Chris Kresser: So, yeah, the more I do this work, the more I am in awe of the impact of stress on our health and it’s clearly not the elephant in the room in this case because you’re very much aware of how this happened and the affect that it’s had on you. But I think in many of our conversations with patients, it is the elephant in the room. There’s pretty much every symptom, every mechanism and pathology that we’ve talked about in this training so far could be either solely or mostly caused by stress. And I just think it’s such a huge part of the work that we need to do with our patients, than in our own lives and in our own practice. We have to be doing that work ourselves and modeling that for our patients or they’re not going to take us seriously. And it’s very subtle and energetic in the sense that we can talk the talk, but if we’re not walking the walk, the message doesn’t get through. And I know this from my own experience.
And lately I’ve been, I’ve definitely found it more challenging to keep up with all of my normal practices since I committed to the ADAPT program. I’m still creating the curriculum and creating all of the materials for the practice series and hiring all the new people. It’s been an enormous commitment and despite the fact that I offloaded lots of different things before I started in an effort to try to maintain balance, I’m out of balance at this point. And I’m feeling the affects of it and this can happen despite our best intentions. We don’t always have full control over our lives and stuff happens, as was the case here for this particular person asking this question. And so in those situations when stuff happens regardless of what our agency was—whether we had any control over it or not—the question is, how do we respond?
I think for me, what I have observed over the years is that—and in my work with patients—is that when the cause of the trauma is emotional and psychological and psychic or energetic, if you will, the way to respond to it best is probably going to be within that realm as well. It doesn’t mean that supplements and dietary changes can’t play a role, but I think that if you go through a severe emotional shock or a trauma, the way to recover from that is to basically nourish and love yourself as much as you possibly can—like outrageously so. And so what that might look like would depend on each person, but it might be something like scheduling a regular massage.
In a lot of places, in the US at least, now there’s an app called Zeel, Z-e-e-l, where it’s like the Uber of massage.You can open up the app, you can pick a type of massage, you can pick whether you prefer a male or a female therapist and then you can pick a time, and then the therapist shows up at your house and gives you a massage and leaves. So you can schedule a regular massage, you could take a hot bath every day if that’s something that relaxes you or go in a sauna. I think spending regular time in nature is really important. Connecting with people that you love and getting empathy, reaching out to friends and loved ones and asking if they can, people that you know that are able to be present with strong emotion, if they can listen and just be a resource for you. Laughter is extremely powerful medicine, and I know it can seem difficult when you’re in the midst of the emotional trauma. But watching something that makes you laugh with someone else. Because it’s interesting, the research on laughter showed us that it’s not nearly as healing or maybe even healing at all if you’re watching by yourself. But if you watch something funny, for example, or go to a stand-up comedy show with a friend, it’s very powerful, very therapeutic.
All of the lifestyle stuff that we talk about in this course and in my book, basically the idea is to create a program for yourself where you’re doing as much as you possibly can to nurture and love yourself. In terms of sleep, I actually believe that in these really extremely traumatic periods that you need to do whatever you can to get yourself to sleep, even if that includes medication. For example, I had a friend that I grew up with who committed suicide and this was several years ago, and his mom who is a very, very close family friend of ours—we grew up basically right next to each other. I would hop over their fence and play with this guy and his younger brother, and our moms were good friends.
So I was there for the service and she was the kind of person who really never wanted to take medications, but she was such a wreck obviously that I and her doctors were suggesting, look just take the sleep medication so that you can get sleep. Because if you get yourself into a deep hole where you’re not sleeping, the not sleeping actually becomes the cause of not sleeping. Your nervous system gets so dysregulated, it becomes very hard to be able to sleep without some assistance. So whatever it is, if it’s kavinace you have to take, three kavinace, if you take melatonin, actually ironically lower doses of melatonin can be more sedating.
But it depends on the person. So you could add melatonin, then you could consider any of the newer kinds of sleep meds, you could even consider a temporary use of the benzodiazepines like temazepam or valium. I’m not obviously a fan of those for long-term use, and they can be addictive. So you have to consider who you are and if you have a history of addiction with opiate type of drugs, then that wouldn’t be a good idea. But short-term benzodiazepine use just in order to get you sleeping again for a week or two weeks might be indicated. So I don’t think that there is any evidence that suggests that that’s really problematic unless you have a pre-existing mental health condition that could put you at higher risk for some kind of reaction to that.
So overall, do whatever you can to get sleep, because sleep becomes the trump card here and let you know it just, if you’re not sleeping because of this trauma and shock, everything else will get worse. And of course everything, when I mentioned the kind of self-care program where you’re doing everything that you say you’re already doing like walking, nature, acupuncture, that should help as well. But it may not be enough when the shock is severe. So, I hope some of that is helpful, and I hope you get some relief soon.