Why Your Doctor Says You’re “Normal” But You Feel Like Crap (Perimenopause vs. Burnout)

Are you tired of being told your labs are “normal” when you know something is off? In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Will Haas, founder and CEO of VYVE Wellness in Charlotte. Together, we discuss the frustrations so many high performers (especially women) face when they hit that midlife wall: unexplained fatigue, brain fog, stubborn weight, and a new reality where old routines just don’t work anymore.

We dive into:

• The difference between burnout and perimenopause (and why they so often overlap)
• Why standard labs don’t always reveal the real cause behind your symptoms
• What deeper tests really show about hormones, recovery, and cellular health
• How to use heart rate variability (HRV) as your “check engine” light for burnout
• The truth about GLP-1 drugs, “skinny fat,” and rebuilding your metabolism the right way

If you’ve ever left the doctor’s office feeling dismissed or confused…the conversation is about to change.

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Transcript

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Have you ever had a doctor look at your labs and say, everything's normal, and you're sitting there thinking, great, so why do I feel like someone stole my battery and replaced it with tiny hamsters? Today, I'm talking with Dr. Will Haas, founder and CEO of VYVE Wellness in Charlotte, who helps high-achieving professionals feel sharp, energized, and strong again through cellular optimization. And we're getting into the stuff we actually want answers to burnout versus perimenopause, the dreaded normal lab trap. What to test when you know something's off, why, what worked at 35 backfires at 45, how to use HRV heart rate variability as your early warning symptom. And. And yes, we even tiptoed into the GLP1 landmine without ending up skinny fat. All right. Join me in welcoming Dr. Haas. Dr. Will Haas, welcome to Create the Best Me. This is an honor and a privilege to have you on the show. It's a pleasure. Look forward to our time together. So, before we get into today's exciting conversation that I'm excited about, because it's stuff that I really want answers to, could you please tell the listeners and viewers a little bit about who Dr. Haas is and VYVE Wellness. Yeah. So I think at the heart, I'm a bit more of a entrepreneur than a physician, but I have kind of gone through all the kind of formal medical training and spent most of my career actually in the space of integrative medicine or kind of functional medicine, but trained by Dr. Andrew Weil and have spent basically my entire physician career looking at how do we optimize health and wellness and optimize performance, especially for high performers. And that's exactly what we do at VYVE Wellness in Charlotte, North Carolina. We kind of help high-performing individuals in their 40s and 60s try to think, feel, and perform like they did in their 20s and 30s again. And that's exactly why I invited you onto the show, because it just seems like a lot of us, the high performers, hit that wall that one day we wake up. I mean, it literally felt like that for me. One day you wake up and all of a sudden you're like, what happened? It's as if, though, someone just got a syringe, sucked all the energy out of you, and it's unexplainable. Yeah. And I think high performers, especially high performing women, they're masters of output. Right. Physiology doesn't really care about the calendar and how much you have stuffed in that day and how much you accomplish that day. So there's this common pattern of under recovery. It's not enough sleep or over training, too much training volume and intensity, or under fueling, not enough protein or over caffeination to use as a band aid to push through all of that. In the season of life, especially kind of the perimenopausal transition, you really can't out discipline biology. You really have to focus on out strategizing it. Right? Yeah. And I've heard that high performing women or men tend to shift their biology sort of in a sense to where it leads them down that road to where they burn out. And then one day wake up like I did and say, what happened? Yeah, this is kind of like the burnout versus kind of hormonal balance or burnout versus perimenopause and what's really going on and how to tell them apart and why they often overlap. And burnout is more of that pattern where you have that exhausted but wired feeling. Right. The motivation drops, mood is more fragile and recovery becomes pretty sluggish. Whereas perimenopausal or even hormonal changes and men starts to leave clues. Right. So cycle changes, new sleep pattern disruptions, temperature shifts, libido drops, brain fog, stubborn weight gain. Right. Those are sort of the patterns that we're looking for. And oftentimes it can be both. Right. It doesn't have to be those in isolation. There's a lot of overlap and the fix is not pushing harder. Right. And what we kind of just talked about, it's about building resilience. Even in high performing professionals, burnout is very common. But we really need to kind of focus on this, this