Full video of webinar:

Excerpts from Webinar:

So let’s start with a definition of stress. Stress is a heightened response to routine and out of the ordinary conditions of events. It’s actually a physics term. We’re talking about the load or the stress on a member load carrying member of a building, but it’s been applied to our mental emotional states.

And unfortunately, that heightened response results in many, many health problems largely related to the hormones that are released, as in the stress response. So according to a recent Stanford studies, there were two of them. Between 85 and 90% of all visits to doctors are for stress related illnesses. So I want you to hear that.

Patients come to me with headaches, they come to me with fatigue, they come to me with insomnia and never really thinking that the problem is really stress. Now, some people do come for stress. They can’t live their lives, basically. But most of my stress patients do not say “I’m here for stress.” They will give a whole litany of signs and symptoms. And that’s completely supported by these Stanford studies, people who experience heightened levels of anxiety four to five times more likely to have a fatal heart attack or stroke.

Again, it’s really hard to get our heads around that number. You know, I was a workaholic most of my life and a stress monkey. And I just, you know, thought I was immortal like many people do. I want you to have more sense than I did when I was younger. And I want you to start monitoring your stress levels. Now, you know, it’s like, oh, another five years and I can retire. Well, another five years. You may have a stroke. So you want to learn how to moderate and mediate your stress and not just put it on the back burner.

And again, 50% of all illnesses are directly caused by stress.

And these are pre- COVID statistics. We saw a huge increase in on the job injuries, up to 15 percent more because of stress. Seventy percent of people surveyed said they felt stress on a typical day at work. I don’t know where that who did that study? It was a well done study. To me, it’s about 90% of my patients. 43% surveyed said they suffered noticeable physical symptoms of burnout. They couldn’t sleep. They didn’t want to eat. It affected their loved life. They didn’t have a good relationship with their kids. And these are pre-COVID. Now, we know with COVID the opioid overdose deaths in the Bay Area, up 30 percent, diagnosed anxiety and depression in children is up over 30%. And I’m bringing this up because you obviously want to take care of yourself and monitor yourself. But it’s very easy to not take these kids anxiety seriously enough.

Several of the therapists that I work with work only with children. One woman brought in several people to help her, and she cannot keep up with the demand for treating anxiety in kids. Suicide deaths are up in all age groups, so please don’t ignore this.

To avoid stress, now, you know, to be realistic, you basically have to avoid life. You know, go live on a mountain somewhere and pick roots and berries. But, I mean, that’s just where we live.

Dr. Hans Seyle wrote the first definitive book on stress. He documented three stages. And I think this is a great way to look at this problem, the three stages of stress.

The first one is the alarm state. Something happens in your body. You know, the fire truck goes by. For me to see a police car behind me because when I was younger, I never paid to have my tags updated. And I was always behind.

Every time a police officer pulled in behind me, it was like, oh, my God, oh, my God, he’s going to pull me over. Now, that hasn’t been the case in forty years.  My tags are always paid. I still have that same response when the cop pulls in behind me, I’m still worried again about getting pulled over. So that alarm stage is normal. You know, we often liken to that to the see a tiger and run.

The problem is the resistance state.

And so the body either adapts to the stress or resists it and returns to normal. So in the earlier example, let’s say I slowed down the police car passes and I relax. OK, great. Pretty much done with. But let’s suppose a police guard does pull you over. I get ordered to appear in court in a couple of weeks. And so for two weeks, most people are going to worry like crazy. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Can I fight this? What do I do? Should I show up in court, etc.?

And this is for a minor thing, for something more significant, like my patients, they get called back after a questionable mammogram, which happens most of the time these days because the instruments are so sensitive. But then until they get their next mammogram, they are in this alarm stage and their stress hormones go up.

Now, you can do that for a little while, but our bodies were not designed to stay under prolonged stress. And what happens is if we it end up too long, we go into the exhaustion stage.

So here we don’t return to normal. So the event is over. You come home from work, you still can’t relax, you still can’t go to sleep. Your mind is still racing. And what happens is you get massively lowered body resistance, lowered immunity and body malfunctions.

