Why is stress and burnout such an important topic for busy professional women in particular? I put myself in this category also, and I’m so passionate about it because it almost sabotaged my life and professional work early on in my career. Women often take on too much trying to care for everyone else but themselves, and frankly, we are typically conditioned by the world around us to do so. This is one reason why we do not tend to our own stress. Another reason is that we do not know how to, nor understand what really causes stress and burnout.

What is stress? If you search the word online, you will likely see some scary images of people who look like they are being tormented with anxiety or severe mental distress. Some look totally overwhelmed and unable to cope. This is a common misconception and a gross exaggeration! The fact is, most people in our society are struggling with stress on a daily basis…even with a smile on their faces. When we realize what stress is and where it comes from, we are better empowered and enabled to avoid burnout.

As an MD medical doctor extensively experienced and trained in psychotherapy coaching techniques, and also functional medicine, stress is one of the most prevalent issues I see in my practice. I believe that you need to take a holistic Mind-Body-Spirit approach to resolve stress before it turns into burnout.

Fortunately, I have learned over time just how dangerous this is for our health and well-being and made it a part of my business (literally) to learn what stress really is, and to learn stress self-regulating skills. Let’s face it – the world around us is not likely to change much very soon. The sooner we learn how to better deal with it, the better!

Chronic stress leads to common symptoms for example, such as anxiety, irritability, weight gain, hormonal imbalances, food cravings, sleep disturbances, recurrent colds, cold hands and feet, hair loss, digestion issues, recurrent infections, low energy and libido, and even lack of motivation!

You can probably see how this will affect your confidence, career, and even relationships!

You can think of stress as feelings of overwhelm that connect with our sense of survival and activates our body’s ‘fight, flight or freeze’ response. Also, stress affects our adrenal-brain connection physiologically, which leads to these physical symptoms and if not treated at the root cause, can result in chronic disease. As stress becomes chronic, it can lead to burnout which causes common mental, emotional, and physical, ‘dis-eases’ which are currently plaguing our society at this time.

There are four key stressors that you want to learn about in order to begin to ‘take back control’ and live a more healthy and thriving life. One has a focus on the mental and emotional realms, and the other three have to do with our food and lifestyle habits.

When we overemphasize ‘hard work’ and struggle and do not understand the necessity of rest, restoration, and renewing our mind as well as how some foods contributes to this, we accelerate our aging.

We increase our risk for low energy and low libido due to inflammation and hormonal issues, and chronic weight gain in particular when we do not understand how food, mindset, and lifestyle are at the root causes of these symptoms. These symptoms are commonly associated with a variety of health concerns. Considering how expensive our traditional disease-care system is these days, ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a TON of cure’, not only a ‘pound’.

I can say that it is better and easier to stop a problem, illness, etc., from happening than to stop or correct it after it has started. Though now that I have also trained as a Functional Medicine specialist, I am grateful so say that we can actually reverse and prevent much of chronic disease that I was taught in traditional medical school to be ‘incurable. Our bodies are very resilient and can heal when we know what to do and why.

In the realm of Functional Medicine, you would be surprised how much capability we have to heal and reverse many chronic, common diseases. At the root cause of 90-95% of chronic disease is stress and the root causes of stress. This is why is it very important to educate yourself about prevention and reversing stress and burnout and their causes, and what you can do about it.

The 4 Key Stressors

Stress essentially is triggered by four basic pillars as shown in the photo below. I will briefly address all four. While you may be familiar with the idea that food, inflammation, and sleep could be connected to stress, very few health practitioners specifically discuss what follows.

The mental/emotional and even spiritual causes of stress (no sense of purpose or feeling disconnected) are often totally overlooked in terms of what is at the root cause of this category of the four stressors. I want to emphasize these areas in particular because hardly anyone talks about this area in the way I will share in this post.

1. Blood Sugar Imbalance

Sugar. Sugar by itself, in excessive amounts, can cause adrenal-axis dysfunction, known as Glycemic Dysregulation. Your brain and body need energy under perceived (whether real or imagined) stressful conditions. Sugar or glucose is one form of energy that is readily available. One important role of the adrenal gland and cortisol is glucose regulation.

