E144 | Why Healing Stalls

Today's one of those things many people shy away from. It's confronting. It's a tough conversation. And it's necessary if you want to truly reclaim your health, ladies. We challenge the quick-fix mindset and map how stress, alcohol, and poor sleep blunt even the best protocols. Today, while Laken travelling, Lindsey shares a compassionate, science-backed path to reclaim agency through consistency, mindset shifts, and behavior change that creates real safety in the body.

• why acute-care medicine fails chronic issues
• how cortisol, insulin, thyroid, and inflammation interlock
• alcohol’s effect on sleep, estrogen clearance, and weight loss
• sleep as daily therapy and progress multiplier
• nocebo, belief, and the biology of expectation
• identity, coping habits, and nervous system safety
• consistency over intensity for lasting change
• why coaching supports behavior, not just knowledge
• questions to audit resistance and reclaim ownership

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Transcript

Setting The Stage For A Hard Truth

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Any views, thoughts, and opinions expressed on the Rejuvenating Health podcast are solely those of the speakers and are intended as such. Please consult your trusted healthcare practitioner for medical advice. Let's go, girls. Hey ladies, welcome back to the Rejuvenating Health Podcast. I'm Lindsay, your nurse practitioner and host, and today we're doing a little solo cast. Lakin is traveling, so it's just me. Um, but I want to kind of have a conversation that maybe no one wants, but everyone needs. So I want to have a conversation today that I think a lot of people avoid because it's uncomfortable. And so this episode is not about the newest medication or the best supplement or the perfect protocol or the next big trend or us yakking at you about your cortisol and your insulin and your hormones and sleep and stress and all of that stuff. It's an episode about why healing doesn't happen, right? Even when you're doing all the right things, because I unfortunately do see this consistently happen in clinical practice, both inside rejuvenating health and inside of my patients that I work with outside of rejuvenating health, right? You go see your clinician, you invest in a program, you get the perfect hormone plan, thyroid plan, you start the hormones, you take the GLP ones, you get the labs run, and you do all of this, and you still don't feel better. Or you still don't lose weight, or you still don't get the goal, whatever that goal was that you're trying to achieve, right? And the reason isn't lack of access, right? You've paid, you've used your insurance, you've seen your doctor, you've invested your time and energy. It isn't lack of information. You have the labs, the data, um, the research, the education, right? It's oftentimes a mindset problem paired with a behavior problem. And those two things are inseparable from physiology, right? And it's not that you're doing anything wrong. I want to preface that. It's that a lot of times the medical model that we all know has failed us, right? So let's kind of start with how most of us are trained to think about health. The conventional medical model, the model that I learned in school, the model that your doctors learn in school, the model that you go to seek care, it teaches, diagnose, prescribe, manage symptoms, right? And it follows algorithms. And you have this blood pressure, you use this medication, you follow, you follow these steps, right? And that model is super good at acute care. That model is great if you're going in with a stroke and a heart attack, and you have some acute issue. You you get in a car wreck, right? But where it fails completely is chronic disease. That molecle is terrible at chronic disease because chronic disease is not created by a single missing medication. It's not created by a single anything, right? It's created by chronic stress, chronic inflammation, chronic sleep deprivation, chronic blood sugar dysregulation, chronic emotional overload. And yet we all think or we all expect to come in expecting one single intervention to override years of issues, years of biology, years of dysregulation. And that's not how the human body works, right? You cannot out-medicate, out-supplement, out-breath work, out-biohack, out anything, a dysregulated nervous system. And so you need to kind of understand the physiology of this for a second, right? If you are sleeping five to six hours a night, drinking alcohol regularly, yes, every weekend, one like regularly means you're having one to two drinks weekly, right? I get it, you think it's not that big of a deal, but once you hit 35 plus, if you're drinking regularly, it wrecks your nervous system. If you're living in a constant state of stress, if you're never allowing your body to rest, if you're always just on, on alert, on it, you're never just downregulating. Your nervous system is in sympathetic dominance, which means our favorite word, cortisol, is chronically elevated, which causes increased insulin resistance, which suppresses your thyroid conversion, that conversion of T4 to T3 and it elevates your reverse T3. It impairs your progesterone production. So you're not sleeping well and you're getting estrogen dominance. It increases your inflammatory markers. So you can take hormones and you can take GLP1s and you can take supplements, but if all these things are dysregulated, your body is literally prioritizing survival. Doesn't give a crap if you're not losing weight, doesn't care if you're not healing, right? Survival does not care about energy, optimal hormones, or weight loss. It just doesn't. And if we're constantly putting toxins in our body, alcohol is a toxin. And this might trigger some people and it might bother you. And it it there's nothing wrong with drinking alcohol. Let me preface that. But if you have goals and you want to feel better and you want to lose weight, it's something that you're gonna have to give up. Alcohol, even just one glass of wine is a week, is not neutral. From a physiological standpoint, alcohol increases your cortisol. It disrupts your REM, your deep sleep. It impairs your liver detoxification, it worsens estrogen clearance because that goes through your liver. And yet, I'll see patients all the time who want better hormones, more energy, weight loss, better sleep, and they won't give up their alcohol. And there's nothing, I'm not trying to bash you, okay? But there's biochemistry, and you can't ask your liver to detox hormones efficiently while also asking it to process alcohol. And at some point, something is gonna have to give. You're gonna have to decide if drinking that alcohol is worth maybe holding on to some extra weight or having some hot flashes or not feeling your best. You cannot be optimal and feel your best and still drink alcohol. Unfortunately. I I wish that wasn't the case, and I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it is what it is, right? You also have to sleep. Sleep is not a medical intervention, it's not optional. Like, we can't treat sleep like medical therapy, right? But from a science perspective, sleep is therapy. It is a it is a medical intervention because when you sleep, growth hormone is released, insulin