For example, again, I mentioned my wife is the acupuncturist for the 49ers. While most professional football players get sick on Monday or Tuesday, that’s because on Sunday they go out and they’re gladiators and they’re putting their lives on the line, basically fighting these 350 pound behemoths.

And they have to use every ounce of energy they have. While on Monday they crash. And I have graphs that I could show you. It’s quite dramatic because the immune system response can easily be graphed by monitoring a few chemicals. Well, in those players on Monday, they bottom out and then anything that’s going around, they catch, they get sick on Monday or Tuesday. They’re fine on Sundays, by the way, because that adrenaline is pumping. Everything is going.

Now in the exhaust and stage. Your nervous system overreacts and stimulates the adrenal glands to activate and secrete their hormones. And there are several adrenal hormones. I like this picture because you’ve got this really well conditioned young woman athlete. And this is a very common patient for me that would be having adrenal stress and adrenal fatigue. Often they over exercise they’re overthinking their type A and they end up really in trouble with chronic fatigue.

So one hormone that we’ve all heard of is adrenaline. That gives you that boost of energy. It gets your heart pumping in order to increase circulation. Now, that’s great if you’re trying to get out of the way of a car or you have a close call with a car wreck. But obviously, over time, this can cause heart disease and chronic high blood pressure.

Second hormone that we don’t hear as much about. And as a major part of what I treat in my practice, is noradrenaline. Now, this stops digestion by moving the blood from the abdomen to the arms and legs. OK, you’re going to run away from a tiger. You’ve got to have all the blood you can get into your legs. If you’re going to be fighting something, you need a lot of blood in your brain and your hands and your legs. And so digestion takes a back seat. But what also takes a back seat are blood supply to the uterus and the ovaries in women.

In fact, this is one of the major, major problems that I find with so-called unexplained infertility. I do a couple of tests and we’ll find that these women are suffering from massive anxiety and it’s pulling the blood out of their internal organs. So we focus on that and voila, they get pregnant.

Those adrenal glands also release cortisol. Now cortisol has become very, very well known 20 years ago when I talked about cortisol. It was magical, strange thing. Now everybody knows about it, but most people don’t know what it actually does. So cortisol is what wakes you up in the morning. It gives you what’s called the dawn effect. It activates your blood sugar and activates your body to release other hormones to bring sugar into your cells so that you wake up. That’s what wakes you up in the morning. Now, that’s great.

But if you keep getting that cortisol rush, it lowers your resistance to disease because your body basically has two modes. I’m either fighting something or I’m repairing. Fighting or repairing. And it doesn’t do a good job of doing them both at once. So if you’re burning cortisol, you’re probably not healing during that time. So it’ll cause fatigue. It causes weight gain. In fact, it purposely causes weight gain. This is not a side effect.

This is a tremendously powerful human trait. When we’re under stress, the body wants to slow down our metabolism so that we can get through the famine or the danger or whatever is occurring. And it does that through a couple of mechanisms, actually more. But a couple of major ones. One is cortisol binds to a hormone called Leptin L-E-P-T-I-N, and not to be confused with lectin L-E-C-T-I-N, which is big in the news these days. But leptin is the hormone that does a couple of important things.

One, it tells you that you’ve had enough to eat, that you should be sated. And this is part of the French paradox, the very slow, relaxed meals with friends they may set for dinner for a couple hours. They have really, really rich food. They don’t get diabetes and they don’t get fat. That’s because of that relaxation. So the leptin levels rise to the point that they don’t eat too much. The second thing that leptin does, is leptin tells your body that it is safe to burn fat.

So if you have high cortisol, it blocks leptin. So you don’t get the message that it’s safe to burn fat. That’s why I have so many patients that come to me want to lose weight. And I will tell them we need to work on your stress, because as long as you’re under that stress, your body will not want you to lose that because fat are your is your reserve against future famine. So you’re going to get problems with sleep and a lowered immune system.

