Are you in tune with your gut intuition? Today on The Girlfriend Doctor, I discuss the mind-body connection with leading functional-medicine expert, Dr. Will Cole. He is among the top 50 functional and integrative doctors in America and the author of The New York Times best-seller, Intuitive Eating. In this episode, we explore the connection between mental and physical health from his soon-to-be-released book, Gut Feelings.
Conventional medicine often overlooks the mind-body connection, usually only addressing a single aspect of health. Dr. Cole’s comprehensive approach to healing trauma, the gut microbiome, and restoring homeostasis to the body is helping patients reclaim their wellness.
Emotional stress has the power to reduce the effectiveness of your healthy habits, which is why you cannot separate mental health from your physical well-being. Dr.Cole guides you through a thorough analysis of your physical and emotional traumas to find the underlying factors causing chronic disease, thyroid issues, and digestive disorders. Join us as we uncover how your gut and emotional health affect your physical body!
KEY TAKEAWAYS
[3:00] The relationship between mental and physical health
[6:00] How mental, emotional, and spiritual components impact the physical body
[8:00] Shameflammation: the connection between stress and inflammation
[12:00] Orthorexia and the overwhelmed of healthy eating
[17:00] Looking at the aspects of your health that are often overlooked
[20:00] How adverse childhood trauma leads to the destruction of the self
[23:00] Intergenerational trauma: epigenetic heirlooms that predispose you to disease
[27:00] Metabolising trauma: Healing without knowing the cause
[29:00] Polyvagal theory and understanding how trauma can be stored in the body
[34:00] Determining your personal point of entry to healing
[39:00] Don’t confuse your doctor’s medical degree with your gut intuition
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
MEMORABLE QUOTES
“In many ways, I find it’s an incomplete conversation around mental health care. Where mental health is relegated as separate from physical health, but the reality is that mental health is physical health, and it’s really a functional medicine conversation around mental health, and around trauma, and chronic stress, and shame, and how these mental emotions, spiritual things impact our physical body.” [4:35] -Dr. Cole
“I see people up against seemingly insurmountable things, and just as trauma can be inherited, so can healing. I see people break the chains of pain, break the chains of disease, break the chains of dysfunction by what you can do today.” [25:50] -Dr. Cole
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