How to know if you are addicted to your stress hormones
Episode 198
Welcome to Integrated You Radio, hosted by Dr. Nick Carruthers and Dr. Nicole Rivera. Prepare to become limitless as we delve into disruptive discussions on integrative medicine, mental health, and human behavior. In this episode of Integrated You Radio, Dr. Nicole Rivera goes solo to tackle a topic she's personally experienced: being addicted to stress hormones. She reflects on a pivotal moment when someone mentioned her potential addiction to stress hormones, leading her to explore meditation as a path to clarity. Dr. Nicole discusses how societal norms, hustle culture, and sacrificing oneself for others contribute to chronic stress. The episode underscores the diverse strategies available, from biochemistry optimization to behavioral shifts, in overcoming stress addiction and regaining control of one's health and mindset. Tune in to learn more! 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 like to schedule a call or just want to say hi? Text us at Limitless Healthprenuer and start boldly disrupting this industry! What you’ll learn: Stress Addiction: Dr. Rivera's personal journey highlights society's stress addiction, fueled by hustle culture and self-neglect. Chronic Stress Impact: Enduring stress triggers fight-or-flight mode, affecting mental health, sleep, and overall wellness. Breaking the Cycle: Strategies range from balancing biochemistry and brain waves to reframing beliefs for lasting change. Customized Solutions: Tailored approaches include meditation, biochemistry optimization, and mindset shifts for holistic healing. Quotes: “The addiction to the stress hormones is partly because things that fire together, wire together." - Dr. Nicole "Being addicted to your stress hormones is the feedback mechanism to say, hey, I gotta break this cycle." - Dr. Nicole
Topics: stress, hormones, unknown, integrative, addiction, meditation, nicole, health
Key takeaways from this episode
- ## Are You Addicted to Stress Hormones?
- Societal norms and the "hustle culture" can inadvertently create an addiction to the physiological effects of stress.
- Constant activation of the fight-or-flight response negatively impacts mental health, sleep, and overall bodily function.
- Overcoming stress addiction involves a multi-faceted approach, including optimizing biochemistry and shifting behavioral patterns.
- Mindset plays a crucial role; reframing beliefs and practices like meditation are vital for long-term change.
Pull quotes
This is the place where you become limitless. **Unknown:** We are covering the latest and greatest topics, of course, in a disruptive fashion, around integrative medicine, mental health, and human behavior.
We will be sprinkling in some truth bombs for our healthpreneurs, so they can join us in our mission to evolve healthcare.
If you are health curious and growth focused, you are in the right place. **Unknown:** But buckle up, because this is real, this is raw, and this is disruptive.
Transcript
**Unknown:** Welcome to Integrative U Radio, hosted by Dr. Nick Carruthers and yours truly, Dr. Nicole Rivera. This is the place where you become limitless.
**Unknown:** We are covering the latest and greatest topics, of course, in a disruptive fashion, around integrative medicine, mental health, and human behavior. We are also covering how those topics affect the human and family dynamics. We will be sprinkling in some truth bombs for our healthpreneurs, so they can join us in our mission to evolve healthcare. If you are health curious and growth focused, you are in the right place.
**Unknown:** But buckle up, because this is real, this is raw, and this is disruptive. This is Integrative U Radio. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Integrative U Radio.
**Unknown:** Uh, I am flying solo again today, um, but I am talking about a topic that I have experienced firsthand. Um, I honestly can't remember exactly who said it or, or where it came from, but I had someone say this phrase of, "It sounds like you're addicted to your stress hormones." This was many years ago, and in that moment, I just had this visil- visceral reaction and started crying. And, uh, at that time in my life, I was not a big crier, and it, it seemed... It felt almost like a reflex, and I was like, "Holy shit, what was that?" And it, it was something that, you know, r- really just hit me in the face, and I didn't even know what to do with the information at the time, to be really honest with you.
**Unknown:** It was just this, this light bulb that I kind of had to marinate on. And fast-forward, I ended up getting into meditation. If you've listened to other podcasts, we've talked a lot about this, and we keep talking about it primarily because I think there's a stigma behind meditation that needs to be busted. It needs to be demystified.
**Unknown:** And really what it comes down to is, you know, people around me would talk about meditation, "Oh, do you meditate?" And I... My blood would boil. It would legitimately boil. I'm like, "Don't fucking talk to me about meditation.
**Unknown:** I got shit to do." Like, "I run a big business. I run two businesses. I got 25 employees. I got, I got this, I got that.
**Unknown:** I got things to do. Like, I don't have time to meditate." And, you know, I'm su- I think there was multiple layers of the connotation around meditation. I think one was this idea of monks sitting on the floor w- with their legs crossed, you know, just meditating, and thinking, like, "That's not me." Like, "I'm a, I'm a go-getter. I'm a doer.
**Unknown:** I'm an accomplisher. I'm an achiever." So it... That... There was a, a misalignment there.
**Unknown:** And then there was the idea of, "I will... I'm not productive if I'm meditating. I'm lazy if I'm meditating." So there was another layer. Then there was the racy mind that happens when you sit down to meditate or even if you sit down to think.
