Change Your Adrenal Fatigue By Changing Your Thinking with Tricia Pingel, NMD

Change Your Adrenal Fatigue By Changing Your Thinking with Tricia Pingel, NMD

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Hey everybody. Welcome back to the EnergyMD Podcast where we help you resolve your long COVID and chronic fatigue syndrome so that you can get back to living your best life. So if you've heard me speak before, I talk a lot about the toxic five, a combination of the heavy metals, chemicals, molds, infections, and nervous system dysfunction. That's at the root of what I believe to be long COVID and chronic fatigue syndrome.

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And one of those things that is caused by the toxic five is adrenal fatigue. So I'm super excited because we're going to be learning more about that today from Dr. Tricia Pingle. And so let's learn a little bit about her. So she is known as the adrenal whisperer. She's a naturopathic physician who began her journey on the fashion runways. Her path from modeling to medicine gives her rare insight into how perfectionism fuels stress and how self-acceptance leads to healing.

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Through her bestselling book, Total Health Turnaround and her supplement line, Total Health Apothecary, she helps high achieving professionals turn burnout into balance. Featured on national TV and in prevention magazine and mind, body green, Dr. Pingel is a leading voice on adrenal health. She hosts the YouTube show, What Am I Modeling? Where she explores how everyday choices shape our wellbeing and what we teach others by example. Bridging image driven culture with holistic healing,

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Her mission is to help people feel better, stress less, and live with joy. Fun fact, when she's not transforming lives, she's dancing hip hop because joy, she believes, is the ultimate medicine. Dr. Tricia, thank you much for joining me today. Oh, I'm so excited to be here. I heard that you like to dance too, so we're gonna have to work that out sometime, huh?

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I do, but I feel like I can no longer put hip hop in my bio because you dance six hours a week in an actual class and I'm in my kitchen with my daughter. So hats off to you. I think that that's really amazing. Yes, I do have a sign in my kitchen that says this kitchen is for dancing and it's on the wall. So that's a great place to dance. It is. We have that one too. Oh, good. It's really important. And then it's right next to one that says something about vegetables, but I can't remember what that one is too.

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So thanks so much for being here today. I want to start off by talking about adrenal fatigue. A lot of people have heard the term before and I'm really curious about how you define it. You know, I think the name adrenal fatigue is kind of misleading because it assumes that if your adrenals are impacted that you're completely exhausted, where it's actually quite the opposite. I call it more adrenal dysfunction. It's when

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the nervous system is firing on an inappropriate schedule. Our bodies were meant to wake up in the morning with the sun and go to sleep at night, and they were meant to respond to stressors quickly, swiftly, and to move on and recover. But we live in a society where we don't recover, we just go, go, go, go, go, and what's happening is our body is adapting, which to be honest, it is one of the coolest things that our body can adapt.

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so quickly to the environment, but what's happening is we're adapting so regularly and now we don't even recognize when we're under stress. We don't even recognize that our adrenals are being impacted every day. And so it is more than just fatigue. It can present with symptoms such as anxiety, insomnia, hair loss, hormone shifts, gut issues like bloating and constipation, skin changes.

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So I always say, if you go to the doctor and you have a list of symptoms and nobody can really figure out what's going on, you should probably take a look at your adrenals and see if stress is having an impact and kind of hijacking your system. Yeah, and so there really is that link between the adrenals and stress. So can you talk a little bit about the difference between like external stressors and internal stressors? Oh, absolutely. So most of us can identify our external stressors, right?

04:09

It's the boss that annoys us. It's when the kids forget their shoes, know, something to that effect. It could be anything from divorce and trauma and loss to a beep of a cell phone. So the body doesn't know the difference. So let's explain it this way first. If you're in the woods and you're just taking a hike and you're walking along and around the corner comes a bear, you have a physiological reaction to that bear. Your heart starts to beat. You you zoom in on where you're trying to go. You divert all your energy to your muscles and you run.

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Right? Ideally, you get away from the bear, it's gone, all good, and you go back to your hike. But in our society, we're running from another bear and another bear and another bear. So these external stressors could be looked at as some of these bears, right? It's like the phone that won't stop beeping, the email you forgot to respond to, all the traffic accident down the street, you know, the red light you stopped at, little things like that. As you experience more and more of these and your body keeps adapting to these bears,

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we start to develop internal stressors. So when we run from the bear, that moment of cortisol release where we start running, we are using up B vitamins, we're using up vitamin C, we're using up magnesium, we're using up zinc, selenium. So if you keep running from a bear, you start to become nutrition deficient. If you're nutrition deficient, now you've developed an internal stressor because now the body doesn't have the B vitamin to help make serotonin or to help break down food appropriately.

