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Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.
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Hello, and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com. And I was so excited for this interview. I’m here with Dr. Olivia Lesslar, who I met at an event last year and knew I could not wait to share her on the podcast. In this particular episode, we talk about psychoneuroimmunology and understanding the science of mind-body connection in a deeper way. And her message is so awesome. She explains things so clearly, and I feel like has such a broad and connected and complex understanding of the human body and especially the nervous system, which we talk about today. She is an Australian doctor with a background in international relations. She has also done postgraduate studies in skin cancer medicine and clinical nutrition management. And she’s currently undertaking a diploma in clinical hypnosis and strategic psychotherapy. And she has done a lot of work and interest in preventative medicine, psychoneuroimmunology, biohacking, longevity, and complex chronic conditions. And you will understand as soon as she starts speaking, how much knowledge and expertise she has in all of these different areas. I could talk to her all day. I feel like I’ve already learned a lot from her. So without any further wait, let’s join Dr. Olivia Lesslar. Dr. Olivia, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.
Dr. Olivia: Oh, thank you so much for having me.
Katie: Well, I got to meet you in person at the Dragonfly Conference last year and knew I couldn’t wait to have you on the podcast because you were able to speak so wonderfully to so many different topics. And I know you have more expertise than we could possibly cover in just a couple of podcast episodes. But I think you have some very specific perspective that is especially helpful to women and moms. And so to start broad, you use a term that I don’t hear used very often or really anywhere else, which is psychoneuroimmunology. And I know within that umbrella, there’s so many things to learn. But to start off broad, can you define what that is?
Dr. Olivia : Yes, so psychoneuroimmunology is kind of a newer term that’s being thrown around, but actually it’s been around for at least two decades. Essentially, it’s that intersection point between psychology behavioral sciences, the nervous system, immune system and hormones. And we now know, of course, everything affects everything. And that the patient or the person is a whole being with all these different organ systems speaking to each other, and gone are the days that we are focusing just on one organ system and not realizing that in treating that one symptom or disease process that it has very far-reaching effects in other aspects of a person’s health.
Katie: That makes sense. And I am so excited to hear that entering the conversation because it does seem like throughout history, there has been a trend in lots of different areas, whether it was genetics and one specific nutrient that someone then started like macro dosing or one specific symptom that someone focused on. And we try to treat that in isolation. And even in my own journey of having in the past Hashimoto’s and trying to just look at the thyroid in isolation and then realizing, oh, everything is so connected. It’s much more complex than just one symptom, one solution. And so that’s what I love about your approach. And you touched on what I think are some topics that thankfully we’re starting to understand more and that you talk about so beautifully, which are, you mentioned nervous system health and hormones. And it seems like these are big areas, especially for women, but can you speak to some of the specifics of those?
Dr. Olivia: Yeah, so, you know, I think that many of us now know about the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. Sympathetic nervous system being that fight flight. Parasympathetic being that rest digests. But because of Porges polyvagal theory, we now know that there is actually a free spawn response, which is going beyond that fight flight. And now we’re looking at a dorsal vagal response. And we see that across all patients in their, the way that their body is handling the stressors that they’re under. Sometimes your body doesn’t have the, in inverted commas, the fight in it. And I think a lot of women in particular who are burnt out, who are taking on a lot of the emotional labor in relationships are left to deal with a lot of the housekeeping and the housework and the child rearing. Sometimes you just don’t have enough of that fight, in inverted commas, left in you. And so they wind up crashing, burning. These are actually a dorsal vagal response. In other words, you are, It’s almost like an evolutionary freeze. We also say fawn sometimes where you’re trying to placate everyone around you. Because it’s a response for survival. So that’s the nervous system that we’re talking about.
As far as hormones go, I do actually look at hormones a little bit differently than my peers. I actually tend to refer out hormone patients simply because I’m more interested in why someone’s hormones are upset. How are they being manufactured? How are they being broken down? What is the metabolism of the hormones in the system? In other words, what’s your liver doing? And of course, you and I both know that there is an excess of these forever chemicals in our system, in our ecosystem. And so you know, these microplastics have a lot to say about our hormone dysfunctions that we’re seeing. And so, you know, I’m trying to get patients to look at their homes first, clean that up before we kind of start you know, fiddling with, okay, you’re low on estrogen, let’s give you estrogen, you’re low on progesterone, let’s give you progesterone, you know. I think that we really do need to be looking further back than that.
