Beyond Psychology: Understanding Burnout as a Bioenergetic Challenge with Dr. Jess Amine

The discourse presented in this episode centers on a pivotal reexamination of the concept of burnout, positing that it is not primarily a psychological affliction but rather a bioenergetic one. In our exploration, we delve into the intricate interplay between the mitochondrial health, neurochemical balance, and inflammatory states that contribute to chronic fatigue and burnout. Our esteemed guest, Dr. Jess Amine, a distinguished practitioner in functional medicine, elucidates the multifactorial nature of these conditions, emphasizing that conventional psychological interventions alone may not suffice for those who remain mired in exhaustion despite diligent efforts to implement restorative practices. We engage in a thorough investigation into how cellular dysfunction and energy production deficits underlie the symptoms associated with burnout, thereby advocating for a paradigm shift in understanding and addressing this pervasive issue. This enlightening dialogue aims to empower listeners with insights into the foundational aspects of health that may facilitate a more effective approach to recovery and resilience.

The intricate discourse on burnout presented in this episode transcends the conventional understanding that frames it as a purely psychological ailment. The conversation delves deeply into the multifaceted nature of burnout, where it is posited that the roots of this pervasive condition may lie far beyond the confines of mental strain and emotional fatigue. The esteemed guest, Dr. Jess Amine, a globally recognized functional medicine practitioner, articulates that burnout is fundamentally intertwined with bioenergetic dysfunction. It is elucidated that the symptoms of burnout often mirror those of oxidative stress, suggesting that the depletion of essential energy-producing mechanisms within the cells—specifically the mitochondria—plays a pivotal role in the onset of chronic fatigue and malaise. Dr. Amine's clinical observations emphasize that many individuals, despite engaging in various psychological interventions and self-care practices, continue to languish in a state of exhaustion due to a lack of attention to the underlying biological and cellular dysfunctions affecting their health. Dr. Amine further elaborates on the interconnectedness of the nervous, endocrine, and immune systems, collectively known as neuroendoimmunology. He elucidates how dysfunction in one system can precipitate a cascade of imbalances across all three, ultimately manifesting as symptoms of burnout. By drawing upon a wealth of clinical experience spanning decades, he advocates for a holistic approach to treatment—one that prioritizes cellular health and the restoration of energy production as foundational steps in the healing process. This episode invites listeners to reconsider their understanding of burnout, urging them to explore the biological underpinnings that may be contributing to their chronic fatigue, thereby shedding light on the path to recovery through targeted interventions aimed at enhancing cellular function and energy levels.

Takeaways:

• The discussion around burnout predominantly centers on psychological factors, yet there is a necessity to consider physiological aspects as well.
• It is imperative to recognize that burnout may not solely stem from psychological issues but could be fundamentally a bioenergetic concern.
• Addressing burnout effectively requires a comprehensive understanding of cellular function and energy production within the body.
• The interrelationship between the nervous, endocrine, and immune systems significantly influences overall health and the experience of burnout.

Links referenced in this episode:

• drjsarmine.com
• dr.jessarmine
• youtube.com/dr.jessarmine
• instagram.com/dr.jessonline724

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Dr. Jess Amine
• Dr. Joe Sa
• Dr. Robert Navio

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Transcript

Understanding Burnout: Beyond the Surface

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Dear listeners, the burnout conversation has been almost I mean entirely psychological. We talk about stress, we talk about boundaries, we talk about mindset. We tell people to rest more, to reframe their thinking, and to find meaning in their work. And people cry, they do the journaling, they take the breaks, they see the therapist, and they are still exhausted, still foggy, still unable to access the clarity or drive that used to feel effortless. So the question comes, I believe all of you are also thinking about it. Like, what if that's not because the psychological tools are not working? What if it's because burnout is not primarily a psychological problem at all? I think I have made all of you a bit confused. So let's not get confused. Today's guest is going to change how you think about your own energy permanently. So hey day listeners, welcome back to another powerful episode of Mind Meets Machine where we refuse to accept the surface level explanation when a deeper one is available. I'm your host, Evig, and I'm really glad that a lot of you are here today. And my guest today is a globally recognized functional medicine practitioner specializing in neuroendoimmunology, genetics, and mitochondrial health. So he addresses the complex multifactoriums through highly individualized root cause approaches. And his work helps patients restore the energy, resilience, and the function that when conventional care has run out of the answer. So by doing it. Let's get started and please welcome our guest, Dr. Jess Amain. Welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 1:43

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Amazing. Amazing.