resilience piece. And I guess the thing that frustrates myself personally is that, you know, when, when we hit that wall, we go to our regular GP's, they run tons of labs and then, and maybe even diagnostic testing like MRIs and, and you know, heart, you know, heart testing, breathing testing, all kinds of gamma testings. And then everything comes back normal. And they tell you you're just getting older or it's menopause or perimenopause. And that's it. That's the, what we call the normal lab trap. Right. That happens in conventional medicine all the time. Right. Part of that is a problem where reference ranges, they don't really kind of promise anything. They're just a statistical average that you can fall into. And many high performers are going to notice that they're starting, the body's starting to change long before they ever kind of drift into the abnormal range. Right. And timing matters, of course, in this, especially in the perimenopausal change, where cycle phase matters, sleep timing matters, the training load and recovery. All of those sorts of patterns matter, especially when we're looking at things kind of maybe a deeper, broader set of quote, normal labs. Right. So more comprehensive hormone testing, a full battery of thyroid tests, not just your standard TSH or thyroid stimulating hormone, or a complete panel of all of the sex hormones and cortisol all the time. I get patients coming into my practice with, quote, normal, even hormones. And we missed other fundamental hormones like cortisol, which is crucial to this whole burnout picture we got done talking about. And then we're also missing the micronutrient labs. What's going on with things like iron and B12 and folate and even important antioxidants for mitochondrial health like CoQ10 and alpha lipoic acid. And we're looking at all of those labs alongside symptoms and patterns of symptoms. I kind of joke in my office all the time with my patients that we're not treating the numbers on the paper. We're treating you, the patient and what's going on and how your body actually feels and then lining that up to, to what's going on on the labs and looking more towards optimal function in labs and not just what's outside the reference range. But I know that, like for myself, because I'm going to use myself as an example. When my provider told me everything was normal, then I went down to Dr. Google and started looking at my labs a little bit more in detail and trying to see what, what did he not test me for? What should he be testing me for that could provide answers to why I feel the way I do. And then having that second visit with the provider and say, hey, what about this? You know, I know that some of the testing that I asked for said that's not traditional testing. Or not covered by insurance, right? Pretty much, yeah. So that's, you know, I think luckily we're in this day and age where there's pros and cons to consumer driven healthcare, but right now there's a lot of empowerment on the individual to, to be able to run more advanced lab testing. Whether you go online to something like Function Health and get broader panels, or you find your way into a functional integrative medicine practice that has access to a lot of these more advanced lab panels. And I think one of the things that we'll commonly see that, and patterns that we kind of touch on is patterns of, of mitochondrial health. These powerhouse cells that produce ATP or energy. Right. And that will kind of commonly show up in some nutrient deficiency patterns. Other things that I see will be very common. That will overlap with symptoms of burnout or even kind of perimenopause will be gut dysfunction. Imbalance of good and bad bacteria in the gut can definitely contribute to that feeling. Puffiness, inflame, brain fog, stubborn weight gain that even when you're doing everything right, you can't shift. Another one I'll commonly see and use beyond standard blood work will be brain mapping, looking at brainwave patterns. Right. One of the things that not only individuals with burnout, but individuals going through perimenopause will experience is going to be those sleep changes and fluctuations, right. That waking up at two to four o'clock in the morning, anxious thoughts, embracing. And some of that can be tied to brainwave dysfunction. And that's what a brain map helps us identify. And so there's a whole host of other labs. Even when you're regular, Doctor says it looks normal and Dr. Google says it looks normal, even Chat GPT says it looks normal. Right. We can, there's many other layers we need to think about of is there overlap? Is this really perimenopause? Are there other factors that it is perimenopause, but also are heightening some of those issues that women in perimenopause experience. And I think that's a big thing that a lot of us women, and I'm married, my husband's also. I thought it was funny when one day he says, I've been having a lot of brain fog. And I thought, oh my goodness, I thought that was just a menopause thing, you know, and it's just like, how do I get my brain back or just a smidge of it back? You know, does brain mapping kind of solve that problem or provide