Your adrenal glands (located on top of your kidneys) release cortisol as a response to regulate blood sugar levels by affecting insulin levels. While this can be helpful for acute ‘fight or flight’ they can be disastrous when we have chronic stimulation of this process, day in and day out. Individuals who consume a lot of sugar can become ‘insulin-resistant’ and this process starts to dysregulate or dysfunction. This can lead to a low blood sugar crash after a meal, which again, will retrigger the cortisol response. This rollercoaster response of the blood sugar can lead to a vicious circle and become difficult to control.

The macronutrients (fat, protein, or carbohydrate) content of our foods matter, particularly at breakfast time. If your first meal of the day is high in sugar (carbohydrates), over time you may accelerate problems within your hormonal and stress response systems. People who have chronic stress will likely to experience these types of dysregulation problems. Eating low-glycemic fruits and vegetables are quite important to this process to keep a good balance in blood sugar.

Read those labels! For the purpose of this discussion, let’s define high levels as more than 15-20 carbs per serving. Having been a ‘go-getter’ and over doing things for too long, I like many, have a history of being in the chronic stress category. I see a definite improvement in sugar craving and hunger since making this breakfast shift. I no longer need to carry protein bars and can go 4–5 hours between meals without any hunger during the daytime, even longer between dinner and breakfast the next day. What a difference!

There is no such thing as an overall ‘one size fits all’ best diet/food plan; this concept of the effects of breakfast sugar is based on the physiology of the stress response, particularly under chronic stress.

Having a ‘my diet is better than your diet’ argument is probably not going to be productive and may even raise our stress levels! In general, breaking your overnight fast (which is what ‘break-fast’ is), with high carbohydrates will likely cause mid-morning or afternoon brain fog or energy crash. Healthy fats and protein do not cause a sharp rise in blood glucose levels and tend to suppress hunger much better.

2. Chronic Inflammation

We are starting to hear more about inflammation, but we often do not connect the dot as to where this inflammation is coming from. It can come from our food sources, with sugar and processed foods leading the charge. It can come from toxins in our environment. It can also come from excessive ‘bootcamp’ style exercise!

What is often not considered as a source that is a very real source, are our toxic thoughts and emotions. Our mindset can ‘inflame’ our bodies. Just think about the effects of anger. While anger is a natural emotion and can inspire or energize us to take action, when we are chronically angry, anger itself is a cause of inflammation. Think about the idea that, ‘he was inflamed with anger.’ This is more than just a metaphor!!

One final cause I will mention here is lack of sleep! Sleep is our body’s chance to heal itself and to recover. When we don’t sleep enough or have restorative sleep, we are much more likely to trigger the biochemical responses of excessive inflammation in our body. Some inflammation is normal and an important part of our immune system, however when out of balance high or low end, it can lead to autoimmune problems or even lack of an ability to fight off infection.

3. Sleep

Well, you probably knew this was coming! I have personally come to realize just how dangerous lack of sleep is. Even as a physician of many years, I had no idea how deadly a lack of sleep can be for our health and well-being until I retrained in Functional Medicine in recent years.

There was a period of time of four years when my children were younger that I would routinely go to bed at midnight and wake up at 4:30am! This was during a time when I was also running a very busy medical practice and doing such a good job with spending time with my children, that at age 7, my son said to me, ‘mom, you don’t seem like you work because you are always here’. I built my schedule, planning and life around their schedules.

Little did he realize at that age and time just how much effort I was putting in to make this impression! Knowing what I know now, I would not have pushed myself this hard.

Lack of enough sleep can dysregulate not only your stress and cortisol, through this mechanism you can disrupt your thyroid, your sex hormones and even add inches to your waistline!

This is nothing to play with. When combined with lack of sleep, poor eating habits and inflammation, a perfect storm of chaos is created in the body’s system that can lead to prediabetes, hypothyroidism, autoimmune conditions, ‘leaky gut’ and gut disturbances, menopausal and peri-menopausal problems, PCOS, anxiety and more.

Hopefully, it is obvious why sleep is fundamental to ‘anti-aging’. As you can start to see by now, chronic disease is not about our age in years – even young adults are now experiencing these conditions with greater and greater frequency. HOW we age is what really matters.

