Whole Body Whole Mind Approach To Microbes And Mental Health

Diane Mueller​, ND, DAOM, LAc

Hey everybody Dr. Diane Mueller here, your co-host for the Microbes and Mental Health Summit and I want to welcome you to this quick presentation on a whole body approach to microbes and mental health. But before I go into that I want to take a moment to tell you to take a deep breath, settle into whatever you’re doing. And the reason I’m asking you to do that right now is because hopefully you’re finishing up watching a great day of the summit talks and if you’re anything like I am sometimes at the end of a full day we can feel our adrenaline running, we can feel our cortisol running and beyond stress. Right? So most of us know that stress can be problematic to health, especially our relationship to stress, but to tie it into our topic, one of the things that we see with certain microorganisms like Lyme disease is one of them. And the bacteria borrelia that causes Lyme disease is that when we have extra adrenaline pumping through our veins pumping through our system that can actually increase the biofilms of the microorganisms. 

So the biofilms are these typically these carbohydrate protein matrix is that will surround microorganisms and biofilms were actually protect the microorganisms from our immune system attacking the microorganisms. So it’s a self preservation mechanism. But a lot of people don’t realize that biofilms also help with the cell to cell communication of these microorganisms. So if we have multiple microorganisms running all over our body, they’re going to be talking and communicating to each other and these biofilms are part of how they do that. Now when we have stress in our body, we have adrenaline in our body at higher levels. That actually increases the biofilm formation of a lot of these negative pathogens. So part of introducing the topic today is to invite you to just whatever you’re doing to see if you can relax a little more into it, if you’re driving and listening to those, you know, pay attention to the road, but if you’re so sitting and you’re able to relax, definitely relax into your chair, see if you can relax deeper into your body, even if you’re moving, take a couple deep breaths. 

Because really keeping your adrenaline down will help not only with mental health because it will help with lowering stress, but it’ll also help with cell to cell communication of these biofilms. So it’s super, super important. So I want to talk a little bit about some of the things we see around connectivity. Right? So a whole body approach to microbes and mental health. One of the things that can sometimes happen when we are totally inundated with so much great information is sometimes we can leave some, it’s like this and feel like oh my gosh I have to implement everything or we can have the opposite thing happen where it’s like, oh this one thing, this one thing has to be the root cause of everything. And I want to invite you if you’re thinking either one of those ways to really think about this whole process of microbes and mental health and getting to the root cause really think about this whole process as usually it’s a both. And so 99.9% of the time, what I see in my clinical practice is that it’s not one root cause that that people, if we have say, a mental health imbalance, right, Whether it’s by polarization, depression, anxiety or something else going on, mental health wise, if there’s an imbalance, it’s coming from multiple factors in the body and multiple factors in the mind that both the mind and the body play a role in this. 

And the other thing is we can get stuck in these vicious cycles where the mind and body play on each other. So when we feel bad in our bodies and we have inflammation in the body, inflammation gets into the brain. Well, that can actually change the chemicals that gets created. And one of the talks, you’ll hear me do later on this week, you’ll hear me talk a little bit about dopamine and the IMF packs of inflammation on the brain and dopamine release and when dopamine release gets dis regulated, we get out of balance. We can get things like anxiety for for example, so we really want to take a step back when we’re listening to this material and say, okay, this is whole body, this whole mind. A lot of the different root causes that are really talked about in this particular week can be a, can be all potential root causes of what’s going on, or it could be a myriad of a few of them. 

So that’s one of the biggest things to orient to now from the whole mind perspective. Another thing to just make people aware of is the research on stress. So one of my favorite studies on stress is done with mental arithmetic and putting people on stage. And so this study will look and I’ll put people on stage and I’ll have them do all of this like mental arithmetic on the on the fly and it’s in front of this real disgruntled audience, audience that’s like scowling at them and you know, that audience that’s giving that feel of like I’m gonna throw things at you, you know, tomato in your face kind of thing. So when we’re dealing and when the study is looking at people in these situations, what is actually, the study is really cool because what it would do is it would actually measure stress hormones throughout the course of the study. And one of the things that was asking people that the study researchers were asking people is when they would measure the hormones throughout the stress inducing activities. They would also ask the participants to say what they were thinking about at that time and what they found with the study found is that the stress response and the heightened level of the stress response depended more upon the thought that was going on than about the activity itself. So for example, if somebody’s on stage and they have to do this mental arithmetic and they’re thinking about it’s not big of a deal, it’s just this research. I’m going to go play with my kid later. It’s no big deal. Whatever. 

If I mess up, who cares, I’m not going to ever see these people again. Right? So let’s say somebody’s thinking that when they’re on stage now we have another person on stage and maybe it’s reminding them of a trauma from their childhood when they were on stage in front of their classmates and they got totally laughed at and it’s really triggering and all they’re thinking up there is I’m gonna fail again, It’s happening again. I’m gonna fail, right? So, you can probably guess with this study taught or the study illustrated. And what the study illustrated is there was a direct relationship with the thoughts that were happening more so than the activity. That was a stress inducing activity. So what this tells us is that our thoughts really, really make a difference in stress hormones in the sea secretion of heightened amount of our stress hormones that two people or multiple group of people can all experience the same stressor and some of them can come out further ahead than others now, I don’t want to be careful, I’m always super careful on these topics when I talk about them to make sure that this isn’t coming across anyway where we’re going to internally gaslight ourselves. 

