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Child: Welcome to my mommy’s podcast!
Katie: This episode is sponsored by Just Thrive Health, one of my favorite companies, and especially their new Digestive Bitters. So I’ve been talking about gut health for years before it was so trendy. I love that everybody’s talking about it now, and the one brand that I have continuously used for my gut health is Just Thrive.
I started on their probiotic seven years ago, and my whole family uses it. I prefer their probiotic over any others as it’s guaranteed to arrive 100% alive in your gut, and it has a thousand times better survivability than most probiotics. It’s also one of the most versatile probiotics out there that we can take in capsule form and I can also add it to smoothies or even bake with it because it’s heat stable up to 450 degrees. So it survives all the ways I use it. I also love their newest product, their Digestive Bitters, and I got to record a fascinating episode on this because for centuries, traditional cultures turned bitter herbs into an ultimate digestive activator.
But in today’s world, these essential compounds have all but disappeared from our diets, and that’s why I am really enjoying their di digestive bitters. Which features 12 clinically proven herbs. It activates your body’s natural digestive processes and encourages healthy GLP one production naturally. So for you, that means smooth digestion, better nutrient absorption, and balanced cravings.
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This podcast is brought to you by LMNT, and this is a company you might’ve heard me talk about before, and I really love their products because proper hydration leads to better sleep. It sharpens focus, it improves energy, and so much more. But hydration is not about just drinking water because being optimally hydrated, a state called euhydration is about optimizing your body’s fluid ratios. And this fluid balance depends on many factors, including the intake and excretion of electrolytes, which many people don’t get the right amounts of. Electrolytes are charged minerals that conduct electricity to power your nervous system. I talk a lot about nervous system on this podcast.
They also regulate hydration status by balancing fluids inside and outside of our cells. LMNT was created with a science-backed electrolyte ratio of 100 milligrams of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium, and 60 milligrams of magnesium with no sugar. Since electrolytes are a key component of hydration, here’s what happens when we get our electrolytes dialed in.
We have more steady energy, improved cognitive function, suffer fewer headaches and muscle cramps, we can perform better for longer, and especially the support fasting or low carb diet because when we stop eating carbs like during a fast, the absence of insulin allows the kidneys to release sodium.
So replacing that lost sodium with electrolytes can help you feel good on a fast. Since LMNT is zero sugar, it also doesn’t break up fast. Electrolytes are also important for maintaining blood pressure, regulating digestion and proper fluid balance. Keeping skin hydrated, which is a big one that I feel like often gets missed and so much more.
I feel like proper electrolytes is a missing piece for a lot of people and I love LMNTs new canned drinks, which are sparkling water with all the same ratios and minerals I just talked about, and they are delicious. You can check it out and learn more at drinklmnt.com/wellnessmama . And at that link you will receive a free sample pack with any order.
Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com, and this short solo episode is going to go into a small reframe that has made a tremendous difference for me and a way that I think about all things health and wellness and a lot of things in my life in general, differently now. Which is the concept of safety signals versus stress signals and befriending our nervous systems and learning to send as many safety signals as possible to our nervous system, and avoid things that might be inadvertently causing stress that we might not even realize.
I definitely had a phase where I thought that health was about doing more, and I’ve talked about this phase before where I had spreadsheets of the supplements I was taking. I had checklist and to-do list of all the things I was trying to do to support my health. And what I understand now is that it’s actually about feeling safe enough to heal. Not just from a mental health and stress perspective, but from what our body perceives and learning to befriend and listen to our nervous system cues and our body signals. So I’m gonna today delve into the idea that our body is always listening, of course, not to just what we do, but to the signals we send. And ways that we can send our body as many safety signals as possible.
And this will touch on a lot of things that I talk about commonly, but hopefully in a new lens. Because like I said, this has been really paradigm shifting for me to look at things through the lens and through the consideration of how do I most send safety signals to my body through my daily choices, through what I eat, how I move, how I sleep.
