that. So that's the talk that I'm always giving to everybody. Here's a day, I drive home, and usually I parked in my garage, and I walked through the garage into my house. As you walk in, there's a long table, and that's where we put the mail and other things that are going to go in or out. So every day in a row I walk in, I look at the mail, I leave things, I move things, it's fine. And usually what happens is the dogs run up to greet me and my husband comes over because he's usually home first and he gives me a hug and a kiss and I say hi and I look at the mail, blah blah blah, you know, normal, ordinary life. So I notice many days in a row that there's like a basically a lot of junk on this table, and it doesn't bother me in the slightest. 'Hi, how you doing? I add to what I take away all fine.'And then this one day I walk in, and as I walk in, the dogs come over, my husband comes over, he's smiling and saying hi. And I look at the table and I look at him and I'm like, 'what is all this mess?'And he's like, oh right. He's sort of gives me that look. And I was like, 'is anyone ever going to clean this? Like what is going on here? Why does this look like this?'And there's a pause. It's just like, 'Oh God, you know what, what is she doing?'
Christine: 'What is going on?'Yeah. Lost the plot.
Kristina: And he very gently says, 'honey, I think that's all your stuff.'
Christine: Wrong thing to say.
Kristina: Well actually, luckily because this is my area, right? And we've got to, you know, heal thyself. So I look at him like, 'you're right.'And I thought instantly what is going on? Like this was an over the top reaction.
Kristina: The scenario was no different than any other day before and yet this. And it wasn't even that much. Like you know it, this is one of those, it took like five, maybe six minutes to put everything away and clear it off. So this...
Christine: But it just triggered. Yeah.
Kristina: Total trigger total over the top irritability and reaction. And luckily we work, he and I well enough together and he knows me and if he says, if he's going to call me on the carpet and hold me accountable without sounding defensive, there's something for me to look at. It was very clear to me, as I looked at it, that I had gotten to a place, because I was loving what I was doing and busy. So it wasn't that things were bad.
Kristina: But I wasn't following the steps that I teach people regarding radical self care.
Christine: Right, ok.
Kristina: And that those little irritants had grown and grown and grown and I hadn't stopped and taken the time to shift the pathway.
Kristina: Whether it was the mess or internally, and so therefore match, tinder, boom. Off I went now it wasn't a bad episode of burden. It was like one of the early stages of that. But that kind of irritability, that's something that is an absolute emotional sign that burnout is going on.
Christine: See, I would just think, 'oh, I just had a back day. I'm a little bit tired.' You know, so I'm actually self-evaluating myself and I didn't have like a trigger like that. But it definitely feel tired and so much going on that I'm like, 'Ooh, hang on, I might need to do some yoga poses here.'
Kristina: Exactly, exactly. So let me just go over some of the different categories of symptoms that we might see.
Kristina: Obviously they, these can account for many different things because you just gave a good example. We know that you’re the sleep expert and so not having enough sleep is certainly something that can contribute to getting some of these symptoms, but not sleeping is also a sign. It's one of the very first physical signs of burnout. So chronic fatigue, insomnia, getting sick a lot, weight gain or weight loss, appetite changes. Those are some pretty significant physical signs. Also aches and pains, a lot of aches and pains are a sign that you want to pay attention. Now if you just have one or two of these, obviously we always want to look to them straight medical first, is there something going on for us physically for anything because we want to rule that out, right? So I don't know if I had pneumonia, for example, or mononucleosis. I might be very, very tired and feeling achy and sick all the time, but in the absence of a known clear physical illness...
Kristina: you need to pay attention to that. So similarly, lots of headaches, stomach aches, aching joints, fatigue, insomnia, change in appetite, and again, I know that you'll appreciate this. We might also see an increased drive for junk food, sugar, particularly sugar at nights. Yeah. So physically that's what we'll see. Emotionally, anxiety, depression, irritability, anger, pessimism, cynicism and detachment.
Kristina: Right. So one more sort of like, 'oh, just go away, just leave me alone and go away.'
Kristina: That's again, that's sort of another, to me these are all yellow flags.
Christine: Interesting. Yeah.
Kristina: Right. So you want to think like how many yellow flags do I have?
