Connections between the brain and gut abound, which can be seen in the dysfunctions that often unite them. Many neurological and mood disorders often have enteric manifestations, GI disorders may present with neurological and psychiatric symptoms, and psychological stress may adversely impact microbiome balance and GI function.
Dr. J and Evan Brand discuss that consideration of the bidirectional relationship of the gut-brain axis will inform individual treatment strategies. Managing external stress-related factors while optimizing gut health may jointly address some chronic health conditions. Specifically, personalized therapeutic strategies that combine stress transformation approaches with gut health interventions, such as functional testing, nutrition, and natural supplements, may help to optimize gut function and bolster related body systems. Learn more about supporting the microbiome and its effect on overall health when you subscribe to this channel!
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:00 – Introduction
0:46 – Stress
6:41 – Brain Chemistry
7:51 – Water Filtration and Organic Foods
13:56 – Cortisol Patterns
23:13 – Stress and Hormones
30:00 – Testing and Functional Strategies
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It's doctor J here in the house with Evan Brand. Really excited. We are back doing our live podcast. Really excited to be back in the saddle. Evan, how we doing, man? What's going on?
Evan Brand: Oh, doing really well. I'm excited to talk about stress. My wife, she woke up this morning.Which is like my jaws tight was like grinding my teeth last night and maybe you need to talk about that today. So I thought, OK, everyone is stressed, there's a lot on everyone's plate, but it's really how you respond to it that really determines whether it makes you and you become someone and something and you get success out of your stress. Or do you just get frazzled and burned out and you resort to alcohol and tobacco and other addictions, chocolate and wine and whatever else to cope with that? And I think there's a lot healthier coping mechanisms or stress for burnout, for feelings of overwhelm. And you and I have done this for years clinically. We've helped people through the toughest of cases. You and I have taken the huge load on our shoulders of, you know, trying to be the helper, be the healer with someone that's struggling. And that's a lot, that's a heavy toll on us. So there's things that you and I do personally. And then there's things that you and I do clinically and then we've got some studies to kind of verify you know, what we're seeing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% So when I look at stress.You have the actual stress issue, like whatever that stress issue is, right? And so feeling anxious or feeling stressed about an issue is a good thing, right? Part of the reason that is there is to get you motivated to get off your butt to solve the problem. So I always look at the issue and I'm like. Right. Why do I feel stressed? Usually there's you haven't closed the loop yet. I call it closing the loops. Problem, right? You take action to resolve the problem, the problem goes away. That's the closed loop, right? And so you have a lot of people with open loops. Meaning they have a problem out there and they just haven't even figured out the solution. So when it comes to being healthy and having good neurotransmitters, good adrenal function, good healthy diet and lifestyle habits, good anti-inflammatory type of environment, nutrient dense foods coming in. Good nutrition, your ability to process one that stressor when it hits you, it's not gonna hit you as hard. It's not gonna knock you off your pedestal to you're going to be able to adapt and you're going to be able to think clearly and troubleshoot whatever the issue is. And so I always look at a problem. I said OK, got it, how do I close the loop on that, what's the action item to execute? That so I always just kind of get clear, have a list. What are the things I can do and set in motion to resolve the issue. I think it's really important if you just dust it away. The healthiest adrenal glands eventually is gonna eat away at you because you haven't closed the loop. So always think about closing the loop on your issues #2 get healthier so these things don't bug you as much, right? If you have good levels of B6, good levels of magnesium, you're sleeping adequately, you have good blood sugar stability, Good amino acids. It's gonna allow you to be able to process it. You're not gonna activate that fight or flight part of your nervous system. That shuts down the frontal cortex and activates the reptilian brain stem part of the brain that's all about fight or flee, fight or flee, fight or flee. And so the more you can keep this kind of reptilian brain from being activated, and then you can use that frontal cortex, you'll be able to sit back, become troubleshoot the issue and close the loop.