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Another example is when you're running from the bear a lot and you're in that fight or flight, you don't digest your food well. So we can have a lot of inflammation that develops in the gut, changes in the microbiome, changes in the way that we absorb the food that we eat anyway. And these now cause internal stressors. You can go on and on about this. The cortisol is related to every single system in our body. It connects to our heart, it connects to our gut, it connects to our mood, our sleep patterns.

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our immune system. So when these start to become imbalanced, now we have internal stressors. And the big kicker is if you have internal stressors, those now trigger more stress response, right? But then makes you react more to the external environment, which then brings up the external stressors. And now we get stuck in what I call a hamster wheel of adrenal fatigue. You're just, everything's being stimulated. And that's why it's so important to understand this. It's important to understand that we have control over how we interpret those bears when they come along externally. And we have control

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about how we manage the internal stressors, particularly working with people that can help identify where those imbalances are and replenish them. Gosh, that was really well said. Thank you. I think, yeah, it was really, really good. I think the only thing that I would potentially add is that the other internal stressors oftentimes are kind of like toxins and infections. Oh, absolutely. So these are things in our environment, right? Absolutely, 100%.

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Viruses, you could look at viruses, you can look at toxins, the food that we eat, anything that is not normally processed by our body and is being put into our body, especially in a stressed state. mean, when you're exposed to a toxin in a parasympathetic or calm state versus an excitable fight or flight state, they both have an impact, but it's more of an impact if you're running from a bear, because the body doesn't know how to break that down. All of that is downregulated. So absolutely.

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toxins, viruses, 100%. Yeah, but I do think that you're right. The mental and the emotional is so much more important. know, the longer that I do this work, the more I realize it's like, gosh, this person has all of these toxins and infections, and yet they work on their nervous system and their mental emotional health, and they can get significantly better without even touching the toxins sometimes. Yeah, and it makes sense.

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because the body works, you when you're in that fight or flight, we have those two nervous systems, right? We have a fight or flight and we have a rest and digest. And we're supposed to spend more than 80 % of our time resting, resting and digesting. And we don't, I mean, pre-pandemic numbers were like over 80 % spend their day in fight or flight. And I'm sure it's higher now. So if your body doesn't have the ability to rest and repair, it can't clear toxins.

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And if it can't clear toxins, right, that's going to have more of an impact. You're going to store more toxins in the body and that's going to have a longer impact and it's going to then cause more stress and compounding stress on the body. So yeah, I think when you can learn how to change the mindset around what you consider stressful or not, what you consider a bear is, and you can learn how to put yourself into that parasympathetic state, there's so much more power in our body to recover.

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It's amazing. It's incredible. Yeah. There's a couple of things you said that I really want to touch on. So of the 80 % of our time that should be spent resting, does that include sleep or is that like 80 % of waking hours? I believe it was 80 % of our 24 hour day, if I recall. This was a steady while back. Have you seen that one? No, I have not. It was a while back because like I said, it was pre-pandemic and we're supposed to spend our time though resting. We run from a bear and we chill out. go...

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You know, we get our food, we get in a community, right? We sit with a group of people, we enjoy our food, we chew it, you know, we talk, we don't shove it in our face while we're driving down the street, you know, yelling at the person out the window, right? I mean, we have a community aspect to how we were built and we have a lot more time in how we were built, time to actually nurture our body with food.

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right? And allow our body to do what it does. And now we're just in this go, go, go, go, go. And I honestly don't think most people recognize it. When I ask people how much stress are you under? Oh, it's good. mean, you know, I have a good life. It's fine. You know, it's just the standard stuff. But that standard stuff could really be having an impact on your health, particularly if there's a symptom going on. Yeah, I mean, it really requires a system wide change and system wide understanding that

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that these systems have to change. You know, the reason why we work a 40 hour work week is not because it's the healthiest thing for us to do. Right. So, so I think that, yeah, and just the way that the way that society is structured with industry and and the and the amount of, yeah, I want to get more into internalized pressure in a second. But you you also talked about

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changing your mindset and what you consider stressful. And I really want to touch on that a little bit because, you know, there is research to support that two people have the same stress exposure and one person saw it as motivating and the other person saw it as scary and it consequently had different effect on the hormones and the neurotransmitters in their body. So can you just talk a little bit more about that? Yeah, I think we develop these fears or these patterns just throughout our life.