How much time I spend outside, and this has been really relevant and empowering for me. So to understand this concept, I wanna briefly touch on the nervous system and especially the roles of parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system. So you’re probably familiar with these terms. Sympathetic nervous system is more in the category of fight or flight or freeze, and that’s when our nervous system is more activated and more perceptive, more preparing for danger. Whereas parasympathetic is more of rest, digest, and heal. And in the modern world, many of us can have a hard time downshifting into parasympathetic, even if we feel like we’re doing a good job of relaxing.
And this was something I learned over time to start paying attention to not just in biometric data, like my resting heart rate and my HRV, but in how my body was actually feeling. And in learning how to downshift consciously so that over time that would be more of a baseline for my system. I also wanna define these terms that I kind of have created and use about stress signals versus safety signals.
So these are basically just inputs to your body in some form or another that tell it to be in sympathetic or parasympathetic. That tell it, it needs to be on alert or that it’s able to downshift and relax. And I’ve shared before that I think I spent over a decade, probably not in parasympathetic almost at all, and learning to rewire my nervous system took a while.
And when I first started doing this my body requested a whole lot of rest and gentleness and not hard workouts. And as I learned to listen and to sit in that stillness, I was able to identify things that seemed to enhance my body’s ability to rest, digest, and heal, and things that seemed to counteract that.
And this, when I talk about stress in this context, I’m not talking about just mental stress if you feel stressed or in deadlines or conflict, things like that. Those, of course, also are stress signals as well. But I’m also gonna touch on things your body perceives as stress, even if you don’t mentally feel stress.
And that’s the category of not getting enough nutrients or calories. So undereating, getting too much blue light at the wrong times of day. Loneliness is actually a tremendous category when it comes to nervous system health and even our self-talk and how we speak to ourselves internally, and how all of those impact our nervous system.
And I feel like this is really vital to understand because our body can only rest, digest, heal, reproduce, repair when it feels safe. So let’s delve into the subtle signals that we can send to our body to signal either safety or stress, and I was a slow learner on a lot of these for sure.
One that took me years to really dial in was how to properly send safety signals through my nutrition, especially when I still had thyroid concerns and I was trying to lose weight. I was undereating for a really long time, and I’ve talked about this before. But undereating is a stress signal to the body because it’s signaling that there’s not enough food and the body produces more stress hormones in an attempt to have enough energy to go acquire food.
And when you do this over a prolonged period of time, it can be really stressful to the body. It can change your cortisol levels, your sleep can change. This certainly was true for me. And I found that undereating was simply not just about calories either. That it is important to make sure we get enough baseline calories that our body feels that it’s not in a famine.
But there are also connected pieces of this when it comes to our micronutrient consumption, our protein consumption especially, and healthy fats for women, and when we’re talking about hormones and minerals. And without awareness of all of those categories, our body may be perceiving stress, and our metabolism may be taking a hit without us even mentally feeling stressed. And so this is something I’ve talked about before, my protein and micronutrient theory and how we can learn to signal safety through every choice we make when it comes to nutrition throughout the day. And look at factors like, how can I most nourish my body through whatever foods I’m going to eat today?
How can I get the most micronutrients and minerals and the right amount of protein to signal to my body that we are safe from a food perspective? That we are not, the resources are not scarce, that we are not in a famine. And it seems like anecdotally from what I’ve seen, people from certain ancestries might actually feel this signal more strongly in that if you come from certain places where famine historically had happened, genes seemed to kind of switch on or off, especially in relation to signals that seemed like famine.
And so for me, this was a slow rebuilding process, and I’ll talk more about it in a little while. But I learned things like, really that first meal of the day is especially important for signaling safety. So not skipping breakfast, getting a lot of protein, micronutrients, and minerals first thing in the morning, pre caffeine, and then reinforcing that throughout the day with my other meal choices.