Evan Brand: And this is hard if you've got toxins, if you've got lyme, different infections. I mean we've seen in the literature that certain infections and toxins. Basically, decrease the blood flow to that front part of the brain. So you become a monkey. You do become primitive as you mentioned. This reptile brain kicks in and you can't make good decisions and you certainly can't comprehend the future. You get stuck living in the day, the hour, the minute with that stress and when you say close the loop, I think that resonates for a lot of people, but many people are afraid to close the loop because this means that they have to end a friendship that's toxic. They have to end a marriage that's failing. They have to, you know, fire someone that they don't like. They have to quit their job because they have a bad boss. So.You know, closing the loop sounds so simple, but this could be a huge roadblock. You know, for people, and I've seen it, where you've got a woman eating perfectly. She's doing amazing with her supplements. But for example, here's the case study. She's in an open relationship and she's miserable and she hates it. And she's jealous and her husband's with these other women and she doesn't want him to be. And so there's issues there. I don't freaking care how much ashwagandha this lady pops. She's not going to supplement out of this situation. That's intense. And there is a place for closing the loop. And you can't supplement your way out of a situation like that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. In relationship, it's always good to have healthy boundaries, right? It's like good fences make good neighbors, right? Having good emotional boundaries and how were relationship operates, right? If your families asking 10 times of you, then, then you, then ten times of you, then they help you on the backside, right, this kind of Arctic give and take that. So you always have to have clear boundaries. I think that's a really, really important one. There's an awesome book out there. Um, by Henry Cloud called boundaries. That's a really good woman. I see patients in relationships. They may not even be a relationship with their spouse. It could be a relationship with family or friends where they're just kind of a parasitic element of people asking many multiples from that person. Then that person's providing back and there should always be a give and take. Right. I always tell patients like when you play catch, I throw the ball, you throw the ball, right. Emotionally, there's a give and a take and it's back and forth and it's equal. When I start throwing the ball, you don't throw it back. I run back over, get the ball, come back, throw it again, that, that, that's, that's you know very depleting, right? You missed the give and take, and so you gotta make sure your good, healthy boundaries are there. Also, with relationships, it's always better to try to restructure. Kind of reboundify the relationship, then just exit. I think exiting a lot of relationships is just, uh, it's an easy way out. It's, you know, you just go somewhere and end your and go on to your life. I think it's always better to see if you can repair or give people an opportunity to repair and get on the same page and see what happens from there. But either way, right, you have all these emotional issues. Get healthy. If you're afraid to deal with these issues right now, put them on the back burner. No, you have to deal with them. Adjust your expectations of healing and try to get healthier so then you have better energy, better focused, better calmness to address whatever the problem is.
Evan Brand: This is great advice and it's uncomfortable and there are situations that are going to be intense, but I would encourage you just to go face first with those now if you have trouble making eye contact with these people. Some of that's related to brain chemistry too. I see a lot of people that when they get in a stressful situation.They just shut down. They look down, they look away. They can't face the person and therefore they can't fully express themselves. That's usually tied into low GABA, and so we can't measure GABA on the organic acids. But we can measure serotonin, we can measure dopamine, we can measure endorphins. So before you and I go into a few of these studies and solutions, you know, let's just give a little back story on some of this. And so, you know, when I had gut infections down in Texas, I had tons of anxiety. It wasn't me, it was not my personality. It was the gut bugs. And when we looked in my brain chemistry, my serotonin was low. My dopamine was low. I had issues to fully get myself motivated. I still push through, but I didn't wake up necessarily with that spark like I wanted, and so I know personally and you and I have seen it 1000 plus times clinically the low brain chemistry problem, it's epidemic and it's only gotten worse even in the last 10 years. You and I have been looking at these labs.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. And so again, there are some people that have been on board here with us for years listening and they're super advanced. And so just kind of out of the gate, we're going to just give a brief overview of foundational things. OK. So first thing out of the gate is an appointment my phone because I just changed my whole house water filtration here, and Evan and I were talking about it earlier today. So check this out. I'm gonna hold up my phone. So you can see here.The clean one on the left, that's a brand new filter. And that all the way up to the webcam.
Evan Brand: We can hardly see. Go closer. Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So the one on the left, right, the white one. That's the new one.That's the one that was in there for the last three months. I mean that is just nasty, dirty and gross that again that sense. That's a post filter. So it went through a massive pre filter, went through the huge carbon based filter and then went through that afterwards. And it was dirty. It is nasty. I actually have it over on my on my bar countertop over there. So pretty pretty freaking gross. So, what does that mean? It means, prioritize good clean filtered water. If you don't have a high water filter water filter system, we'll put some links down below to the ones that we personally use, but in general, at least get a good quality glass water Topo Chico, Cheryl Steiner, a Perrier, a mountain valley one out of a good glass model was gonna be excellent during the day and then I definitely recommend getting a whole house water filter once you're in a in a place where you can do it. Some people may be in an apartment, then maybe a temporary housing. You can always get an under the counter filter. There are even some temporary ones that actually go on top but still filter water out pretty well. But that's pretty nasty. And so 70% of your body's water in regards to all the liquids. So you need good clean filtered water without all the junky chemicals. Maybe drugs, maybe pesticide runoff? Bull run off, who knows. So the first thing is kind of get your water right. Comments there, Evan?
