The Wellness Upgrade on Elevate Springfield featuring Dr. Bryne Willey: Elevating Through the Power of Hormones Part 2

Summary

In this conversation, Robert Ferriell and Dr. Bryne Willey delve into the intricate world of hormones, focusing on cortisol, melatonin, and sex hormones. They discuss the importance of understanding hormone imbalances, the impact of stress on hormone production, and the significance of lifestyle choices in managing these hormones. The conversation emphasizes the need for personalized approaches to health and wellness, including testing, supplementation, and lifestyle changes to achieve optimal hormone balance and overall well-being.

Takeaways

• Cortisol is crucial for managing stress.
• Testing hormone levels is essential for accurate diagnosis.
• Melatonin plays a key role in sleep regulation.
• Exercise can enhance hormone production and mood.
• Stress can lead to hormone imbalances.
• Sleep hygiene is vital for hormone health.
• Diet and hydration impact hormone levels.
• Personalized health plans are more effective than one-size-fits-all solutions.
• Understanding the interplay of hormones is key to wellness.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to Elevate Springfield, where we will dive into strategies and stories that help you rise to your full potential. Each episode, we'll talk about how you can take intentional steps to elevate your life and your business while making a meaningful impact on those around you. Along the way, we're gonna bring in the change makers from our community that are already elevating. We'll bring the actionable strategies, you bring the discipline and follow through, and together we can elevate Springfield. Hey, you are listening to the Elevate Springfield Podcast coming to you from the big dog construction studio in beautiful downtown Springfield. Robert Farrell here, certified 10x coach, speaker, and mentor, here to bring you actionable strategies, you bring the discipline and follow through, and together we're gonna Elevate Springfield. Well, hey, you are listening to the wellness upgrade on Elevate Springfield, where we're gonna bring you specific strategies to help elevate your health and wellness. Say, if you're not elevating your health and wellness, you're not gonna be able to elevate in all other areas. This is the baseline. You know I'm passionate about it, and you know that's why I brought this segment to elevate Springfield. We want to thank our friends over at Shudokan Karate Club here in Springfield. Sensei Dennis and his team over 50 years in the Springfield area. Traditional karate teaching self-discipline, confidence, community, traditional, powerful, real. That's Shudokan Karate Club here in Springfield. Check them out with Shudokan Karate Springfield.com. We're gonna get right to our guest after the break.

SPEAKER_00 2:02

When I first walked into Shudokan Karate Club, I was just looking for a way to get stronger. But what I found was so much more. Here we train in traditional karate, the real stuff. Passed down through generations. Every punch, every kata has purpose. I've learned self-discipline, confidence, and how to protect myself. Not just in class, but in real life. It's not about being aggressive, it's about being prepared. This is more than a club, it's a way of life. Join us at Shudo Khan. Traditional, powerful, real.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

All right, and we are back for another edition of the wellness upgrade. Joining me in the studio, friend of the show, familiar face, Dr. Brian Willie from Align Life Chiropractic in again. How are we doing, sir? I get to be a friend of the show. I like that. Show now. Yeah, once you hit the uh the third time on you, you turn into friend of the show. Third time's like a t-shirt, like five's a hat, jacket, it'll be like 10.

SPEAKER_02 2:58

That's right. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 2:59

Now I got my goals. A few more of these, and you'll be official contributor to the show. Now we're talking we're moving around, moving on up here. Happy to be a friend. That's good. I like that. So last time you were in, we we started talking about hormones, specifically a lot about cortisol. Because as you called it, it's the master hormone, right? Truly is. So remind everybody real quick just what cortisol is, and then we'll dump into the rest of the stuff.

SPEAKER_02 3:21

Yeah, so cortisol is the body stress hormone. Whenever you experience a chemical, physical, mental, emotional stressor, your body secretes cortisol to help make sure you're not creating inflammation and eventually your body doesn't shut down.

SPEAKER_01 3:31

All right.