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You know, have some people who love dogs, some people who are fearful of dogs, right? You could put those two people in the same room and the one that's fearful with dogs is gonna freak out and the other one isn't, right? These are patterns. I think this happens throughout our lives with what we look at, what we see is happening. We learn from our parents, we learn from our environment, we learn with what's being modeled around us, right? And we start to develop these subconscious patterns in our head.

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So you could have two people that enter into the same situation and one person sees it as stressful and one person doesn't. But what if you saw that bear and instead of thinking, oh no, there's a bear, I'm gonna die, you thought, oh, what a cute bear. You know, I'm just gonna turn around and go this way, he seems cool, I'm just gonna go this way. Like you don't have to react to the bear. What if you imagined it as a bear cub, right?

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What if the bear alerted you to maybe just take a different path, but you didn't worry about taking a different path? I think in our world, what I find with the people I talk to is we so live by the external validation. Like we learn by what we're supposed to do. What we're supposed to go this path. And when it doesn't go our way, we freak out about it and we develop stress.

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I historically have always been someone that created stress in my life until more recently when I started to practice all of this, where I would find the stressful moment in everything rather than just letting it go. Right. So you can it has to do with the way that you look at it. Is it an opportunity to grow or is it a failure?

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You know, and you can retrain your brain to this. It is not hard. But when you're in that mode of I'm going to run, I got to run, I got to run, I got to go, I got to go. I have to do this. I have to do this rather than I get to do this or I want to do this. When you start getting stuck in those words and those patterns of have to and oh, and how annoying and this sucks and fearful and whatever, you're going to develop more stress response within the body than if you're like, this is rough. It's hard.

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I don't feel great about it. I'm going to take a moment and then I'm going to figure out how can I pivot? How can I honor the situation for what it is and look at it from a realistic eye? It's hard to do that when you're in a fight or flight. And, you know, we use things like breath, you know, removing yourself from a situation, those little things that we were probably taught when we were toddlers.

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you know, to remove ourselves from a situation or breathe or change focus, we need to go back and relearn again because adult life has changed that and has made us feel like we have to be involved in everything and we have to control everything. And the thing is, here's the news splash. The stress isn't going anywhere. The stimulation in the environment is going nowhere. It is not going to be better after Christmas. It is not going to be better after your kids graduated. It is not going to be better at the end of the work day. It is always going to be there.

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But what you can change is how you look at it, how you interpret it, how you use your senses, your eyes, what you see, what you hear, what you feel, what you touch, what you smell. Those can all have a different reaction. I think there's been all sorts of studies on just changing smells in a room, calming people down and having them have a brighter outlook. There are ways to manipulate what that stress looks like. And if we start really paying attention to that,

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We can change our health. We can change our heart health, our immune system, our toxin clearance, our mood, our sleep. We can bring back joy. Because it is no fun running from a bear after bear after bear after bear. It sucks. So stop running. Quit it. Just stop. You know, find a way to utilize the bear in some way. Yeah, that's so good.

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You know, and you're really talking about mindfulness and you're, you know, you're starting with noticing, like, how can we notice when we're in that state, notice the sensations in our body and make a different choice, you know, tell ourselves, you know, and this is so much of the mindset work that needs to be done, you know, like how can we, know, when you feel that really uncomfortable sensation, are you going to run away or can you sit there and be like, yeah, I know that this is hard right now and I'm safe. I'm loved. I'm enough.

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I'm enough is a big one. That's a big one. I think that's why we chase bears and we bring more in is we're trying to achieve something because we're not enough and you are enough and you are, I think it's on my wall right here. Today you are exactly where you are supposed to be. What happens tomorrow is up to you. Everything we do is a choice. Whether we have cereal or eggs for breakfast, that's a choice. What's...

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better for your body in the moment? What does your body need? Are you listening to your body? Whether you sit down and eat at a table versus eat a breakfast burrito in the car, what does your body really need? You know, it needs proper fuel. It needs rest. It needs love. It needs gratitude. But we live in a have to society. We live in a keeping up with the Joneses society. And if you're not on top of it, you're failing. And that's not true. It's not true.

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Yeah, I hope everybody who's listening to this right now takes this to heart and starts implementing from a place of love and compassion and curiosity. You mentioned that too. You notice and then you have curiosity, And then you just being curious about what are those sensations and then you make a choice. Well, and you can buy back your time that way. I think a lot of people don't take action on their health because they don't have time.

