Being Hohl
This podcast is here to help you feel "Hohl" again. I’ll be sharing real stories, functional medicine tools, and holistic wellness practices to guide you back to your healthiest, most aligned self — in mind, body, and soul.
Being Hohl
Stress Resilience vs. Stress Management — Why the Difference Matters
Most of us have been taught to “manage” stress — go to yoga, take a deep breath, pour a glass of wine at night. But stress management only helps you cope after the fire has already started. True health begins with stress resilience: your body’s ability to respond to stressors, recover quickly, and return to balance on a cellular level.
In this episode, Dr. Dani Hohl, Doctor of Functional Medicine, breaks down the science behind stress resilience — from cortisol rhythms and vagus nerve regulation to immune function and blood sugar balance. She shares why most people are stuck in sympathetic overdrive, how that damages your health long-term, and what you can do to retrain your nervous system.
You’ll also hear about in-office therapies at Being Hohl — including red light vagus nerve therapy and the vibroacoustic bed — that directly support stress recovery and help your body remember what safety feels like.
What you’ll learn in this episode:
- The difference between stress management and stress resilience — and why it matters
- How stress impacts your hormones, immune system, and metabolism
- The role of the vagus nerve in regulating your stress response
- How innovative therapies like red light stimulation and vibroacoustic sound therapy accelerate recovery
- Simple steps you can take today to start building resilience at home
👉 Book a consult: [In-Person Link] | [Virtual Link]
Hi friends, welcome back to the being Whole podcast. I am your host, dr Dani Whole, board-certified doctor of functional medicine, and if you tuned in to the last episode, you know that I gave you a little update on everything that I've been building and where we are headed together. Today we are diving right into a topic that I keep seeing a need for in my wellness clinic, and that is stress, not just stress itself. I'm going to be talking about the difference between stress management and stress resilience and what to do, how stress affects your body, all of those things. So stress management and stress resiliency are not the same thing, and understanding the difference between those two can literally change your health trajectory.
Speaker 1:In my practice, stress is the foundation of what I do to help people, and when someone comes to me with autoimmune digestion issues, weight loss resilience or weight loss resistance anything any just they don't feel like themselves. The saliva kit that I use looks at how stress is impacting everything else in your body, and that's not just stress like yes, I'm stressed, no, I'm not right, like your body does not know the difference between good stress and bad stress. So we are looking at environmental stress, physical stress, mental, emotional, food stress, just all of the different things that can play a role in your everyday life, because here's the truth Stress is not avoidable, right. The way that your body handles stress, though, determines your health in life and your health journey. So, on a cellular level, your ability to recover from stress determines whether your cells repair, your hormones balance, your gut heals, your brain focuses, or whether everything stays stuck in survival mode. Stress resilience is the baseline. Everything else in your health and wellness journey is built on top of that. So all the supplements you're taking or may you know whatever may or may not be taking. If you're eating, you know you're paying extra for all organic foods. You're doing everything else right, but you're still seeing those struggles.
Speaker 1:I would bet 99.9% of the time the saliva test would show that your body is not handling stress appropriately. So when I say stress support, what comes to your mind? Usually it's things like going to yoga, doing some deep breath work or something before a meeting, maybe pouring a glass of wine at night to unwind. Those are what I would call stress management tools, because they help you cope after the stress has already hit. They can bring your central nervous system down in the moment, and that is not a bad thing, but here is the problem. If you're constantly managing stress after the fact, you're always playing catch up right You're always behind your body's stress curve. That's when people notice burnout. Their hormones are collapsing, which looks like hair loss. Skin is not necessarily as vibrant and clear. It can cause acne. You might be noticing weight gain. I've seen people that are on GLP-1s and they are not losing any weight because their stress is so out of whack that it is literally preventing them from losing weight. Those people typically end up in my office wondering why they're exhausted, why they're inflamed, why they've gone to the doctor. The doctor's done blood work and they say that they're fine, but they don't feel like themselves anymore. Those are the people that I typically work with.
Speaker 1:So what is stress resilience? It's your body's capacity to handle stressors, respond appropriately and return to baseline quickly, without tipping into that chronic overdrive that so many people find themselves in. So think of it like this Stress management is putting out fires after they've already started. Stress resilience is fireproofing the house so that the flames never spread in the first place. Resilience isn't built by accident. It's trained. You don't build muscle by accident. You go to the gym and train right, you don't learn how to become a long distance runner by accident. You train.