Another one for me that leads into our next point of sleep is to try to stop eating when the sun goes down, which of course is easier in the summer, especially in the US. But when we have time to adequately digest before we sleep, we are able to tap more into the deep healing states of sleep. And so I still eat in a somewhat restricted window, but I’ve now shifted that much earlier in the day, and I’m very aware of making sure that any meal choices that I make during the day, as much as possible, are maximally nourishing to my body. And I also feel like this is a much more empowering mindset to come from because I’m focused on nutrients in, versus restriction or trying to lose weight, which our psychology doesn’t love losing anything.
And versus restriction, I’m looking at nourishment and my energy levels and my sleep, and a lot of things have reflected this change. Which also brings me to sleep. Of course, we know sleep is important. I’ve said before that not a single guest in the almost 1000 episodes of this podcast has ever said that sleep is not important.
We know that sleep is important. I haven’t seen it yet, but I know there was a recent documentary about a biohacker that really honed in on the importance of sleep and how if we could only focus on one thing, this would be potentially the highest ROI. We also know that most people in the modern world are not getting enough sleep. And so this one you can do a lot of inexpensive or entirely free things to help improve your sleep. I’ll talk about some of those in more detail later in this episode, but really making sleep a priority, especially when it comes to an early bedtime and a consistent wake up time can just single-handedly make a massive difference in how your nervous system feels.
I’ve heard it anecdotally said that an hour of sleep before midnight is worth two after. This, in my past, I’ve historically been a night owl, so this was a tough one for me to learn, and I definitely noticed a difference in my nervous system and my metrics like heart rate and HRV when I consistently go to bed early. If you want a sleep resource, if sleep is a struggle for you, my friend Molly Eastman from Sleep is a Skill, has phenomenal resources.
A lot of them are free, that you can just watch and learn online about how to really tweak and experiment to dial in your sleep. But even just one hour of sleep debt can trigger cortisol issues and insulin resistance. And I’ve even read that one night of just six hours of sleep is similar from a cognitive perspective to being mildly intoxicated the next day.
So sleep is kind of the master control switch. It’s when your body and your mind and your nervous system hopefully get to reset. So if you are not already, this is a great area to put a little bit of intention and to really dial in the factors that work for you. Another massive safety signal or stress signal, depending on how we do it, when it comes to our nervous system, is our light exposure. And I’ve talked about this as well, but circadian misalignment or being out of queue with the natural rhythms of light on the planet has a mitochondrial impact. It has a hormonal impact. We need light. And I know many people like to avoid sunlight because they have concerns about skin cancer or they don’t wanna age, and I can understand those concerns.
However, light is one of the biggest switches we can pull for our nervous system. And a lot of people in the modern world don’t have this one really dialed in. I didn’t for a lot of years. And I’ll talk more about this one later on as well, but some simple levers here are things like morning sunlight, which I’ve done an entire podcast on, I will link in the show notes.A little bit of bright midday sun, never with sunburn. Of course, I’ve never had an any expert recommend being in the sun to the point of sunburn.
However, when we are in the sun, I did a great episode about this. I’ll link to it in the show notes as well. Recently, a very long form episode about how when we get the right amount of sun exposure throughout the day our nutrient absorption increases by up to 500%. Our sleep improves, our hormones improve. Cortisol gets in a proper rhythm and range. Light is a massive, massive lever here. And the same is true of being aware of artificial light, in that our body can’t always tell the difference and blue light, especially at night, because blue light is present during the day from the sun it’s not bad in and of itself, but when we get it at the wrong time, it’s kind of, I’ve heard the analogy of it, junk light being like junk food in the stress that it puts on our body.
And so this can be as simple as experimenting with changes like getting morning sunlight as soon as we can after we wake up. Getting some bright midday sun, not just for the vitamin D, but for the mitochondrial benefits, for the full spectrum of light that signals so many things in our body, and also helps align our circadian rhythm. And then trying as much as possible to move into a gentle, low light environment after the sun sets and avoid screens as much as possible, or use red filters or blue blockers to avoid as much blue light input at night.