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There's not enough time in the day, but when you can let go of a lot of the things you're doing and get more time, you have more time to nurture you. We can always find time. We can always find it. We just have to let go of some things. We have to swap the time.

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And so you're talking about prioritization. Prioritization, yeah. And, you know, not taking everything on. mean, it's not my responsibility to find my husband's shoes. Now, he may say, honey, where are my shoes? And I may say, you know what, hon, I just don't know. But I don't have to get up and go search the house and find them and make a big deal out it and then say I'm late because I can't find it and then get frustrated. Right. But how often do we do stuff like that?

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We take on someone else's issue as our own and we assume that we're supposed to. And maybe that does root from I'm not enough or I need to be better at or never feeling like you can just say, you know what, you're a big man, go find your own shoes. know, last time I saw them, they were in the closet. You know, I mean, that's a kind of simple example, but it's something that we do every day. We take things on if someone's in the room with you at work and they're in a bad mood.

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you pick up on their energy, right? And then you carry that negative energy with you to the next thing. Don't allow that, right? You get to choose how you feel today about the situation going on and you get to choose to feel it and then find, I guess it's the silver lining, the silver lining in it that helps you propel forward every single day. Yeah, I love this. know, before we started the podcast, you were talking about people pleasing.

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Yeah. And I'm just thinking about all the ways that I do this in my life, you know, where, you know, my wife might come to me and it may not be a good time for me to answer a question and she may have a question for me. And sometimes I'll just say, okay, I'm going to go ahead and deal with this now, but then it ends up making me late and whatever. And then I'm frustrated with her. When the reality is, is that I just didn't take care of myself. I wasn't a good owner of my time. And I should have said,

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I love you, tell me what it is and I can get to it at this time when I have it blocked off for dealing with those kinds of tasks. Yeah, we don't have to, but we've been trained, right, for everything to be immediate. The cell phone rings, we need to answer it. It beeps, we need to answer text right away. My teenagers, if they text me and let's say I'm doing a podcast, if I don't write back, literally within like 20 seconds they're like, mom, mom, you okay? Mom, you okay?

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like, what are we training our children right now? Are we training them that we have to respond immediately? And we don't. We don't. And the thing is, is these little things, you know, people say, oh, yeah, mindfulness, I get it. But these things impact your physical health. They impact your adrenal health. They impact your hormones. They impact your immune system. They impact your heart. They, you know, and we're looking at our society and saying we have

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you know, huge rates of diabetes, have cardiovascular disease, we have cancer, we have tons of toxic overload, we have all these things going on around us. And by not bringing in the mindfulness piece, we can only get so far because we have to calm our bodies down because our body's amazing. It can take care of all of that. We just have to support it. And we're leaning so much to other people, I think, for validation to determine who we are as people.

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We're afraid to say what we want to say because someone might view it inappropriate. We're afraid to admit that we're struggling. We're afraid to ask for help. We're hiding. We're not being out in the communities. We're not having face to face conversations and long meals that a lot of the blue zones have. Right. And this is having an impact on our physical health. And it's just these little things, you know, taking three breaths every time you're at a stoplight. That's a good start. Just.

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and say one gratitude statement, you know? It's okay that I'm five minutes late. It's a red light. What can I really do about it?

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Nothing. So why are we worried? Right. Yeah. And it's surprisingly hard for people to do this work, you know, to practice the mindset component, to practice gratitude. It's not fancy. It's hard work. How do you encourage people to do so?

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Let me, can I tell a story? Please answer this question. So my mom and I were very close. She was diagnosed with cancer when it did finally start to take her down. She was very vibrant and within three to four months she was unable to walk by herself. She was very thin. She could barely eat by herself. She couldn't go to the bathroom by herself. She couldn't shower, right? She was basically bedridden and

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You know, I sat with her towards the end of her life about a month before she died. And I said, mom, do you have any regrets, any regrets at all? And she said, not really. She said, I have one. And she said, I wish I would have not worried so much about that 10 pounds I needed to lose because I would give anything for that 10 pounds now. And that was a really profound statement for me. And it was a life changing statement because I started to think how many things do I do in a day that I ignore.

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How many times do I go to the bathroom without assistance? How many times do I feed myself without needing assistance? You know, how many times do I beat myself up over something physical like five pounds of weight gain that really is wasting my energy? And I started to look at it and say, wow, we really do just power through. We just power through everything. And if we just stopped and looked at how much is actually around us, like I'm so grateful just to wake up every morning.