SPEAKER_02 3:32

So what else we getting into on hormones, man? Yeah. So hopefully they listened to the previous podcast. If they haven't, I would recommend they go back and listen to that as a part one. But one thing I'd mentioned in that podcast was that there is a gland that makes cortisol. It's called the adrenal gland, but it's also responsible for making sex hormones, you know, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone. And I think for most people, when they associate those sex hormones, they think about the reproductive organs making those hormones. And that is true, but they're not the only place where it makes those hormones. The adrenals have an effect on that as well. And what I see oftentimes is when people are coming in with symptoms, it could be from inability to lose weight, it could be from low energy, high fatigue, it could be uh poor sleep, it could be um irritability or mood regulation, uh, it could be any number of things that are symptoms of a hormone imbalance or an endocrine disresponse. But oftentimes those downstream symptoms have an upstream cause. And so most of the time when patients come in with those types of symptoms, they want to address the symptom. And the allopathic model typically races to addressing the symptom as opposed to finding out why those insufficiencies or those imbalances exist. And so I'd mentioned that I don't like to guess, we like to test. When we run these tests, we don't just look at cortisol and a four-point draw of cortisol, but we also look at melatonin. We do a three-point draw of melatonin, which is the body's sleep hormone. We test three different estrogens, two different progesterones, and two different testosterones, so we can get a more clinical, holistic picture of where are there imbalances and inefficiencies and insufficiencies, or where's everything great? So you're not just throwing a cookie cutter, you know, approach at you know, this problem. You're identifying the exact issue and then coming up with a very specific customized treatment plan to address the issue so that they can get the downstream symptom improvement or lifestyle improvement they're looking for.

SPEAKER_01 5:33

Right. You're not guessing, but you know exactly what you're you're shooting for. Absolutely. And I love that. You said a second ago, just for clarity's sake for the audience, allopathic, just so they know what that means. What is that?

SPEAKER_02 5:44

That'd be your traditional medical doctor. So if you go to your MP or your OB.

SPEAKER_01 5:48

Okay. So when you're doing all those different tests, how often do you do those? Great question.

SPEAKER_02 5:55

And it just truly depends on um are you asking like how frequent do we do it? How frequently? Yeah. It just depends on the patient. So um, once we determine and we run the test, um, if we find those imbalances, then we create a custom game plan of how to address those. Or, you know, most of the time they're, you know, they don't have the raw materials they need, you know. So there's usually some combination of supplementation, lifestyle enhancements, dietary changes, and sleep enhancements and exercise enhancements from there. So depending on the degree of that insufficiency, we're typically retesting those levels somewhere between four to eight months to determine how effective the improvements are happening. The goal is to not have somebody, you know, you mentioned allopathic, like we don't do medication in our practice, our pharmaceutical intervention, but a lot of times when people go on medicine or pharmaceuticals, they don't come off or they have a very difficult time coming off. So whenever we give these recommendations, I'm very clear with patients and saying the goal is not for you to be doing these nutrients or doing these um changes forever. The goal is to get these levels back in line because your body's more efficient, it's working the way it's supposed to. And then we turn the body loose to do what it does best, and that's to heal and that's to regulate on its own.

SPEAKER_01 7:02

Yeah, our bodies are beautiful machines, hardwired to heal. Absolutely. They can take care of themselves in most in most instances if you treat it the right way. And if we get out of our own way a lot of times, exactly, exactly. So are there any, I guess, generalities when you're seeing people come in? Are there any deficiencies that you see a lot?