SPEAKER_00 1:48

So, Dr. Jess, like before we get into the science, I want to ask about the clinical reality. Like in your practice, you work with people who have been often even even through the uh conventional systems without resolution. What does that patient typically look like when they first arrive?

SPEAKER_01 2:06

My practice is total made up of complex multifactorial illnesses. And the key is that has not that have not gotten help elsewhere. This, you know, the basic break is the way that things are looked at. You know, as your diagnosis, okay? Uh you're an OCD person, you're an ADD person, you have um chronic fatigue, you become that person rather than looking at not only root causes, but the combination of what started it to what led to the expression that whatever your diagnosis is. And let me tell you something, people most diagnoses are not diagnoses, okay? I know I'm gonna get it for this, but a diagnosis should point to a root cause. I'll give you an example. If you have a sore throat, that's a symptom. If you have strep throat, now I know why you have the sore throat. If you have OCD or anxiety or ADD, that's a list of symptoms. It doesn't tell me why. And unfortunately, taking it from that point of view and doing a pharmaceutical or nutraceutical protocol based on that has its, shall we say, difficulties because you're not shooting at the right target, okay? If we're going to talk about burnout,

Understanding Burnout: A Deeper Look into Root Causes

SPEAKER_01 3:15

okay, burnout, there's first off, I agree with you, it's not purely psychological, okay? As a matter of fact, the psychological portion comes after the problems happen as a result of the problems. It's a mitochondrial, neurochemical, inflammatory, and metabolic problem. What does that mean? Your mitochondria are your energy producers, like your batteries, okay, and whatever. Okay. And nothing heals without energy. Neurochemical simply means that neurochemical and inflammatory, you mentioned neuroendoimmunology. The way we balance ourselves is by a relationship between the nervous system, the hormone system, and the immune system, because they constantly talk to one another. And that talk, that crosstalk, is how we balance ourselves. But when one goes off rather significantly, then another one's going to go off, then the third one's going to go off. So when we talk about, let's say, somebody who's a high achiever, a high performer, they get burnt out because they've been working years and living on their stress hormones. By the way, there's not an inexhaustible supply of those. Okay? There's not an inexhaustible supply of your neurotransmitters that create your moods. They can burn out, which means they can get empty and become dysfunctional. You don't have what you need for nerve transmission or to create a normal mental state. Okay. So if we look at the underlying cellular dysfunction, okay, we can start looking at a reason and a pathway to healing. I've been doing, I've been a healthcare provider for about five decades, exactly five decades, as a matter of fact. And I've been, I've been a paramedic, I was a registered nurse, the emergency department in critical care, I've been a chiropractor, and I've been doing all this, and I'm certified in loads of different areas: genetics, the neuroenterogenology, mitochondrial dysfunction, and I could go on and on and on. But I don't want you shouldn't be impressed. I've got lots of stuff in my CV. But what you should be impressed with is the fact that I can put this together for you. When I started doing this, people would come to me with Hashimoto's thyroiditis, rheumatoid arthritis, autoimmune diseases, ADD, autisms, and all these varied things. And I start, you know, I interviewed people for a long time and said a good history. And I noticed there was one factor that was either not treated or not considered, or not treated with its proper weight, and that was the function of the cell itself. I called it fundamental treatment or foundational treatment, the foundation of the body. You may see that these days in something called terrain treatment or bioturain treatment. Okay. I invented it, so to speak. In other words, I got the I got the stuff together and I started beating my colleagues with, and they laughed at me for like decades. And then all of a sudden now you're seeing, hey, we've got to treat the cells. I'm like, okay, I wonder where you heard that before, you know. I don't hold on to my knowledge. I give it out freely because this has to change. There's no Dr. Jess method out there, okay? This, what I'm, you know, we're going to talk about is the way things, what is the stone left unturned, if you will. Okay? So because of different things like illnesses or toxins or microbes, or believe it or not, all the psychological, spiritual, and emotional traumas, okay, will injure a cell in equal measure, usually a combination of things. And when that starts happening, your mitochondria, your energy cells can't produce the energy. And the more you stress it over time, the more you stress whatever system over time, it's going to become dysfunctional. At first it'll overreact, and then all of a sudden it will just, if you will, give up the ghost. And when that happens, is when you start getting symptoms that appear to be different conditions. And yes, I mean there are inflammatory conditions. Why some people go to autoimmune, why do some people go to neuropsychiatric, that depends on your genetic predisposition. Your genes are not sitting there waiting in the tall grass to get you. Okay? The genes, the different pathways, which I'm a which I'm also an expert in, may or may not be fully functional, you know, if you look at them. Then you say to yourself, okay, if there's think of it as think of it as traffic, okay? Think of the the normal as being an eight-lane highway, something called the heterozygous gene being a four-lane highway, and homozygous being a two-lane highway. If there's no traffic, what's the big deal? Okay, everything will start working. But when you start putting traffic in, obviously the two-lane highway is gonna block up faster than the whole four-lane. And can you have enough traffic to block up an eight-lane highway? Absolutely. What's the traffic? And today the stress, and the toxins, and so forth and so on and so on. That's what causes wherever the glitches are, is the direction you're gonna head to have symptoms. If you think about it, if you go back to the cellular function, which is what originates all that, aren't you gonna start reversing some of this stuff? Either completely or at least partially. That's what I discovered. It was there. I mean, it's like physics. We don't discover physics, it's there. We're just catching up to the universe. You know, it's okay.