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My dad woke up, he went downstairs to the fridge, he opened the fridge to make breakfast and he fell to the floor with a stroke and he was in a coma and his life was over. Right? I wake up every day. That's freaking great. If that's the only thing your gratitude statement is in the morning, that's a start. You're awake. You're allowed to make a choice. Oh, I have to go to work. No, you don't. You don't have to go to work.

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You have to make that choice. I going to my get to go to work? Do I get to go earn money today? Do I get to be with my kids for the minimal amount of time? I mean, we get to do a lot and there's a lot of people who can't or never will again. And I think we lose sight of that. So it's not just a fluff gratitude statements. It's not just making things up and finding superficial things like I'm grateful I have a nice car. It's more about I'm grateful I can even drive the car.

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I'm grateful I can walk to the garage by myself because I'll tell you what, talk to anyone who's been through chronic issues and they lose those activities of daily living. Their perspective on gratitude and life changes dramatically. So it's really about honoring what we can do rather than what we can't do and what we get to do versus what we have to do. And those little tiny statements throughout the day.

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is what builds the muscle to be able to do more types of meditation. It also brings more joy. I mean, it puts a different perspective on life. mean, life is perspective. So when we were talking earlier about how do we view the bear, you know, I have people that wake up and say, oh, great, it's another day. Great, I gotta go to work again. And I wake up and say, oh, that bear's really cute. I have a great day ahead of me. What am I gonna do with it? You know, you could look at it in two different ways.

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same situation, two different perspectives. And I do see dramatic changes in people who have this epiphany, who go through something tragic and it turns them around, or that take care of a family member that goes through something tragic and it turns around their perspective. And that's what it is. And it isn't easy, but it is simple.

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Right? Yeah. You know, when I talk to people, you know, when they recover from long COVID and chronic fatigue syndrome, oftentimes they'll say that it saved their life, you know, because then they have a new perspective. And I just so appreciate you focusing on that and talking about that.

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So then in terms of some of the practices that you like to do, you've kind of talked a little bit about gratitude, but I know that you also do some things about changing the energy around you and some exercises to stimulate the vagus nerve. Can you talk a little bit about those? Well, favorite way, well, first of all, the vagus nerve calms the body down. It's as simple as that. So you want to stimulate it, you want to tug on it. And some of the best ways to do that are you can sing and hum.

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In children is always my favorite when they get stressed out. They tend to sing or hum Have you ever noticed that? I'm minded and it's a natural way to calm it down. Um, so that's one of my favorites deep breathing So when you breathe in deep from the diaphragm the diaphragm pulls on the vagus nerve and that calms you down There's a couple other things you can do a little bit more advanced as far as moving eyes up Looking up with the eyes to help calm the nervous system, but those are some good starts learning how to fully breathe

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If you really took, like you talked about earlier, you want to recognize what it is, you want to acknowledge it, right? You want to be curious. So if you really looked at an hour, how many times do you truly breathe? Most of us don't. We shallow breath. I haven't taken a lot of deep breaths when I talk, right? And I have to stop.

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and calm myself down, but taking a few deep breaths can help. One of my favorite exercises, though, for all of you people pleasers out there that say this is impossible, everybody needs me. The world doesn't run without me. One of my favorites is when you look at a situation to ask yourself, one, do I have control over the outcome? Yes or no? Right. I worry about when my 16 year old gets in the car, I worry that he's going to get hit.

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you know, run into a tree, but do I really have any control over that outcome? No, other than locking him in his room, I have no control over it, right? Number two, is this worth your energy? Is it worth your energy to even get involved? Right, because a lot of the times we know it's not, it's someone else's problem. We don't really want to help them. We don't, it's their issue. They're having a bad day. You don't necessarily want to go sit in the coworker's office and do this or that. So we make those decisions based on that. You make a choice. Am I going to take this on?

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Am I going to delegate it or am I going to let it go? Right. If you have control over the situation and it's worth your energy, the solution is very clear. It's easy. You can take it on, get it over with, move on. If you have no control over the outcome, you can delegate it to someone who does. But if it's not worth your energy, you can just let it go. Right. And I found when I started doing that practice and when I talked to my patients about doing that practice,

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Like at least 50 % of our daily woes were gone. Not worth our time. And I think that's really important because that opens up the time for you now to sit outside, put your feet in the grass, you know, to take a few deep breaths, to have a little bit longer meal with your family and start to practice the things that you know will benefit your health. And now you just bought yourself tons of time. And that's what we're all waiting for, right? Is the right time.

