An Integrative Look at the Root Causes of Depression, Anxiety, and Other Mental Health Conditions
Episode 177
In last week’s episode, we spoke about how some neurotoxins lead to a neurological decline in people and why it’s so prevalent these days. Today more on mental health we’ll be diving into the root causes of mental health disorders such as depression and anxiety. A lot of us get through rough patches in our lives once in a while. But Dr. Nicole will brief us on why you can’t always blame the “bad coping skills” as these disorders can also be caused by underlying health conditions that affect your mood and day-to-day routine. Tune in to the full episode to learn more about the various root causes to better identify and treat mental health disorders in yourself and your loved ones! Interested in learning more about Dr. Nick & Dr. Nicole’s courses, memberships, or private work? Learn more at Integrative You . Have a quick question, Would you like to schedule a call, or just want to say hi? Text us at 732.913.0009. Our mission to innovate humans & Healthcare does NOT start and stop with us! This is why we are also dedicated to helping other practitioners in evolving healthcare too! If you are a healthcare leader and are looking to up-level your clinical + business excellence Learn more about our course membership: Limitless Healthprenuer and start boldly disrupting this industry! Noteworthy Time Stamps: 03:18 Struggling emotionally is not your fault 07:56 Blood sugar roller coaster 17:28 A patient’s case study 35:14 Could it be a gut issue? 38:20 It’s not in your genetics 57:11 You have to figure out the foundation
Topics: health, mental, depression, anxiety, root, causes, conditions, integrative
Key takeaways from this episode
- ## An Integrative Look at the Root Causes of Depression, Anxiety, and Other Mental Health Conditions
- Emotional struggles are often not a personal failing but can stem from physiological issues.
- Blood sugar fluctuations can directly influence mood and energy levels, contributing to mental health symptoms.
- A patient case study highlights how seemingly unrelated health issues can manifest as mental health challenges.
- The gut-brain connection plays a crucial role in mental well-being, suggesting that digestive health is key.
Pull quotes
Imagine if medicine actually looked at you as a whole opposed to looking at you as a bunch of separate systems.
Nick and Dr. **Unknown:** Nicole to learn more about the top trends in integrative medicine, to learn about what the limitations are with testing, and what you can do to start your health journey.
And I honestly anticipated for a lot of people to be here with us tonight because I think that so many of us are struggling with these types of feelings and, you know, at times we do feel that it is warranted.
Transcript
**Unknown:** I been up all night, no sleep. Imagine if medicine actually looked at you as a whole opposed to looking at you as a bunch of separate systems. Dive into Integrative Wellness Radio with Dr. Nick and Dr.
**Unknown:** Nicole to learn more about the top trends in integrative medicine, to learn about what the limitations are with testing, and what you can do to start your health journey. Sometimes I tend to lose myself when I'm out here on the- Hello, everyone. Welcome. Uh, as we continue this month talking all about mental health, so I know that this is a topic that a lot of people want to understand and want to really be able to know that there is a solution to.
**Unknown:** So tonight specifically as we continue the conversation about mental health, we're talking about depression and anxiety. And I honestly anticipated for a lot of people to be here with us tonight because I think that so many of us are struggling with these types of feelings and, you know, at times we do feel that it is warranted. We do feel that there are things happening in our lives that are contributing us to feeling a certain way. But then there's a lot of us that are just feeling this low level sadness, depression, lack of joy, or are having panic attacks in the grocery store and have no idea why.
**Unknown:** So tonight, the biggest thing that I want you guys to take away is that there is a lot of variables when it comes to this description of depression or anxiety, but more importantly, there are so many potential root causes. This is not for you to feel that there's something wrong with you, that you have bad coping skills, that you have not been able to just get over it and move on. Like, we have all of this internal dialogue about, you know, "What's wrong with me? Why do I feel this way?
**Unknown:** Why can't I get through it?" You know, "Why do I feel so powerless to these emotions?" And there are so many components that can contribute to this, and definitely one of the big things that I want you to take away is, yes, of course, there is going to be the effects of trauma and different emotional adversities that we've gone through in our life. But in addition to that, there is also going to be a lot of other components that are not on your radar, and these are things that can be going wrong physiologically in your body that are contributing to you feeling so out of control when it comes to your feelings, you know, your emotions, and really how you're functioning in your day to day. So we're gonna definitely be talking about a variety of different things when it comes to depression and anxiety because I'm not gonna sit here and say, "Oh, you're depressed because, you know, you need to quit your job," or, "Oh, you're depressed because it's genetic." I'm not gonna give you these things that people are just blaming our depression and anxiety on. I'm gonna give you real-life scenarios that I see every single day that you will be able to walk away with clarity of being like, "Oh, my gosh, this is not in my head.
**Unknown:** This is actually... There's actually a reason for why I feel the way that I do." And the biggest thing that I want you guys to take away is that it is not your fault that you have been struggling emotionally. It is not your fault that you've had to leave parties because you've had a panic attack. It is not your fault that there are days that you don't wanna get out of bed.
**Unknown:** It's not your fault that you haven't been able to figure out your own puzzle, your own health puzzle, because there is so much mixed information out there, and we are, again, we're, we're slapping this label of depression and anxiety on everyone. And we're just like, "Oh, just medicate," or, "Oh, you know, it's just genetic," or, "Oh, it's just in your head," or, "Oh, you know, it's just bad luck." And really, there is always, always, always, always a reason. Always a reason. You might not know what that reason is, but that is where integrative medicine comes in, is that it's not about my opinion of me saying, "Hey, I think your anxiety's coming from this." It's actually about leveraging better, more advanced testing that gives you insight of why the heck you feel the way you do, and it allows you to be in the driver's seat of your own-Own health and your own journey because we are not just doomed to just feel sad, and we're not doomed to just have a lack of joy in our lives.
**Unknown:** And we are not doomed to just have to deal with this debilitating anxiety that doesn't allow us to even get out of our car or our homes. These are things that are a result of dysfunction, and that dysfunction is different for everyone. And I just wanna like circle this back to mo- the most basic, basic principle, or I should say basic understanding of the body, is that when we take apart our healthcare system, and we take apart and we separate psychology and psychiatry from immunology and gastroenterology and neurology, and we separate everything out, we often are going to feel a lot of difficulty with getting answers. And unfortunately, the doctors are getting...
**Unknown:** having difficulty with getting answers, but they're also just assuming that everything is working independently. But if we actually look at basic physiology and we look at the physiology of your gut, your gut is where ninety to ninety-five percent of your feel-good hormone called serotonin is made. So the serotonin is gonna be made by the gut, but it also has to be picked up by the receptors in the brain in order to actually help you feel good. Or maybe you just have heartburn and indigestion, then there is a strong probability that you are not producing serotonin appropriately.
**Unknown:** But then on top of that, maybe you're getting migraines and maybe you're getting headaches, or maybe you have a lot of brain fog, or maybe you have bad blood sugar issues. And all of those factors are actually telling us that your brain might not be using the serotonin properly. So when you understand how these systems are working together and you understand basic physiology, that's when you can actually start to understand that you're not just a big old mess that nobody can help, and now you only have the option of antidepressants or Xanax, that you actually could potentially have a gut issue that's not being managed properly that is the root cause to your depression or anxiety. So I am not sitting here telling you that every single person that has depression or anxiety has a gut issue.