SPEAKER_00 7:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:56

Nevertheless, when I started looking at the cellular function, the foundation of the body, and started giving the body what it needed in an absorbable form, the body was saying, hey, okay, thank you very much. And it started rebuilding itself. I've got some great examples of how that happened. What the result was in very serious cases. So I would not only look at root causes like Lyme disease, and you know, I would look at different things that may have not been considered. And the way you find that out is by taking a good history. You can see where the glitches are, but what it did to the body and the expression of it, which is what everybody's worried about, chronic illness with the decline, and so on. That's the result of this stuff. Now, sometimes medications help mitigate, in other words, hold on to it, you know, so that doesn't get worse, but you still have to treat the inside. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:44

Very true. Yeah. And you know, here here I definitely would love to ask about burnout

Understanding Burnout: A Bioenergetic Perspective

SPEAKER_00 8:49

is uh bioenergetic. Like let's go to the right of the claim that I think will stop a lot of people uh mid-scroll that burnout is not psychological, it's bioenergetic. And that's a significant reframe, right? So I mean if we can share like what does that mean? I mean, what is the evidence base that makes you confident enough to say it directly?

SPEAKER_01 9:13

Burnout, the word burnout means fatigue, sometimes depression, sometimes and all those different symptoms can be from burnout. If you look at the list of symptoms for burnout, you're gonna see almost the same symptoms as oxidative stress or the same symptoms as a lot of other stuff. Clinically, burnout is a combination of maybe dopamine depletion, chondrial dysfunction, tidative stress, nervous system overload, chronic inflammation, stress adaptation. You can't outdiscipline a broken cellular energy production. So burnout is a lack of energy. So if we look at and this there's I could go through tons of scientific evidence and you're just gonna be, you're just gonna I'm just gonna confuse everybody. But you should one of the ways of doing this, if you're listening, is use your intuitive sense. If what I'm saying makes sense to you on a on an internal basis, I could, you know, if you go to my YouTube channel, which is Dr. Jess Armine, you're gonna see loads of videos on different things. Scientific evidence is there if you if you're very interested. I've written a paper recently that was published that, you know, it's very scientific about long COVID. But things that injure the cell, now, where's the scientific evidence for that? Dr. Robert Navio, MD PhD, wrote a paper in 2013, Features of a Cell Danger Response. What that is, is how your cells respond to an attack. And he divided into the things that he divided that will injure a cell that are proven on a scientific basis are toxins, which I don't think anybody would argue about toxins, microbes and parasites and viruses and so forth. But he also proved on a scientist on an acceptable scientific basis, a peer-reviewed scientific basis, that the emotional, psychological, and spiritual traumas that we face injure the cell in equal measure. There are studies that show that depression and anger will develop inflammation. It develops pro-inflammatory cytokines. When I when I say something fast, people ignore it. Okay? Please ignore it. Because how much you sit there and say, what the heck is a cytokine? It doesn't matter. Okay? What matters is that's what creates inflammation. But those emotions. Now, it also, way back in 1936, Hanselier posited and proved that if somebody is depressed, they caught colds easier. Okay. Depression and anger and anxiety dampen down the immune system and allow other things to come in. So there's a ton of scientific evidence. All we've done is unpack it so that we could look at the various functions. So if you have dopamine depletion, there's a two-phase thing. One, your enzymes that