Kristina: Similarly, at work, it could be a drop in productivity or forgetfulness, difficulties with concentration and attention. So all of those can be signs that burnout may be going on and we want to pay attention to that because if in fact we're seeing a whole bunch of, oops I just, something went wrong. If we're seeing a whole bunch of those different signs, then accumulative number of those or seeing that over a number of days. So absolutely as you said, anyone can have a bad day, anyone can have a bad couple of days, but when you're beginning to feel this way more as more often than not, or as a regular course, you really want to begin saying, 'hm, let me do an assessment.'That's why I love the Provider Resilience app.
Christine: It's true.
Kristina: Because you can log this and you can sort of say, 'hm, how are things going?'Now one of the other things that we know, is that everybody has this recency bias. So anytime someone comes into my office and I say, how are you doing? Literally they start telling me about the last 48 hours.
Christine: Ohh.
Kristina: The 48 hours are good. They're like, 'oh, I'm great, blah blah, blah, blah,'and then they say, 'oh, you know, a week ago x tragedy occurred, but you know, last few days.'
Christine: I'm fine.
Kristina: Or they've had things go really well, but in the last two days they've gotten stuck or they're struggling and they come in and they're like, 'oh, I feel awful.'
Christine: I get it. Yeah, it's like when my clients come, I've been sleeping well for two months, but the last night I had a bad night and it's like, 'oh, come on.'You've been sleeping so badly before every night, so yes, Yeah.
Kristina: So we want to pay attention to that for ourselves and in our clients. Right? We want to keep in mind that people are immediately looking at really the short term past what's gone on. And so that's why I love tracking, so using particularly tech tools to track how are you doing or how is your client doing, having your client track, doesn't matter and you know what? Your client doesn't have to be a healthcare provider, anyone can get this app. So even though I'm saying 'Provider Resilience' and it was made for healthcare professionals, it works for everybody. That's what's fabulous.
Kristina: But particularly relevant to the healthcare professional.
Christine: Alright.
Kristina: So we begin to track this. We're like, 'okay, I'm having more and more of these signs. What's going on? What do I need to pay attention to?'And then we need to step back and begin to take sort of an inventory of what am I seeing and how strongly is this feeling? You know? And so remember I mentioned pessimism and cynicism.
Kristina: Right? So I want to highlight those...
Christine: I have the [inaudible] my cynicism sometimes.
Kristina: So and so do I mean I am, I consider myself a realist, although my friends will often also say that I'm Pollyanna, not so I don't ignore the truth. I totally believe in bringing in a realistic view, but I want it to be balanced. So I think our goal is balanced. We don't want to be up all the time. We don't want to be down all the time, right? We want that seesaw to be relatively balanced. So the prime key for me is when you look and you say, am I in balance? Like in general, if I think of the last week or the last month and having data helps, then am I in balance? Or are there more days where I'm catching myself being this other way? So I'll give you an example from one of my executive coaching clients, senior executive. And the reason she came to me as she, she said, 'hey, I think I'm having some real anxiety, maybe going into depression and so maybe I need therapy.' And I said, you know, can we talk coaching first before therapy because like, let's see where you're at, let's assess this. So instead we did coaching and what it was was burnout, and here was her sign, her number, two major signs, one was she noticed that at work, little things were irritating her.
Christine: Yes, I have so many clients with that.
Kristina: She was finding herself being a little shorter or a little more snappy to her staff, and she was really beginning to think, 'okay, how quickly can I retire?'Now this was a young woman. She was not at traditional retirement age, you know, sort of early, middle age. And so literally as she loved what she did, she didn't want to stop it. But she understood that she was feeling irritable.
Christine: Something was happening. Yeah.
Kristina: Yes. And I think one of the things that we do is when we begin to question this, we might go into this other area of, am, do I have an anxiety disorder? Is this depression, anxiety and depression go hand in hand, and we may be feeling more anxious, so she was also waking up and immediately overwhelmed by thoughts of her workday and what was she going to do, and how could she manage it and would get anxious. So she was experiencing anxiety. She was experiencing some of the early signs of maybe like an irritable agitated depression, but she didn't have a full blown anxiety disorder or she wasn't in a major depression. And that's part of that differentiation I think is important because early intervention can make such a difference and so I don't want us to pathologize things and that's what we do. We tend to say, oh look, right, because we're often so critical, so I was fine, fine, fine, fine, fine. And now everything's, everything's blown up and it's awful. And that's where that pessimism and the cynicism can come in, and we are sort of overly negatively catastrophizing how we're, how we're doing.