**Unknown:** But I will tell you that if nobody has evaluated that system and nobody has looked at that system, then easily you're being managed for depression by giving yourself an antidepressant. But in reality, all you're doing is you're creating a band-aid effect, and the root cause is fix the g- the gut issues, and then you might actually see that your depression dissipates. So this is just, again, one piece of the puzzle here. But when we don't look at the big picture and we don't look at how everything is working with each other, then it's very, very difficult for us to figure out the root cause.
**Unknown:** And all we're actually doing is we're using medication and other therapies to act as a band-aid effect, and we're not getting anywhere. And this is why people often change their medications or add medications, or they start a medication for depression, and then they end up on a medication for anxiety or a combination. So when it comes to some of the things that are often mind-blowing to our patients is that, one, yes, serotonin, most of it is made in your gut. So if you have a mismanaged gut issue and you also have depression, then you might be able to actually see your depression improve just by getting your gut working better.
**Unknown:** Another thing too is that most of you are walking around with the blood sugar rollercoaster, and I will tell you exactly what that looks like. So you wake up in the morning, you're not super hungry, so you usually have a cup of coffee. Then that kind of, you know, suppresses your appetite. So then you end up going eleven, twelve, maybe one o'clock, and now you're starving.
**Unknown:** So now it's like, "Ride or die, give me something to eat ASAP." And you might be on the go kind of lifestyle, so you're gonna grab something, you know, out, but it's usually gonna be carbohydrate-based. Maybe you're going the healthier route and you're getting sushi that has a boatload of white rice. Maybe you're doing a sandwich, maybe you're getting pizza, maybe you're getting a burger. But usually your body now intuitively wants carbs because your blood sugar is so bottomed out.
**Unknown:** So then you eat and you feel like a little burst of energy, but then you crash, and now you need midday coffee. Then dinner-Rolls around, you're starving again, so maybe you're snacking on cheese and crackers. You have your dinner, and now you want something sweet. So I say this because majority of my patients relate to that, and what that is, is low blood sugar.
**Unknown:** So this is not about are you pre-diabetic, diabetic. This is do you also have low blood sugar that as soon as you eat something, you spike, then you crash, and then you spike, and then you crash? That rollercoaster is not only going to affect the fuel that your brain is getting, but it actually affects your frontal lobe, and your frontal lobe is where those little receptors are for your dopamine as well as your serotonin. So again, for those of you that have been listening since the beginning is this is not just about the production of serotonin and dopamine, two of your feel-good hormones.
**Unknown:** This is also not about putting it in through a pill. This is about can your brain use it? And if you have bad blood sugar, chances are your brain can't use it. So you can take all the antidepressants, and you'll feel maybe a little bit better, but you'll hit a plateau.
**Unknown:** And then you'll change medications, you'll raise the dose, you'll add a medication, and then you're just gonna feel like you're on this merry-go-round of why can't I get better? What is wrong with me? And then you're gonna start having internal, um, negative self-talk, thinking that there's something wrong with you. And why can't you just move on?
**Unknown:** Why can't you just get over it? Why can't you cope like other people? So when it comes to other components that can be part of the puzzle that are common but probably not as common as the blood sugar issues is that you can have infections in your brain. And people are not being regularly screened for this, and we're almost thinking that this is crazy rare that, oh gosh, an infection in your brain.
**Unknown:** Is that even possible? But we have this new diagnosis in kids called PANDAS. It's pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric, um, strep disorder. So I may have said that wrong, but that's what it is.
**Unknown:** It's when strep gets into the brain, and it's thought to mainly be a pediatric issue, a, a, a problem with kids. But I actually will regularly screen for strep in the brain, and most adults also have strep in the brain. Yes, guys, I know you're all thinking, "Strep? What is she talking about?
**Unknown:** Strep like in your throat?" You could have strep in your sinuses. You could have strep in your mouth. You could have strep in your glands. You could have strep in your lymph nodes, and you could have strep in your brain.
**Unknown:** You could have strep in your knees. Most people that we work with that have had reoccurring knee pain that it doesn't go away, they've had surgery. They've had meniscus repair. They have had scopes.
**Unknown:** They've had physical therapy, and their knees don't get better. Most of the time it's strep, by the way. So you can easily have an infection in your brain. The other most common infections I see in the brain is herpes simplex virus.
**Unknown:** Yes, cold sores. Think about how close your mouth is to your brain. You could easily have that virus get into the blood which mobilizes up into the brain. You can get Coxsackie in the brain.
**Unknown:** Coxsackie is the condition that your kids get when they get hand, foot, and mouth and those sores. So what you need to understand is that, again, the reason I do what I do is because nothing looks like a textbook. People come in, and they go, "Oh, I don't get cold sores." And I'm like, "Well, you technically have herpes simplex. It's coming up in all of my testing, including your blood work." And they're like, "How's that possible?" I'm like, "Do you get canker sores?" "Oh, yeah, I get canker sores all the time." So you could easily have canker sores and just not cold sores.
**Unknown:** It's just a different location. Same thing, herpes simplex. When you think of those giant cold sores, they're sores. Think about Crohn's disease.
**Unknown:** Crohn's disease are sores, ulcerations in the gut. So herpes simplex can actual- actually be the culprit to Crohn's disease in the gut. So again, this is not textbook at all. And then when we get these infections in the brain, now we have to start having autoimmune conditions in the brain.
**Unknown:** And one of the primary autoimmune conditions that is more common than you may realize... And this is a marker, by the way. You can run this through LabCorp. You can run this through Quest.
**Unknown:** Like, you can run this through your insur- or in-network insurance labs. So this is not, like, fancy, fancy testing. But one of the, the tests is called anti-GAD. What this is actually looking at is the pathway that helps you to make a neurotransmitter called GABA.
**Unknown:** Let's keep it simple, guys. GABA, think of that as your anti-anxiety hormone or an anti-anxiety neurotransmitter. So if you are having the pathway that's supposed to make your GABA compromised, then you're not making this anti-anxiety hormone, and you're gonna feel anxious all the time. And you're gonna just be taking Xanax, thinking there's something just wrong with you, when in reality you have an autoimmune condition happening in your brain potentially because you had a boatload of strep as a kid.
**Unknown:** And now that strep is affecting your neurological system. So one of the things that the... I have an institute where I teach other physicians how to do what we do in integrative medicine, and one of the things that they always say is that, "I never thought about anatomy as much as I do now after learning from you." And really, at the end of the day, if you've been the person that has had tons of sinus issues, maybe you've had tons of pink eye, maybe you have tons of dental issues, maybe you have tons of s- uh, strep throat or sore throats, then all of that is circula-Bloodstream that potentially is getting into your brain. So this alone can be a huge culprit for why you now feel anxious and depressed.
**Unknown:** The other thing too is that not only can we have physical trauma that can affect our mindset, our perceptions, and that creates judgments, resentments, and triggers. So when it comes to physical trauma, this is the people that have suffered concussions, head injuries. These are things that now are being acknowledged as being problematic. How many of us that are thirties and up have had head injuries that were never managed properly?
**Unknown:** We are... kind of think back and we're like, "I think I had a concussion, but I don't know." Nobody knew any better or any different, so nothing was done. And now later down the line, you know, we don't have that bump on our head or, you know, we don't have tenderness. We don't have any of that, but now we have depression and anxiety.