SPEAKER_02 7:22

Yeah. So I would say cortisol is one of them. We do see often times where cortisol production is too high, but more often than not, I see it at the end downstream, end stream when it's too low. So in the beginning, when you're dealing with a lot of stressors, your body starts producing a lot of cortisol to try and keep up with those stressors. And then it uses these building block hormones. So let's do a visual analogy for the podcast. So think about a car. You have an engine, you have a fuel tank. So your foot ped is the stressor. So when you hit the gas pedal down, that's your body revv up the engine, saying, I need more fuel to go in the engine to make more cortisol. Right. So if you got a full tank of fuel, you can bury that gas pedal down to the floorboard and watch that RPM gauge look really good on red line for so long. And then you'll watch that fuel tank start to drop down. You start burning through those building block hormones. The engine's still revving hard and heavy. The RPM gauge is still way up. You're still able to produce enough cortisol, but you're starting to burn through fuel really quickly. Well, if you play that game long enough and you run out of fuel, eventually the engine stops running. Right. And a lot of times what we'll see is we'll see a decrease in the body's ability to produce enough cortisol despite an increase in the stressors. Uh-huh. And the engine starts to smoke out. So when we run this test, what I tell patients is we have the ability to determine is the problem the engine is the problem you're not able to produce the right hormones at the right times, or is the problem you don't have enough fuel of those building block hormones to go into the engine, or is the problem both. Right. So to answer your original question, we have to determine at what stage of that you know stress response are they at, and then set a realistic expectation of what does this plant look like and how long is it going to take.

SPEAKER_01 8:59

Okay. All right. Let's dig into melatonin a little bit. That's one that people like to take as a supplement a lot. Right. I mean, that's a big one. Take a little melatonin. Take a little melatonin. You'll be you'll be good. Yeah. So, first off, tell us again what melatonin does and why is it that it's used as a supplement so often?

SPEAKER_02 9:18

Yeah. So melatonin is the body sleep hormone that your body makes to push you into a deep reparative state so you can recover and repair all the damage you do for the day before. Cortisol and melatonin have an inverse relationship. So they have an opposite correlation. So when your cortisol's high, and again, if you didn't listen to the first podcast, go back and listen to it. But in the first thing in the morning, your cortisol should be very high. So your melatonin should be very low. You don't want to be waking up like a zombie and hitting the snooze arm, you know, five times and I need five cups of coffee before I can even look at somebody. Right. That's an indication that your melatonin's probably too high in the morning. But that's when you want it should be low. And then as the day goes on, though, it should flip-flop. Your cortisol should drop down to a very low number in the evening time. And that's when your melatonin should be spiking and producing higher levels. A lot of the labs that we see, their melatonin may be normal in the morning, but they're not producing enough melatonin in the evening and um right in the middle of night. So when we do these tests, the fifth point of the draw, we haven't wake up between two and three o'clock in the morning and do a draw right at that point. When your melatonin should be at its absolute highest. And Robert, I can't tell you the last time I saw one of these labs that had an adequate melatonin number between two and three in the morning.

SPEAKER_01 10:24

Without supplementation, I mean, are we doing things just in our normal lifestyle to blunt the production of that? What are we doing that to where it's not producing like it should be?

SPEAKER_02 10:34

Yeah, most people are staying up too late at night and they're sleeping in too far in the morning, or their bedtimes and wake up times are all over the board, you know, hours difference. And so the body doesn't get into a rhythm of knowing when it should be spiking and crashing those specific hormones. Scrolling screens and looking at watching TV. If you have a TV in your bedroom, get it out of there. If you do, make sure you turn it off before you go to sleep. Because those excitatory neurons firing in your brain based on what you're seeing or what you're hearing, or even when your eyes are closed, it's still perceiving that data and that information. It's telling your body, I can't go into rest and recovery because I'm taking in information, which shifts back into that fight or flight response. And if the nervous system can't have predictability and adaptability on when it should be high rest versus high fight or flight, then you're never shifting into that deep reparative sleep. So when you're if you're listening right now, if you wake up two to three times a night because you have to go to the bathroom or because your dog made a noise or you heard a sound, like that's not normal. You should be in a deep reparative sleep where that does not happen. And I would venture to guess if you can see a predictable pattern when that's happening, you're probably not shifting into that deep reparative sleep. You're probably staying in this superficial non-REM sleep where you're sleeping, or I'm exhausted, I fall asleep on the couch, and then I wake up and I go to bed. And you're probably not getting that deep restore sleep. And specifically, and you know who you are if you're listening right now, if you can time it when you wake up in the middle of the night and it's between two or three o'clock, two and four o'clock in the morning, I guarantee there is a cortisol melatonin imbalance there. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 12:08