lead to dopamine may not be working very well because they don't have what they need to work. The base amino acids that create it, you may not be absorbing from your gut because you've got a bad gut. That's going to lead, and then you're overusing the dopamine because of a high stress environment. So eventually, if you're using it and you're not getting a lot, it's very logical. Your mitochondria need certain things to work, certain vitamins and minerals, but they also have to get these things called electron donors put in there that get rendered and create energy, which is ATP. What does that is how you get your energy. Glucose becomes lactic acid and goes into this big thing called the Krebs cycle, which is a hawking amount of biochemical processes that end up in the production of these electron donors, then coenzyme Q10 bring it to the mitochondria. Problems in that pathway, which is fairly common, means that you're not going to get enough electron donors. And this can all be from oxidative stress over time. The great example I give is when people have depression, doctors automatically put them on an SSRI, which is a seroton reuptake inhibitor. What does that do? It doesn't produce serotonin. In the nerves, there are synapses, okay? And in the in the nerve, you have these little storage houses of cold vesicles. Let's say serotonin is needed. So it goes down, releases some serotonin, goes over to the other side, goes on to the receptor, and after it delivers its message, it pops off and either hangs out with its buddies, gets broken down, or gets reabsorbed to be reused. Well, over time, when you have a lot of stress and you're using a lot of serotonin to combat dopamine, what's going to happen is eventually those little vesicles are going to start getting empty. At some point, they give you a reuptake inhibitor which temporarily holds on to more serotonin, but it does nothing for the production. And that's why those medicines fail. If we look at where the serotonin gets produced, which is in your gut, 80% of it, and we start extrapolating back and say, let's look at the gut and fix it, you have to be able to digest your foods to get the base amino acids, and that's what supplies the manufacturer. That's where the big divide is. Okay, we're going to treat this, we're going to, you know, hold on, we're going to treat the receptors, but there's nothing for the actual production. And that's what I've been preaching in the way that I practice is okay, you know, if you tell me your medicines, I'm going to, I can tell you exactly what's going on physiologically, but I'm going to fix your ability to digest your foods, to absorb your foods, to give your biochemical processes what they need to work, and also look at the causations and the downstream effects and treat them specifically in order to get the cell to work. Because remember, put cells together, what do you get? Tissues. Put tissues together, what do you get? Organs. Put organs together, you have a body. So if you don't look at it from the very base, people don't get better. This has been ubiquitous. In other words, very common in chronic illnesses that have not gotten, haven't gotten successful help elsewhere. And that's one of the ways of looking at it. Now it can get really, really, really uh really complex. If you go to like uh Google, Dr. Google is my my nemesis, by the way, to just put in chronic inflammation causes, and you'll see these little charts that show chronic inflammation causing things like autoimmune diseases, you know, but that's the base of it. Start bringing that down, giving your body what it needs to work. Many of these things go away. Maybe not completely, because it's it's even more complex. But everybody has to realize they're not broken. What you have is not permanent. You can get your body to work. And this is where my studies have been, I guess, like I said, very interactive. Uh because we're not separate systems, we're an interactive system. But it that's the base of it. If you work on the base, things often take care of themselves to a certain degree. It takes more than that, of course.

