Welcome to the Commune Podcast. My name is Jeff Krasnow.

As we approach 700 episodes here on the Commune podcast, we are now republishing some of our most popular interviews with teachers and doctors who

now have full-length courses over on the commune course platform. This interview is from

23 with Dr. Will Cole. Will has been central to my health journey. So Will has been named

one of the top 50 functional medicine and

integrative doctors in the nation and runs one of the first functional medicine telehealth

centers in the world. He specializes in excavating the underlying root causes of chronic disease

and customizing a personalized precision medicine approach for conditions including thyroid

issues, autoimmune diseases, hormonal imbalances, and digestive and mental disorders. At the time of

this interview, Will had just published his book, Gut Feelings, Healing the Shame-Fueled

relationship between what you eat and how you feel. Will shares that

clinical studies show us that chronic stress, unresolved trauma, shame, and environmental toxicity

can impact the body's underlying biochemistry, creating chronic inflammatory problems, metabolic dysfunction, and brain health

issues. Now, the fight or flight response is a natural adaptive biological feature, but modernity

has created an evolutionary mismatch. And when we're exposed to chronic stress, the HPA axis,

that's the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis,

increases cortisol and adrenaline levels. And this affects blood sugar, blood pressure,

heart rate, and increases inflammation. This is why managing stress response is essential

to fostering balance and homeostasis in the body.

I talk about this all the time in my book, Good Stress.

But fear not, we'll also outline actionable protocols that you can lean on to improve gut

function, such as consuming probiotic fermented foods.

...