**Unknown:** And you go to your psychologist or psychiatrist, and they're not asking you about concussions and head injuries. They're just saying, "Oh, what's going on? How do you feel?" You know, "Are you in a bad relationship?" Or, "Oh, you just need meds." And nobody's asking better questions, when in reality, physical trauma to your brain can be a huge culprit for why your personality has changed or you are really having highs and lows from an emotional perspective. But in addition to that is most of us have gone through things in our lives.
**Unknown:** We've gone through, you know, adverse emotional things. We've had loss. We've felt abandoned. We've, you know, felt shamed.
**Unknown:** We've felt things over time, and sometimes those things stick with us. And one of the things that I learned over time is that you can actually have physical manifestations from specific emotions. And I'm gonna talk about that further in the next few minutes, but it will literally blow your mind. But kind of, uh, piggybacking off of that is that when we are talking about physical manifestations of emotions, is that the left and the right side of the body actually have different meanings.
**Unknown:** So for a long time when people would come into my practice, I have a background in functional neurology. So if somebody was coming in with left-sided issues, then I would assume, okay, there might be something going on in their right cortex 'cause it's opposite of the right cortex controls the left side of the body and vice versa. And then when I started to dig into more Chinese medicine and bioenergetic medicine, then I started to really piece the puzzle together of how emotional traumas, adversities, and things like that affect us, is that when you have a lot of left-sided issues, sometimes that is in correlation to a female figure. So that could be in correlation to different types of judgments, resentments, or traumas in association with mom, grandma, a sister, a best friend.
**Unknown:** And then on the right side of the body, that is going to actually be more representative of a male figure. So I'm gonna get more into this, so this makes a bit more sense in the next few minutes. But one thing specifically is that when it comes to one of my patients, and I know that I've touched on this already, but I had a patient who was thirteen years old. Um, she came in primarily because she went from depression to anxiety within a two-year span.
**Unknown:** In addition to that, she also had a history of Crohn's disease. So for those of you that have been listening the whole time, one of the things that I've already said is that a mismanaged gut issue can be a huge part of the puzzle for depression, especially because your gut is the primary system that is producing the feel-good hormone serotonin. But the thing that happens here is that you see people that go from depression that sometimes move into anxiety, or they're having bouts of both. So this specific young girl was actually, uh, being...
**Unknown:** She was not-- Her Crohn's disease wasn't really being, uh, managed appropriately. She was on primarily a high dose, um, NSAID, which is literally an anti-inflammatory, and that was the primary route that they were using to manage the Crohn's disease. And they said, "If it gets worse, then we'll consider, you know, surgery, or we'll consider a biologic, which is an immunosuppressant." But they said, "You're not there yet, so we're just gonna use these high-dose, um, NSAIDs in order to buffer the inflammation." So that alone has its own ramifications of creating more damage to the liver and the gut because it can cause, um, internal bleeding. Besides the point.
**Unknown:** But she was also then being medicated for depression, so she was actually taking antidepressants. So the thing that happens here is that when you are flooding the brain and the body with serotonin from an external source, is that if you have too much serotonin and it's not being used properly, AKA the receptors, the catchers are not picking it up and using it, then if you have a bunch of free-floating serotonin, that can actually shift you from depression to anxiety. So this is not my opinion. This is research.
**Unknown:** It's called serotonin syndrome. So the thing about this is that we need to understand that these types of medications should never be used for the long term. These are medications that can help us to get out of a really low or dark place, but then we also have to use other strategies and modalities to figure out what is the root cause here. And that is what's gonna allow us to truly be able to, you know, get ourselves back to feeling well without relying on these medications, because these medications are not supposed to be lifestyle medications.
**Unknown:** These are supposed to be used in an acute state. And so much medication has really just become lifestyle. We're using these things over long periods of time, and nobody's talking to us about what does that look-Like, does this have any effect using it over the long term? So another really big myth when it comes to talking about emotions and different events that we've gone through in our life that have created either judgment, resentment, or, or trauma is that we are told, there's even a saying that time heals all.
**Unknown:** And what I have realized is that that's not true. And just because time has passed doesn't mean that the person, the situation, the judgment, the trauma is no longer affecting you. Guys, this is what we call triggers. When you have a trigger and somebody says the wrong thing, if you're driving down the street and somebody flips you off and you lose your shit, like, these are triggers.
**Unknown:** These are unresolved emotional things that you are still holding space for. So we all have stuff. This is not about feeling guilty, but when we go into therapy and we tell our story of our crappy relationship we had with our husband, our wife, our, our mom, our dad, or, you know, the abuse that we went through, and we tell that story over and over again, it becomes embedded. It becomes neuroplastic.
**Unknown:** It actually creates stronger pathways in the brain. And just because you do not think of these types of things in your conscious mind every day because you're working and time has passed and you're, you're living a different life, just because you're living a different life and it's not in your conscious mind doesn't mean it's not affecting you in this current day and age. I have this conversation over and over again with my patients, and they're like, "Yeah, well, I hate my dad, but I don't talk to him anymore, and he's... you know, I have a different life now, and that's, that was years ago." But if you can actively say that you still have an emotional judgment or you're gonna get triggered if somebody brings that person up or that scenario up, it's unresolved.
**Unknown:** And there are ways that you can actually resolve these different things that you've been through, but it's not necessarily by telling the story over and over again, and it's definitely not by suppressing it through medication. So when we get through to a couple more slides from now, I'm gonna talk more about some of the modalities that we have found to be the most effective. But here's the crazy thing is that, I've said this already for those of you that have been listening the whole time, is that emotions, nobody is thinking that emotional things are manifesting in your physical tissue causing physical symptoms. And I will tell you that I learned this the hard way for myself in my own healing journey.
**Unknown:** I was going through probably about a year of, um, a detox to help me detox my liver from mercury toxicity, and I was constantly rechecking my mercury levels, and they were not budging, literally not changing. And I was so pissed. I was so... I was like, "I am doing all the right things.
**Unknown:** I'm on a strict diet, juices, smoothies, supplements." One of my supplements was $150, blah, blah, blah. So literally, I was just, I was just getting so aggravated that I'm like, "What, like, what is this? Am I gonna have to be on this strict regimen for the rest of my life? Like, is it really gonna take years to get this out of my body?
**Unknown:** I just don't understand how this is possible." And there were a couple of layers here. Like, one of the pieces, because this was years ago, one of the pieces that I didn't understand at that time was that I didn't understand that you can't support one detox pathway and not support the rest. Because if I'm just trying to support my liver, but then I'm not supporting my kidneys, and I'm not supporting my lymph nodes, then I'm, all I'm doing is stirring stuff up, and it's getting clogged in other areas. So that's definitely one thing to understand is, like, that's why we do integrative medicine is because we're able to look at the whole body, and we- we're great with helping people detox 'cause we know how to do it right.
**Unknown:** Unfortunately, I was part of the trial and error, and, um, I went through a lot of crappy things before I was able to figure it out. But I think that the kicker for me was my... Here's Dr. Nick.
**Unknown:** Hello. Um, I think the kicker for me was really being able to see that part of the puzzle was actually things that were manifesting in my liver. So when you get into Chinese medicine, which has been around for thousands upon thousands of years, is they talk a lot about how there are specific emotions that can reside in specific organs. And one of the, uh, specific emotions that was correlated to the liver was anger, resentment, and rage.So when we started to leverage some of our testing, it's actually one of the tests that Dr.