Katie: That makes sense of kind of taking a first-principles approach and not just identifying like, oh, this hormone is out of balance. Let’s fix the hormone. But why is the hormone out of balance to begin with? And I think you’re right, especially for women. I resonated with a lot of what you just said of we often carry so much. And it seems like this can create a negative feedback loop sometimes that touches on a lot of these areas that you mentioned. And when you’re burned out and you’re stressed and your nervous system is dysregulated and now your hormones are disrupted and now it’s harder to absorb nutrients from food, it can feel like an overwhelming cycle. And I remember being in the thick of Hashimoto’s and just feeling that fatigue every day. And it seemed so hard to even make the baby steps to begin the process to create a more positive feedback loop. But I love how you talk about because of how all these things are connected, we actually have a lot of levers we can pull and a lot within our control that can start to affect change. And of course, every patient and every person is going to be different. But what are some of those levers that you begin to address with people to help starting to create more resilience or more, both cellular and mental energy to begin that change.
Dr. Olivia: Yeah, you know, when patients start to get sick and have these symptoms which seem very inconvenient, part of the journey that everyone goes through is that you start to almost hate your body or hate the symptoms. You know, you feel like your body is letting you down. And this kind of mentality really gets everyone on the back foot because you feel as if you’re losing control. So one of the things that we try to talk to our patients about is what is your body trying to tell you? And if you were to look at the symptoms as a way that your body is trying to help you that reframing can actually be very powerful in and of itself. So Hashimoto’s, for example, or fatigue is a fantastic way of, realizing that partly your body is trying to get you into a cave. From an evolutionary perspective, that is the safest place for you. Especially if it doesn’t really know what the threats are. So I kind of conceptualized these evolutionary threats in a particular way. It’s the plague, famine, winter, predator, and damage to the five senses. So I’ll go through these.
Plague is, of course, any viral bacterial parasitic infection. Okay, it can be very detrimental. However, there’s a lot of symbiosis that can happen as well with these infections. Winter is actually any extreme of temperature. I say winter because it sounds very, you know, very moody. Then, there’s famine. And famine is a evolutionary response where If we feel that we don’t know or our nervous system doesn’t know where the next calorie is coming from, it can start implementing very quickly these survival mechanisms. A lot of us will know it as fat around the midsection, for example. Inability to lose weight no matter what you’re doing. And that’s, you know, actually it speaks to the fact that intermittent fasting has become very popular. And we have a lot of women sort of fasting like a man where they’re doing 16, 8, for example, 16 hours of fasting, and the nervous system actually gets tripped and thinks, oh my gosh, we’re in the middle of a famine. And it starts implementing these other hormonal changes. So that’s predator. Oh, there we go. Predator.
So, a predator response is where you feel that your nervous system feels that it’s in danger because of the excess of cortisol and adrenaline in the system. Because from an evolutionary perspective, you know, this is what kept us safe. If we thought that there was a saber-toothed tiger prowling, or if the neighboring village was coming to invade ours you know, it would be cortisol and adrenaline. Now it is the same hormones being produced if we lose our khakis. So our ancient nervous system, our ancient brain sees these hormones and thinks, oh, my gosh, there must be some sort of life threat and it’ll enact the exact same ancient programs. The threat to the five senses or actually to the eight senses, but the five that we know of is sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. But the other three are also vestibular. In other words, where we are in space, because of you, Iif your body doesn’t know where you are in relation to the ground, then you’re not going to be able to fight or run, effectively. Proprioception, where are your joints in space? Again, for the same reason, you need to be able to run or to fight if you need to. And interoception. Being able to read the signals from within your body. Fourth thirst. You know, hunger. Are you too hot? Are you too cold? So that you can implement survival instincts. Okay. So as far as the nervous system goes, if you have any of these perceived threats by your nervous system or by your ancient brain, there are going to be these responses that are going to be produced. and so these are things that I talk to my patients about, about understanding. What their nervous systems might be upset about.
Katie: You have such a good way of explaining things and categorize those in ways. And as you were explaining, I was thinking the modern world does not set up our nervous system for success in most of those areas that you talked about. Because like the opt-in quoted, we’re not being chased by the tiger. But from our nervous system’s perspective, whether it’s the news or social media or losing our keys or whatever it is, our nervous system might think that we are. Or the famine one. I’m so glad you touched on that because even though we have, in most cases, access to food in today’s world, I’ve often said we don’t have access to the nutrient density within food that we used to. So even if we’re getting enough calories, our nervous system and our bodies and our cells might still be screaming for something. Or as a personal example, I know I underate for so long trying to lose weight because of my thyroid issues that I had been just consistently signaling to my body like, this is a dire situation. Preserve everything at all costs. And I also love that you touched on reframing symptoms as your body letting you down. Because I think that simple mindset shift alone can be pivotal in how you think about solutions and think about ways that your body can heal itself through what it already knows how to do because your body’s not attacking you. It’s always on your side. So what is it trying to tell you? And as you explained all of these potential threats, especially in the modern world, it made me curious. Are there any general areas where we can create more nervousness safety or signal more safety to our bodies in a way to start reducing that perceived stress that we’re encountering all the time?