Evan Brand: Yeah, I mean, this is important because when you're stressed, you're gonna be dehydrated. You're burning through everything. You're burning through hydration, you're burning through B vitamins. You and are looking at papers on B vitamins and magnesium for helping with stress. So we know that when you're burning the candle, and most people in the modern world are.You need good water and the tap water. You can look up EWG and put in your zip code. It's scary. I mean, almost every single city has insane high levels of trihalomethanes which are carcinogenic as you mentioned pesticide residue, pharmaceutical drugs like heart medications, beta blockers, anti anxiety, antidepressant medications. You know what's scary? There are studies now being done on bays, some of these inland bodies of water. And there was one down, I think it was in Florida near Miami. Biscayne Bay is one of these most famous bays. They have an issue now where all of the fish. I'll see if I can pull it up.They now have drugs in them. And it's because of the runoff from people. So let me pull this up because this is.This is pretty crazy. This was, this actually came out over the summer this year. And I think it's pretty shocking and most people don't have a clue.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, there was that famous study on atrazine up at UC Berkeley showing the frogs were essentially having reproductive organ issues like a major. I think they were almost becoming like asexual and their sex organs were like switching some kind of weird dynamic what's happening. Based on the hormone, like disrupting compounds in these pesticides. And that was atrazine.
Evan Brand: Did you, did this pull up my screen here? Oh yeah, the screen share, I'm going to share with you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Go ahead.
Evan Brand: Alright, yeah. So here it is. Pharmaceutical drugs showing up in fish from South Florida waters. Yeah, so it's Biscayne Bay and I know you've got 2.5 million Miami residents and a lot of those people are on pharmaceutical drugs and then they're peeing that out and then some of that runoff is ending up in the water supply and then that runs off into the Bay and then the fish then accumulate those drugs. So they did a three-year study.They found the Valium. They found antibiotics. They found blood pressure medication in the blood and tissue of bone fish. One fish showed 17 different drugs. So here you are thinking you're getting your fish clean. I'm gonna eat fresh fish. It's like well. You know you're looking at antidepressant treatment, medication, narcotics, pain relievers. That's insane. Now they're saying good news is that this is a catch and release species. But, what about the other fish that people are eating? So move. I don't know. Just tuna fish.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. So I mean, getting your water clean, getting your food quality clean, organic food. Here's the atrazine study. And they were talking about it here at UC Berkeley Press release back in 2002. But it was April 16th in the National Academy of Sciences, UC Berkeley, essentially what happened here, the frogs were developing, they were becoming hermaphrodite. They were heading both sex organs. So you could see testes here, ovaries, ovaries, and you could see abnormal gonads and male exposure to this type of frog.The frogs have become hermaphrodites. Both male and female due to the hormonal exposure. So you can see because the atrazine environment basically an uncontrolled experiment this would be no atrazine free environment talking about because herbicides been used for 40 years of 80 countries. It's effect on sexual development and male frogs could be one of many factors in the global decline of amphibians. So crazy, right? Now we're talking about lowest levels of 0.1 part per billion. So this is real. So that's why I'm saying out of the gate, easiest thing out of the gate. Clean water, good water filter, organic food, organic food. And then outside of that, right then we could talk about blood sugar, stability, at least a pound worth of protein at every meal. I think it's a really good making sure you have good fats that aren't all pufa-based fats. Seed, nut oil based fats, refined vegetable oils, you know keeping it good healthy saturated fats, coconut oil, avocado, olive, you know cold press. You know most of your good quality fats coming from more stable.Had accelerated fat sources. This is great. And then after that you just adjust the carbs for your activity level and kind of your metabolic type, meaning do you need to lose weight? Are you kind of a skinnier person? Are you really active right? The more active and the more at an optimal weight you are, the more carbohydrates you can handle. So you got to adjust it. It's not a one-size-fits-all on that.