answers as to where we may be deficient? Provides answers. And the complex thing here is it depends on every individual. You have to kind of listen to those, those patterns, those symptom patterns and start to think about where is the cellular dysfunction, where is the, the dysfunction happening underneath the surface? And then go look for clues. Right. So a, a well trained and seasoned functional integrated medicine physician are going to be able to hone in on those patterns and then start to guide you and direct you to the location of do I need to look at that brain map or do we need to look at gut testing or do we need to look at more micronutrient deficiencies to kind of confirm what we think might be the cause of that brain fog. And I think this is something that maybe a lot of people might wonder is how is it that I ate what I've been eating and have been able to function and now I hit a certain age or whatever it was and it's not working. The body's not working, the mind's not working. I'm not functioning to my high performance level. Yeah, there's kind of two pieces there, and that's the. That's kind of the backfire of more intensity. Right. So I think part of it's pushing yourself too hard on the workouts and not getting enough of recovery. So there's I think, kind of a yin and yang there kind of two parts to this puzzle. Right. So what, what worked at 35 tends to backfire at 45. Right. So that constant hit becomes more of gasoline to the fire. Right. In perimenopause strength training zone two, cardio plus deliberate recovery tends to outperform that red line cardio, that kind of pushing your body and thinking kind of more, more discipline is better. Right. So it's kind of more about building that metabolism that ends up trusting you again. And so it's the kind of more of the season of the goal isn't burn more. It's it's recovery are recovering better. And you know, and I think you've probably heard this so many times when a patient comes to you and they say, I'm tired. And you say, okay, well, you've run all these testing and then you tell them, by the way, you need to do some strength training. And they might look at you and say, you're crazy because I'm tired. I came to you because I'm exhausted and you're telling me that I need to burn some energy in order to solve this problem. How do you, how do you get convince people that, that this is to their betterment as to their detriment? So I think it's. Sometimes you have to. You give them what you know. A lot of times there's this notion we have to kind of first tap into the first domino that is going to give you the biggest result. And I may have to say, okay, here's where we're going. Where we're going is we need you to be able to do this resistance exercise and more energy output. But before we can get you there, we might need to focus on this recovery pillar that I talked about, that kind of the yin and yang, where we really need to spend more time focusing on sleep. And that can be the biggest place for getting better recovery. And a lot of women in that perimenopause, that's what they first kind of start to notice, right? That sleep issues, that 2, 4 o' clock in the morning that we talked about, and kind of restful, restless on sleeps and temperature changes and when you're not sleeping and the nervous system becomes triggered and even appetite signals start to get distorted and your body holds onto that fat. Right. So if we can start to calm the nervous system, get more restorative sleep change appetite signaling and reduce cortisol, making it easier to then expend more energy and then burn fat from that expended energy, things become a lot easier. So a lot of us like, hey, this is where we're going to go. But before we're going there, let's talk about how you're sleeping, let's talk about the recovery, let's rebuild the mitochondrial cells so they produce more energy. So we can then start to apply the smart exercising in your 40s and 50s. And when you talk about that pillar of restoring yourself, getting some sleep, what do you use? Do you usually recommend that women, if they're in that perimenopause, menopause period, do you recommend that they take hormone therapy, bioidentical hormone therapy, or are you more on the side that they take melatonin? Great question. And that again goes back to. It depends on the, on the patient and where they are. And they are kind of their kind of life cycle and the kind of transition and. But I will always think about foundational before I'm jumping to more of the advanced regenerative tools. I'm thinking what are the foundation? If we don't address the foundation, it doesn't matter. You can throw on bionicle hormones, you can even throw and layer on peptide therapies or you know, the sexy things like NAD or ozone therapy. Right. But if we don't have that foundational built to layer that on top of all that stuff will just be kind of a flash in the pan and you'll kind of get a little bit of initial lift and then you come back several weeks later like, okay, I felt good for a little bit, but now I'm, I'm, I'm still back to where I started. And that's because the foundation wasn't addressed. So I'm thinking