Kristina: So the other sign for her was that she would come home and she was too tired to do the things that she said she knew she should. So she wasn't exercising, she had a hard time at making a healthy meal and she'd sit on the couch and eat cookies and basically give herself a hard time mentally about sitting on the couch eating cookies and not exercising. And so literally she was like, I know what to do. Like, you know, I'm not an idiot. I know exactly what to do, but I can't get myself to do it.
Kristina: And so what I said to her, as you know, let's think about this differently. What if we think about this as burnout and what if we say it's at a stage of burnout that absolutely, in a very short period of time, there are some things that you can do, hashtag radical self-care, in order to stop the progression and turn things back so that you're back to loving the work that you love, feeling, that you have energy doing what you need to do to take care of yourself.
Kristina: So one of our very first interventions was starting the day off with laughter. Laughter is the best, biggest hit of dopamine that we can get.
Christine: I love it.
Kristina: Dopamine makes us feel good, right. So she loves, this sounds so silly. She loves funny YouTube cat videos.
Christine: Oh gosh, who doesn't.
Kristina: Right? Exactly.
Christine: Totally up there.
Kristina: Dancing parrot. I liked the dancing parrot, right? They crack me up.
Kristina: So now traditionally we would say, don't look at your phone right away. Don't go on media. Okay, that's all well, generally speaking, that's true. As in don't dive into it.
Christine: Don't check your email. Don't go on the internet. Yeah.
Kristina: Exactly. But for her, the minute she woke up, she was flooded with these anxious thoughts about what she had to do and how she didn't want to do it. So we needed to get that to stop right away.
Christine: Not spiral out of control. Yeah.
Kristina: Exactly. Five minutes of silly YouTube videos, she would laugh...
Kristina: and then get out of bed with the energy and the positive mood to face the day.
Christine: I love that.
Kristina: Shower, eat, etc. and later go look at the email. So that's just one example. That's radical self-care.
Kristina: Right? And that's what I mean. Simple intervention, simple short, no cost or low cost interventions.
Kristina: Some other interventions that we used for her, really worked with her on time blocking in her day. So as a senior executive with an open door policy, because she wanted to be accessible to her clientele, she didn't feel like she ever had time that was focused to do what she needed to do and the burnout was inhibiting her focus and concentration. So we talked about, if you think about this as coming from a place of you want to have the most to give those that you work with, you must have a break. And there is so much research in the...
Kristina: peak performance and mindset, literature on the fact that we can only work for a certain amount of time...
Christine: Of course.
Kristina: and then we need a break.
Christine: It's much less than we actually think it is. Like an eight-hour workday it's just ridiculous. You never going to get eight hours of work done, it's just ridiculous. Power naps baby. Yeah.
Kristina: Yes. So we actually need, the research says, and it depends on what it is that you're doing, but somewhere between 50 and 75 minutes, we must take a break. Meaning you can't work longer with focus concentration than either an hour or an hour and a half, sort of depending on what you're doing or what your profession is. And so at about 50 minutes you need to take a brief break. What do we do? We pull up our Provider Resilience app and we use some of those things to rejuvenate us during that.
Christine: Amazing.
Kristina: So again, right? We're talking five minutes or less, and that context switching in that moment, basically reboots your brain so you can go back in with increased focus and concentration. So that's one of the ways we use some time blocking.
Kristina: We also had her set aside some dedicated time where she could in fact close her door for half an hour and attend to those things that were really high priorities...
Kristina: but that would, right? Again protecting her and saying no, so she could say yes to her to have more, to give.
Christine: Love it. So this is obviously super important when we have a client or when you know for ourselves, you know, if there's someone listening and it's like, okay, I see I literally coach five clients a day for one and a half hours. It's like, come on, you know, how's your brain supposed to do that So I think for ourselves, this is a super important one. Now my next question would be, I know that if you know, you have a case where this person wasn't as mindful or wasn't as open to, you know, get help straight away. I mean, this lady, she was aware, she knew that something was going on and most of the time our clients usually feel that something's not right. What do we do when we have someone? Because if you have a full blown burnout, it's seriously physical incapacitating and it can leave permanent damage. So, what would you suggest? What are some of the signs where you would say, okay, this is actually not just a yellow flag, there's this like orange verging on red. When is it time for a general health care provider or health coach to say, this is not my boathouse anymore. I need to refer this out in order to give my client the best care possible.
Kristina: The things that I see most commonly at that more advanced stage of burnout are an unremitting fatigue, a sense of hopelessness and this negativity or pessimism about the ability to change.
Christine: Interesting. That is a thought I cannot change anyway.