Evan Brand: Let's transition. Talk about cortisol. Yeah. This is important for stress. When people think stress, most people think cortisol and you and I've run so many of these, probably more than anybody, I pulled up my screen. If you want to pull it up. This is a Dutch panel. That you and I run on almost everyone in regards to hormonal health and what you're looking for is really the health of the cortisol pattern. So you can see here this particular female, she was absolutely exhausted. You could see for people on audio, you're missing out, but you could go back to. Uh Justin Health YouTube channel and you can watch this video if you're listening on the audio and you want to see the the the some of the screen shares. But you want to basically charge your smartphone battery first thing in the morning, get a full charge and that full charge last throughout the day, but in this case this woman, her cortisol pattern was completely shut. She was below range the entire day except for night time. She perked up just a little bit, and that could have been like maybe she was on her phone, she was watching a horror movie or a scary TV show or something an artificially boosted her cortisol. But this is the real issues. So no matter how clean your water is, if your cortisol pattern looks like this, you're gonna be absolutely exhausted and you were gonna deal with stress terribly. You're not going to deal with stress. How many people are you seeing like this now versus maybe 5 Years ago, do you feel like it's becoming more common or no?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean it's, it's always tough because we're, I'm seeing a large percent of the population that are have chronic health issues, right. So I'm always gonna get that, that slice that's going to be significant. But yeah this type of pattern is, is a big deal, right, because not only is this a sign of you being chronically stressed and depleted, but this is a reverse cortisol rhythm, so you're gonna be tired during the day and it's gonna be harder for you to relax at night and recharge. So it makes it really difficult to get that good regenerative sleep wake cycle going. And so these are the people that have.Hard time sleeping at night and getting and reestablishing those good healthy lifestyle patterns that should be in place. That's what makes it really tough. One thing if you're just tired, but you can work on getting sleep and and recharging if we can't. And then also this person, I guarantee you there's there's stress handling capacities gonna be at Max, so they're just gonna like flip out on their kids, flip out on their friends at the simplest thing, or they'll just be an overwhelmed and they'll just be in flight constantly ignoring and sweeping all their problems under the rug because they jerked their capacity so low.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and I know this particular female here was incredibly histamine intolerant. Someone in the comments said, let's talk about histamine. So there is a component to that. And in her case, she was sensitive to everything, chemicals, fragrances, EMF food. So this was a, you know a pretty sick middle-aged woman, but I mean everything was completely crashed here and so you and I wanted to talk about some of the herbs. Now if we jump right into one of these papers on. What's called Magnolia and Phellodendron? This is a blend, actually. And it's usually under the patented name Relora. Some of the professional products you and I use contain Relora. Now. This is a good option for reducing stress and anxiety, but the problem is you really don't just want to start taking supplements without the clinical data because if you look back at that woman and the cortisol pattern is completely crashed, if we were to go to something like Relora, I would say this is not an appropriate thing to use because if you look at the results of the study of supplementing Relora for four weeks, the salivary cortisol was18% lower in the Relora group. So what that means is they saw less stress, less tension, less depression, way less anger, less fatigue, less confusion, and a higher mood. But would you say in her case that's not appropriate because she was so crashed already. We don't want an 18% reduction in cortisol.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Now the question is what type of people were in that group, because a lot of these adaptogens, if someones low like ashwagandha for instance. There's studies on Ashwagandha on helping to lower cortisol as well as increased cortisol. So I would say that the adaptogens are probably not like a drug where they're gonna suppress. If someone's already low, they're probably gonna more help that HPA access kind of adapt. Now there are certain adaptogens like ginseng or licorice that may be more stimulatory even if someone's high, it may still over stimulate. So you gotta be careful with over stimulating ones, but usually ones.like holy basil Holy basil, Magnolia, Ashwagandha tend to be more adaptogenic, so I'd be curious about that. What that sample size was? Were they kind of higher cortisol people? If they were higher cortisol people, then that would totally make sense that the herb was working to kind of bring things back into balance. Does it say it all in that study?