about maybe my first layer in is stabilizing inputs. And what I mean by that is the first morning light and consistent wake times. We talked a lot about sleep, but when you first get up setting Those circadian rhythms with regular waking times and then getting that first morning light and then following that immediately with a, whether you're exercising or not, having some sort of protein forward breakfast and then putting some boundaries around caffeine. Right. We can, you know, if we enjoy the cup of coffee, but we're not kind of using that throughout the whole day. So kind of stabilizing those, those inputs for both healthy hormonal balance and preventing burnout. And we then already kind of talked about one of my other pillars, which was sleep and then training for the resilience. Right. So kind of shifting into now we have better recovery patterns in place. That's where we can kind of shift into that strength training in zone two cardio. Once that foundation is there, then we can start moving into some of those more advanced modalities. Right. So maybe some strategic use of peptide therapies, different peptides to support mitochondrial health or support growth hormone release or reset circadian rhythms, but only after the foundation has been addressed. And I've heard that our heart rate, whether it's our regular heart rate or resting heart rate, can be the first warning sign that something is going to happen before we hit burnout. How can we monitor that heart rate so that we know the burnout signals, you know, it's been addressed? The red light came on. Get ready. I think before the age of smart devices, back when I was, you know, in my, in my 20s, I remember my coach said it's as simple as just checking your resting morning heart rate. He said, the first thing I want you to do when you wake up in the morning is just take your pulse and record it. And I want to see a trend and I want to be able to look at that alongside your training volume. When I was racing competitively triathlons, and so that was the simplest, easiest way. This day and age, we have smart devices and they can do that for us. But the smart devices will actually look at an even better marker than resting heart rate, which is heart rate variability or what we know as hrv. And HRV is basically a lens into looking at your parasympathetic nervous system or that rest and digest system in the body versus that fight and flight sympathetic tone that's so activated in high, high performers. And the idea there is the more variable beats of your heart. Right? Right. It shouldn't beat at the same consistent metronome pattern. It should have a slight variation then that tells us you have this higher tone of the rest and digest your parasympathetic system that allows you to kind of rest and recover and is more active, which is a good thing, and has been tied to all sorts of studies on longevity and healthy aging. And a lot of the things that we talked about are fantastic ways to address that. So improving your sleep and regulating your circadian rhythms are fantastic for that. One of my favorite tools is just doing a mindfulness meditation practice before bed. Or if you are a little antsy and you just not down with sitting still, I'll recommend some sort of, you know, on the floor, gentle yoga practice with some, you know, breath work for five to 10 minutes before bed as a way to kind of, you know, tap into that parasympathetic nervous system and allow your body the most important time for recovery is at night. And so allow kind of your parasympathetic nervous system to be kind of activated. So your heart rate variability is elevated for what should be the longest rest period of the day. And you talked about practices before bed. Tell me, when should we fold our computer, our laptop, put our phone away? What is that period before we go to bed? Because I do know that blue light can affect us. I have to be realistic when I ask my patients this, right? So, you know, my patients are, they're, they're lawyers, they're, they're business owners, they're CEO and entrepreneurs, right? Like the brain never shuts off, right? And you're always thinking, and the moment you finally like sit down, relax on the couch, then your brain immediately goes, oh, I forgot that I got to forget this or get this. So in an ideal world, I'd say like, turn it off an hour, right? We should minimize blue light at least an hour before we end up going to bed. And if you're not doing that, that five to ten minute window before you jump to bed is even more important, right? So if you're like, hey, like, there's no way I'm putting my laptop down or not looking at my phone for the hour before bed. That's why I say like, okay, if that's non negotiable, that five minutes of some sort of intentional unwind or breath work practice, that that has to be in place, right? Things you can also do even though, like you can't shut that laptop down or not put that phone away after dinner time in our household is when the blue light

classes go on, right? So 7: 21:39