SPEAKER_00 15:36

Amazing. Amazing. And neuroendoimmunology, the nervous system, the endocrine system, and the immune system in conversation with each other. So, what is happening across those three systems in someone who presents with what looks like burnout, chronic fatigue, or I'd say persistent anxiety?

Understanding the Gut-Brain Connection

SPEAKER_01 15:56

Okay. Um, I did a lecture in Ireland on the gut brain axis and its relationship to neurodiversity, things like ATD, AD, HT, yeah, well, system. And just to give you one one leg of that, in the gut, there's signaling that goes on. Think of it as Morse code, okay, going back and forth. And because they constantly talk to one another, if the gut is dysfunctional, the normal signaling doesn't happen. And then in the nervous system, its receptors and signaling gets all off. And guess what? You start getting imbalances in the neurotransmitters which cause mood issues or, you know, mood disorders or thought disorders. So that's one aspect. Another aspect is looking at the endocrine system, the hormone system. And in there, you have the adrenal system, and that's called the HPA axis, the hypopatutary adrenal axis. And that's how you handle your stress. But in that, in that system is also the HPT axis, which is for thyroid, and the HPG axis for gonad or ovaries or testes for metal. One goes off there, and that whole system goes off. So think about this H and P are a stool, okay? And you had three legs, like they do when you're when you're milking cows, and stuff, three legs, and that's balancing almost anywhere. Well, you shorten the leg, make this one a little weird, okay, and that's gonna go off, and then all these other systems are gonna go off. The beginning of burnout when things start getting dysfunctional. Go into the other systems, immune system, and if this is causing, usually in the immune system, you're talking leaky gut syndrome and stuff, the origin of inflammation, and if it's not treated, the inflammation gets worse. Your body's using its energy, its resources to fight the inflammation and leaving less for you to repair, heal, and live your life. So the relationships are not all that complex. They can be pretty simple if you think about it. But when one starts going off and we allow that to happen because we're not feeling it or whatever, once it starts getting worse and worse and worse, you start getting symptoms, and then it's affecting other systems, and that's why it has to be looked at like a big picture thing. Okay? Concentrate on the mitochondria because it's how you produce energy. But fixing what you do to fix a cell is what we do to fix mitochondria, because they're basically a little cell within the cell. Actually, mitochondria is not native to our genome. It was a bacteria that invaded our cells during evolution. And the reason it liked us is because we produced lactic acid and it likes lactic acid. Okay. So we were giving it energy, and it said, okay, I'll hang out with you. The fact is that if you go through the whole system between glycolysis and all the way out, you get 38 ATPs per unit of glucose. But if you didn't have the mitochondrial function, you'd only get two ATPs per unit of glucose. Then your body would start screaming it wants more sugar, which would produce more acid. So it really gets, you know, it gets a little complex, but not much. And believe it or not, once things start going off, you start getting, you know, you start having feelings. You know, if you have depression for a reason, that's called situational depression, anxiety for a reason, that's situational anxiety. In other words, you break up with a significant other, you're going to be sad for a while, that's appropriate. But when you have these feelings for no identifiable reason, what you end up doing is backfilling in. In other words, filling something in there because you don't want to be crazy. And guess what? That becomes, you know, that keeps on going and going. Then you go to your physicians who are treating the end result. They're not treating why it happened or the pathway of it or what could be causing it now. You start thinking that way and people get better. So burnout is a multifactorial condition that is a result of long-term stress, of all ilk. Remember, if it's psychological stress that's going to injure the cell as well, chronic inflammation, and the failure of the body to adapt, it doesn't compensate. Up until we get sick, our body is compensating for whatever's going on. You don't even know what's going on. But once you enter a phase of decompensation, that's when you get symptoms. Our bodies are really cool. They're trying to adapt to everything. The reason that they may not adapt is because they don't have what they need to adapt. It's not a simple solution, but it is that conceptually it works.