Speaker 1:Same thing here when we're talking about your stress, we're talking about your autonomic nervous system. Okay, and it has two main branches which you may have heard of your sympathetic and your parasympathetic. Your sympathetic is your fight or flight this, when you are triggered, when you are put into a fight or flight type of a moment, your body is going to have a spike in cortisol and adrenaline which increases your heart rate and your blood pressure, which then diverts the blood flow away from your digestion and it tells your body we have to survive first, we'll heal later. Your parasympathetic, which is your rest and digest, is when your cortisol lowers, your heart rate slows back down, there's an increase in digestive secretions and you're noticing more support in fertility, immunity, cellular repair. Most people today, and especially the ones that I see in my practice, are stuck in sympathetic dominance, so their brain thinks it's running from a tiger 24-7, but really the tiger is emails. Really the tiger is emails, bills, traffic, inflammation right, I know, for me this is a huge part of my daily life and what I've built in into my calendar each and every day because it can be very overwhelming.
Speaker 1:I am a wife, I'm a mom, I own multiple businesses. I have this podcast. So you know, before I learned how to use this stuff in my own life. It's how am I supposed to drink enough water? How am I supposed to get the laundry done? How am I supposed to keep my house clean and groceries and pack lunches and spend time with my husband, spend time with my friends, self-care, shower, all those things? So even just your daily, everyday things can create this underlying chronic stress in your body.
Speaker 1:Over time, that stress signal reshapes your biology. It changes your body on a cellular level. What that looks like is your adrenal glands start flattening out, your mitochondria right. The batteries of your body are getting depleted. It means you're aging faster, things like that. You don't have as much energy. You're not recovering as quickly. Your gut lining can break down. You might notice digestive symptoms and bloating and diarrhea, things like that, and your immune system starts to get confused. Is this a virus, or do I have leaky gut that's allowing things to seep through my gut and go into my bloodstream? And now my body is attacking those things, but really it shouldn't be.
Speaker 1:All of that can be created when your stress has changed your body on a biological level, so resilience involves training several interconnected systems. So I'm going to break down those systems for you. The first system that's involved is your nervous system regulation. Every time you stimulate your vagus nerve which your vagus nerve connects your gut to your brain Every time you stimulate that through slow breathing, cold water, humming right You're sending a signal to the brainstem that says we are safe. Thank you for keeping me safe, we are safe. This is going to flip your parasympathetic switch back on so you can go back into rest and digest.
Speaker 1:In my office in Ohio, I use two different tools to help stimulate your vagus nerve. The one is our red light infrared light helmet, which has a piece that goes around your neck and connects to your vagus nerve using red and infrared light. So what that's going to do is it's going to use the red light to stimulate your vagus nerve, which is going to improve your heart rate variability, which is a key marker of stress resilience. If you have a smart watch or a health watch, a lot of them have been updated to track your HRV, so you might even have some insight on HRV, like if you look on your watch and it's telling you that you're stressed. You're like, oh, I don't feel stressed, nothing is stressing me out. That's a sign that you're stuck in fight or flight. Better, hrv means that your body can shift between sympathetic, parasympathetic quicker, instead of staying locked into fight or flight.
Speaker 1:The other therapy I use that I believe if everybody had access to it, the world would be a better place. We would not have nearly as many sad, scary things happening that we do, and that is our vibroacoustic bed. It uses low frequency sound waves that travel through your tissues. These vibrations calm down your limbic system, which is the emotional center of your brain, and lowers your sympathetic output. So it's like giving your nervous system a reset button. It is absolutely one of my favorite tools. When people come into our office and they have a package, it includes that so many of them grossly underestimate how amazing of a tool it is. So by the time I convince them to try it and they do, every single one of them comes out and they're like holy shit, that is the most amazing thing I've ever experienced, and they're hooked after that. So highly recommend, if you are near our location in Stowe Ohio, that you come check it out, because it is amazing If you aren't local to us. I would just search fibroacoustic therapy near me and see if anyone around you offers that, because it is one of the greatest tools that can truly help calm down your central nervous system.
Speaker 1:Okay, so the first system we talked about was your nervous system. The next one we're going to talk about is your hormones. Now, when I talk about hormones, what do you think of Most people think of? Truly, if we're being honest with ourselves, I think most people think of emotions. Right, when someone gets emotional, they're hormonal, right, we equate the two of those together. You may think of estrogen, you may think of testosterone, right? Like you might think of those hormones. Well, cortisol is a hormone which is your body's built-in stress hormone. Insulin is a hormone. Yes, testosterone, estrogen, progesterone right, insulin is a hormone. Yes, testosterone, estrogen, progesterone right, you have all of these hormones.