Evan Brand: We assess salivary cortisol and psychological mood in 56 subjects, 35 women, 25 or 35 men, 20 21 women. They were screened for moderate stress, so that would have been interesting if they would have came in and did a cortisol panel on all these people and showed the before and after, but that's OK because you and I have seen this a lot clinically and as you described, we'd like to just give the nutrients to let the body do what it needs to do. Meaning we're not coming in with Cortef necessarily and cranking her up. We're giving HPA access support and the body can figure this out on its own in many many cases.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And the fact that a lot of these symptoms improved. It's probably not a low cortisol person making their cortisol lower because that those symptoms would get worse, right? They would actually, you know, they wouldn't be improving, right. So the fact that they're coming down, there's probably an improvement. So imagine these people had higher cortisol patterns.To begin with. And that would make sense. But that's why we don't even go all in on just any herb, right? Or making these diet changes. We're getting the inflammation down. We're increasing nutrient density. We're also providing all the cofactors to help your adrenals function better, whether it's vitamin C, whether it's pantothenic acid B5, whether it's B6, I have one study in here talking about B6 and Magnesium actually works better than magnesium alone. And part of that is unique cofactors for these nutrients to work better. And a lot of your brain chemicals actually have cofactors for a lot of these conversions of serotonin and Dopamine and norepinephrine to happen, you need a lot of cofactors. And then we can kind of go more into the category of like, well, if your diets crummy and you're eating a lot of sugar or inflammatory foods, you can actually deplete those pull factors more. Or if you have mold exposure, you may deplete, you may be depleting your B vitamins in your in your in your folate and your B12 and your B6 for methylation purposes. Because that mold exposure is revving up those methylation pathways, you may be utilizing more of your acetylation and glucuronidation pathways for glutathione and acetyl cysteine right. You're sulfur aminos may be depleted as well and also chronic stress does deplete sulfur because you need sulfur to actually activate dopamine to norepinephrine. And so when you look at those pathways, the more stressed you get, you will actually deplete sulfur and when you don't have enough sulfur if you have mold exposure coming in.You see how you have a toxin on this side and then you have stress over here and you're kind of burning that candle at both ends.
Evan Brand: Yeah.Let's hit Ashwagandha. And then I like B vitamin magnesium when it's pretty interesting. So ashwagandha, we hear a lot about it. I'd say it's probably the most popular adaptogenic herb. I mean, you see it in grocery stores now at the checkout counter, I've seen Ashwagandha gummies and Ashwagandha pills, which I think in general is good, I have seen at the high dose and I have seen chronic usage in some people. It gives them a little bit of flatness where they just don't have as much emotions. I've just seen, if you look on Reddit, there's several threads if you type in like ashwagandha at Hedonia, this is basically just the loss of pleasure in life. So there's some people that are reporting either high dose or long term use of ashwagandha. They just sort of become numb. So I think you need to watch out for that. But in general, you and I are cycling on and off of these things and we're rotating. Now out of protocols and not necessarily, always in isolation. Just for a couple months, if they have excessive fatigue, maybe we're adding in some rhodiola, so we'll look at that in a minute too. But the Long story short is many, many papers on Ashwagandha. This is just one. But you're always gonna see an anti anxiety activity and you're always gonna see anti stress. It's going to improve symptoms of depression and insomnia and it's going to help primarily by modulating the HPA access and also the sympathetic adrenal medullary axis, as well as GABAnergic and serotonergic pathways, meaning that it may help boost GABA, which calms you down. It may help boost serotonin, which helps you become less irritable, less anxious, and you may sleep better.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. I just swallow some Gabba and some glycine right now, some amino acids that also help with stress. Love, Mike.
Evan Brand: I took some right before. Yeah, right before we jumped on. I told you about those gummies and my wife. And so I had a couple. It was like Ashwagandha, Rhodiola I think it might have been some Maca too, but, so that was good. So here's another paper on ashwagandha. This was a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled, which is the best, the best type that you want. And they said, compared to placebo, significant reduction in what they're calling the Hamilton Anxiety rating scale. So significant reduction in that. In a near significant reduction and the depression, anxiety and stress scale. Also reductions in morning cortisol testosterone levels increased in males. So you and I didn't mention that but. Stress.Those surprise stress is going to negatively affect your hormones too. Stress is going to reduce testosterone. That's going to affect your sex drive. So when you see that Viagra is being passed out like candy, now you wonder what all's going into the stress is a big component.