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the time to take control of our health, the time to remove, you know, to start the supplement protocol, the time to join the gym, you know, we'll do it after this or that. What we're really looking for is time. And once we have time, we feel like we can nurture ourselves. So let's open up the time first.

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And breathing only takes what, 30 seconds? Maybe a minute?

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Every stoplight.

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You know? It's really good. Yeah. And I think it's interesting too, is that sometimes when I'm taking deep breaths, I think to myself, how long is this going to take? That's the cortisol, right? It's like, Hey, there's a bear. Like you can't just sit down behind the tree, man. You got to get up and run. Like, what are you doing? Yeah. It's, difficult and I'm still working on it. I'm a work in progress. I've been working on this. My mom died nine years ago.

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And every year I just try to get better and better about learning how to give myself that time and give myself that nurturing. didn't start by dancing six hours a week. I started with one, right? And I gradually found a way to give myself more time to do more. And also, if you're one of those people that's feeling very overwhelmed and you're feeling like there's no way I can do this, my life is too crazy, this and that.

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One of the other tips I like to say is what brought you joy as a kid? What did you do when you were little that really made you happy? For me, it was dance. So when I was at my low of low and I didn't want to get out of bed and I was depressed and my health was just not where it should be and I was exhausted, the last thing I wanted to do was go dance because I thought I don't have the energy. I don't have, I can't do this. You know, I don't feel like talking to anyone. I don't want to be with anyone.

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But when I started to think about the joy I used to get from it, the first thing I did was I started dancing in my room. And then I moved to the kitchen and then I moved around the house. Then I started playing more music. And then I started to grieve because music was very relatable to me with my dad. And that was a part of my life that I hadn't grieved yet was the loss of my parents. And I had to start to cry and I had to let it out and I had to find my joy again.

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And once I found my joy, then I made more time for more joy and more joy and more joy. And I think we get so bogged down with the little things throughout the day that we forget to do something that makes us laugh. It makes us smile and laughing and dancing and all those things help with the Vegas nerve. Laughing is a great, great option. Read a joke, watch a funny movie. That's a great way to stimulate the Vegas nerve. Yeah, when you're looking at YouTube and you're doom scrolling. Yeah.

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type in comedy or laugh or something like that. Yeah, for sure. And get a good belly laugh going. I think my kids were my favorite for that. They'd find so much humor and so much. Like we don't find humor and stuff is more when we get older, but my kids will find, I mean, they'll find the silliest little thing funny. And I'm like, oh my God, that is kind of funny. Like, and now I find myself laughing along with them where 10 years ago I didn't. It was annoying 10 years ago. was like, oh my God, what are they laughing at again? What do I have to go?

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You know, you'd start thinking, what do I have to go do now? And now I just laugh along with them. And so it is possible with small little steps, finding your joy, just recognizing what's going on around you and what really is worth your energy. And then every day, just making a choice. And if you make, I guess what you would consider to be the wrong choice once that is fine. You have another choice right ahead of you. So the next choice, you just make a different choice. We don't always have to do the exact same thing every single day.

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and switch it up.

32:45

So good. And I think that it's important to, you for a lot of people who are scheduling their lives, oftentimes they don't schedule joy or they don't schedule downtime. Right. And so I think that that's, that's something that I encourage people to do. That's something that I have done. Um, you know, for me, when I came out of residency and I had my chronic fatigue, I went to the CF therapist and

33:13

she recommended exactly what you said, which is, what were you into when you were younger? And I said, well, sports and music. And she said, well, just do those things. And I was like, duh. I know. It's so straightforward. And you're like, oh, yeah. I used to also build little Barbie houses out of books. I was very much into decorating and architecture. So it's funny. My husband always knows when I'm under stress, because I'll move the couch.

33:41

or I'll move the lamp to the other side or I'll like rearrange a drawer and he's like, what's, he's like, what's going on with you? I'm like, Oh, I just needed to move something around. made me happy. Little things like that. That's good. That's listening to your intuition. this has been really great discussion. I want to bring it back a little bit to burnout. I know that that's part of what you focus on. Can you tell us like, how does somebody know if they have burnout?