And also because it’s burning sugar, it gives you energy all day long. But when it’s out of balance, you just get fatigue. And the other way here that it lowers your ability to burn fat is it binds to one of the thyroid hormones and it diminishes that hormones the ability to become the active thyroid hormone T3. So once again, your body doesn’t have enough thyroid hormone, even if it looks great on the test, because you’d have to run a specific test to determine this, which I think should always be run, but it’s not.

But at any rate, the high cortisol will block the ability of your thyroid gland and your thyroid hormones to do their job.

Then another hormone released by the adrenal glands is Dehydroepiandrosterone or DHEA. This hormone controls a lot of things. But one of them is estrogen, estrogen reserves and also the balance between progesterone and testosterone. And so what you’ll see here is a very imbalanced hormone levels.

Once again, when a patient comes in with severe premenstrual dysphoria or menstrual cramping, this is the first place we’re going to look, is what is the hormone balance? what’s out of balance here? And is stress at the root of that? And often it is takes us usually two months to fix that. But part of that is getting the patient to be a little bit more relaxed.

Those adrenal glands also release cortisol. Now cortisol has become very, very well known 20 years ago when I talked about cortisol. It was magical, strange thing. Now everybody knows about it, but most people don’t know what it actually does. So cortisol is what wakes you up in the morning. It gives you what’s called the dawn effect. It activates your blood sugar and activates your body to release other hormones to bring sugar into your cells so that you wake up. That’s what wakes you up in the morning. Now, that’s great.

But if you keep getting that cortisol rush, it lowers your resistance to disease because your body basically has two modes. I’m either fighting something or I’m repairing. Fighting or repairing. And it doesn’t do a good job of doing them both at once. So if you’re burning cortisol, you’re probably not healing during that time. So it’ll cause fatigue. It causes weight gain. In fact, it purposely causes weight gain. This is not a side effect.

This is a tremendously powerful human trait. When we’re under stress, the body wants to slow down our metabolism so that we can get through the famine or the danger or whatever is occurring. And it does that through a couple of mechanisms, actually more. But a couple of major ones. One is cortisol binds to a hormone called Leptin L-E-P-T-I-N, and not to be confused with lectin L-E-C-T-I-N, which is big in the news these days. But leptin is the hormone that does a couple of important things.

One, it tells you that you’ve had enough to eat, that you should be sated. And this is part of the French paradox, the very slow, relaxed meals with friends they may set for dinner for a couple hours. They have really, really rich food. They don’t get diabetes and they don’t get fat. That’s because of that relaxation. So the leptin levels rise to the point that they don’t eat too much. The second thing that leptin does, is leptin tells your body that it is safe to burn fat.

So if you have high cortisol, it blocks leptin. So you don’t get the message that it’s safe to burn fat. That’s why I have so many patients that come to me want to lose weight. And I will tell them we need to work on your stress, because as long as you’re under that stress, your body will not want you to lose that because fat are your is your reserve against future famine. So you’re going to get problems with sleep and a lowered immune system.

And also because it’s burning sugar, it gives you energy all day long. But when it’s out of balance, you just get fatigue. And the other way here that it lowers your ability to burn fat is it binds to one of the thyroid hormones and it diminishes that hormones the ability to become the active thyroid hormone T3. So once again, your body doesn’t have enough thyroid hormone, even if it looks great on the test, because you’d have to run a specific test to determine this, which I think should always be run, but it’s not.

But at any rate, the high cortisol will block the ability of your thyroid gland and your thyroid hormones to do their job.

Then another hormone released by the adrenal glands is Dehydroepiandrosterone or DHEA. This hormone controls a lot of things. But one of them is estrogen, estrogen reserves and also the balance between progesterone and testosterone. And so what you’ll see here is a very imbalanced hormone levels.

Once again, when a patient comes in with severe premenstrual dysphoria or menstrual cramping, this is the first place we’re going to look, is what is the hormone balance? what’s out of balance here? And is stress at the root of that? And often it is takes us usually two months to fix that. But part of that is getting the patient to be a little bit more relaxed.