Kristina: Right? There's nothing. It literally comes down to I'm helpless and hopeless. There's nothing I can do. I have to do ABCDE. There's no getting around it, nothing can change. And our thinking, the more burnt out we are. We just talked about a lack of mental flexibility.
Kristina: So the more burned out we are, we're not regenerating and we're not recuperating and so we have narrowed options that we're seeing as what, how we can manage something. So I mean I just think of parents who will say, 'oh, we'll have to take care of my kids and I have to work and I have to take care of the house and blah blah blah blah blah.'And you say, 'well, what if you wanted or what have you left the dishes in the sink overnight.' 'Oh, I can't possibly do that.'
Christine: Okay. So complete inflexibility and, and like not seeing the forest for the trees.
Kristina: Right. And this degree of, it's not even, it's even beyond flexibility. It's often this, huge resistance, and that won't help.
Christine: Interesting.
Kristina: Even if I did that, that won't help.
Christine: See, I wouldn't have known that. So this is super interesting to me, okay.
Kristina: Yeah, so again, we're often using the relationship we have with the person to say, how about, how about you? I'll say like, let's test the hypothesis. Let's do an experiment, right? People love that. People like, all right, right, fine, because we're not gonna. I'm not gonna say, I mean I think I'm right, but hey, what do I know? I'm not you. You know this. So are you willing to engage in a little experiment to see what happens. Now one of the core techniques that we're using to manage burnout aren't really because burnout is about stress and stress management, right? Whatever the stressors are, it's all of that. Stress doesn't have to be bad, but that's a whole other conversation. The power of stress. But when we're talking about in this way, one of the impacts, again, of stress, is that decrease in cognitive flexibility. And stress means that our limbic system and our Amygdala is highly activated. So basically we're on red alert all the time.
Kristina: That's why we get the irritability. We have a greater startle response.
Christine: Yes. Just on edge.
Kristina: At all. It's almost done. Right, I'm on edge. I can't catch my breath even though you're not out of breath.
Kristina: That feeling like the world is coming down on me.
Christine: Your lungs are just too small suddenly. Yeah.
Kristina: Yeah. So breathing. Now I literally, people look at me and they just sort of roll their eyes and they're like, seriously? Seriously like, do you like have anything better than that? I'm like…
Christine: I know. They want something new.
Kristina: Let me tell you. Yeah. And I'm going to say my techniques fall under another catchphrase. 'Simple, not easy.'They're very simple, but it's not easy because you have to make a commitment and you have to persevere in applying the technique. So it's simple but not easy.
Christine: Love it, yeah.
Kristina: And so really validating that like, this isn't going to be easy, but if you don't want to feel as crappy as you feel, I can change that.
Kristina: And we start that with breathing. So I'm going to throw in here another little app for you because this is one of my favorites. There's about a bazillion different good breathing apps and I will say to people, 'hey, find one search, find something that you love that works for you,'but the same group that developed Provider Resilience, did this app that I'm going to tell you about, and it's called Breathe2Relax. So it's the word Breathe with the e, 2 the number 2, Relax, also free, totally available.
Kristina: And the reason I love this is it has an audio component, so there's a voice that tells you what to do. You can set the background, so you have a pretty background and you can adjust the length of the inhale and exhale so you can customize it. But the part I love the best is it has a little cylinder that fills up as you inhale and then the cylinder.
Christine: So you visualize it.
Kristina: Exactly, exactly. If someone has an apple watch as an example, there's a that there's a little circle and it gets bigger when you breathe in.
Christine: I love it, yeah.
Kristina: Fabulous. So again, we're talking like you can do this two minutes, two minutes or less when you go for a potty break. So, it also gives you a rate your stress, so you can rate your stress from low to high so you can track it as well is, it's always about tracking. But if I go to this, come on. Alright, I'll just start this and I'll show you a little teeny bit of it just so you can see the cylinder. And again, for those of you who are listening, check out the video so that you can see this because it's pretty awesome. All right, so oops.
Christine: Oh yeah, I can see it. Alright and so now and again, yeah, I love that. So you have this cylinder filling up and basically emptying out again, I love it.
Kristina: Yes. And I picked flower background because it's nice and it's a soothing voice, whatever, but you can set it to whatever you want. So what we know is that all of our sensory memories, good and bad, are stored in the limbic system. That's what the amygdala does. And that's our warning system as well. So when we use additional sensory components, we can help calm the amygdala down even more. So this app in particular, we've got the audio sensory who have the visual sensory, right? Both of those are there as it's guiding us to do the breathing, which is the important piece that we're really trying to do. So it's the breath that makes such a difference. The amygdala in that with the other sensory components.