30, toddler goes down, blue light glasses go on immediately, right? And so we're kind of starting kind of an extended unwind phase where we're at least blocking out as Much of the blue light that we can. Even though we're probably still kind of checking things on the phone before heading to bed. Um, so. So they're just regular blue light classes that you would normally wear, if you're looking at your computer. I tend to use different shades throughout the day. So if I know I have a admin day and it's not like a patient care day and I'm glued to the computer monitor all day, I'm using more like blue light glass and blue locking glasses for the computer. You know, the coloration is. Is what you'd see almost on normal glasses. And then I might kind of transition into a yellow towards the end of the day. So kind of a three to five o' clock and then you're putting on kind of those. Those orange

ones in the evening time. So yeah, 7: 22:39

30 is the. Is the orange glass time. Definitely kind of distorts if you're watching any sort of television. What's happening on there. But that's kind of the idea and goal. You can also put on the filters and I love the fact that Apple kind of caught up in iPhone. You can actually activate filters to reduce that. That's. That's built according to your time zone and changes. You can also download apps for your computer. I use Flux was the one I end up using. And then that also kind of changes my computer screen throughout the day as well. So not only you have the glasses, but you have the screen time kind of automatically adjusting as well. So those are nice other little hacks you can. Yeah. Let's go into that stubborn belly fat. Or stubborn, maybe not belly fat. Maybe it's fat in other places that we don't want because we're in perimenopause or menopause. I know that stress can sometimes be that thing that makes us hold on to that fat that we're trying so hard. We're working out, we're eating clean and nothing's happening. Then we try to introduce a GLP1. How does that work? And now there's the GLP1 pill. Yeah. We stumbled upon the GLP1 landmine. I see. So GLP1 is a very powerful tool. We kind of alluded to the power of peptides earlier, but only when the foundations are addressed and you stumbled upon one of them or you highlighted one of them right here. So the, the stubborn weight gain beside despite doing everything right. Same concept from earlier. The foundations have to be addressed before you layer that tool on. GLP1s are a fantastic tool. I am a physician Who's a proponent of using GLP1s alongside smart foundational lifestyle changes and addressing some of those root causes. Right. So cortisol, sex hormones, micronutrient deficiencies, gut health, I see are the biggest blockers for individuals who are doing all the right things, right? They're eating clean, we're exercising. We finally kind of got that sleep pattern back in to check. But we're still not losing that stubborn weight, whether it be hips and thighs or lower abdomen. If we're not looking at some of those key areas and we just layer on a GLP1 what happens a lot of times that way, it's going to come back if you haven't fixed the underlying metabolic blocks and metabolic dysfunction. And what was unique to that individual that was kind of sending them off course with their metabolism. So cortisol is definitely a big part of that. But if you started to take some of the strategies that we talked about, you should be regulating and modulating your cortisol, right? If we're tapping into those things that support better heart rate variability, right. We're getting good, deep sleep patterns activated again, Right. We're starting today with a protein forward meal and first light. A lot of those hunger signals are very much tied into circadian rhythms, right? Leptin, kind of the fat hunger hormone, along with ghrelin. Those are very much regulated by circadian patterns and light exposure. And so all those things need to be addressed with a GLP1 in the picture. Because what I've noticed is that I've know people that have taken GLP1s and have done a phenomenal job of losing weight, but then you have what's called skinny fat. It's breaking. That's teasing apart, though, what are you actually losing? I always tell my patients and it. They always look at me funny, like, I don't care about your weight, right? It's always a little bit. A little bit more than men, right? They're like, what do you mean you don't care about my weight? I care about my weight. And I'm like, no, we care about your body composition change, right? So there's not a single person in my clinical practice that goes on a GLP1 without regularly stepping on a body composition scale, right? So I care more about the distribution of that weight. You know, how much body fat are we carrying versus muscle mass? And of that body fat, how much is the dangerous stuff in and around your body organs, the stuff that's creating more inflammation in the body, creating more insulin resistance in the body? Some of those metabolic blockers. Right. And are we shifting those? So if you ultimately go on to a GLP1 and we're not doing that strength training that we talked about two to four times a week, and we're not doing that protein forward meals and we're not getting that recovery and modulating cortisol, the