sensitivity improves, your cortisol resets, your lymphatic system clears neurotoxins during sleep. So when you're not sleeping, I mean you're getting less than seven to eight hours a night, even just one night, you're raising inflammatory markers, you're increasing your appetite hormones, you're worsening anxiety and depression, you're increasing insulin resistance. So when someone tells me, you know, I'm on hormones, but I'm still exhausted, I'm on a GLP one, but my weight has stalled, I'm taking supplements, but nothing is working. One of the first questions I ask is, are you sleeping? Because none of these interventions are gonna work if you're not getting rest. And this is a huge hindrance in shift workers. Um, and I know sometimes you can't do anything about your career and your job, but it is harder to get optimized if you're if you're having sleep disruptions, right? And a lot of this goes back to your mindset and the way that you think about stuff, right? I don't want to talk about like fluffy woo-woo mindset stuff, but there isn't really, there's very, very, very real science behind belief and healing. So if you go into something expecting something negative, I'm not gonna, this isn't gonna work. I've tried everything. I'm just stuck being this way forever. Studies have shown that negative expectations increase your pain perception, worsen inflammatory responses, they reduce treatment. Like this is called a nocebo effect, opposite of the placebo effect. And the placebo effect works. So expect, like, I've seen the placebo effect to work, so I don't know why people can't wrap their head around the reverse working, right? So if you truly believe my body is broken, nothing works for me, this isn't going to help either. Your brain activates stress pathways, your stress hormones go up, your inflammation goes up, your healing capacity goes down, your thoughts, the stuff that goes through your head is not separate from your physiology. There's biochemical signals in all of it, right? And it's hard. It's hard to change that mindset because you're tired and you're frustrated and you've tried all of these things, okay? And this is where I want to be very clear. I know most of you are not failing because you're lazy or because you weren't trying. No one is saying that. You fail because change threatens your identity. Your old habits feel safe. Truly healing requires a lot of discomfort. Letting go of coping mechanisms like your alcohol is super hard. Food, alcohol, busyness, overworking, these are often nervous system regulators, even if they're unhealthy. I will be the first one to admit I overwork and I'm go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, because it's a coping mechanism for me. And it's a nervous system dysregulator. Even if it's, I don't think it's unhealthy. It is, right? So when we ask someone to change these things, I know we're not asking you to just change behavior. I know that we're asking you to find a new way to feel safe, and that is super hard, right? It's hard, and I acknowledge that. But you need to know that just because that you have to do these things, right? Just because you pay for a program or you hire a coach or you get on a medication, it's not the same as doing the work. And this is one of the hardest truths, and you really need to look inside yourself. You cannot outsource healing. You can buy a program, you can buy a protocol, you can buy a health coach, you can buy a provider, you can do all of these things, but you still have to be open to change and getting uncomfortable. You still have to be open to eating differently, to managing stress, to setting boundaries, to showing up consistently, to maybe even getting worse before you get better. Oh my God, right? If you've been eating a thousand calories, I'm gonna ask you to eat more. And you know what? You might gain some weight at first. But what you're doing right now isn't working. So you need to trust the process and let the experts that you paid do their work, right? And healing is participatory, right? You have to be an active participant, and the people who get results are not the ones that have the perfect plan. They're not the ones that execute 100%. They're the ones who are open and willing to change, right? And they're the ones that are consistent. So from a physiological standpoint, consistency matters more than anything. It matters more than intensity, right? Hormones respond to repeated signals, to stable routines, to predictable inputs, not extremes. Not on track Monday through Thursday and chaos through the weekend. Like your body doesn't reset weekly, it responds to patterns and consistency, right? And so this is why coaching matters so much because knowing what to do and knowing all of these things is not the same as doing it, right? When you have a health coach or you have someone in your corner, they're addressing these mindset difficulties, these shifts, these challenges that you're having. They're supporting you in behavior change, they're helping you build nervous system safety, they're helping you create sustainable routines. Medicine without behavior change is incomplete care. And that's why you see so many people diving into functional medicine and um lifestyle medicine and all of these things because we're starting to finally realize that medicine without behavior change isn't the answer. And we're starting to realize that healing requires some ownership. At some point, healing asks yourself to stop negotiating with yourself. It asks you to say, I'm here, I'm willing to change. I'm willing to get a little bit uncomfortable. I'm willing to let go of habits that no longer serve me. I'm willing to trust the process. And that is not punishment, that's empowerment. It's if you can do these things, there's so much empowerment in it. So, the question that you need to ask yourself if you're listening to this and you're not seeing results, really ask yourself these things. Where am I resisting change? Where in my life am I resisting change? I can tell you right now, I resist change and busyness. I resist sitting still, right? What am I holding on to? Like what what purpose? So for me, what purpose is that busyness doing for me? What am I expecting someone else to fix? Because no one else is gonna fix this for you, right? Because the moment you shift your mindset, the moment you change your mindset on these things, your biology is gonna follow and you're gonna have healing. But healing, it requires more than medicine. It requires you showing up daily for yourself and you doing the hard things. So if this resonated with you, hopefully it didn't make you angry. That's never my goal. My I know that sometimes I might come off blunt, and my goal every time I communicate with anyone is to just be real, right? To never lie, to never tell you some false story, to never do anything, but just be real with you. I'm not gonna sugarcoat it because I don't think that that helps, but there's always compassion in it, right? So share this with someone who's struggling, who's maybe having trouble allowing themselves to heal, right? And next week we'll be back to normal programming. But this was on my heart, and I felt like I needed to share it with all of you guys. So like, share, give us a five star review, and we'll see you next week.