Does light play into it, the type of light that you're seeing late in the evening? Of course, when you're scrolling, of course, your mind's going because you're taking in information. But I've always heard that the light matters there too. It certainly does. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:20

And we can get into the weeds on like a blue light, the different K's and lumens and that kind of stuff. In general, what I would would always recommend our patients do is make sure you're exposed to them as much bright light first thing in the morning and you're eclimiting the light in the evening time. So when you wake up in the morning, you should have the same wake up time every single morning. So you have that predictability response. And as soon as you can expose yourself to as much bright sunlight outside as possible, that's the best thing for you. If you wake up and it's still dark and it's still not as light as I want it to be when I'm up in the morning and going to work. So I'll blare the lights. I'll just blast them as bright as they possibly can be and get outside as soon as I possibly can when the sunlight comes up. In the evening time, because the days are getting longer now, you want to start drawing shades. You want to start dimming lights, make the environment that you're in darker and darker as you get closer and closer to bed. And then, you know, within about an hour before bedtime, 45 minutes to an hour, the screen should go off. So I'm not saying you can't scroll your phone, you can't watch TV in the evening time, but you need to have a buffer when those screens go off and then when you actually go to sleep. And then the question is what do I do during that time? So we mentioned high cognitive task early in the day, low cognitive task end of day. So if you want to run the dishes and run the dishwasher, you know, run a load of laundry, pick up light around the house, read a book, talk to your significant other, listen to music, do some meditation, prayer, that's the time to do it and have that time in between the shutdown before you actually go to sleep. Right. That will push you into that deep REM high melatonin production cycle.

SPEAKER_01 13:45

Okay. So selfish question because I'm thinking about buying a pair. I love it. Do the uh blue light glasses, do they work?

SPEAKER_02 13:52

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And if you can't do the glasses, a lot of the new phones have blue light filters on them. Turn those on as much as you can. I do that.

SPEAKER_01 13:59

I definitely do that on my phone, but I've I've been thinking about like Dave Asprey has his true dark since I was thinking about buying some some of those. So those do if you're gonna be in front of a screen a lot.

SPEAKER_02 14:08

So, like you had mentioned before, like, you know, when you're editing your pods, when you're on you know, emails and that kind of stuff, if you're spending more than 30 to 45 minutes on a screen, you're gonna benefit from it. If you're the person that works on a computer screen all day, every day for hours, and then you're looking at your phone on top of that, it's a great investment. A very low cost, high, high uh return investment.

SPEAKER_01 14:29

Okay. Well, there you go. My selfish and my selfish question worked out. Now I got a good answer. I'm gonna go buy it. Your accountant may have something to say about that, but I'll take the blame. I'll take the blame. There you go. Because he even has the ones that uh that's the Dave Asperg, the true dark ones. He has some that are for daytime and for night based on, you know. So I thought those were pretty cool. Get the get the set and see how it probably changes like how much it's light it's filtering through. Exactly. Very cool. Yeah, definitely. Okay. So back to the the sex hormones, real quick. Yeah, we should talk about that. Yeah, get into that a little bit with testosterone. It's not just for guys. I mean, women have testosterone. Women have to have a you and I have estrogen, progesterone in our bodies. Exactly. So dig into that a little bit. What what do they do? Why is it important? And what are you seeing out there?