Christine: Exactly. And that's what I love to tell people is that you are in control. Like your brain, yes, it is incredibly complex, but it's also incredibly basic, and you can control it. It's the best thing in the world, especially if I have people who are like, 'everything's out of control. It's spinning out of control. I'm just a slave to my thoughts.'And it's like, no, you're not. You can use your physiology to literally control your thoughts.
Christine: Which I think is super powerful and empowering really people in so many different ways. I do these things with my clients before going to bed, but this is definitely something super easy. But yes, not or simple, not easy. Which I think is a great tool to let people know, and I love also that you told us what to look out for. So we're running out of time, but I think we know after this episode, we know what to look out for, what you watch out for, for ourselves. Like I definitely have a couple of yellow flags at the moment and super stressful at the moment. Right now. My business is going great. So lots of stuff going on. So I need to walk the talk as you said, but also for my clients, like, I looking back, I definitely had at least five to 10 clients where I would say they were definitely showing some signs. Inadvertently I do a lot of techniques that help burnout as well. But I loved that you said that one of the main things that you have to kind of think about referring out is that when people become stuck, you know.
Kristina: Yes.
Christine: And really give up on themselves and just think this is never going to change. And if you don't have the right way of talking to them, I believe that you hit a wall and you're not serving them. So for everyone out there, if you do have a client like that, please, maybe they can even get in touch with you and ask you for advice. How would they do that?
Kristina: Oh absolutely. So you can always reach me through my website, which is a DrKristinaHallett.org. D r K r i s t i n a H a l l e t t dot Org. You can also email me and seriously my email is out there everywhere but it's Kristina M as in Mary, KristinaMHallett@Gmail. I'm so happy to talk to people. You can reach me through LinkedIn or Facebook and this is exactly it. And you know, one of the things that I do is I often partner with other coaches. So for example, if you were working with someone on your sleep coaching and they got to that point...
Christine: I'm just like, oh, not quite there with my practice, which, you know, I do stuff paper to a certain limit but I'm not a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist or whatever, you know. So I know when I reached my limits I would just say, look Kristina, I want to refer you someone, let's just do this together. And if they fine with it actually may be exchanged notes, depends on the kind of course. Yeah.
Kristina: Exactly. And then I would work on that piece and then send them back to do the piece that they were doing, because I'm not trying to be an expert in everything either.
Christine: Exactly.
Kristina: So one of the people that I work with in fact is teaching people about money management and being in charge of their financial side of their business. But same thing if a person you see this with entrepreneurs all the time, if they get burnt out, they're stuck.
Kristina: Those blocks that need to be addressed so they can go back and do that. I don't want to teach somebody about the financial aspects of running their business. I'm good with mine, you know. So that kind of thing. So I absolutely love that, because to my mind, then everyone's getting to be in their wheelhouse, their area of expertise…
Kristina: but also making a difference.
Christine: Absolutely. And I think it's a sign of being an integrity and it's also a sign of being a high end coach if you have a referral network, if you have a team that you know can help you with, just showing that you have a great network and it's just professional. I just find people knowing when to say stop and having someone they trust that great to work with, that's just showing how professional you are. So anyone who's doing coaching but it has a lot of these types of people and it's like I don't feel quite equipped for that. I think Kristina would get better results. She obviously has the experience. She has the credentials. We just heard her speak, so everything's just been golden. Then do you get in touch with her. We have all the links on our website, 360healthbizpodcast.com. You'll just have to click on the links and you can get in touch with her and I just think this is amazing. Have a look at the video where she's demonstrating the app. We're going to link it as well in the post on the transcript and that's all we have time for today. Kristina, I cannot tell you how grateful I am for you being here and sharing all this system with us. I think it's a topic that's, you know, people roll their eyes as soon as they hear the word burnout because it's just been used so much, but it's very, very real and I think because so many people are fed up with it, they don't care to even look further into it. So I think this is a golden episode that every health practitioner is mandatory to listen to it.
Kristina: Well, thank you so much for having me on. As I said, this is my passion because I truly believe that we can feel better and when we feel better, we give better care and so that means that we're literally making a difference in changing the world, and we have to start with ourselves.
Christine: Yes, we do. I love this. I'm totally in love with you right now. Crushing hard.
Kristina: Yes, yes, yes, yes. Ditto, so there with you.