Now, there are tons of lab tests can that can indicate the severity of the problem. There are some that are very specific and adrenal stress index, for example, which is a saliva test, but there are blood tests that are as low as $14 that can give you a very, very good clue about whether you’ve got adrenal imbalance.

So it’s not expensive, but beyond that, there are tests that can be done in the office. In fact, with our new patients, everyone gets at least one of these tests and over time we’ll retest to see how people are doing.

One of those is called an adrenal function test. It’s actually the name was a Raglands test. It was created by a Doctor Ragland in the 1920s. And I just found his paper a couple of months ago. And it’s fascinating because they didn’t have computers. So it’s typewritten with all the typos marked out and then new spelling. So it’s really fun to see his original paper. And he showed that the ability to maintain blood pressure when you change positions is a function of the adrenal glands.

And there are two major mechanisms by which that works. One is called the aldosterone system, which you don’t need to know. But aldosterone controls your sodium to potassium balance. So if your sodium is too low, for example, then you don’t hold fluid, enough fluid in the blood because the sodium and fluid balance needs to maintain a fairly narrow range. But if you don’t have enough sodium, then you don’t pull blood into your bloodstream.

You have too little blood volume. And when you stand up, rather than increasing your blood pressure by 10 points, which should happen when you go from lying down to standing up, we’ll see it drop significantly. If it’s 10 points, that’s something we need to look at. But I’ll see a lot of patients at 20. And my I chronic fatigue patients will drop 30 to 40 points. So literally the reason they feel lightheaded when they stand up is the blood is literally falling out of their brain.

So, of course, they feel lightheaded. And so this we do in the office. It’s a very simple test. I think it should be done at every initial intake through all forms of medicine. It’s typically only done in your doctor’s office. If you come in complaining of orthostatic hypotension or when you stand up, you feel like you’re going to pass out and you get dizzy and then they may test it. Legally, the definition of orthostatic hypotension is a drop of 20 points, but you’ll see symptoms much sooner than that.

A second test that can be done is paradoxical pupillary response. Again, these are pretty inexpensive tests. Now, we all know that when you shine a light into your eye that the pupil constricts.  Well, what most people don’t realize is that that constriction should hold for 30 continuous seconds. It should maintain that tightness if it doesn’t stay close. That indicates weak adrenal glands or post concussion syndrome in some cases. And post concussion, I will always do this test.

And so typically with my adrenal patients, they’re holding that pupil closed for 4-7 seconds. That’s how dramatic that is. So if that’s happening, you can imagine how dysfunctional and disoriented the entire neurological system is at that point.

OK, so these are just some of the symptoms. I could have listed a hundred; but fatigue, headaches, irritability is a biggie… Sleep, allergies… People don’t think of that being related to anxiety, but it definitely is because the anxiety will cause your immune system to plummet. And digestive trouble is a major issue.

As I mentioned, the noradrenalin pulls the blood away from your stomach. So then the process of digestion has to start when you stop being stressed. Actually a while after you stop being stressed. So that’s why it’s very important to try to eat a nice, relaxed meal with your family. Don’t talk about the day’s problems. You know, keep it light and relaxed. 

We’re going to send to Madeline and we’ll probably have on our site a stress survey. I just want you to go through it and mark it. You don’t have to send it to us. You can send it to us and we’ll give you a response. But I want you to check things.

Now one of the things that’s fascinating about Americans. So on here, one of the things is headaches and people go yea, I don’t really have headaches. Well, do you have headaches? Well, yeah, once in a while. How often? Once a week? You know, children don’t have headaches, babies that are healthy don’t have headaches, you shouldn’t have a headache. Every time you have a headache, that’s a sign that something’s out of balance.

So if you have headaches once every six month, mark headaches and do that with all of these problems, even if they don’t happen a lot. So I’d love to have you fill out the stress survey. If you want to send it in, we’ll take a look at it. If not, it’s just for you to keep.

Now, and this is really one of my favorite slides that I have. I mean, if you’re driving your car and the check engine light comes on, we all know how to fix that. You put a piece of tape over it, right? Huh. But that’s what we do with headaches. You’re getting a headache every 2 days. Well take an Aleve. Take an Advil. That’s the same as literally it’s the same as putting a piece of electrical tape over your check engine light. What that headache means is, “wow, I better get to the bottom of this and see what’s causing that before it gets worse.”