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, we just saw a major study come out last month looking at the effectiveness of antidepressants. And they're showed to be, you know, no long term benefit with a lot of these antidepressants. I think that was a Lancet study out of the UK and so we kind of look at a lot of the antidepressants, we look at the mechanism that's happening there. You know, we know there's data on things like tryptophan and five HTP and B6 helping. So there's definitely like, there definitely is like a depletion theory where people are chronically stressed and then as they are stressed, they do deplete their serotonin, they deplete their dopamine. We see that in organic acid test. But the medications for that are blocking these reuptake ports, trying to accumulate more serotonin in between the synapses may not be the right school of thought. And there are a lot of doctors and people and pharmacologists looking in the direction of just brain inflammation. And so everything we do in functional medicine is about reducing inflammation. So when we give this nutrient with this herb we're doing so many things in the background, diet and lifestyle wise to reduce inflammation. There's so many variables we're moving so it's so hard in functional medicine world to do a double-blind placebo control trial because in those trials you have to typically control a variable or two at once. If you control 10 variables at once, 12 variables, there's just too many things moving in one Direction to know which one was the deal breaker and like in this one, study over here. I'll show you. Where they look at tyrosine supplementation. And or stress for cognitive demands. I'm going to pull this trial up here. So this is interesting right here. And this is kind of why we like to test and not guess, right, assessing over guessing. So they looked at dopamine, tyrosine which is a building block for dopamine, right. It goes, it goes phenylalanine and tyrosine and then it goes L DOPA dopamine and then under stressed dopamine can get converted to norepinephrine.Then you actually use a lot of sulfur. From dopamine to norepinephrine. But they talked over here that the potential of using TYR supplementation to treat clinical disorder seems limited and benefits. But then it talks about down here tyrosine does seem to effectively enhance cognitive performance particularly in short term stressful and/or cognitively demanding situations, we conclude tyrosine is an effective enhancer of cognitive function, but only when neurotransmitter function is intact and dopamine or norepinephrine is temporary or depleted. So if we have some functional deficiencies and we may see that based on a stress profile or you know functionally, we may see it on a cortisol rhythm test and we may see it with an organic acid panel, looking at vanilmandelate, looking at Homovanillate and we may see some of these markers either go overly high or overly low, which shows that there's some significant depletion going on here. And so you can see that this the nutrient tyrosine tend to work better when people actually had a depletion.
Evan Brand: Well, you made me think of something and we've probably talked about this before, but how crazy is it to think about trying to do a proper, supposedly double-blind placebo-controlled study? Because, think of Sally who woke up and had a GMO Gluten bagel with vegetable oil. Instead of real butter for breakfast, she takes the antidepressant. Or she takes the herb and they've got Johnny over here who had a grass fed rib eye for breakfast and he took the same medication. They're going to get totally freaking different results. So you and I were talking about this before we hit record, but it's so hard to actually look at and appreciate a study that's going to give you that outcome because like what time do they go to bed? Are they all going to bed at 10:00 PM or Sally staying up till 2:00 AM? No wonder she didn't get relief from the antidepressant or the antidepressant herb or whatever. So it's like, my God, when you really break apart using the functional medicine lens, you break apart the sleep, the stress, the diet, the family relationships, like how many of those people are going through a divorce during the study? Those are the seven people that didn't get relief from depression, right? So it's very difficult. And I think that's why you and I can look at these studies and there's other people that will talk about studies on podcast, but the reality is when you have the clinical experience that would, that's what makes the difference because we're coaching people through some of the lifestyle measures, the sleep, the nutrition, the water, we're not just throwing the herb and saying good luck. It's just not going to be that effective.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And also like we just mentioned earlier. We got a test, right? We don't wanna guess, we want to assess. And This is why someone may have, you know, no experience with this supplement and say it's it's joke it's it's snake oil and someone's like no i had a really great experience because there's one you may Had a really great experience because there's one you may not need that nutrient as much if you need something more than someone else, right? Then you may have a better benefit, but also a lot of nutrients work synergistically, right? So this one study looks at magnesium with B6 and they found that this study that, right here, many civilizations regard subjects with severe extreme stress study provides clinical support for the greater benefit of magnesium combined with B6. So both groups did well. They had a magnesium group and a magnesium with B6 and they found the magnesium with B6 actually did better and so a lot of nutrients are synergistic. I mean, I think anyone, most people will benefit from magnesium just because a large percent of the population are depleted in it. Our food supply becomes less and less on it. It's one of those core nutrients it's hard to get enough of. So I think it can't hurt to ever take some of these core nutrients, but a lot of these nutrients are synergistic and so magnesium is very important for stress and relaxation. But B6 also helps with, it's an important cofactor for all of your brain chemicals to work. Very important cofactor and it helps a lot of your neurotransmitters like serotonin and GABA and dopamine and adrenaline all work and convert in the brain. So it's important that you can't just ever rely on one nutrient, you got to look at the whole thing and it's always better to assess versus guests too.