One key area that is typically ignored is staying on technology devices or watching television into the evening hours. The blue-white light that is emitted can literally raise your cortisol and stress levels and disrupt your sleep quality! No joke! At the very least, use a good quality blue blocker eyewear protection, and even better, stay off of devices at least one hour before bedtime. Lifestyle medicine is an idea whose time has arrived and is greatly needed.

4. Mental and Emotional

Mental or emotional causes of stress can also be perceptual in terms of ‘how we see or feel’ about a situation. If this situation feels ‘novel’, or like a threat to our person or ego, or feels unpredictable or that we have a sense of loss of control…. it triggers our stress response of ‘fight, flight or freeze‘. This is why some people may love public speaking while others are terrified even at the thought of it! This category of stress requires special skills training to overcome.

Many people think that practicing mindfulness is a panacea that will alone,…and of course, in a short period of time (the quick fix), take care of this category. This is simply not the experience of many people, nor of my own. Mindfulness practice is an important aspect of beginning to retrain our brain to deal with this aspect of stress, but it is only the first step.

Mindfulness allows us to observe our thoughts and feelings, but we must then have tools and skills to ‘self-regulate’ our thoughts, feelings – intentions and attention – so that we are best able to take back the steering wheel of our mind. We must learn emotional resiliency.

This is more layered than it initially appears. This is where I tend to pay attention to stress management in a different way and where most physicians are not aware to do so. Remember stress management is not just about food, exercise, and sleep, though as I have already pointed out, they do matter.

For example, our own self-image and level of confidence will affect how we respond to the 4 Key Aspects of Mental/Emotional Stressors, which are:

• Novelty
• Threat to our ego (real or imagined)
• Lack of predictability
• Need for control

This is where learning how to transform our perception and ‘retrain our brain’ comes in. This is a skill set that we can all learn. As an entrepreneur, I can say that I am exposed to all four of these key aspects on a regular basis. I have observed in myself over the decades the power of these skills to bring greater confidence, fulfillment, less stress, and greater physical health and well-being when used with self-awareness. I now have greater emotional resiliency because of this.

A few words about spirituality and stress. When we do not have a sense of purpose or contribution that comes from our authentic heart, we may struggle with the meaning of our lives. Having a sense of connection with a higher power, purpose, or to nature can help us to live with more joy, inner peace and even tap into our own unique form of creativity easier. As you can imagine, this would all be stress alleviating on several levels.

You will generally not hear about these mental/emotional/spiritual aspects of stress management from your healthcare provider, whether in functional or traditional medicine. Understanding our ‘whole self’ is central to being able to live a life of thriving, not simply surviving.

Maintaining good health takes conscious effort in the world we live in now due to food quality challenges, excessive environment toxins, and a work environment and society that does not tend to honor self-care and downtime.

In order to be in control of our health, we will have to reeducate ourselves and look for alternative healthcare options and modalities that allow our body to tap into its natural healing powers. We can prevent and reverse many common chronic conditions when we understand how and have a strong enough desire to learn how to do so. This is a personal journey and the science is here now to validate many of the holistic approaches I use.

Yet, many of these approaches I used before the science substantiated it – like mindfulness of example – are now recognized quite broadly. Personally, I decided a while back not to wait on consensus from science but to trust my own experience – and it has served me well. I invite you to explore new ways of thinking about your health so that you can better empower yourself to thrive also.

Next Steps….

It’s my mission to help as many people as possible to live beyond stress and burnout. Please help me with this mission by sharing this blog post! ????????

If you’d like to learn more about how stress can lead to burnout, aging and low energy, I invite you to watch my free webinar on this exact topic.⁠ You can access it by going to the link at Taking Control of Stress and Burnout .

If you would like to learn how you can begin to transform your experience with stress, schedule your Free Discovery Session with me Here

Your perception can obstruct your vision through your brain as much as a literal cloudy fog can hide a huge mountain in our environment. The photo on the left is the same portion of my backyard as the photo on the right taken only about an hour apart.

Where’s the mountain and the blue sky in the one on the left? From a perceptual viewpoint, it appears there is no mountain, we can’t see it. If we didn’t know better, we would not even assume there are other possibilities than the way we are currently looking at this area of the background.

Perception is ‘how’ we see, it’s the story or the meaning we assign to a given situation or circumstance based upon our unique way of looking at life.