Four major ways to reduce stress and a lot of small things to do. I’m just going to mention a few of them here. One, I found this to be an amazing graph. It’s a little small here, but it’s total refined sugar consumption per person per year. Well, if you look at 500 A.D., it’s as close as you can get to zero. Basically, you had to go everywhere you could to try to find some fruit, which is typically in season for a couple of weeks, a year, or you were a beekeeper and got honey.

And if you notice, up until about sixteen, seventeen hundred A.D., the sugar intake was about the same. In 1994, the average intake was 149.2 pounds. Now, since it was like that in 500 A.D., it’s probably been that level of sugar consumption as long as humans have been walking on the planet. So all of those years we developed the system that was designed for less than a pound of sugar a year.

So what do you think happens if we eat 149.2 pounds of sugar? It’s going to create sure weight gain. You’re going to get fat, you’re going to get fatigued. But it’s also going to put massive amounts of pressure on your adrenal glands to deal with this stress because this is a stressor to your body.

And that’s why Type II diabetes is a horrible epidemic in America. It’s also, by the way, a horrible, horrible epidemic in China. I did my diabetes training in China because they are having massive problems. And the reasons are obvious. When you walk through a major city, Shanghai, for example, downtown, every other store is a Starbucks or a KFC. We have taken over there food cravings. Or they are taking over ours. Shanghai, the streets are tense, 10 lanes each way.

When I was in China in the 1980s, typically a 10 lane street would be an average of one lane of cars. Everything else was people bicycling, maybe a few motorcycles. Now it is 10 lanes packed of cars. So pollution, no exercise, poor diet, and they have become Americanized and now have massive diabetes rates.

A couple other things. Women who regularly engaged in moderate activity. This isn’t like going out and running a 5K. This was the realm of 20 minutes of walking a day out of 41% lower death rate. That’s pretty good return on your investment

Men, this 7 year study, 20 minutes a day of on average of exercise. Again, not intense exercise. Just moving your body. Weight lifting actually was very superior. But again, short duration, weight lifting, only a couple of times a week. 37% less likely to die of coronary disease, huh? Now that I’ve seen this slide, I think I might end the presentation go work out for a while. But it’s really that dramatic.  We tend to overlook it.

So in order to heal, your body needs a constant flow of blood and nutrients. Constant. And I’ve got films that I could show you of people that are under physical stress or under stress from being around a lot of electromagnetic flow, a lot of cell phones, computers, etc. and you can actually see their blood being hypercoagulable. And so it looks as because there is a five million dollar machine at an institute in Berlin where it seems like you’re inside the blood vessel, it’s that clear.

And when people are in that stressed state, their blood stream looks like a rush hour on the L.A. freeway. The traffic isn’t moving. You get to the little off ramps going into the smaller blood vessels. There’ll be a six car pile up and literally no blood is getting into those small vessels. So if it’s not getting into the small vessels, those cells are not being supplied with nutrients and the toxic elements are not being taken away.

So it’s the worst of all possible things. And then there are a few things you can do. You can do acupuncture, you can do devices to neutralize the electromagnetic waves and suddenly the blood starts shooting through there. Just like the traffic jam has been relieved.

So we don’t want interruption of blood flow. If you get an interruption to the knee, you’re going to get arthritis. If you get an interruption to the other organs of the body, you’re going to have other maladies. And so, any health problem, I know this is really hard to believe. Any health problem, can be helped with acupuncture., Acupuncture, the brilliance of it was or is that the Chinese doctors mapped out the entire neurological system of the body and cataloged with each of those nerves and points did on the body 2500 years ago. That didn’t happen in Europe, until a few hundred years ago.

And the Chinese understanding is still way beyond that. We can do points in your hand that will send a stimulus up to your your spinal cord, that sends a stimulus up into your brain, that causes the release of feel good chemicals, GABA, oxytocin, serotonin, all the things that make us happy and healthy get released. So that’s why I say no matter what you have, acupuncture can always help. It may not be the perfect treatment, for that problem, but it always helps because it increases blood flow and lowers pain.