**Unknown:** Nick does here, he was able to test me and say, "Ooh, yeah, it's rage." It wasn't anger. And I was just kind of almost embarrassed in the moment, but when I really reflected on it, I was like, "Well, you know, I could see how this is true just based off of my past and some things that I've gone through." So one of the things that we leveraged was we leveraged one of the emotional techniques that we do in the office, but we also leveraged a bioenergetic technology that actually helps to clear out different things that you could be holding that are blocking these organs, specifically block- blocking the meridians, and that's called the bio scan, by the way. So I actually did a bio scan on, uh, my liver and worked on some of these layers, and literally got physically sick the next day. By the way, didn't put two and two together at all.
**Unknown:** I literally thought I was getting the flu, and then it was weeks later that I retested my mercury levels and they dropped in half. And I was like, light bulb moment. I go, "No freaking way. There's no way that that helped to cl- like, get my liver working better to clear out the stuff I'd been detoxing for a year".
**Unknown:** And it was literally... it had to happen in that way for me to start acknowledging this other side and acknowledging that emotions, and meridians, and energy, and all of these things were part of the puzzle. And now it's definitely we always... we're doing blood work, we're doing all of these labs, but we also have enough knowledge to be able to bridge the gap to see if there is another piece of the puzzle here.
**Unknown:** Can I add on to that? Ooh, okay, go. So an interesting thing about the, the bio scan, you know, it definitely helped clear her energetic, quote unquote, "aspects of rage", uh, that was affecting the liver. And the amazing part of that is that's going to take so much stress off of her liver so that it can do what it's supposed to do.
**Unknown:** Yeah. It's supposed to detox, so it'll finally have that ability to allow it to detox the mercury, which is why it went down so much. On the other side of things, actually going back and just looking at the rage though, she didn't collapse the foundation of why the rage was there. So she...
**Unknown:** and this is like we've learned so many different techniques that are sometimes amazing short-term, um, benefits, um, but they're not always long-term benefits. Mm-hmm. So it's always looking at the body and seeing not everything you have to work, you know, entirely all the way through the process, but some things, uh, especially it's like for her looking at if this was such a major aspect, then we wanna actually look at the longevity of it as well. Yeah.
**Unknown:** And that's why it's so important because the... if you don't actually deal with the cause of something, that stress is going to come back into our life because we haven't fully learned the lesson of why that feedback mechanism was there in the first place. So it's like we pretty much had a shortcut, and we gave the liver what it wanted to be able to release- Yeah ... the mercury and all that stress of it has on the nervous system and the immune system.
**Unknown:** Uh, but we really didn't go through deep and neutralize the cause of the rage. So that's when- We didn't have those tools at that time though. We didn't have those tools. So it's like- So- ...
**Unknown:** jumping forward, and we'll talk more about it, but that's really where the Demartini method comes in, is that- Wait, I haven't gotten there. I know. We're gonna get there though. I'm jumping in.
**Unknown:** I'm stealing the show. I wanna show you guys, this is just so fascinating, is that when you're looking at this, this actually helps you to understand the principles of Chinese medicine and really some of the things that are correlated. And it's very fascinating because there's even, um, homeopathic remedies that exist, uh, that actually help to neutralize some of these things as well. But, you know, when we're talking about lungs, like this has so much to do with grief and loss and even kidneys, you know, this has so much to do with fear and even like the lack of life force.
**Unknown:** So when we're talking about these things that we're holding onto or these areas that we feel like are imbalanced, we actually can have this be a contributing factor as to why we feel the way we do physically. And like just to circle this back, so this is like kind of bringing this back down is I feel like when a lot of people get stressed, we feel something. Like, a lot of people are like, "Oh, I have a knot in my stomach." And some people are like saying that figuratively, but there's a lot of people that physically feel a knot in their stomach. There's people that get stressed and they wanna eat everything, or they don't wanna eat at all because they feel nauseous.
**Unknown:** There's people that get stressed and get a headache. So again, like we are experiencing this, but we're thinking that it's just psychosomatic when we're not realizing that it actually can be creating a physiological change. So speaking of that, uh, we actually had a really fascinating, um, situation with a woman that came in. Uh, so we were leveraging some of our in-house testing and, uh, we have a, a specific technology that evaluates down to the DNA level, so we get information really fast.
**Unknown:** And this specific woman was actually dealing with a issue in her right lung. She was also dealing with an issue in her, uh, right shoulder, as well as her liver, which is also on the right side. So, um, she did not go in depth about anything with, um, her, uh, like any- anything that was like going on in her life that was stressing her out. But I just thought that it was too interesting that she had all of these right-sided things going on.
**Unknown:** So for those of you that are just hopping on, the right side of the body is synonymous with a male figure. And then if we go back to we're dealing with lung, which is grief, loss, and then we're also dealing with liver, which is anger, resentment, rage, and then the shoulder can also be something like what are you hol- trying to hold up or hold on to? Finishing what I'm saying about this specific woman is that she had physical things coming up in her blood work. She literally had her liver enzymes were elevated.
**Unknown:** It was not viral, so there was no like hepatitis, nothing like that. And she did have changes in her right lung. So I asked her and I was like, "Listen, I know that we didn't talk about this in your exam, but I'm just curious, is there anything going on with a male figure in your life that you feel angry towards, or you feel like you've lost something, or you potentially are gonna lose something, and like you're having trouble with either letting it go or you're just feel like you're, you're holding something up?" And she just like broke down and she goes, "My husband cheated on me, and I know that I have to get a divorce, and I'm grieving the idea of divorcing him, and I'm really trying to just hold our relationship together." And I'm just like, "Whoa." So it was just really such an eye-opening moment that, yes, she had physical symptoms that we could definitely work with, but there was a foundational piece that would've caused this woman to hit a plateau. And I think that that's important for you guys to know is some of you are here right now is that you've been maybe down the road of conventional medicine, some of you have been down the road of functional medicine, and maybe you just haven't been able to get better, and you've hit a plateau, and you just are like, "I don't know if I'm ever gonna feel better." And-This is the fascinating part is that, you know, when you run the labs, and you look at the blood work, and you look at the, you know, the stool samples, and you look at all those things, that's looking at the body from one view.
**Unknown:** It's not looking at everything. So when we start to look at everything, and we ask better questions, this is really when we can start to actually understand, okay, what is the foundational problem, and what actually more of a situational problem? So I'll let Nick actually go more into why it's right and left side is segregated. So when you look at the nervous system, especially the brain, we have our big brain, and then in back we have our small brain.
**Unknown:** Our big brain is called our cortex, in back it's the cerebellum. But, uh, left cortex controls your right side of the body, your right cortex controls the left side of the body. And when you go back to the cerebellum, it's ipsilateral, so right's right, left is left. But when you look at, like, the masculine and feminine aspects of the brain, your right side is more is the artsy creative.
**Unknown:** Uh, this has been pretty much, uh, kind of taught to us that it's more of the feminine energy, uh, more the creative energy. On the opposite of that is when we look at, like, the intellect, the numbers aspect, mathematics, that's gonna be highly driven in the left part of the brain, uh, which has been more associated with men today. The interesting part is that as our general gender neutral, uh, society is changing, that the whole concept of masculine, feminine brain, I think in probably the next ten, fifteen, twenty years really is not going to play a role, which is awesome because we're gonna have more synchronicity, um, happening in between both hemispheres as they communicate more intelligently together. But when you have more of that overall stress, um, just on that one side of the brain, if it's associated, uh, with more of that male counterpart, um, that tends to affect that left brain.