Speaker 1:Your cortisol is your body's built-in stress hormone and when it's balanced, it should be highest in the morning when you wake up, and then tapers down so it's at its lowest at night, so you can fall asleep and you can stay asleep. Chronic stress can actually flatten that curve. So we have various stages of people that come into my office. Right, you have people that have super, super elevated cortisol, where we've caught it early and now we just have to bring it down. You have people that have a complete dysfunction of cortisol, where it's low in the morning so they're waking up exhausted. It spikes in the afternoon, where they're irritable and have mood swings, and it might be lower in the early evening where they cannot wait to climb in bed, and then it's higher again and at nighttime, which prevents them from being able to fall asleep. And then we have people that are just flatlined across the board. Those are typically the three types of cortisol patterns that I see. A flattened cortisol rhythm contributes to fatigue, weight gain, brain fog, mood swings. All of that is affected by your cortisol levels. All of that is affected by your cortisol levels.
Speaker 1:You also have your DHEA, which is another adrenal hormone, and it's supposed to buffer the effects of cortisol, but when your stress is prolonged, dhea ends up crashing too. Now your DHEA is converted into estrogen and testosterone. So if those two things are out of whack, male or female, it's going to accelerate aging. If you're a woman and you end up having high testosterone, you might experience hair loss around the perimeter of your face, acne, hair growth in different areas. All of that. If you're a male and you have higher estrogen, you might notice that that's your sex hormone, right? So you may not be wanting to have sex as often. You may be more tired, more lethargic, maybe not bouncing back as quickly. So your DHEA is critical to your overall hormone health.
Speaker 1:Testing your cortisol multiple times throughout the day helps show me the rhythm, and from that rhythm I can help build a protocol that gets it back into the rhythm that it should be. This is going to help rebuild the resiliency strategically instead of just guessing. So if you've gone to the doctor and they've tested your cortisol most of the time that even what I've had done with my body in the past they only test it first thing in the morning, that's not enough. If it's low, then you can still support it, but what if it spikes in the afternoon? Well, now they're just treating it for low, which means in the afternoon it's already high and they're raising it even more. What if it stays flatline throughout the day? You can't only support it first thing in the morning. You need to know what it's doing off throughout the day so that we can help it get back into the rhythm that it's supposed to be in. So hormone health is a huge factor in here.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we've talked about nervous system and we've talked about hormones. Let's talk about immune function. So I use what's called your secretory IgA in my office when I'm talking about stress, because stress directly lowers your secretory IgA. This is the antibody that is coating your saliva and your gut. You can have low secretory IgA and I also see a lot of high secretory IgA. So low secretory IgA means the first line of defense in your gut for your immune system is just gone. It's going to leave you more susceptible to infections, to allergies, to gut imbalances.
Speaker 1:High secretory IgA is typically seen in people with autoimmune issues, so we want to make sure it's in that sweet spot where it should be. Good news is, I can help whether it's low or high. We also want to look at chronic sympathetic dominance and how it drives your systemic inflammation right. Your body is on alert mode, which means it's releasing inflammatory responses even when there's no infection. Right, when you have leaky gut, for example, your body is releasing things from your gut into your bloodstream. All your bloodstream knows is that's not supposed to be here, so it attacks it. It doesn't know if it's something healthy like broccoli? Right? It doesn't know. All it knows is it's not supposed to be there. So that's where we see a lot of the autoimmune issues coming from. Your body is literally attacking itself. That inflammation. In addition to autoimmune conditions, it's also linked to depression and, honestly, even heart disease.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we've talked about nervous system hormones immune. Let's talk about your metabolic flexibility immune, let's talk about your metabolic flexibility. So your ability to keep your blood sugar stable is a huge factor for stress resilience. When cortisol spikes and then crashes, your cortisol gets triggered to compensate for that. So that's keeping you stuck in this stress loop. So when your body is balanced and has a balanced insulin response, less cortisol demand means better energy and more resilience. This is why I always say if your blood sugar is chaotic, no amount of meditation is going to save you. Now, even in terms of because I work with people that have type 1 and type 2 diabetes type 1, right like. There's nothing that we can do to undo that right, that is, your body is not making insulin at all. But I do see a lot of people in my office that are type 1 diabetics that they still are having a hard time balancing out their blood sugar. They have highs, they have lows, like it's all over the place. A lot of that is because of their metabolic flexibility. So, even if you are diabetic, we can still help work with finding a more balanced blood sugar and making sure that when those two things get spiked, that they aren't wreaking havoc on all of your other systems, right?