34:11

Yeah, so there's three stages essentially to adrenal dysfunction. This is how I look at it. Stage one is like the superhero stage. You're doing everything. You're kicking butt. Everyone's like, wow, you're working 10 hours a day and raising a family and doing this. Med school, right? Well, you're just going all day long. You're powering through. Stage two is where the cortisol levels go up and down erratically throughout the day. So this may result in fatigue at certain times of the day, say in the afternoon, but wide awake at night.

34:39

You may find that it's unpredictable, which makes it difficult to figure out what it is. Maybe you have anxiety sometimes, depression sometimes, some foods cause a reaction, other foods don't. Sometimes it's the time of day, sometimes it's not. It's a roller coaster phase. I consider Bird Out to be the third stage, which is where the body has just been going for so long in this state that it's almost just said, I don't want to do it anymore.

35:06

Or I'm just going to sit back. I'm going to lay down. And this is where you see the things that you treat a lot of chronic fatigue. And when you start uncovering that, which you could speak to more than me, I spend a lot of time with people in stage one and stage two. That's really my specialty because I like to catch this before they end up in that burnout stage. But at that point you find so many different layers, right? Of, of things that have contributed over the years to that burnout. So this could take

35:35

years and years and years. By the time I finally took action, I was in a stage two, beginning stage three, and I'm sure it had been 10 to 15 years of adrenal dysfunction before I got there. Sometimes it's something big that hits you down and knocks you down faster. Other times it's just life catching up with you. And I think genetics, think diet, I think outlook, they all play a role in how fast cortisol can take over.

36:03

Um, and that's why we see such varying presentations. And I think that's why it's not really, adrenal fatigue isn't really considered a medical diagnosis because you can't put everyone in the same box. We're all so different, but if you're feeling like it's hard to get out of bed, right? You have pain when you get up and what that's coming from seemingly nowhere, right? These are things that the body is just saying, I'm inflamed, I'm done, help me. And I think the first step.

36:33

is to uncover the internal stressors and the external stressors. Internal stressors being some of the things you talk about, know, nutrition, toxin, what systems have been affected, inflammation, you know, what's overlapping things. And then also looking at, really looking at and asking and taking a deep dive into how do you see the world? How are your bears? And then now making a conscious effort to start to change that at the same time that you're recovering and building the body back up.

37:02

And when the two recombine, it's fricking amazing.

37:08

Magic. Magic. Yeah, I think it's hard for people to believe sometimes that they can really change their life by changing their mind. It's kind of like a catchphrase. They're like, oh, is that real? But you and I are seeing it every single day. Every day. And people really need to, hopefully this resonates with folks and they start to make those changes. So then in terms of adrenal fatigue, adrenal gland dysfunction, do you have a favorite diet?

37:37

that can really help people turn this around? Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the fad diets out there because I feel like that's living by other people's expectations of what you should do. What I look at is I look at food as nutrition. It's nutrient dense. And by knowing what your body needs and learning what your body needs from your unique biochemistry, you need to feed it nutrients. So when you put a food in your mouth, what are you getting out of it? When you eat an avocado, what are you getting? Right.

38:05

I think we spend so much time looking at the macros, which are important. We need protein. We need carbohydrates. We need fat. But not everybody needs the exact same amount of protein. I think we have to look at what's your muscle mass, what's your activity level, what's your nutrient level. Let's start with that. Are you getting enough minerals in your diet? Are you getting enough B vitamins? If you're burning through with the adrenal glands, vitamin C, B vitamins and minerals, that's a place to start. So I always say look at nutrient dense foods.

38:33

For me, I have found that to be a lot of different variety of plants. The proteins can vary. I personally don't eat meat. I do plant-based proteins. That doesn't mean that someone else wouldn't use plant-based proteins. But I think if you want a large variety of nutrition, for me, you have to look at a wide variety of foods and not always eating the exact same thing every single day. And most of those diets out there

39:00

That's what they do. They say you eat this for breakfast, this for lunch, this for dinner. So it's learning what your body needs, giving it nutrition, and then learning how to intuitively eat.

39:13

I have a history of iron deficiency and I now know if my iron starts to hit borderline levels because of the foods I start to crave. Right. I know when I'm dehydrated based on the foods I start to crave. If I start to want to go towards a carbohydrate, a piece of bread or something, even if it's gluten free, I usually can tell that my body's dehydrated because when I'm hydrated, I don't reach for that food. So learning those little things about yourself by really doing a nutrition based diet is is key.

39:43

is absolute key. And I have tons, by the way, of recipes on my website, tons of recipes that are all nutrient dense that support adrenal health. And I put them on my Instagram and Facebook and stuff, but definitely can check those out and see. I think food should taste good and I think it should be community. And I think we should enjoy it.