**Unknown:** If we have more of that stress coming on from a female or somebody that represents that female energy, it's going to affect more of that right cortex, which is gonna be associated with the left side of the body. Well, I think that this is important to understand too because sometimes when we work with patients, and we use, um, uh, our different modalities, one of them being the Demartini method, sometimes also correlating that in with, um, something called the BioScan technology, and we're helping people to kind of clear out and resolve some of the emotional things that they've been through, is that you sometimes also have to go, go back and use different modalities to balance out the left and right brain so that they are communicating appropriate with... appropriately with each other. So one of the things that we use, um, is that when we kind of work on that foundation, and maybe the foundation is getting rid of infections, getting rid of inflammation, balancing the blood sugar, and we really help to fix the foundation.
**Unknown:** Sometimes people are like, "Wow, my symptoms have completely resolved," or, "I'm so much better, but not all the way there." And that's really where we use some different functional neurology techniques. One of them being called, uh, neurofeedback. And neurofeedback is a specific type of technology that actually helps to create balance from left to right, right to left, and it also helps to balance out overactive centers or under active centers of the brain. So there's so much that can be done, that's the point.
**Unknown:** But I don't want you guys to think that, oh, gosh, if you wanna, you know, resolve your depression and anxiety, that there's all of these layers that you have to deal with. Because really at the end of the day, everyone is so different. So some of you that are struggling emotionally maybe truly just have a gut issue. Some of you struggling emotionally maybe have a blood sugar issue.
**Unknown:** Some of you struggling emotionally, it's because you're holding space for previous things that you've gone through. So everyone is different, but there are so many tools that are out there that can keep us from suffering, and it can keep our kids from suffering and being medicated at such young ages. So I think that that's just one of the key reasons why we wanted to really share this information. But even more fascinating is that when you get into very specific conditions, symptoms, and diseases, is that the...
**Unknown:** a couple of people, Louise Hayes and Dr. Demartini, have really spent their life work understanding human behavior and also understanding how different physical symptoms are actually correlated to different things that we're struggling with. And one of the things that I found to be so, uh, fascinating was even just having, like, fat in your hip area, and fat in your hips, even though you're dieting, working out, clean diet, you know, uh, squats, all the things, it was in relation to lumps of stubborn fat in relation to having a n- a stubborn relationship with your parents. And I, like, literally couldn't relate to this one more.
**Unknown:** But it was just, like, so fascinating and on point. But so much of the time it's, like, knee pains, being stubborn, having ego and having pride, inability to bend. Lupus, uh, is literally better to die than to stand up for oneself. Heartburn, fear, clutching fear.
**Unknown:** Psoriasis, fear of being hurt, refusing to accept responsibility of one's, like, feelings. There's just so many interesting layers here that can be happening from an emotional perspective that are actually contributing to some of our physical symptoms that we're feeling. Yeah. Okay.
**Unknown:** I was like, I knew y- I figured you wanted to say something about that. But another aspect here too is that when we go to this place of being told, like, "Depression runs in my family," or, "Anxiety runs in my family. Bipolar runs in my family," and we assume that we are just doomed to our family history and our genetics. So number one is that there is a such thing called transgenerational trauma.
**Unknown:** So this really goes back generations of there could have been a family m- member generations back that went through war. And through war they had PTSD, which obviously outputted tons of adrenaline and put them into an anxiety state. And thatAn unresolved, literally emotional and physiological change in the body can change the, or cause the genetics to express differently, which then was passed down generation to generation. So it's not that you're just doomed, because your genes can express differently based off of really knowing what is the root cause and what is the imbalance in your body.
**Unknown:** I can talk more about that. Okay, go ahead. So yeah, I mean, epigenetics is a crazy complex topic, but to make it simple that it's really your genes, when you look at your genes, they're a printer. They don't really decide anything, they just have information coming to it, and depending on the information, then they're going to pretty much create a print, really making proteins, uh, to make it simple.
**Unknown:** So it's like, quote-unquote, "Good information in, good information out. Crappy information in, crappy information out." But that change in information is what we call a mutation or a splice within the DNA, and that's what changes the cell signaling, which will change the production of amino acids. So it's like anytime that we go through a major trauma, the DNA is going to express itself differently because- Mm-hmm ... it wants to protect itself and it wants to live, or keep us alive.
**Unknown:** So that is how our pretty much traumas will create these epigenetic changes. And then when we have offspring, both that information from each person gets expressed or the possibility of not being expressed through the child. Mm-hmm. The cool thing about, uh, science has actually proved that I think it's up to seven generations now.
**Unknown:** It's, it's, uh, for sure five- Mm-hmm ... I think it's seven. So literally seven generations we could still be dealing with their, quote-unquote, "Bullcrap", that they never dealt with. So the awesome thing is though is that we have the responsibility too, if we have that coming up, to be able to neutralize, um, whether it's anxiety, whether it's depression, uh, whatever trauma is being passed down, we have the opportunity to break that cycle- Yeah ...
**Unknown:** and to reverse that mutation so it doesn't get carried on anymore. Mm-hmm. So it's not so much that, "Oh my God, I'm a victim of this transgenerational trauma." It's, "No, actually, I'm empowered and I can step in to be able to resolve something that doesn't have to run through my family history anymore." Yeah. Well, I think a good, uh, example of this too is that I know that, you know, based off of our age, we have tons of friends that are having children and, you know, they're noticing odd behaviors in their children sometimes.
**Unknown:** And they're saying like, "What is... Like how does my child know about this?" Or, "Why is my child worried?" Or, you know, almost exhibiting signs of anxiety. And this can definitely be due to this whole transgenerational trauma that we're talking about. And it also can be in relation to if mom, you know, fell down the stairs while she was pregnant and was terrified that she hurt the baby, or mom got into a car accident and had this adrenaline output because she was super scared in that moment.
**Unknown:** So there is a lot of ways that these things can show up. But, you know, to look at a two-year-old, three-year-old, four-year-old and say, "Oh, my child has anxiety", sometimes it's a bit deeper rooted than that, and this has to do as an expression from either mom's experience or past experiences. So even on this realm of genetics and epigenetics, uh, so growing up here in New Jersey, uh, and surrounded by mafia, is that we have a lot of amazing people with strong personalities. And I- I've only met one person like that.
**Unknown:** And I cannot tell you how many people say, "Yeah, whatever, I have stress, but I can handle it. I can handle it. Like, I'm tough, you know, stress, it's life. I gotta deal with it.
**Unknown:** I can handle it." And what they don't realize is that despite you can handle it, genetically your body doesn't get that. It doesn't know what you're talking about. So when you're pumping out tons of stress hormones, your body still thinks you're in the woods about to fight a tiger or run. It does not say, "Oh, she's from Jersey.
**Unknown:** She can handle it." Like, it literally says like, "Survive, pump out tons of adrenaline, and, you know, get this person into a safe place." So the longer this goes on that you're in high stress, you hate your boss, you hate your spouse, you're, you know, in an abusive relationship, or you're just burning the candle at both ends, you're commuting two, three hours, you know, each way from work. You're working late at night, you're barely sleeping, all of these things are perceived as stress and what we call fight or flight. So you need to understand that just because you can handle it, it will catch up to you. And this is something that I can relate to because I experienced the massive burnout of running on adrenaline for literally 15 years.
**Unknown:** And it definitely, when it hits you, it hits you like a ton of bricks. Um, okay, so judgments and triggers are a normal part of life. I know that Nick is gonna have a field day with this one, but one of the things that I just wanna say is that, I said this earlier on, but triggers are something that are just not normal. They're unresolved things that you have, that you have kind of built up in your system.