SPEAKER_02 15:10

Yeah, so most often, if the body's not producing adequate levels of those hormones and they're not adapting to stressors effectively, it's the cortisol insufficiency that's driving the hormone imbalance within the sex hormones. So oftentimes when I'm looking at these labs, it's very rare for me to see imbalances in estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone when cortisol is normal. Usually those imbalances show up when the cortisol is not producing the right amounts at the right times. But it'll still show up in those areas. So oftentimes, what I'll see is that for women, we'll see a significant drop in progesterone. That's one of the two dominant female sex hormones. And if you want to get into the weeds on hormone conversion pathways, if you're a nerd like me and you pull up a hormone flow chart, if you follow how these hormones convert from one form to another, right before these building block hormones convert into cortisol, it takes the form of progesterone. So oftentimes there exists what's called the progesterone steel, where your body says, I need so much cortisol. You're throwing so much stress in me that I'm gonna sabotage any other hormone in order to make more cortisol. It will pull the form of progesterone through a conversion pathway to make more cortisol. So it's not that the system's broken, it's not that somebody's body can't produce enough progesterone. It's that the cortisol demand is sabotaging the body's ability to make enough cortisol and still have enough left over to produce enough progesterone. That's typically in women what I see is if the stress response is poor. In men, if there's a testosterone deficiency, oftentimes there still is a cortisol imbalance, but a lot of times they'll have a deficiency in a building block hormone called DHEA. So Delta Henry Eric Apple DHEA, that is a precursor building block hormone that can also get reallocated to make cortisol. So again, you're burning through the fuel too quick and there's not enough leftover to make testosterone. But one step down in the conversion process from testosterone is estradiol. Another name for that is E2. That's the dominant form of estrogen when you think about female menstrual cycles. So a lot of times for men, if their T is too low, they're either too low on the DHA fuel side because cortisol insufficiencies exist, or I'll see on labs too, where that testosterone is getting converted into making estradiol and their estrogen levels are too high for what they should be.

SPEAKER_01 17:40

So when you see these deficiencies, what are some of the lifestyle changes, nutrition changes, anything you recommend for folks to do when they're when they're low like that?

SPEAKER_02 17:48

Yeah. So we mentioned the sleep piece, like in some of the tips and the hacks there. From a stress adaptation standpoint, I would say making sure that you're carving out time for exercise is so critical. You can't skip that step. So cardiovascular exercise is really important. At least three times a week, 30 minutes at a minimum. What's really interesting, and you can look this up in the research and the data, when you're exercising, you know, via cardiovascular exercise regularly, it increases the production of serotonin and dopamine, which are the happy euphoric hormones. We all need more serotonin and dopamine for our body. Yes, indeed. But what most people don't realize is those hormones play a direct conversion role into making melatonin, which is the body's sleep hormone. So if you want to sleep better and you're not doing regular cardiovascular exercise, that's one of your big hacks right there. But you have to do resistance exercise too, because you have to be able to metabolize the macros, the protein that you're ingesting via your diet, building lean muscle mass. That will just adding lean muscle mass will increase your adaptability to stress. So that from a stress adaptation standpoint, but also, and I'm gonna get some chuckles and people listening to this right now, but carving out 30 minutes in your day where it's just you time is very important. I mentioned those cortisol spikes and crashes. What I find is that people just compress and they try and be too productive for what their day allows and they just do, do, and do and go, go, go. And they don't carve time to just decompress. And having that time, 20 to 30 minutes of time where it's just robber time, but it has to be in your calendar. If it's not in your calendar, it doesn't exist. Not in pencil, it's got to be in pen and no other appointments slide in there. And for most people, they'll experience an energy crash in the early afternoon after the lunch hour. I'd set that time right in there, that time. I don't care what you do during that time. You pray, doodle, listen to music, go for a walk, whatever just gets you in that calm-centered space. Um, that's the key, you know, from the stress adaptation standpoint. Dietary-wise, high protein intake, uh, limiting simple carbs and sugars and hydration. You need to be, you know, drinking half your body weight and ounces of water per day. We talked about that when I was here last. Um, and then, you know, specific supplementation. Um, there are nutrients, there are raw materials that your adrenals and your body needs when you're dealing with these cortisol insufficiencies that you can't ignore. You can't supplement your way out of this problem. Let me be clear, I'll say that again. You cannot outs you know, supplement your way out of this problem. But if you're lacking the raw materials that you need for the body to work and go through these conversion pathways and assist it to be able to regulate on its own, you gotta support that in a short-term manner. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:20

No, I love that. You can't out-supplement that just like you can't outwork out a bad diet. Amen, brother. Peep me to the punch there. Yeah, that's the other one I was saying. Right.