SPEAKER_00 20:02

Amazing. And today for the listeners, if you have to give one advice, what that would be.

Understanding Chronic Illness and Healing

SPEAKER_01 20:15

I want you to step back, look at, look at everything that's gone on, and you feel like you've done everything, but maybe not. Maybe you can sit back and say, hmm. And once you get the idea that you can heal, you'll begin the process of healing. A lot of stuff really does require professional guidance. But the first thing you can do is take like liposomal multivitamins, which will get directly into your cells, and they're not expensive anymore. You can look at different ways of treating a leaky gut, which almost everybody who's got a chronic illness has. And if you treat it and happens not to be there, which is rare, but you're not going to hurt yourself because the treatment of it is very benign and will slow down the production of inflammation. A lot of this stuff is not is almost counterintuitive. It's almost too simple. That's why we had so much trouble with it. It doesn't have a fancy name, it doesn't have a sexy name. And what we look for is the complex or the protocol, the nice big fancy name with the with the good-looking doctor, you know, it's good to round glasses and stuff like that. But they forget the simple st the simple stuff. And when they do treat it, a lot of times they treat it either incompletely or without knowledge. In other words, here's a multivitamin. No, no thought to absorption. So if anything, I would tell you, you're not, you're not broken. If you're sitting up looking at me, you're fixable. It's just a matter of stepping back and saying, okay, let me do some research, let me contact somebody who may know what they're doing, you know, and get some counseling, not counseling, psychological counseling, but someone who can put all this stuff together. My tagline is putting the health puzzle together. Okay, and that's what I do.

SPEAKER_00 21:45

Amazing. And if someone wants to connect with you, what would be the great medium?

SPEAKER_01 21:49

Well it's easy. You can go to my website, which is drjessarmine.com. You can go to um to YouTube, Dr. Jess Armin, and you'll see lots of videos that explain a lot of this stuff. And if you want to uh join me on Instagram, uh Dr. Jess Online724, which is my bait which is my birthday. Uh if you wanted to have a conversation with me, if you go to my website on the bottom left-hand side, you can click get acquainted, which will allow you to schedule a free 30-minute consultation. What we do there is we sit down together and we chat and see what's going on, and I can tell you in no uncertain terms whether I can help you or not. And then I leave it up to you whether you want to work with me, okay? But we also want to see if we get along, okay, because everything is a relationship. A good relationship with your doctor, you're gonna start healing. Okay, see, it's a matter of trust. So that's how people can get in touch with me. Amazing.

SPEAKER_00 22:39

So, dear listeners, what I'll do is I'll put all the links and the details into the show notes for your easy reference. And with this, I'd say that's the wrap for today's episode on Mind Mate's Machine. And if this conversation named something that you have been living with but couldn't explain, the exhaustion, the fog, the loss of clarity or the purpose that didn't respond to the things that were supposed to help. So please take that seriously, and the answer may not be in your mind, it may be in your mitochondria. So, uh, as I mentioned, uh details will be there in the show notes. And if someone in your life has been burnt out without resolution, then this episode was made for them. With this hope, this is the host of week and this is Mind Meets Machine. Definitely have to say that energy is not a luxury, it's the foundation of everything, including the clarity, meaning, and the life that you came here to live. So take care of yourselves. See you next time. Thank you so much.