**Unknown:** And these triggers can pop out at random times. It could be called road rage. It could be called, you know, I hate cheap people. It could be called a lot of different things.
**Unknown:** But in a- I hate stupid people. In addition is that, you know, also ties back to judgments that we have is that, you know, there are times in our lives that we're judging others, and there's a lot of times that we're feeling judged, and we have in-laws and family members telling us how to raise our kids, how to live our lives, how to... you know, what, what they think we should do for a living, and we get triggered. We get annoyed, and we're like, "Don't...
**Unknown:** Like, who are you to tell me how I should live my life?" and whatnot. And a lot of times these judgments that we are either, you know, portraying or we're receiving have a lot to do with our values, and I feel that this... when you understand this concept, it can be very, very, very freeing. And I'll just tell my story, and I'll let Nick go more into this because this is the foundation of hi- the Two Martini Method that he does with people that come to IWG.
**Unknown:** But, like, I'll give you the silliest example is that I used to go to dinner with a... well, well, I would say most of my friends growing up, we all would go to dinner together, and it was, like, our favorite thing to do, and we would go out, enjoy ourselves, you know, laugh, you know, cry. It was, it was the best. And then, you know, your, your friend group expands, and then we would go home, and we would complain about the people that would nickel and dime the bill at the end of the night, and we're like, "What's wrong with them?
**Unknown:** Who acts like that? Ugh, so annoying." But what I realized is when I did the values exercise with Nick is that one of my biggest values was quality time, and in my mind, I could not put a price on quality time. So when I was portraying or projecting my values onto other people is I'm just thinking, like, "How could you not value quality time? What's wrong with you?
**Unknown:** Why would you sit here and talk about the bill?" When really at the end of the day, their value was wealth, and their value was maybe having a savings account for their, for their c- for college for their kids, and who am I to judge that? So it was such a, like, humbling, eye-opening moment of this simple judgment that I would make where it really just had to do with me projecting my values onto someone else, and, like, there's nothing wrong with my values. There's nothing wrong with their values. It's just, you know, we need to kind of take that into consideration, and when you understand that, you feel so much more free of those things that would normally be a extreme trigger to you.
**Unknown:** Now I get a run? Go. Go ahead. So as always, there's tons of layers, um, in looking at judgments, like Dr.
**Unknown:** Nicole said, is foundationally... like, we all say, "Oh, don't judge somebody," but we have to judge because literally judgments aren't just a bad thing, but they're not just a good thing. Uh, judgments are a feedback mechanism to help us figure out what's most important to ourselves, hence our values. So it's like judgments are a necessary means to allow us to really know how to serve ourselves, and until we know what's most important to ourselves, uh, it's impossible to do that.
**Unknown:** So judgments aren't just a bad thing, but it's when we're pushing our values and our judgments onto other people, that's when it, quote, unquote, "becomes a bad thing." Uh, because when you look at relationships, there's really three options. We have, we have a win-win option, we have a win-lose option, and we have a lose-lose option. I would say the majority of all relationships today are a win-lose relationship because when you look at win-win, really what has to happen is there needs to be a fair exchange between both parties. Your values and what's most important to you needs to be equally as served as the other person or the other party.
**Unknown:** So that's a win-win. Uh, most relationships, it's, "Hey, you're gonna serve my values," or, "Hey, I'm gonna serve your values," and then resentment starts to build because one party isn't served. That's called when you just do it my way, everything will be better. Yes.
**Unknown:** And, uh- We've all been there, people. ... relationships don't get fixed by one person being served. It's really just it gets worse, and it gets worse, and then eventually, uh, there's the lose-lose where it's like it's just a blow-up fight, and no parties get served.
**Unknown:** So really it's like, it's being able to understand that we are every trait. Judgments, nothing's good, nothing's bad. It's just how we utilize things, and that's how, quote, unquote, "it can be either good or bad, have drawbacks and benefits." When looking at triggers, um, we're really triggered internally by literally what it says is what's unresolved, uh, in ourselves. So it's like a lot of times we'll place the blame on somebody else because this person, quote, unquote, "was an asshole," and they did all these dick things to us.
**Unknown:** But at the- ... really the honest effect is that they were actually allowing us to see what's unresolved in our own lives, and once you go through and you literally see that, they're a blessing. They're not a curse. It's they were giving us an opportunity to really go in deeper, resolve our issues, and love ourselves more, and in doing so, it's like there's nothing to be triggered by from the other person.
**Unknown:** It's really just that negative feedback loop, uh, giving us information, uh, to be able to go in deep and work on ourselves. Well, I think overall, like, for people listening to this too, though, is like you could easily be like, "Screw that. He was an asshole. Like, what are you even talking about?" But it's just, you know, that's why, uh, Dr.
**Unknown:** Nick is doing this method is because he's probing better questions that help you to see things that you can't see. And I'm not saying they weren't an asshole or a dick. It's like... but I mean, but that's a big part of it.
**Unknown:** It's like people are like, "Well, like, bad things happen." I was like, "Of course bad things happen." It's like there's the pain of the situation that w- won't change, and we're not trying to change that. It's like traumas suck, and a lot of life does suck, and it's not fun at all. But it's like we don't have to stay with pretty much that feedback mechanism that was all drawbacks because when you look at life, there's a balance of energy. There's an equal amount of benefits as there are drawbacks to everything.
**Unknown:** And when we can go through and actually increase- See them ... increase our awareness to be able to see the, the benefits, the upside of things, then we can actually utilize that situation that might have sucked so much to actually be able to serve us, and then that's, that's a paradigm change. That's, that's when you're... you go from being a victim to be able to be a master and actually use situations instead of situations using you.
**Unknown:** Yeah. It's definitely something that it almost goes against all of our programming of how we've been brought up, and obviously everyone's been brought up differently, but, you know, we live in this world where we say, oh, we're working towards peace with no war, and we're working towards this, like, polarized view. But if we think that everything is always gonna be good and nothing is gonna be bad, we're gonna put ourselves into a state of literally psychosis. So even for those of you that are doing these positive affirmations, like, "Everything's good, everything's good, I'm happy, I'm joyous, blah, blah, blah," is that you're gonna make yourself crazy because you don't really feel that way all the time.
**Unknown:** You're gonna have highs and lows in your day. You're gonna have moments that you feel happy. There's gonna be moments that you feel aggravated, but it's shifting how, oh, why am I aggravated and getting out of the mindset that you are always gonna be happy, happy, happy, happy.Literally the people that come to us and are like, "I'm happy. Everything's great in my life," they...
**Unknown:** we do their blood work, they're sicker than ever because they're just stuffing it down, stuffing it down, and internalizing it. So it's really, really about balance, and I really can't stress that enough. So- And it's not that affirmations are a bad thing, it's just how... it's not what you do, it's how you do it.
**Unknown:** It's, so it's, like, how are you using affirmations, and they need to be affirmations that are congruent with what's your values are, what's most important to you. And from that, it... you have to believe it. Yeah.
**Unknown:** Well, it's not creating, it's not creating an expectation that you can't live up to. Like, if you're trying to create this affirmation that's, like, so different than where your mindset is at, you're just gonna have negative self-talk and be like, "Well, I'm, I, I can't think like that," or, "I don't believe that." And it's just becomes this vicious cycle, essentially. And what's really cool is, like, when, when you look at it that way, it's like if you're constantly putting something that you're supposed to be living up to on a pedestal and knowing that you can't achieve that, not that you can't achieve it, but it's actually not even in what's your value system, it's not really what's most important to you, then guess what? That's gonna create anxiety.