SPEAKER_02 20:28

Can't out exercise a bad diet. Right, you're right.

SPEAKER_01 20:30

So we talked uh before about the workout in the morning, not in the evening. Yeah, when it comes to resistance versus cardiovascular, is that the same? Should cardio and resistance should that both be in the morning or does one work better in the evening?

SPEAKER_02 20:42

See, I try and stack it because if like most people, I don't have a lot of free time. So hit training is the way to go. Like find a way to get your heart rate up and do resistance at the same time is the way to go. Um, I would say if you're gonna do one or the other, if you're prioritizing, the resistance in the morning is gonna be more important. The cortisol is going to help you recover from those workouts more effectively and make sure that you have enough resources to build stronger muscles, more testosterone. I'm talking men and women both. Women, you need testosterone to maintain and build lean muscle mass, to be able to have a strong immune system, to have a healthy libido. So, like that stuff's important. Men, women both. I would do the resistance if you have to in the morning, and then do the cardio in the evening time. But I'd, if you can, I'd stack them and combine them both in the morning.

SPEAKER_01 21:27

Love it. Well, I'm doing the right thing then. That's what I do. Yeah, that's what I do. And I got my question answered about the blue light. So, man, yeah. Awesome stuff today. I love it. I'm glad I got to be personalized, but I'm sure if you're wondering, everybody else is too. Exactly. That's how it works. We might even be able to do a part three, part four, part five on hormones. I think we could go a long way.

SPEAKER_02 21:44

We didn't touch on thyroid hormone. We didn't touch on insulin.

SPEAKER_01 21:48

Yeah, there's a lot of fruit on this vine. Yeah. We're gonna come back for part three. How about that? That's you good with that? Cool, let's do it. All right. Well, remind everybody if they want to come out and see you, where do they go and do that?

SPEAKER_02 21:58

Yeah, so just uh reach out if you've got questions. Just reach out to us Align Life Springfield, Google socials, our website. If you want to come into the clinic, it's on the west side of Springfield on Montville.

SPEAKER_01 22:08

There you go. Appreciate it as always. Appreciate you, man. All right. And we're going to see Dr. Willie for part three of hormones here in a little bit. But in the meantime, we're going to let him get back to elevating Springfield. And for the rest of y'all, we'll be right back. Hey, Springfield, when it comes to reliable, high-quality roofing, you don't want to leave things to chance. That's why you should reach out to Acosta Angeli Ruffing, your local roofing expert serving Springfield and surrounding communities, from quick, dependable repairs to full replacement, from residential to commercial. They are your trusted pros. Call them today at 217-993-2748 or visit their website to book your free quote and inspection. Don't wait. A little leak now could lead to major damage later. Trust the local experts, protect your home, and get peace of mind with Acosta Angeli Roofing. Well, thank you for joining us today, everybody. Appreciate you making us a part of your day. Hope you're enjoying these quick hits of actionable strategies here on the wellness upgrade on Elevate Springfield. Thank you again to Shudokan Karate Club. A take what you learn today. You bring the discipline and follow through it together. That's right, y'all. We're going to Elevate Springfield. Be great. Looking for expert tree care with hometown integrity? Look no further than Sangamon Tree Service. They're your trusted local pros, delivering quality workmanship, exceptional customer service, and fair, honest pricing. Every time. Whether it's trimming, removal, or storm cleanup, their team brings professionalism and care to every job, big or small. Call the name your neighbors trust, Sangman Tree Service, or visit them today at SangamentTreeService.com. Sangman Tree Service, rooted in quality, built on trust.