Another big category here when it comes to safety is hydration as dehydration is a massive stress signal, even mild dehydration. Of course our bodies are primarily water. We do need water, and I believe another piece here is that we also need minerals because we’re not just full of water, we’re full of salt water and salt water with very specific mineral ratios. And so my kind of big ones I look at are magnesium, sodium, and potassium. We need, of course, many other minerals beyond that, but our body is electric and voltage gated. And those especially are important for its proper function. When we are even mildly dehydrated, our blood thickens, it can cause mood shifts and a difference in energy.
And I’ve heard that often when we think we’re hungry, we might actually be thirsty. So I attempt whenever possible to hydrate with mineral water when I first wake up, usually in the sunshine, and then to drink in between meals as much as possible. There are some sources that say drinking too much water with meals can dilute our stomach acid and not be as effective for digestion.
So I try to think of hydrating in between meals whenever possible, and I now definitely notice a difference when I don’t hydrate enough, especially in my energy levels. So those are kind of the big categories, and then there are some smaller and overlooked categories that I also wanna touch on. Including that even if we don’t feel stressed and even if we have all those big factors dialed in, if we are exposed to things in our environment that our body perceives as stressors, our nervous system is still gonna pick that up.
And this is where the conversation of what we put on our body or inhale in our environment also comes into play. So these are things in personal care products, fragrances in home air fresheners and that kind of thing, or anything that we put on or around our body that our body can perceive as stress.
There’s now a lot more awareness even in how many synthetic fibers are essentially plastic and petroleum based, and those being on our skin all day every day it can be a stress signal as well. And I found over time that we can really simplify our personal care routine and also just become a little bit more aware, make swaps when possible of the things we put on and around our bodies and that over time those can make a big difference as well.
And then there’s the movement category, and there’s kind of a sliding scale here because depending on the state of our nervous systems, certain movements can be really helpful or much less helpful or even harmful. So when I was in kind of my intensive healing phase, I found that my body did not want high intensity exercise because that was too much stress on a system that was already stressed.
But also lack of movement entirely is a stress signal as well. So it’s kind of learning and listening to your kind of golden window of movement and giving your body what it needs. So for me, in that time period that meant lots of just gentle walking outside, which of course has other benefits as I explained, or gentle swimming, but I was not doing high intensity workouts or trying to lift really heavy weights during that time.
That said, as our body moves into a better nervous system state, we have heard from guests like Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, how muscle is the organ of longevity. How the more muscle we have as we age overall, the healthier we age, the less risk of all cause mortality. So muscle is important. I feel like this nervous system piece is also important to understand in that we want to make sure our nervous system is in a place to get safety signals from whatever movement we’re doing. So for a lot of people, this can be as simple as going for a daily walk and actually just giving our body enough gentle movement so that our nervous system feels safe. Because we were designed as humans to move more than we often do in the modern world.
And this is not just about an hour workout in the gym. This is about movement throughout the day, even in little ways, little walks after meals, longer walks if you enjoy that or hikes, but ways that our body can perceive safety from our movement. And all of these things in combination, especially consistently over time, signal to our body that we are safe.
And if we aren’t getting these factors or if we’re doing things that kind of signal the opposite, even if we don’t feel unsafe or stressed, our nervous system might be getting the message that you are not safe. And over time the body listens. So I touched on them a little bit already, but briefly going to go through the checklist of some free and simple ways that we can send good safety signals to our body.
And this is about kind of remembering your body’s wisdom and tuning in. This is not about optimizing. This is not designed to create a checklist that you’re going to feel guilty if you don’t accomplish. This is just a mental reframe towithout stress over time, learn to communicate with your body in a way that signals safety. For me, the ones that were most impactful were learning to eat enough.
I under ate for a very long time. I will link to my episode with Justin Nalt from Clovis about the metabolic implications of that. And from a nervous system perspective, eating enough, especially protein, whole foods, and micronutrients, sends the body the signal that we are safe. We are not in a famine and it’s safe to heal and to release things like toxins and excess fat that we may have been carrying to protect us. The body’s always on our side. So when those things happen, it’s because the body is working in our best interest. And when I learned to think of that differently and to nourish and fuel versus restrict, over time, that made a massive difference for me.