**Unknown:** Yeah. And then from being anxious, we're gonna have guilt and shame, and then we're gonna be depressed. Yeah. So it's, what's amazing with that is, you know, we can figure this out through going through so many different things, but one of them is actually mapping the electrical activity of the brain.
**Unknown:** Mm-hmm. So it's like when doing a brain map through, uh, what's called a qEEG, it's a quantitative aspect of an EEG, looking at the electrical, uh, brainwaves coming out of the brain. When we experience, um, in a state of anxiety, the prefrontal right cortex is gonna be really driven up in the what's called beta wavelengths of the brain. So it's the high- Don't get too fancy, my friend ...
**Unknown:** the high, fast brainwaves. Um, but what's very interesting about the brain, understanding that literally everything's always in balance. It will actually go through because when you're using up all that energy, that is gonna get fatigued, and it's gonna balance out. So then it's actually gonna shift, and that's when we go into areas of, like, manic depressive, depending on- Yeah ...
**Unknown:** how polarized you are. You may just be slightly anxious to slightly depressed. Yeah. Uh, but when we go to depressed on the brain map, it's gonna be higher markers of that prefrontal left cortex, and that's gonna still be high, but it's gonna be high in the opposite.
**Unknown:** So instead of your fast brainwaves, it's gonna be high in the slow brainwaves called your delta. So it's like when we get into deep sleep, that's our delta brainwaves. So you think, you know, it's, like, low and slow. So it's like when that high brainwaves are being slow as low, that's what we feel.
**Unknown:** We feel low. Well, I think that the other component to this that is that a qEEG exists. There is a way to actually map the brain. There's a way to know what's over-firing, what's under-firing.
**Unknown:** You know, what, what brainwaves are out of whack, and this can help with sleep. This can help with developmental issues, behavioral issues, depression, anxiety, and a variety of other mental health issues. So that's, like, the point of even this slide is understanding that these things do exist in the world. There are ways of actually measuring your neurotransmitters and figuring out, like, do you have too little serotonin?
**Unknown:** Do you have too much? Do you have a dopamine issue? Which is a completely different issue. And then also leveraging better testing to figure out, like, do you have infections that are triggering immune reactions in your brain, which are then a culprit for why you're not producing or absorbing these different feel-good hormones.
**Unknown:** Then we also look at, you know, do you have issues in your gut? Do you have issues with blood flow to your brain? There are so many things that need to be considered to really decipher what is the root cause to why you feel the way you do, and then being able to leverage this testing to really be able to fix the foundation. 'Cause again, if you have just been palliating and, and using different medications to manipulate these neurological hormones, like, called your neurotransmitters, and you're not getting anywhere, then chances are the testing you have done has not revealed the root cause or the foundational problem.
**Unknown:** So I know that we talked about this already briefly, but we often when we're dealing and struggling with depression and anxiety, our thought process is medication and/or therapy. And that's really what has been offered to us. This is not, you know, our own fault that we don't know what else is out there. It's just that's the common theme, and that's the common knowledge.
**Unknown:** And we're here to really help you understand is that, first of all, there's better testing to figure out what's the root cause of why you feel the way you do, but there are-... options when it comes to helping to get back to feeling good again, and to not feel anxious, and to not have panic attacks, and to not, you know, not wanna get out of bed. And, you know, some of the therapies that we're using, we're using that ma- brain map to figure out what's imbalanced, and we're using a therapy called neurofeedback to balance out those brain hemispheres. We're using a therapy called craniosacral, which actually helps to bring more nutrients and blood flow to the brain.
**Unknown:** We're helping people to heal their gut. We're using bioenergetic work, which is helping you to, like, let go of the crap you're holding from everything you absorb from your friends and your family, and all the people that dump their baggage on you. And then we have the Demartini Method, which we've broken down into three parts, and I'm gonna let Nick talk more about this. But, you know, we, we sit there and we help you to establish, like, what the heck do you actually care about?
**Unknown:** Like, what do you value? And from there, helping to probe better questions as to why you're still being triggered by a situation, or why you cannot let go of the shame. Why can you not let go of the abandonment? Why are you still grieving something 25 years later?
**Unknown:** And working through those aspects, and then being able to actually know how to step into your world and your relationships differently. And this is something that we actually learned because we had a specific woman who went through this method with Nick, and her mindset about her life and who she was completely shifted. And some of the things she experienced in her life left her feeling like a victim, and she noticed that she actually... a lot of people in her, her inner circle, her group of friends were in a very similar mindset, and they were constantly putting a lot of judgment out in the world of, you know, people that felt empowered and saying like, you know, "Oh, I can't believe they feel like that.
**Unknown:** Look who... They have a huge ego, huge pride," blah, blah, blah, because they all were... their self-identity was a victim. And when she was able to free herself of that, she actually, uh, went back into her friend circle, and they were not happy about it.
**Unknown:** And she came to Nick and was kind of like, "You didn't prepare me for this." And that's one of the reasons why we do the implementation session, is because once you're able to walk away feeling and functioning very different, then sometimes you actually need support on how to now step into conversations and relationships in your life. So start with step one. Go ahead. So I would...
**Unknown:** I always give an analogy. It's like, it doesn't matter whether you're dealing with emotions or whether you're trying to heal the gut. It's like you first have to figure out the foundation. Uh, so it's like without a foundation, you really don't know which direction to move.
**Unknown:** Uh, I would say it's like if we're gonna go to London, how to get there is different if we're in New Jersey or if we're in Australia. So it's like you have to know exactly where you're at in order to know where you're going. Uh, and that's really where the values come in. So your values, what Demartini has figured out, is it's really what's most important to you.
**Unknown:** Uh, he's written an amazing book called The Values Factor. I would say if you're wanting to learn, uh, more about it, that's an awesome place to start. Um, but once we get crystal clear on what's most important to you, uh, that's the foundation. Then we n- we have somewhere, uh, and know where to go from that.
**Unknown:** Where to go from that is always really trying to figure out what's the most polarized aspect in, uh, a person's life. Uh, it's... I don't know if you guys have read any of Brian Tracy's, um, information, but he wrote a great old book called Eat That Frog. And the philosophy was, uh, was literally every single morning, eat the frog.
**Unknown:** You know, pick what the hardest, most difficult task is, and do that first because every single thing afterwards is gonna be easy. So really with the Demartini Method, I always try to start to work on the most polarized aspect that's actually affecting the person. So polarized can be, understand energy, both positive and negative. Uh, so...
**Unknown:** and they're both detrimental because they both create distress, uh, onto our s- uh, nervous system and onto our, uh, parts of the body. So the positive aspects, it's like what's... why would something be good bad? Uh, so it's like if we're overly attached to something, uh, that we're fantasizing about or that we overly admire, uh, that's just as detrimental of something that we despise.
**Unknown:** Uh, is it a trauma? Is it something that our parents, that we're judging our parents, or our friend or- Mm-hmm ... a coworker. Uh, some, some type of assault that's happened to us.
