Chris Kresser: So, yeah, in the case of the adaptogens, it’s a similar answer to what I just gave. Ideally we use the supplement short term, and we rely mostly on behavior and lifestyle modification. And there’s a ton that can be done there even in small amounts throughout the day. I know we talked about this, but it’s worth reiterating: there’s a tendency for all of us, myself included, to think that we have to make these huge sweeping changes. We have to quit our job, we have to spend three hours every day meditating or doing stress reduction. But in reality, it’s really small changes like just doing five minutes a few times a day of sitting quietly and meditating, or doing a kind of mini-move or deep relaxation type of technique can make a huge difference in our overall health and well-being. And the changes that we talk in terms of sleep hygiene, or just getting to bed an hour earlier can make a huge difference. Using something like timeout to take frequent breaks throughout the day and standing 50 percent of the time rather than sitting can make a huge difference. So I think we always have to remember that there’s a lot that can be done in terms of behavior and lifestyle even without changing any of the situational circumstances in a patient’s life, or in our own lives, for that matter. And I think that this behavioral lifestyle component is really underexplored and underutilized in the vast majority of medical practices, whether we’re talking about conventional or functional practices. And in part, that’s because it’s hard to get patients to make changes there, and in part because I think as clinicians we can sometimes get overly focused on all of the data, the lab tests, all the stuff that is important and that we need to be focusing on. But if we lose sight of the more fundamental stuff, then that can be problematic.
So remember getting this course, this is why I spent so much time on this in the introduction of the course. Remember that diagram of concentric circles that worked as my systems model of functional medicine? The very core of that diagram was the interaction between our genome and epigenome and exposome, and addressing pathologies, which is the next ring out, is crucial, but that is going to be of limited value if that.core is not continually emphasized.