Another free lever is to sleep enough and sleep deeply. Things that can help with that are kind of sleep environment and hygiene. Having a dark, cool environment without noise or interruption as much as possible. And really as much as we can, I know it’s hard as a mom, especially in those baby ages, really prioritizing a consistent bedtime and wake up time and hopefully one that is a little bit earlier.
It’s also avoiding junk light at night. I also find it helpful to take magnesium and to have a nighttime routine that over time helped signal my body to prepare for sleep. Now I talk about sunlight a lot. I think this is potentially one of the most impactful free tools that we have at our disposal.
Everything on earth depends on the sun, and as humans, we have the option of divorcing ourselves from the sun. And I think that learning our natural light cues and really being aware of them and nurturing them can be deeply impactful for the nervous system. So this is first thing in the morning, getting sunlight when possible without glasses or contacts.
Outdoor sunlight, not through a window. And that begins the clock on our circadian rhythm, our melatonin production, it’s supportive of other hormones like cortisol and all of our sex hormones. And this is a massive free lever that we often underestimate because it’s simple. Also getting as much light as possible on as much skin as possible at other times throughout the day without burning. And I use an app called D Minder for this, which helps based on your skin tone and your location, you to know kind of the optimal range of how much sun to get without burning when getting enough Vitamin D.
And of course, the benefits of sunlight go far beyond just vitamin D. We need it for so many things within our body, our mitochondrial function, our nutrient absorption, our electrical communication, our hormones, so much depends on light, and the sun is available to all of us. Even on a cloudy day that natural light exposure is so impactful. Another really inexpensive or free one is to hydrate daily with minerals.
Not just water, but water plus minerals and electrolytes, which signals cellular safety. When we don’t get enough minerals, the body perceives that as a stressful situation, even if we don’t feel stressed. And so this is one that we can really pay attention to and be a little bit more aware of that can have a massive difference.
I also mentioned movement, and this does not have to be high intensity classes, expensive gyms, anything like that. It can be walking, mobility work and fascia care, rebounding, stretching, a lot of things that we can do at home. Even things as simple as learning to be able to hang from a pull-up bar for up to three minutes a day helps nurture grip strength, which is correlated with longevity. It also decompresses the back.
I’ve heard physical therapists say that the majority of minor shoulder and back injuries can be really helped by that act of just hanging for three minutes a day. And if you can’t yet hang for three minutes straight, you can do it in as many sessions as possible to lead up to that three minutes. And you might be surprised how much different your posture and your body feel when you incorporate some small things like that, like hanging, like mobility work.
In my interview with Hunter Cook, he has something called CARS, which is controlled articular rotations of every joint of the body. And he has a free video that you can learn how to do that at that simple daily practice. You can do it in the morning, outside in the sun, it can make a big difference on your nervous system.
And then of course, things that are more traditionally defined as nervous system support, like gentle cold therapy, which may or may not be appropriate if your nervous system is already stressed. Warm salt baths I find these especially helpful lately. Things like tapping or EFT, which is designed to signal safety to the nervous system and which I use a lot in my intensive healing phase.
And then anything that helps the vagus nerve. So that could be singing and humming, that can be movement. Those are all things that kind of more directly signal safety to the nervous system. Some other kind of peripheral categories that are also very important are things like human connection. My friend Lawrence says, humans are nutrients and our nervous systems definitely seem to feel this way.
So getting enough connection and touch through eye contacts, hugs, laughter, spending time together, those are massive safety signals to our nervous system. And another thing that often gets kind of swept away in the busyness of modern life. There’s also the category of nurturing your environment. I’ve heard it said that yes, we create our environment in our homes, but also our environment creates us and shapes us.
And so that’s things like trying to have natural and clean products in our house, and ones especially that we use on our body, getting our light exposure in our homes designed to support our nervous system. So as I’ve shared before in my house, this means I have broad spectrum daylight bulbs in my ceiling lights.