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and when you click on the podcast and it says helping with stress or feeling overwhelmed, you may think of us talking about meditation and float tanks and scheduling massages and getting manicures and pedicures.And take it a vacation and taking Fridays off and hugging your kids more and having more sex. All those things are great too. But we're really trying to get geeky here with you guys, because most people that come to us, as you mentioned, they've already been to 5 10-15 20. They done the massage and they've been through the talk therapy and they've been to so many other practitioners. They need the nitty gritty granular stuff like this. It's really going to get them better. So if you guys are listening for the lifestyle stuff, we try to integrate that and that is important, but ultimately most people are doing a lot of that, and they've tried and they're still suffering. Let me pull something up on Rhodiola. This is pretty cool. I told you years ago how Rhodiola changed my life. And this is a paper that just concludes that Rhodiola is a very effective potent herb for treating mild to moderate depression. And we're talking in six weeks. So this is not a long thing. Like people think it's gonna take years and years and years.I'm not saying that if you've got mold, you won't still be depressed. If you've got Lyme, you're still going to be depressed like that. That can happen. But what if I can just give you a tool, which is gonna boost you. Let's say it reduces your depression by 30%, enough for you to get back into the gym. And now you're exercising. Now you get the natural endorphin boost, and then you feel more confidence. Now you go on a date with this woman you've been wanting to go on a date with, and now you have more fun and oxytocin cause your bonding. But at this this whole snowball effect happened all because I just gave you this herb to pull you out of a dark place. So that's really what we're trying to do.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. So we talked about some of the Earth, some of the nutrients, some of our big favorite ones. Of course, movement is going to be helpful. Again, you got to figure out where your level is. If you're chronically inflamed, movement maybe too much, too stressful and puts you in a more catabolic place because you're breaking down tissue. Figure out where you're at if you're at a good place.You can lift some weights, do a little bit of interval sprinting, whether it's a walks, walk, run, walk, Sprint, you can do a rower. We like rowers because of, you know, the extension and also there's less impact on the joint. So if you're already inflamed, you're not going to create more inflammation. You can start with some bands or some gentle lifting of weights to kinda you know find that 8 to 12 you know rep 8 to 12 you know, Rep movement, that's going to give you a good muscle breakdown, give you a little soreness. That's good. You know, getting 10,000 steps today, these are all simple strategies. Strategies. We don't have to overthink it. You don't need to super crazy customized plan out of the gates. Just get some good movement. Make sure you're, you have good form. If you're not sure, you can always start with walking or yoga or something more gentle and you can always check out some YouTube videos and do some band work or some cable work or I like the new tonal that's another good at home device for lifting is really good so you know just get get enough movement in there to get your muscles a little bit sore.
Evan Brand: Yeah, absolutely. I've got my roll machine right here. I just try to put it on this heavy of a setting as I feel confident with it's not gonna injure me where I can still go. And I almost use it like a sprinting device. I don't necessarily just go slow and steady, I try to just kind of sharp relatively fast. Kind of like a Sprint row movement and I tell you it, it can be depleting, but man, I've heard many people talk about this, like when you want to get out of your mind with your ruminating, if you're worried, if you're thinking negative, you're going through all these bad things in your life and bad symptoms and all. I'm so, you do these pity parties for yourself when you're exercising physically. It almost shuts that brain off completely to where you could just focus on like how hard this exercise, how hard this movement is.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% great 100% now outside of the gates here right? There could be some hidden issues that were not addressing and you have to see a good functional medicine provider over there could be you may need to look at your adrenals. Your adrenals could be more depleted like that patient Evan just show where they have significant kind of reverse cortisol pattern. It's good to know your adrenal pattern because if you have chronic issues, you want to know, hey, this is where I'm at one it gives you a timeline of how long it may take to heal that person may look at look like a 6 to 12 month journey on that. Also it gives you the ability to have, you know, realistic expectations, good timeline, also something like that. We'd probably wanna do a retest on someone that's that out of balance to make sure they're back in balance, but also want to look at hidden stressors that could be behind that, whether it's mold, whether it's pests, whether it's, you know, toxicity issues that aren't being addressed. Whether it's gut issues we talked about, a lot of these nutrients have to get eaten, so for our diets poor there's a problem. But also what if it's good now but we're not breaking down and absorbing it? That's where we'd have to do deeper testing on the functional medicine side to see how you're doing digestive wise with HCL and enzymes. See if there's any gut bug issues.And then we can also do other intracellular nutrient tasks for their organic acids or nutrients, look at other kind of intercellular nutrients. So there could be some other hidden stressors going on there. I always say just kind of start from the ground and work your way up, start with the low hanging fruit. Keep it simple because that provides a good foundation anyway, but you know if you have chronic issues, you definitely want to reach out to someone like Evan evanbrand.com or someone like myself,Doctor J justinhealth.com for the deeper issues and we'll put links down below so y'all can reach out. Evan, anything else you want to add before we wrap things up?