40:02

Amen. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's interesting too, because oftentimes, you know, there's a big focus, at least in the chronic fatigue community. And even with long COVID, you know, there's the intermittent fasting and there's, um, there's paleo and there's keto oftentimes, you know, we're low glycemic and low on the grains, but oftentimes for people who have adrenal gland dysfunction, they need some grains.

40:30

you know, and so they might be craving them and there might be a reason why, and sometimes that helps to satisfy them. Yeah, for sure. And I think it's figuring that out. And I think the other thing is intermittent fasting can do wonders for certain people. But if your adrenal glands are burned out and your insulin and glucose levels are all over the place, it can also make you feel really crappy. So you kind of have to figure out what's the balance for you. And it goes back to

40:56

working on the mind, working on the body, the external stressors, the internal stressors, and then giving the body, I look at this in four ways, giving it nutrition, giving it exercise that is done in a calm state. So I dance hip hop, people would say, Dr. P, that's not a calm state, but it is because I can't think about anything else. Dance is one of the best ways to calm the brain because it has to think about, it has to hear the music, it has to feel the music, it has to put your arm where it needs to go, you have to remember the choreography.

41:26

I don't have time to worry about anything while I'm doing it. I just, can't think about it. Um, and so when I come out of there, I've spent a whole hour not thinking about the little things of the day. And usually for the rest of the night, I don't think about them either. So when you do your exercise, it doesn't always have to be yoga and Pilates, although those are two of my favorites, um, walking, but making sure you're not doing a conference call while you're, you know, running outside, like listen to nature, be present.

41:55

Number three is supplement, supplement the deficiencies that your provider and you have come up with. And then the last is working on the mindset every day. Nutrition, exercise, supplement and mindset. Wonderful. Yeah, I love, you know, for me, I sing a lot and that helps to get me into my body. so and then part of what you're talking about in terms of the dance is really getting people out of their heads and into their bodies.

42:21

And I think that that's such a, it's an epidemic of sorts in terms of our focus on the intellectual and the amount of time we spend in front of our computers and working and not walking and not moving. And so sometimes we can really just get out of our, we can get into our parasympathetic just by moving our bodies. Absolutely. And it all goes down to you feel like you have to be productive to be successful. I'm not enough. I have to keep working. You are enough.

42:50

You do not have to jam pack your day to be successful. You can actually be more productive, more successful and healthier if you don't jam pack your day. Right. Who knew? Yeah. What if success was based on a different metric? What would that metric be? Yeah. I mean, exactly. And I think asking that question, what is success to me and why do I feel that definition is that?

43:20

Um, you know, because really success to me, for me is waking up every day, coming in contact with someone. And when they walk away from our interaction, they say, wow, that was really cool. I really liked meeting her. What a cool chick. Like that's my day. If, that happens and they're like, I'm going to miss her, I'm going miss seeing her. Then I've done like that success for me because I've impacted somebody else. I've transferred positive energy to somebody else.

43:47

that now can take that energy and hopefully use it for good. So I think really looking at what is success and why do we do what we do and then making different choices about our behavior is how we overcome pretty much any condition that's thrown out there. So where can people learn more about the work that you do?

44:11

Drpingle.com, that's a great start. It has all my social links. It has some freebies on there. I have an adrenal quiz. I have a lab list. I have links to everything that I do. And all I ask is if you find me on social, just say hello, just say hey, say hey, introduce yourself. I mean, why are we there? know, so say hi, let me know where you heard about me and hopefully you'll enjoy the dancing on social. It won't be any doom or gloom on my channel. So.

44:38

we will have fun together and build community. that's drpingle.com is your go-to resource for all of that. Nice. So do you dance on your Insta? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I don't put all of my stuff on my feed, but on my stories, I do quite a bit. Like more of my classes and stuff like that. I'll put on my stories periodically. If you're watching, you can catch it. And then yes, absolutely. I mean, why not?

45:03

Why not dance? And I try to have a little bit of humor too, because what's the point if we don't laugh about the silly things in life? You know, the whole goal is to just bring joy. I love it. I'm going to have to put more singing on my YouTube channel. I would love it. I want to watch it. I would love This has been great. I so appreciate you coming on. Hopefully people are listening to this and they're going to make some changes in their lives and live the best life and change their definition of success. Absolutely.

45:33

Patricia, thanks so much for being with me today. Thank you for having me.