Sometimes we can be even looking at a situation or event right in front of our eyes and not really see that there is more than one possibility of what is before us. Like the mountain range behind the fog. Very recently, during a period of heavy rain here in Northern California, I noticed that the vast mountain range behind my home seemed to disappear as the clouds and fog descended low enough to obstruct it, so I took the photo of my backyard from my window.

If I didn’t know better, it looked like there were no mountains, that the land behind my home was flat and that I was just seeing the edge of the sky on this rainy, dreary day. In reality, things were not as they seemed. In a little while, the clouds and fog rolled away to reveal the huge, majestic mountains and the beautiful sun and blue sky.

I found this situation to be a an interesting metaphor for perception. This is important to your mind and body health and well-being. Whether we realize it or not, things really are not always the way they seem, and in fact, they are generally are the way WE see; it is subjective based upon the meaning we assign due to our perception.

It’s like a ‘Cataract of the Soul’ that blocks the Light of our soul, who we really are, and keeps us from witnessing our own intrinsic worth and beauty and from seeing this beauty also in others.

As an ex-eye surgeon, I can tell you that most people had normal, healthy eyes behind their cataract, which is simply a clouding of the lens of the eye. Once removed, their vision typically returned to 20/20. We don’t often realize that there is more to a situation, person or explanation than meets the eye. Two individuals can come to very different conclusions based upon how they have unconsciously wired their brain over time and how they expect the outcomes to evolve.

They can have different, ‘stories’ for similar circumstances. So they ‘see’ things differently. Often we are metaphorically seeing the world through a ‘cloudy lens’ of perception.

For example, we’ve been taught that chronic disease is a part of aging. Therefore, when we buy into this, we assume that there’s nothing we can do to age with good health. We don’t look for causes in our behavior, food, or toxins in our environment that harming our mind and body and destroying our health. We ignore new research. We don’t pay attention to reports that show toxic foods and pesticides are harming out gut. We don’t recognize that allowing our mind to wander into negative self-talk is actually creating disease in our body through the stress response. We continue to only look for evidence that aligns with what we believe and we therefore miss evidence right before us. It’s like there’s a cloud blocking out potential. That’s perception.

This is how perception can work. When we are not aware of how we are conditioned and have unwittingly wired our mind with a host of self-limiting beliefs, we can make assumptions that we will never see our way clear again and become full of stress, anxiety or even become depressed. When we don’t have a vision for our life we only focus on the clouds and lose sight of the potential majesty that could be hidden from our view at the present time. However, if we take the path of higher wisdom, we can make room for the possibility in our mind that perhaps there is just a mis-perception within our thoughts. That things can change, that we can change. The the ‘authorities’ are wrong and that what we once thought was true, is just not true or certainly not for everyone. That we can expand our vision and possibilities and change our perception.

Instead of thinking less of our self and allowing our fear to rob us of peace of mind and even help create disharmony in our relationships and lives, we can learn to hold the faith and courage to recognize that there are beliefs and ways of seeing life that need to evolve if we are to reach our greater potential. As we change our beliefs, we will notice new information starting to show up in our view.

Our soul’s journey is one of remembering that underneath the surface, behind the clouds in our life lies the Light of our spirit that is magnificent, like the mountains, beautiful, strong and majestic all at the same time.

It just may be temporarily covered over by confusion in our mind and heart that cloud our vision for our life. If we make time to

• feed our soul and spirit, to contemplate and reflect
• develop the trust in our inner spirit to guide us
• to apply the actions of our intuitive nudges that come from within our heart…

…we will be able to expand our vision for our lives as the circumstances shift and the clouds roll away in our perception to see the hidden beauty that was there all along. We can open our mind to new ways to heal our bodies and reverse chronic disease. This is the new science. It also requires your active belief change to participate.

The more willing we become to learn and grow and recognize that retraining our brain and mind and ‘making friends with our emotions’ is a skill that we can develop, the easier it becomes to navigate the storms and clouds that show up in our lives, including our health.

As we get to know our inner lives and the power within us to cut through the confusion and fog around us, we are better able to live with greater purpose, passion and to see the beauty that is hidden from our perception within the context of our everyday lives.