**Unknown:** It's like your mind ping-ponging in 70 million directions, and then you say, "I'm not cut out for this. This is not my thing." And the list goes on, essentially. And when I finally hit a point in my life that I knew what got me where I was, was not getting me where I was going or where I wanted to go, which was a life of more balance. It was a life that I wasn't in that chronic hustle, chronic achievement, chronic accomplishment.
**Unknown:** Because being in that mode for 12 years, I still wasn't where I wanted to be or I thought it would be. So I, I always joke I'm a slow learner, 12 years, you know? But I was like, "Okay, there's ti- it, it's time to figure out another way, and it's time to explore what I don't know." And that was when I embarked on working with someone, and it was really all about clarity. It was about getting more in alignment with, like, who I am, which actually took quite a few sessions because my...
**Unknown:** It was like my brain was, like, on fire. It... I remember at one point feeling like I was w- I was word vomiting, not feeling like I was word vomiting. I was word vomiting on this, this guy who was my mentor, and I was like, "I feel like I'm a tornado." He's like, "Yeah, you're kind of tornado-ing right now, yes." And it made me realize there's...
**Unknown:** I have all these ideas, I have all these thoughts, I have these visions, but nothing is cohesive and nothing is actually truly in alignment because I haven't taken the time to figure out who I really am and what is most important to me. That's actually one of the main reasons why we're so passionate about teaching values, and we have a whole course that we built on it now. Because values, once you get familiar with what your values are, like, what do you stand for at your core and-What are the things that give you energy that you would do for free, that you would do if you were retired tomorrow because you love them that much? Like th- that, that is the compass that should be driving your decision-making.
**Unknown:** But most of us don't take the time to ever figure out what's important to us, and we don't have the skill set to figure out what's important to us. Because I, I was acquainted with this idea of values for a very long time. As I'm sitting here at, looking at my bookshelf doing this podcast, I'm literally looking at The Values Factor by Dr. Demartini.
**Unknown:** And so very well aware, read the book, but still didn't have the easiest time trying to figure out my values because my brain was all over the place. And on top of it, there was a lot of injections. There was injections from my past of who I thought I wanted to be, but a lot of what I thought I wanted to be was based out of survival because essentially, I just didn't wanna be my parents. I wanted to, I wanted to be the opposite.
**Unknown:** And so that's not, that's, that's not my authentic self. That's me w- operating and making decisions out of a void. And then on top of it, there were a lot of programs injected from family, injected from mentors, injected from society that were not in my conscious mind, but were just kinda lingering in the background saying, "Hehehe, you're not, you can't do that. You can't have that.
**Unknown:** You can't be this." So there was a lot of shit to work through, and I say this because if you go and you embark on, you know, downloading our values workbook and you're like, "Uh, I don't know what my values are," or like, "This was stupid," or, "This, this wasn't that great," it's just not that easy. I'm gonna say that. The workbook is great. You could scratch the surface, especially if you're super new to this.
**Unknown:** But really at the end of the day, it's y- y- s- phase two is do the course, and then even too is if you are a person who has a mission and you wanna live with purpose every day, you really need someone to help facilitate to really nail down your values. Um, and I say that not because I want you to buy anything from me. I just say that because that was my experience, and when I finally got that clarity, it was such a game changer for my life and every decision that I made moving forward. But this idea that your nervous system is addicted to stress hormones is th- this is so much of the population right now, literally so much of the population.
**Unknown:** Because we're g- we get wired for doing. Doing, doing, doing. I came from the n- Northeast, so New York, um, New Jersey, f- even Philly. It's like most people that I knew in my life do, do, do, do, do, handle tremendous amounts of stress, fall over, get up, and, and do, keep doing.
**Unknown:** Do it all over again. So it's like truly people that were not scared of hard work, you know, not scared of hustle, um, but were doing this at their own expense because the more that you do, do, do and never think, never pause to have that clarity, you're programming your nervous system to run on adrenaline, to run on stress hormones, and then we wonder why we have such an epidemic of sleep issues in this country. We have sleep issues, but at the same time we have chronic fatigue, and we have a majority of our population that is running around in fight or flight, and fight or flight, this is, this is the catalyst to anxiety. I feel like most people nowadays, if, uh, no matter what age they are, no matter what culture, no matter what religion, no matter what, you know, socioeconomic status, they have anxiety, some form of it.
**Unknown:** And this anxiety is being driven by the fact that we live in this chronic state or f- of fight or flight, and part of it is the go, go, go lifestyle. It's the hustle culture. It's the take care of everyone before yourself. It's work hard.
**Unknown:** And we get locked in this state, and we literally turn certain genes on and turn certain genes off that lock us in the fight or flight, and then we slowly start to see our health decline, and, uh, that looks different for everyone. This isn't a black and white of like, "Oh, you're in fight or flight, so you're gonna have this." Some people get fibromyalgia, get chronic pain. Some people get chronic fatigue. Some people get hypothyroid.