And then amber and red bulbs in lamps. And I try whenever possible to at sunset switch the lighting so that I’m only getting lower light from eye level or below from the source of those lamps, which I definitely feel helps my nervous system calm down and my body start preparing for sleep. And this is also whenever possible avoiding screens at night. If I do need to work at night, I use a daylight computer, which does not have blue light or bright artificial light, or I use a red filter on my phone and I do try to avoid screens for a couple hours before bed as much as possible. And the environment piece, I feel like this also includes creating a cozy environment that feels safe to your body and your nervous system, and that you can kind of feel that deep, Ahh, when you enter, and especially in my bedroom.
I’ve really made this a priority in the last couple of years. And then the more kind of ambiguous and difficult to understand, but how we talk to ourselves, our inner voice. I’ve talked about this before, how even shifts from things like when I was told I had Hashimoto’s, instead of saying I’m sick or my body’s attacking itself, learning to shift my inner speak to my body is healing and I feel better and better every day.
And starting to pay attention to the harsh things I was saying to myself because our minds and our nervous systems don’t really know the difference between the reality of something harsh happening outside of us, and the same thing being created from our inner dialogue in our nervous system. So one way to look at this is, would you speak to your child or your best friend in the way that you speak to yourself?
And if not, what ways could you subtly learn to reframe and to shift your inner talk and kind of enlist your mind and your nervous system through that on your side in healing?
So I know I touched on a lot of different points there. I will put follow up resources in the show notes. I feel like the theme of all of the things I talked about is remembering that our body is always on our side. So if something’s not going the way we want in our body, our body’s doing that for our best interest to take as good of care of us as possible.
And so it’s learning how to communicate with our bodies and remember that we’re not fixing a broken system. We are learning to trust our body’s wisdom again, and that requires some practice and some communication, and it can be massively impactful and have a tremendous ROI wwe do that consistently. It’s also about remembering we’re not lazy or inconsistent.
Our bodies are protecting us from perceived danger, and our nervous system is protecting us from perceived danger, and it’s amazing and dramatic the recovery, the healing, the growth that can happen when we learn to befriend our nervous system and to send safety signals. When the body feels safe, it will begin to open, to soften, to heal, and to recover.
That’s what it’s designed to do. It’s always trying to, and so if something is getting in our way, it’s about learning how to identify what those things are and to create habits that nurture what the body needs. So key takeaways and my encouragement to you from this episode would be to start with just one safety signal at first.
If any of this resonated with you, whether it be morning sunlight or a slight change in your sleep routine, or just reframing how you eat to focus on nutrient quality and build from there. Don’t let this come from a place of stress that would, of course be counterproductive. This is not meant to be a to-do list that adds more stress or anxiety to your plate by any means.
But just start with one small change at a time, and as your resources expand and as your energy expands, add things on that feel good. Do this in alignment with your body and your nervous system. Find the joy and the pleasure in eating nutrient dense foods in that bright morning sunlight, hitting your skin, on just being outside and breathing fresh air and moving in the sunlight.
It’s not about doing more, it’s not about adding more to your plate. It is about undoing the danger signals. Even the ones we might not have been aware we were sending and learning to signal trust and befriend our bodies and our nervous system. So I would love to hear from you of if any of this resonated on what you are focusing on, how your nervous system feels, if any of this was new or are things you had already heard before.
I do read every review and comment on podcast or message on Instagram, and I would love to hear from you as well as to hear what you would like me to talk about in future episodes. So please reach out and as always, thank you so much for listening and sharing your time and your energy and your attention with me today.
I’m so grateful that you did, and if any of this was helpful and resonated with you, I would be honored if you would share it with a friend as well. I think that if we all can tune in a little bit more, befriend our bodies a little bit more, that especially when those of us who are moms that impact can really ripple and impact so many beyond just us.
So thank you for listening and I hope you will join me again on the next episode of The Wellness Mama Podcast.
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