end result will often be a state of catabolism or breaking down muscle mass. All right. And so yes, you dropped the weight on the scale down, but you lost a lot more muscle mass than you did body fat. You didn't do yourselves any metabolic favors here in the process, or you actually worsened your metabolism now in the long run. So again, changing body composition in your 40s is trickier than your, your 20s and 30s. Totally get it. But we need to make sure we're doing it kind of smart and correctly so that our metabolism is supported and comes out on the other end stronger. So we, when we remove that tool, which is what we want to do, we want to take that GLP1 away eventually that you don't gain all the weight back or you end up skinny fat like you talked about. So what should our, what should we strive for? And I know this is going to be kind of a tricky question. What should we strive for as far as, when we get on these scales, muscle and what should we strive for as far as protein? I try to keep it simple and you can kind of get into the macro constructs. You know, I will get in the weeds with my patients. We will do resting metabolic rate tests where you're breathing into a device to look at oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange to know exactly how many calories your body burns at rest. But if we want to kind of keep this kind of something that we can easily main manage on a daily basis, I'm usually kind of thinking the, the average region should be targeting between a minimum 100 to 120, maybe in some 140 grams of protein, depending on the activity level. Right. That's going to go a little bit counter towards conventional nutritional wisdom, but that is definitely what I've seen lead to results, especially when you're trying to shift body composition while in a GLP one. Right. And ultimately the pattern I'm looking for is there's at least an equal amount of muscle as there is body fat, assuming that we get body fat into a healthy range. Ideally, I would like for there to be more muscle relative to body fat when it comes to your overall weight. So that's the pattern I'm ultimately after. I think that's the, that is what gives you a lot of metabolic flexibility in your 40s and 50s and 60s. And that's what allows you to have that 80, 20 lifestyle, right, where you maybe get, enjoy a glass of wine or two over the weekend, or you can go on vacation and not get disrailed and you can come back and lock into doing the right things. And you're not, you know, totally, you know, digging out of a hole because you, you've, you've built that metabolic flexibility. And most of that metabolic flexibility comes from muscle mass. And I think what a lot of people don't understand is that the more muscle you have, or, you know, muscle versus fat, it allows you to burn fat regardless to what you're doing, whether you're sitting on the couch watching binge watching Netflix or you're running or at the gym and pumping iron, you're burning fat, doing. You're constantly, you're a fat burning machine. The more muscle you have. A lot of that I think gets that. I love that point. Right. And that's, it's a, it's one of the best things about muscle mass. But the other thing I think is fantastic about muscle mass that relates to our earlier conversation today is the more muscle mass you have, the healthy and stronger your mitochondrial cells are. Right. So you also kind of get that protection around from that burnout. Right. You can push your body beyond its limits. But if you have healthy mitochondria and one of the things that stimulates healthy mitochondria is regular exercise, then you kind of give yourself more buffer from that burnout as well, in addition to burning more calories at rest. I tell my patients all the time, muscle is the currency of aging. It is, it certainly is. And I think that, I think for women, one of the things that we fear is that we might end up looking like a man and that the more muscle we get. And I don't really think that will ever happen naturally. Naturally, yes. So I mean, some women are genetically, you know, just kind of blessed with more of these muscle fiber types that have the ability to kind of grow, but yet usually you have to unnaturally kind of stimulate to kind of end up getting, getting that physique. And that's the thing that I see all the time. And you know, I'll. That's probably the conversation that comes up most frequently when you're talking about hormones and you're broaching the conversation of testosterone. Right. That's where, you know, you're talking about lifting lots of weights. I think luckily, now, enough. There's enough dialogue out there, all right? There's enough conversation, social media, that we know that just lifting weights will not end up turning you into kind of a, a manly figure. But where I still see that kind of come up is, hey, I. I really think in this perimenopause transition, you might benefit from a little bit of testosterone replacement, depending on the individual. Not everyone does. But if we've addressed all those foundational issues and those testosterone levels are kind of on the low end of the normal range, and we're having a hard