Gary Brecka

So I thank you for that explanation because we're now starting to accept the fact that mood and emotion have a real impact on physiology.

I really define thriving versus nearly maintaining as making self-care non-negotiable.

If you look back to the category of autoimmune, the reason why 82% of all autoimmune disease is found in women is not because autoimmune disease is selective by sex.

It's because women have a tendency to develop something called caregiver syndrome.

because they were meant evolutionarily to bear children, they have a tendency to put the needs of others before the needs of themselves, their spouse, their children, their career, their girlfriends, their coworkers.

And what this does is it keeps the central nervous system, it keeps the autonomic nervous system trapped in a sympathetic state.

And very often there's guilt and shame around self-care.

And I think when you make self-care non-negotiable, you make yourself more available to give the balance of your day away and the balance of your time away.

One of the things that I've done very intentionally, as I mentioned, is I not only schedule sleep and exercise, but that first 90 minutes of every day belongs only to me.

And then I give the balance of my day away.

And I've done this with thousands and thousands of clients where we really begin to schedule the time for self-care and release the guilt that's associated with just simply putting yourself first and then giving the balance of your day away.

So someone that is thriving is someone that has accepted that self-care is non-negotiable.

And, you know, I find that the best time to do that is in the first 90 minutes of the day when you learn to tolerate silence, you do a round of breath work, you maybe do some gratitude journaling, and you make that mobility part of your day non-negotiable.

It is a game changer for people that have chronic pain, chronic stress, excess rumination, that suffer from anxiety.

And as you mentioned before, too, I mean, there's so many...

men and women that suffer from anxiety.

I've never met once a patient that came through our functional medicine clinic that suffered from anxiety that did not also have gut issues.

Not once, not a single time.

If you're a chronic anxiety sufferer and you don't have gut issues, I want to study you.

You're a unicorn.