And then we’re back to headaches. As headaches are almost always a blood flow problem. Asthma is made much worse with blood flow problems.

So they’ve been doing this for 3500 years in the East. Millions and millions of people. Right now, it serves two billion people. Unfortunately, there’s no money in advertising it. So you’re not going to see it on TV. Although there are a couple of TV programs and now they’re kind of fun.

So solutions to all sorts of things we do nicotine and drug addiction, stress and anxiety are the major things we’re dealing with right now. Which then lead the digestive problems, low back pain, et cetera.

But again, a lot of it comes back to stress, anxiety and hormone imbalance. All of which are fixable.

Madeline: “if they are afraid of the word “acupuncture.” And they are afraid of needles. What is your answer to that Dr. Nieters?”

Dr. John Nieters L.Ac, DAOM: There’s my first answer is that that is normal. We’ve all, or at least almost all of us have gone through vaccination with huge needles that are 100 times bigger than an acupuncture needle and that’s buried in our brain. It’s like, oh, my God, they’re going to stick a needle in me, you know? And I still… I have my dentist is incredibly gentle. When I get in that chair, I almost start sweating. It’s just from my childhood.

So, A, it’s normal to B we don’t even have to use acupuncture. This is talking about acupuncture. We have many, many other forms of treatment. We have a little electrical stimulators we can do on the surface. That’s what I do with kids primarily, I’ll stimulate the points. And they think that’s cool because it kind of tickles a little bit.

Our primary treatments actually in my practice, because I do internal medicine and gynecology are actually more supplement, food and herbal based. So just doing a consult when I see people’s labs, again. There are a lot of things that will trigger me to see that they have an endocrine problem. Well, that’s a dietary lifestyle change. They don’t have to do any acupuncture at all. And then often, what I’ll do, is after a little negotiation, I’ll say, let’s do two needles. And I’ll show them the needles.

They’re so tiny they can’t see them. I hold it, right up in their face. And I thought, let’s do two needles. If you don’t like it, we won’t do anymore. And as I’m talking to them, I’ll put a needle in their calf and then I’ll go, are you ready? Now they go, “Oh, gosh, doc, I’m really scared.” I said, I’m already done. And they just start laughing. And I do this with kids too. It is so painless.

Now, my wife does very different thing. Her primary modality is acupuncture. She needles into muscles and tendons, etc. but she’s so accurate she doesn’t get much response either. And just to put it in perspective, with people that have fear, she treats these 350 pound defense or offensive lineman who get paid millions of dollars to go out and bang against a thousand pounds of beef on the hoof, basically. They get constant shots, injections of everything. You can think of and they almost cry the first time they’re told they have to have acupuncture. Because the training staff tells them to get acupuncture.

But after the first time, it’s like, really, that’s it? She see so many patients in a day. It’s crazy when she’s down at the facility. So basically, A, it’s normal. Maybe we’ll work around it and C, you might want to try a needle or two and see that it’s really nothing you need to be worrying about. I think I only have one patient that we don’t do acupuncture with and probably 20% come in with that initial like, oh, I don’t know about this. I have one older patients suffering from dementia and that fear is so strong that we just use the electric stimulators on her and she loves it.

Madeline: OK, great. Thank you so. Another thing that I wanted to ask you about is. What triggers someone to just basically make that phone call, even to get help from you when they know in the back of their mind that they have stress and anxiety, but they’re not acknowledging it? Well, what would you advise these people?

Dr. John Nieters: One. I assume that your stress and anxiety is worse than you think it is.  Have someone in your life that you really trust to be straight with you, to kind of monitor you like Joe, you are really stressed and anxious. You need something. And so because we’re so used to the level of stress, I mean, the least stressed person in our culture is probably more stressed than the highest stress person living in Bali.