time recovering from exercise, or we're having a hard time losing that body fat, and you're seeing that skinny. The skinny fat composition on a bonded composition scale, then things like testosterone can be very helpful for supporting that lean muscle mass without going into a manly figure. Yeah. And I think another thing that's important about lifting weights for, at least for women in menopause or perimenopause is that we need that, because as our hormones shift, our bones start to deteriorate, and we need that muscle to protect our bones. I mean, the body works off this concept of stress adaptation. Right. That's just one of the foundational benefits to exercise. And in this case, you're stressing the bones. Right. You're creating stress on that bones, and the bones adapt to that stress by producing more bone tissues, more activates acid class osteoblasts, and that kind of the science pattern stuff. Right. But it makes the bone stronger, more dense, because you're putting a stress on that from doing that exercise. And it goes beyond bone. Right. The other B word, brain. Right. Muscle activates neurotropic factors in the brain to support neurogenesis, to support, you know, neuron protection and growth. And so you kind of have this prevention of cognitive decline as a result of muscle mass as well. Yeah. And I think that's very important, especially in today's age where we're seeing a lot of younger people. You know, 40s. You know, when I say younger, I mean early 40s that are being diagnosed with cognitive issues and take a lot. They can take on for a lot of different reasons. Right. We definitely know there's a strong connection between the shifts and change in estrogen and the impact on the brain. That's probably one of the more common things we see starting to happen. Right. But underneath the surface, there can be a wide range of other things leading to that cognitive decline that goes beyond just brain fog. That goes beyond just walking into a room and kind of forgetting why you were there. We can all have those moments. It's just the frequency and how often those sorts of happens was when they come more concerning and there are more tests you can do for pattern decline. And looking at that, some of the other patterns I will see outside those hormonal changes, when we haven't talked about today, can be toxic burdens, especially in the full form of mycotoxins or mold. Right. It's estimated that 50% of commercial residential buildings have molded in them. That's a pretty shocking number. Right. And that has a pretty profound impact on, on the brain. Right. If you're walking around with that and that's accumulating year after year after year and creating inflammation within the brain, and then you layer on top of hormones declining estrogen deficiency, you start to kind of magnify that impact. So there can be a lot of other things that really need to kind of go beyond those normal labs to take a look at. Yeah. In fact, I had, last year I had a mold expert on the show and what he shared with me was so scary about the mold we can't see. So, you know, we look around our house and we're like, oh, everything looks fine. And so we don't even tap into. Could that be a possibility? You know, could that be the root problem? So that's pretty scary. Dr. Haas, for the woman who is listening right now, listening or watching right now, who says, I did go to my doctor, my labs did come back perfect or my diagnostic testing did come back perfect, I am active mentally and physically, I eat clean, but I got have all these problems and I don't know where to go for answers. What can she do right now to start getting answers and start feeling like she did when she was 20? One, I think the most important thing there is trusting what you're feeling and advocating for yourself. Right. So do not let somebody kind of dismiss that. Right. Because to me that is very much a signal that we haven't uncovered exactly what's. What's driving you not feeling like yourself. Right. What is, what is driving that brain fog? What is driving that weight gain? What is driving the disrupted sleep? And we may need to dig further. Right. And so that as I talked about earlier, one resources, you know, doing some direct consumer lab testing like function health or searching for a integrative or functionally medicine trained physician in an area for you to dig further, to look further to find what the root cause of these symptoms are. If everything is quote unquote normal because you're feeling something quite the contrary and listening and advocating for yourself and searching for that, I think is probably the thing I would recommend. Because usually we just haven't found the pattern or uncovered what is causing you not to feel like yourself. And you're in North Carolina. Do you only work with patients face-to-face, or do you also work with patients? Do you do telemed? I have a hybrid approach. Most of my patients will establish in person, you know, and that is due to a variety of reasons. Mostly because the way I have built my practice is very heavily around doing some of these advanced and diagnostic testing and then doing some interventions, some