Dr. Olivia: Yeah. So if you, as we were talking, you know, if you reframe the symptoms that you’re seeing then you’re able to speak to your brain in a way, in a language it understands. Safety signaling is one of those things. So actually, I’d like to talk about the food. You know, you were talking about having all these either fasting or decreasing calories, but the food is not necessarily as nutrient dense as it could be, which unfortunately is a plight of our modern agriculture.
There is something called a food matrix. And a food matrix is a line of study that’s been undertaken by food scientists now for at least a good decade. It hasn’t quite made its way into clinical practice yet. And it is the study of the fact that individual reductionist nutrients in food taken in isolation outside of the full complement in a whole food actually doesn’t have quite the impact that we think it should. The, first sort of research that I remember about this is lycopene, which is a polyphenol that’s found in tomatoes. They found that you would actually get more antioxidant effects from lycopene in a whole food, i.e. in this case it was tomato paste, as you would if you just had a supplement of lycopene, even though there was more lycopene in the supplement. And part of this, as you were saying about that nutrient density, signals to your body a lot of information about the environment. It tells your body about what season it is, about what’s in the soil. And if the food that you’re constantly eating has got low nutrients, the body feels that even though you’re putting things in your mouth and you’re getting the calories that there must be something wrong with the environment that you’re in, i.e. are we on the brink of famine?
The food matrix also talks about the fact that, you know, in a whole food there is this synergism to the different nutrients, to the different vitamins, which we’ve lost. We’ve lost that ability to read our food. We’ve lost that appreciation for how important this complex is. Because of this reductionist approach that we’ve had to nutrients and therefore over supplementing our patients, I feel, or over supplementing ourselves, you know, we see things as piecemeal. We see things in isolation. And, you know, to a certain extent, that’s kind of reflective of our society. You know, we can’t function individually, we really do have to start leaning into that community spirit again. Into that village mentality. Because the first people to suffer from the fact that we close ourselves off from our neighbors, built high fences and, you know don’t have an open door policy, basically is the women. The women suffer first. And then, of course, our children. Because we’re, we’re missing that community. And it’s not just having a hand with food or, you know, childcare, there’s a lot more to it. That’s a bit nuanced that has, goes into deeper roots of emotionality and spiritualism. But anyway, I digress.
The other safety signaling that we can do with our bodies is to make sure that we are trying as much as possible to be in step with evolutionary function, with our circadian rhythms and circadian biology, i.e. that we are living with the sun. So that we are up you know, as soon as or around sunrise. That we are out in early morning sun because that’s UVA, that’s good for collagen, that’s good for anti-aging, but that also forms part of what’s known as photoprevention. Photoprevention is where the receptors in your skin feel early morning rays and then starts to a cycle or a chain of events that’s going to allow it to handle mid-morning sun better than if you didn’t have photoprevention. In other words, if you didn’t see early morning sun and then you just went out in mid-morning sun, you are more likely to burn than if you saw early morning sun first.
Being out in nature of course we all know about forest bathing and all that but the benefits of grounding of having your bare feet, bare body on the earth’s surface for electrons to flood your body and to get your mitochondria going. All these things seem trivial in and of itself, but actually as a layer-caking effect really does speak to your nervous system about safety. The fact that you are out in the wild, wide open spaces tells your nervous system that you are not afraid of being seen by a predator from a nearby hill because you are apex. Those are sort of the safety signals we talk to patients about.
Katie: Yeah, I remember you speaking about that on our panel and even just adopting a posture of, I think, like kind of confidence as you explained it, or just having good posture, standing on the ground and seeing natural light. I think often we underestimate the simple things because of their simplicity. But over time, especially those can be the most profound things. Because like you said, we’re meant to live in alignment with nature. And we’re really good in modern world at giving our body cues that we are not in nature at all anymore. And so even small steps to realign with nature, I feel like can make a huge difference. And I know, on the clinical side, you even see that hormones can change in relation to just getting more natural light exposure at the right times, cortisol patterns can change, melatonin patterns can change. So it can really be profound.