They don’t even have a word for stress in Bali. It doesn’t exist, basically. But so for us, we’ve become so used to it that we just don’t get how bad it is. So I would say trust someone else. Look to someone outside of you. Often, you know, people that listen to their husbands, wives very much about that. But that might work. But have a friend or colleague, someone you work with and just say, “hey, what do you think? Do you think my stress or my depression or my moods, are those an issue?” and then take action on it?

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And again, that’s why I’ve done this, the free gift. I just want at least that not to stand in people’s way.

Madeline: You know, that to me, I think because we all have stress. I mean, I know I have a lot of pressure and stress myself, but I think we get used to living with it, that it becomes part of our life and we don’t recognize that we are going through it. Unless someone comes and tells, you know what, you are really exhausted and burned out.  You should go and see someone. 

Dr. John Nieters: Yes. Someone in my life who shall go unnamed was having horrible symptoms, lightheaded, their chest, their heart was pounding, etc., and finally I insisted that they go to the hospital. You need to go in and get checked and they did all the heart tests, they did all the stuff on them and they couldn’t find anything. And finally, this very kind, sweet doctor came in, young woman, and said, “you know, dear, I’d like you to take this pill.” And my friend said, “What’s it for?”, “well, it’s for anxiety.” And the person said “I don’t have anxiety.”

Well, just go ahead and take it. 15 minutes, all of her symptoms were gone. 100%. But in her mind, in her self identity, she was not a person that would have a panic attack. She was not a person that would have anxiety. But it was clearly anxiety and a panic attack. And so that is something we have to deal with. My personal thing, I was a workaholic. I worked 100 hours a week for 40 years, basically. And then when I finally said, you know, slow down. So it took me six months literally before I caught myself.

So I’d be sitting in the chair reading the paper or reading a book. And all of a sudden I would get this slight panic reaction like, “oh, my God, I need to.” And it took me 6 months, and then I realized I didn’t need to do anything. That was just my old habit. And it took me six months before I actually did not have that reaction when I was sitting in my chair. So, again, I wouldn’t have said that I was a high stress person or had high anxiety because had learned to deal with it. I learned to live my life with it. But the truth was, I was a mess.

And so, it just comes down to acknowledging. And anybody, that has gone through the last year and a half, particularly in the Bay Area, has massive anxiety and stress, and the sooner you get rid of it, the better.

Madeline: I agree with you. I guess, I’m one of the people that lives in denial of not stress, but I am, I can tell. I think if we take care of ourselves and reach out and get that solution, we will have better performance at work and the relationships with our significant others and families. So I’m advising everyone to take Dr. John Neiters generous offer, to take him up on that telehealth because it’s a phenomenal thing. I did have the opportunity and the pleasure to be taken care of by him a couple of times for headache and for a knee injury.

And I really liked that experience and I really recommend him very much. Because, like I said, he did treat me. So I know what many people want to experience. And when you have a positive experience. You need to make sure that accolade that person and really become their advocate. So I am advocating for Dr. John Nieters completely. Thank you so much for your time today.

Dr. John Nieters: OK, thank you.

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Dr. John Nieters L.Ac, DAOM, is an acupuncturist, Chinese herbalist, functional medicine, writer, teacher, and leader in the community. In this episode, John talks about his experience with the importance of finding your vision and purpose in life, in order to create the right goals for you.

Disclaimer: Dr. John Nieters received his Doctor of Oriental Medicine and Acupuncture degree from Five Branches. His use of “doctor” or “Dr.” in relation to himself solely refers to that degree. Dr. Nieters is a licensed acupuncturist in California. This video is for general informational purposes only. It should not be used to self-diagnose and it is not a substitute for a medical exam, cure, treatment, diagnosis, and prescription or recommendation. It does not create a doctor-patient relationship between Dr. Nieters and you. You should not make any change in your health regimen or diet before first consulting a physician and obtaining a medical exam, diagnosis, and recommendation. Always seek the advice of a physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. TheBalancingPoint.net, Alameda Acupuncture, and Dr. John Nieters L.Ac, DAOM are not liable or responsible for any advice, course of treatment, diagnosis or any other information, services or product you obtain through this video or site.