**Unknown:** Every person is so different because epigenetically, certain things will turn on and off depending on the s- societal, the social, and the environmental factors. But the addiction to the stress hormones is partly because things that fire together, wire together. So if you're, if you've trained your brain and body to, to function in a state of chronic stress, then you're creating neurological pathways that are locking you into that. That becomes your, your new state of normal, and essentially it's, your, your body is doing it as a protective mechanism because fight or flight, all that that means is your body literally thinks you're getting attacked.
**Unknown:** It thinks that you need to flee or you need to fight. So it's a protective mechanism, and your body will stay in that protective mode for as long as it needs to. ButFrom a cellular perspective and a neurological perspective, your body can't handle that. Your, your body cannot handle being in that state for ex- extended amounts of time.
**Unknown:** Things start to break down. You're going to have more breakdown than build up, which essentially is what's going to create symptoms, which is then cr- going to create diseases, which is then going to create chronic illness. And the other patterns that you're going to see in your life from more of the, you know, the mental-emotional perspective is you're very reactive. You feel like life is happening to you.
**Unknown:** So you don't ever have the time or the space to be proactive. You're too distracted and busy and wired by stress hormones that you're, you're never strategically thinking ahead. You're never able to have a wider lens to forecast, "Okay, this is the good and this is the bad that can happen, and let's be prepared." So instead, when things happen, you're extremely reactive to it, and then you further embed the program that life is hard. You further embed the program that life is chaotic.
**Unknown:** You further embed the program that you can't have X. And this just creates the hamster-on-the-wheel cycle. You go round and round and round and round. And this is something interesting because Dr.
**Unknown:** Nick and Dr. Demartini have always talked about how cycles run in life, like cycles of, of judgment, cycles of resentment, cycles of grief, cycles of fear. And this is one of the reasons, because you've now turned certain genes on, certain genes off, and you have created a biochemical cascade. And so that biochemical cascade is going to then work with your neurological system, and you're going to have cycles of the same thing that keep showing up with a different face.
**Unknown:** So at the root of it is fear, but the situation is different, and that's because your nervous system is literally programmed for it at this point. So you end up being extremely reactive to life, but you're probably a doer, so you op- you, you will do something quickly to rectify it. So you operate quickly, but very wastefully, because you don't think through the, the pros and the cons. So you operate quickly, you make moves, but very often you find yourself in the exact same position or you find that the cycle keeps running its course.
**Unknown:** And this then leads us to make a lot more decisions out of fear. And making decisions out of fear keep us very paralyzed in our life. So if you pic- if you're picking up what I'm putting down is that it is one hell of a cycle. So being addicted to your stress hormones is something that we need to be more aware of, and we need to use that as a feedback mechanism to say, "Hey, I gotta break this cycle." And a lot of it starts in the mind, but what I will say is that when I've worked with people, the beauty of, of what we do and the, like, the hyper-personalized part of it and the very unique testing that we do on the health side is that w- we can really determine, like, what is the best starting place for the person.
**Unknown:** So in some individuals, we actually help to improve their biochemistry before they can make different lifestyle changes or break neurological patterns. So some individuals, we're actually working on the effect first because we can't dive into the root cause because their nervous system is so wired from floods of adrenaline and cortisol. So sometimes that's the best approach for the person. But if you only work on the biochemistry and you don't actually work on the root cause or break those neural connections, reprogram them, um, you're not gonna really get very far.
**Unknown:** You're gonna hit a plateau, essentially. And then there are some individuals, been there, done that. They've like, "Oh, I've taken either pharmaceuticals or I've done natural things for my neurotransmitters. I've even done neurofeedback to balance my brainwaves," and they're still not where they wanna be.
**Unknown:** And that they're ready to dive into that human behavior work of how can I start shifting my thoughts and my beliefs in order to turn certain genes on, certain genes off for a more balanced nervous system, a more balanced biochemical system. So the cool thing is, is there's so many ways to go about it. Some people, it's about leveraging things to balance their brainwaves. Some, that could be meditation, that could be neurofeedback.
**Unknown:** Some people, it's about balancing their biochemistry so that we can calm the cortisol, we can calm the adrenaline, and then work on that other layer, layer afterward. Some people, it's about diving right into the thoughts and the belief systems in the mind in order to improve or shift the biochemistry and the brainwaves. So there's so many ways that you can go about it. So if you've tried something and you haven't gotten where you want it to be, don't think that you're a lost cause or don't think that, oh, you're a really hard case, because it may have been that you just didn't have the right strategy.
**Unknown:** You haven't figured out what is the best starting point for you to set that stronger foundation and then to build on that foundation. So as I always say, it's not about what you do, but it's about how you do it. So don't forget that when it comes to your health and when it comes to your mind. It's all about strategy.
**Unknown:** All right, guys, we'll see you next time. We thank you so much for being an avid listener of Integrative U Radio, formerly known as Integrative Wellness Radio. We appreciate all of your support. We love your comments.
**Unknown:** Please visit us on social media as well as our website to see all of the fun things happening behind the scenes and the new amazing content and courses that is being rolled out on a monthly basis. We hope to see you there.
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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.
Further reading
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