And I also love that you touched on that these are not things we can get from a pill, especially when we’re talking about community, about nature. There isn’t a pharmaceutical solution to those problems, we actually need the interaction with nature, the interaction with other people, I have a friend, Lauren, who says humans are nutrients. And I think that’s one that a lot of us are deficient in in today’s world is that community piece. But I’ve even noticed that in small ways where I can take vitamin D and have less of an effect than I would get when I make vitamin D from the sun because of all those additional benefits of light exposure, like you talked about.
It seems like the liver is also a recurring thing that comes up when it comes to health, of course, but nervous system regulation, inflammation, it seems connected to a lot. And at least from what I’ve read, our livers are kind of under assault in the modern world as well with a lot of the things you mentioned household exposure to toxins as well. Are there ways we can support our liver to help keep the body functioning optimally?
Dr. Olivia: Yeah. You know, it’s I know this sounds like so obvious, but nobody seems to be drinking enough water. So, and the thing about drinking water is not just quantity, it’s about the quality of the water that we’re drinking as well. And when we’re talking about the quality of the water, it’s what’s in it but also what’s not in it. So we have, you know, I do some work with ME/CFS patients, chronic fatigue syndrome patients. And a lot of them will complain about drinking lots of water, but never feeling satisfied. And this is because the water that we have now coming out of taps in the kitchen it has been filtered, filtered, filtered. Then there’s fluoride and chloride that have been added to it. The water is dead. There is nothing in it, basically, apart from H2O and a few chemicals. Chemicals which for patients of ours who’ve got thyroid issues, they have to be very careful about as well. You know.
Iodine is very important for thyroid health. Iodine is a halide. It is in the same column as fluoride, chloride and bromide. In the periodic table and there can be a little bit of displacement by these other these other molecules. Anyway, so you have this water that’s coming out that’s dead, and it’s nothing like what we would be getting from wells, streams, brooks. And that water is, and anybody who’s ever drunk from water in natural sources will tell you that water is alive. Now, we can, of course, talk about water having memory and about fourth phase of water, you know, Pollock’s work and all that. But actually, let’s just take it really simply. The water that we drink has zero minerals, basically. And not only has our water got no minerals, but the minerals in our soils, according to the government has got you know, anywhere between less 10% less to 53% less minerals than it did 20 years ago. So where are we getting our minerals from? We only need trace amounts. We need small amounts. But the thing is, we need those small amounts. And when we take water from natural sources, it’s actually the rocks that are leaching little bits of minerals, you know, tonically into the water. We don’t have that anymore.
So I think it is time to start looking at water for our liver health. Making sure that we’re having enough. But also, not only is it filtered, but we are trying as much as possible to take out the rubbish that’s being put into the water, like fluoride, for example and chloride. And that we are also making sure that we know where is the mineral content coming from. So I use a little bit of you know, like Shilajit, for example, or other micro minerals which I add to my water. And then there are obviously some water filters where they actually have mineral rocks in them so that they’re slowly leaching those minerals into the water too. Because every cell that’s floating in our body there’s an inside to the cell and the outside of the cell, those, those areas have got certain ions, in other words, certain minerals, potassium, sodium. And the ratios of those determine how water moves in and out. So when we’re drinking water with no minerals, it affects how we even absorb the water. So I know it’s super simple, but liver health really does also depend on water health.
Katie: That makes sense. And again, it’s the simplicity of those things being the most profound over time. I know from getting to hear you speak on the panel that there’s also a whole side we can delve into on the mind-body side, and that there’s actually a lot of science that backs this up as well. So you guys stay tuned. We’re going to do a whole other episode that really goes deep on that side, because I have seen in my own life how important that piece is and how I ignored it for a really long time. But for today, where can people find you to keep learning? Because I know you have so much wealth of knowledge in so many areas, and that there’s going to be specific things different people are searching for that you have answers to. So where can people find you?
Dr. Olivia: The best place is probably my website and Instagram. So all my social media handles Instagram, LinkedIn and X, @drolivialesslar, D-R-O-L-I-V-I-A-L-E-S-S-L-A-R. And that is my website as well, www.drolivialesslar.com.
Katie: Perfect. So I’ll put those links in the show notes as well. And I look forward to our next conversation. But for today, thank you so much. This has been wonderful.
Dr. Olivia: Thank you.
Katie: And thank you for listening. I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama podcast.
If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.
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