**Unknown:** Uh, so once we can get crystal clear on what actual the action or the trait, uh, is that's been, that we're judging, uh, then we go through and we literally increase our awareness through different quality questions to be able to help us, uh, really bring into balance both the drawbacks and the benefits. So we're not being attached to everything's positive, uh, and we're not being attached to everything's, you know, a drawback and negative. Uh, once we can see both sides clearly, then as, as I was saying earlier, we can actually utilize it to serve us because we can see the good in the event, the trauma, the judgment, uh, and we can utilize that to serve us. Mm.
**Unknown:** And then taking that forward, that really changes our programming, how we see reality, and how we actually, instead of reacting, we're actually able to act, uh, to things that happen, and from that, uh, state of empowerment, uh, our life changes. Like Nicole said, sometimes our life changes in what we perceive as to be bad and detrimental, uh, but it's really just coming from that awareness side, is that every single growth, every single build, uh, you have to have also, um, a destruction. It's like if you're going to renovate a home, you're usually doing some destruction, uh, taking out a wall, you know, ripping things out to be able to rebuild and put new things in. Uh, so it's going through and not, and I would say, and realizing that all growth is not linear.
**Unknown:** Uh, you have to have really destruction to be able to, uh, to rebuild, and that's really what the, the post Demartini that we've kinda created is really some coaching to be able to help evaluate and evolve that new program that we have. Yeah. So in reality, with all of the different things that we've covered tonight, you know, I think a lot of people walk away just realizing you don't know what you don't know. And I know that for us, we didn't know what we didn't know.
**Unknown:** We didn't know that emotions can play a role in your physical body. We didn't know that just purely having a gut issue can play a role in feeling depressed or anxious. We didn't know these things, and we just continued to learn, grow, and evolve so that we could better help people. Because we have all dealt with some level of emotional things in our lives, and we might be judging ourselves, we might be feeling judged by others, and we just don't know what's out there, and we just don't know what we can do to actually help ourselves.
**Unknown:** And a lot of times we're just being told it's bad luck, it's bad genes, and, you know, you just need to take this medication and call it a day. And really overall is just most of the depression and anxiety that people are experiencing, some of it looks like the textbook and some of it doesn't. But I think that the most important thing is that you might have the symptoms of depression and anxiety, but it doesn't mean that you and everybody else who has depression and anxiety has the same root cause. Everyone is extremely different, and that means that the way that you're going to, like, help it, improve it, or get through it is going to be very different.
**Unknown:** Can I answer Sure. So, like how would acupuncture be able to help, uh, anxiety and depression? It can help in many different ways, depending on the meridians that are actually affecting the, the body and the tissues. Uh, there's so many different meridians that go over and affect the brain, um, that you can work on or-Aural therapy, uh, that is crazy beneficial in helping.
**Unknown:** Uh, but the interesting aspect of acupuncture, uh, and meridian health is that it's not changing the program, it's only actually increasing the flow of energy. Uh, so when we have a distress or a stressor, it pretty much creates a roadblock in the meridian, so it doesn't allow the proper information to really travel through and then end up going to the tissues or the organ system. So as acupuncture can help in a lot of meridian technologies and aspects, but it doesn't change, I would say, the fundamental problem because anytime that we're actually going through and perceiving that stress again, uh, we go back to our old program. So we're going- Excuse me.
**Unknown:** Bless you. We're going to react the same way because we haven't actually neutralized and balanced out our new way of thinking. Uh, so we actually can't act appropriately. We're still reacting, and then that distress is gonna go back into our energetic being, and maybe it's gonna show up in the same meridians, maybe it's gonna show up in a different slightly form.
**Unknown:** Uh, and then we'll be dependent on the acupuncture to constantly be helping us- Yeah ... because we haven't taken enough deep steps, uh, to fully resolve the, the cause at hand. Well, I think it's kind of the concept of like you hate your job and your boss is treating you terribly, but you just go and get acupuncture to like help de-stress you, but you don't change your situation. So it's just being able to have different tools that help you to step into different, to think differently with a different mindset as well.
**Unknown:** So when you're able to get to the root, figure out what the heck has been the cause of this depression and anxiety that has been debilitating you, I really think at the end of the day it's just priceless. You know, I, I know, I know that there are many people that are just... they wanna take the pill. They just wanna, you know, cover it up and, and call it a day.
**Unknown:** And then there's a lot of people that have just been searching and searching and searching, and they are just like, "I don't know what to do. I just wanna be better." And for those of you that are watching, share this with people. Share it because there are so many people that are suffering. There are kids that are suffering.
**Unknown:** There are so many people that have debilitating anxiety that literally don't leave their homes. It's heartbreaking the things that we hear on a day-to-day basis, and I just... we do these 'cause we want people to get here sooner. We want them to get here before they're completely debilitated, or before they're on ten medications, or before, you know, they have a child who takes their own life because they didn't know what to do.
**Unknown:** So please just share this with as many people as you can so that people understand that it's not in their head. There's not, there's nothing wrong with them. It's just there's things that are being missed by conventional testing. So the great thing about our testing in addition to the DeMartini Method is that if you're long distance it's really no problem.
**Unknown:** You can actually, we can do the, for all of your testing with a hair sample. Um, obviously blood work and stool samples and things like that are sourced local to you. We send you kits, you go to a local LabCorp or Quest. But also we have you send us a hair sample which contains your DNA, and that allows us to do some of our really unique testing from a distance.
**Unknown:** But before that, I just wanna let you guys know that I thank you for being here. I know it's an hour and a half. I h- really hope that this was a very eye-opening educational experience because, you know, this information is not out there. This is not something that, you know, most people are talking about.
**Unknown:** It's not also what doctors are telling you, and again, we're just feeling lost and we feel like we don't know what to do. So when you finally have that moment in time when you can actually get the testing and figure out what the heck is going on and what's the root cause and what's been the root cause all along, that's really when this becomes a breakthrough experience, and we really hope that all of you guys can experience that at some point in time and shift from just taking in the information to actually being able to take action on it. Yeah. I was, I mean, I was late coming into this 'cause I was finishing up a new patient exam, and he had seen five or six practitioners, um, before coming here, and I, at the end I asked, you know, "We have more tests to do, really to be able to put all the pieces of the puzzle together, but do you have any questions?" And he goes, he goes He goes, "Honestly," he's like, "I've learned more today than I have in the past five doctors", and I, I haven't even gone through all of the information.
**Unknown:** Don't even have all the information. Um, so it's literally, it, it just, it's, it saves you so much time, so much money, uh, so much stress, um, to really just go through and do things right the first time. Yeah. Uh, so it's like whether it's us, whether it's another integrative practice, uh, go to somebody who's just really looking at the whole picture.
**Unknown:** Oh my God. Looking at the whole picture, um, and the whole body. Thank you guys for being here with us. We really appreciate it.
**Unknown:** All right, guys. Thank you for being here, and we will see you soon. We thank you for being a listener and subscriber to Integrative Wellness Radio. If you're looking to learn more about Integrative Wellness Group as well as Dr.
**Unknown:** Nick or Dr. Nicole, you can check out integrativewellnessgroup.com. All night, no sleep. 'Cause I feel like I'm always dreaming.
**Unknown:** Wide awake, that's okay
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About Integrative You Radio
Integrative You Radio is a root cause medicine and integrative medicine podcast hosted by Dr. Nicole Rivera and Dr. Nick Carruthers — two integrative doctors who build personalized wellness protocols from your DNA, minerals, hormones, gut, and nervous system rather than from a population template. Looking for an integrative doctor who reads your labs together instead of in isolation? This is the show.
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