Evan Brand: Yeah, I think for people that are, in a short term, acute stress, they have to travel for a wedding. They're maybe going on a honeymoon. Sounds fun, could be stressful. Travel, new food, new water supply, their new parents. They've got small children, those are situations where you may come in, not small children cause those are long term stress, you and I can attest to that but you know, honeymoon, you know, new marriage, whatever. So, so those acute stressors, you could probably do some of these formulas whether it's Tongkat or Magnolia or Ashwagandha,Rhodiola, holy Basil, there's many, many options. Extra magnesium, B6, GABA, taurine and acetone. These things are great, but if you have been stressed and feeling overwhelmed for 1,2,3,5,10,20,25 years and beyond, you really don't just want to go try to get rhodiola and get your way out of it. It's not going to happen. I've tried. I took so many supplements when I was sick and it helped me to stay alive and it helped me to continue to work and be up on my feet but.I knew that ultimately I was missing something, and it wasn't until I really cleared the parasite, cleared the H pylori, my energy started to come up like I was on Rhodiola while I had parasites.I was still tired. I was less tired, but I was still tired. And I think the problem is like naturopathic medicine. So naturopaths specifically, they may come in and instead of, you know, quartet for cortisol, they give you licorice and ashwagandha, which is great, but then it stops there. So you really have to ask the question why? Why did I get myself into this? How did I get into this? Was this the bad relationship? The moldy apartment? The college dorm? That got me sick? And I think people need to just ask why a few more times. So, like, I'm tired. OK, here's rhodiola. But it could be. Hey, I'm tired. Well, why are you tired? Well, because I'm stressed. Why are you stressed? Because I'm in a bad relationship. OK? So we need to work on that. And if people keep asking why, usually you're going to uncover some stuff. And I just encourage people, don't be afraid, to look in those dark spots. Don't, don't be afraid to look in those corners where there's some cobwebs of things that you've been emotionally shoving away, as you mentioned, dusting in a way or putting it under the carpet. Yeah, eventually those things are going to weigh you down.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, someone in the chat talked about a Epstein barr virus kind of plummeting their energy recently. Well, when it comes to Epstein Barr and some of these viruses like Epstein-barr said cytomegalovirus, it's very rarely the virus just comes out of blue, comes out of the blue and just knocks you on your pot, right. Usually there's some level of depletion going on and it's the straw that breaks the camel's back and so. There's different supports we can do to address viral issues, whether it's silver or Monolaurin or Rishi, right? Different herbs and nutrients cats claw. But you've got to look at how did your body, how did your immune system become so compromised and susceptible to it. And you tend to have to work backwards and fix all of those issues that led up to this point. It's very rarely something just coming out of the blue and doing all of it. It's usually a level of susceptibility that you incurred and then this virus came in. So you have to really address everything, never just one thing.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I've seen that too, and I've seen it with a lot of things that are probably still controversial on YouTube, but we've seen things that people put in their bodies that all of a sudden reactivate Epstein Barr and other problems. We've seen this in celebrities, we've seen this in clients. So yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. But guys, we want to give you actionable information. A lot of people out there, it's just like sales, sales, sales, market, market leave you kind of hanging. I want everyone to kind of listen and be like, all right, here's some foundational things. When we're talking and doing a long podcast, it's super easy to get overwhelmed. So just pick one or two things, execute, execute, execute action, action, action. And then if you're feeling a little bit overwhelmed that you want to take next steps, you have Evan and I for resources. It's all about educating. It's all about empowerment. So we'll put links down below where you guys can reach out and work on taking the next steps. But worst case, just continue to take action. We're here to help.
Evan Brand: Absolutely. So go take a bath, do your lavender, your Epsom salt and all that. Get your mind right. But then ultimately you gotta figure out what's under the hood.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it. Very good. Evan, wait. Great chatting with you man. Glad we're back in the saddle.
Evan Brand: You too. Take it easy. Talk to you soon, brother. Take care everyone. Bye now.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye y'all.
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/how-to-deal-with-stress-and-feeling-overwhelmed-podcast-376
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