Gaslighting last year I guess was the most looked up word in the dictionary last year and gaslighting is a really important topic. So when we’re dealing with mental health stuff and we’re dealing with imbalances, we’re dealing with things like stress. We want to be very, very careful about not gaslighting ourselves while we’re looking to change our thoughts. Right? So we want to be very careful for feeling, feeling anxious and scared about being on stage about acknowledging that that’s coming from our body, trying to protect ourselves that our is coming from maybe a trauma that’s not totally healed? We don’t want to make it bad to have these emotions. We just also want to bring in additional thoughts that will help the stress response come down. So an example could be in this research study say somebody was feeling stressed about the whole process perhaps and again, you know, this is always on a case by case basis, but perhaps an internal thought of, wow, this is gonna be an interesting experience and I’m going to just look at this as an interesting experience or maybe I’ll learn something out of it. Is there some other way we can bring in a different element of thought, not making the thoughts or emotions bad or wrong or problematic. 

None of that. But what else can we bring in so that we’re not gaslighting ourselves. But we’re adding something of value to our nervous system to help our nervous system not hit that same sort of heightened stress response and calm down. And so the idea of that is getting people out of this vicious cycle. Remember we’re talking about whole body, whole mind approach to microbes right and mental health. So one of the things that can happen, like I said, is we have these microorganisms and so these microorganisms, this is a vicious cycle. I see the microorganisms caused neuro inflammation. The brain is inflamed, the body gets in front flame. We might feel horrible in our mind, we might feel horrible in our body when that happens what happens next? Well, most of us start thinking about it. The brain is very oriented to help us look for what’s wrong because the brain is helping us try to survive and if the brain is looking and saying, oh this needs to be fixed, this needs to be fixed, This is needs to be fixed. That’s actually the brain doing its job to help us survive and thrive. So the brain is oriented, looking for what’s wrong. So if we have pain in our body, we have inflammation in our brain, we have all sorts of imbalances in the brain is looking at this and saying problem here. Problem here. Problem here. Problem here. Guess what? That can increase though? 

That epinephrine, that adrenaline stress hormone level that can make the biofilms of the microorganisms communicate better with each other when they communicate better with each other. Guess what? They grow faster. They avoid our immune system faster, all of these things. Then we get more in flames, more Nauru in flames in our brain. And when that happens then the vicious thought cycle continues. So the whole body approach is really looking to say, okay, well what can we begin to do from a thinking thought emotional perspective to try to work with our brain to the best of its capacity while we’re inflamed. And then what can we also do from the body perspective to figure out what is going on in the body. And for most people, I find that it’s a combination of so many things you’re gonna hear over and over throughout this week. It’s a combination of needing to sleep better and doing sleep hygiene things. It’s a combination of wanting to make sure the glymphatic system that trash clearing cycle of our brain gets activated when we’re sleeping. 

It’s needing to make sure the lymphatic systems working in our body to help clean out the trash. It’s looking for dysfunction in our gut, right? Because small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, hidden parasites. There’s really not test on the market that are testing well for every parasite available. There’s some great test there but there’s also a chance that parasites are gonna show up on a test parasites can burrow deep in our tissues and may not show up on some of our laboratory tests. So it’s good to do the test, definitely recommend doing the test. But we also want to consider things like chronic hidden parasites not showing up on the test. So things that inflame our gut can really impact our immune system, our microbiome, our nervous system even. And we want to make sure that we’re considering the good microbiome of our body, the good microbiome on our gut of our sinuses of our skin. We have microbiome all throughout our body. We want to make sure that we’re considering hormone imbalances because hormone imbalances can play a big role in some of this. You’ll hear from some of our speakers this week on some of the problems with hormone imbalances and actually creating inflammation and creating imbalances in the brain and the brain system. We want to make sure hormones like thyroid and sex hormones and adrenal hormones are all balanced. We want to look for any toxins and chronic infections and look at cholesterol. You’ll hear from me later this week, talk about how cholesterol elevations will lead to leaky brain and we get leaky brain. We get some of these toxins into our brain that aren’t supposed to be there. Right. So there’s just this myriad of interplay of all of these different parts of our body and so and and our brain and our mind. So really when you’re listening to everything this week, make sure you are considering this, that you really try not to be reductionist, IQ, that you really look at. Wow, there’s a lot of these different things that we’re going to present to you that really could be part of your healing picture and your healing process, and it’s probably not going to be just one thing. So make sure you’re really considering that again, I’m Dr. Diane Mueller, the founder of MyLymeDoc Clinic treating functional medicine problems of all kinds and I hope you have a great and wonderful summit. You’ll see me throughout this and I look forward to seeing you soon.