Speaker 1:Okay, so what can you do today to start building resilience? One, micro practices. These are things like humming, gargling, cold exposure, pausing to breathe before a meal, taking a walk after you eat. All of those things are going to directly activate your vagus nerve. So when I talk about cold exposure, I'm talking about it in terms of vagus nerve specific. So for me it usually looks like just putting my face in a bucket of ice water.
Speaker 1:Um, I do not love a cold shower. At the end, I would rather use high heat showers because they do something different in your body. Um, and it's just. I meditate in there. It's my practice. Um, what I do. You can absolutely do cold plunges, things like that. However, if your body is already under chronic stress, doing things like a cold plunge can actually stress your body out even more and do sometimes the opposite of what you are doing. If you are a female, you can actually hurt yourself by doing full body cold plunges at certain points of your cycle, so it's super important to just know those things. Again I'm talking. There are health benefits to cold plunges, of course, especially depending on who you talk to. I'm talking about in terms of calming down your central nervous system, and that is just dipping your face in ice waters is enough to calm it down. Okay, those are micro practices, foundational habits.
Speaker 1:Sleep Are you falling asleep with a TV on? Are you laying in bed, scrolling until you fall asleep? Are you staying up way too late? Are you sleeping in a hot room? Would you benefit from a weighted blanket? What do your sleep habits look like?
Speaker 1:We talk about hydration, so making sure that your body is hydrated on a cellular level is critical. Chronic dehydration is very common in people. Things for hydration when you're sleeping. Typically, people are sleeping for six to eight hours, which means you are waking up already dehydrated, right. So before you eat breakfast, before you have coffee, before you have your protein shake, whatever your morning routine is before you do any of that, I like to take little bits of salt not table salt, pink Himalayan salt, celtic salt, one of those.
Speaker 1:I use Celtic salt, but I just take a little pinch of it, put it in my mouth, chew it up and then drink water with that. So I learned that trick from Barbara O'Neill. If you don't know who she is, she is one of my favorite people. Just for all things natural remedies. And the sodium in the salt helps get your body takes it, carries the water into your cells on a cellular level. I use it for my kids, for sports, I use it when we're sick. I use it all the time. It is my go-to trick, especially when I have a headache. I'll put salt in my mouth, let it dissolve under my tongue. It is my go-to trick for hydration without having to consume all of the extra ick things like sugar and dyes and all these other things that are in common electrolyte beverages. So salt for sure.
Speaker 1:Protein with every meal is going to help. It's going to balance your blood sugar, it's going to just keep you fuller longer, help with cravings, all these different things. So we're going to do a whole different episode on nutrition, because it is critical. But we want to know what's happening with your secretory IgA first, because if you have low or high secretory IgA. Again, what you're eating is not being absorbed by your body anyways. Not that I want you eating processed foods, I still want you eating healthy. But if you're spending all the money on organic foods but your body's not absorbing them, you're just right. You're just wasting right. You're just wasting it essentially. So nutrition is a factor of what I do, but we actually don't even get to that until after we've done a couple other things.
Speaker 1:And then again, another foundational habit is boundaries with technology. Are you monitoring your screen time? Are you using blue light filtering glasses? Are you like? Just what does that look like? Do you using blue light filtering glasses? Are you like? Just what does that look like? Do you have healthy technology habits and boundaries or not? So simple doesn't mean easy, but these foundational habits work because they're going to restore your baseline physiology In office support. So, if you're local, this is where the red light nervous, the red light vagus nerve helmet and the fibroacoustic bed come into play. So they're going to accelerate your nervous system retraining, help your cells and your brain. Remember what safety feels like.
Speaker 1:Again, with me it's testing, not guessing, so saliva test is what I choose to use. But if you are looking to build your stress resiliency, you need to know what the stress is currently doing to your body. The saliva testing that I use is going to show us your cortisol curve and your DHEA levels, how your hormones are adapting or not adapting to stress. From there we build a personalized roadmap just for you. So here's the truth, right, stress is not going away. Your life is not suddenly going to become easy or to slow down, but you can become more resilient to stress if you change how your body responds, and that changes everything right your energy, your hormones, your immune system, your ability to heal on a cellular level.
Speaker 1:So if you are ready to stop just coping with stress and actually build stress resilience from the ground up, I'd love to help. You can book a consult with me, whether in person or virtually. I do work with people across the country. I would love to look at your stress and metabolic profile and put the picture together. I will post the links for both of those in the show notes for you. If this episode resonated with you, please consider sharing it with a friend who may be managing or not managing their stress and feels like they are running on fumes. This may be the shift that they need. So remember wellness starts at the root. Resiliency is built, not born. As always, you are enough. No-transcript.