advanced interventions alongside of that. We spent a lot of time talking about kind of foundational tools today. But some of the advanced tools that can really start to move the needle and shift how you feel very quickly. And a broad toolbox there. Everything from therapeutic plasma exchange to ozone to hyperbaric oxygen, things that definitely require in person therapies, kind of sometimes will start that foundation of that healing process. Right. And one of the core tenants to my approach in optimizing cellular health is addressing detoxification. Plasma exchange is a great tool for that. Ozone can be a great tool for that. And so there's a kind of this hybrid approach of where usually patients will come in. We'll do an advanced battery of tests, depending on what their symptoms are. Not everyone gets the same kind of testing when they come, but usually there's some sort of diagnostic testing to identify what areas of dysfunction under the surface. And then from there, a lot of times we can continue remote. And I have patients that come in from all over the country and even outside the country. People from the Dominican Republic and people from even China. But most of my patients, I'd say 60% of them are definitely in the Charlotte metropolitan area, but another 40% come in once or twice a year, once a quarter. We kind of touch base in person, do some of these therapies, and then continue their care remotely. And just this thought just came up because I know that when you take drugs, like, you know, something for, like, let's say you have high blood pressure or high cortisol or not cortisol, cholesterol, you could start to feel results right away, maybe as opposed to when you start taking more of a natural approach or holistic approach that takes a little bit longer working with you or using the modalities you talked about. How soon can a person start to feel different, know that they're on the right track? I'd say in the beginning, there's some tools that you're going to notice that fairly quickly within two or three days. Right. But my general goal is I'm looking for about a 90 day period of time where I can really start to make changes at a cellular level and those changes start to stick and stay. So it's usually, I mean everybody's different and what we're treating can be different. Some cases can be more complex than than others. Right. Long Covid going to be very different than somebody just kind of going through the perimenopause change that is doing everything right and is pretty much normal on paper. But 90 days is kind of what I'm after. Great. Where can people learn more about you and VYVE health or wellness? Yeah. So simply go into vyvewellness.com v y v e wellness.com/get-started and there is a place to do a a little kind of survey for a free complimentary discovery call if you're interested. A little bit more on our homepage as well, just below the the fold you'll see our cellular health optimization quiz where you can kind of start to ascertain what part of kind of your cellular health foundation may be off and how we can kind of start addressing that. That sounds great. And I will say you have a beautiful website. Love it. Thank you. Yeah. Dr. Haas, thank you so much for coming on the show. I will include all of your information in the show notes so that people can start to feel like they did back in their 20s or maybe even better because some people didn't feel so well in their 20s. Wonderful. All right. Thank you very much. Okay, so you've been told your labs are normal, but your body is basically waving a giant red flag. You're not imagining it and you're not alone. Here's what I'm taking from Dr. Haas. Don't let normal be the end of the conversation. Trust what you are feeling, advocate for yourself and zoom out. Sometimes it's not one magic answer. It's a pattern sleep that is suddenly broken. That wired but exhausted feeling, brain fog, stubborn weight gain, under recovery, under fueling, and stress psychology running the show and instead of pushing harder, the shift is smarter. Protect your sleep. Build recovery, strength train, and zone two. Prioritize protein and track something real like HRV so you can see burnout coming before it body slams you. And if GLP1s are part of your plan, the goal isn't weight loss, it's body composition. So you keep muscle and don't wreck your metabolism in the process. Also, I'm saying the evening blue light glasses might look a little ridiculous, but waking up at 3am feeling like a raccoon with anxiety is so not the vibe. If you want to learn more about Dr. Will Haas or move forward with a discovery call, head on over to createthebestme.com/ep168 or you can find the links below in the show notes. If this episode helped you, please like, subscribe and share it with a friend who keeps being told everything looks fine while she's there barely holding it together. And don't forget to come back next week for another amazing episode created just for you. Until then, keep dreaming big, take care of yourself, and remember you are beautiful, strong, and capable of creating the best version of yourself. Thank you for watching. Catch you next week. Bye for now.