A Simple Solution For Stress: A Conversation with Christian Yordanov

The most consistent thing we hear in every developing nation, especially North America. Stop stressing. Chill, relax. Why are you so worried? Stress is even a part of your life. In primary school, elementary school, on the playground, you're getting bullied, you ain't do your homework, you too fat, you too skinny, your hair too long, your hair too short. All of it's about stress. You don't have enough money. You got too much money. Stress, stress, stress. You eating too much. You not eating enough. Drink enough water, don't drink too much water. A lady just passed out and died from drinking too much water on the marathon. Are you freaking, kidding me? What are we supposed to do? Well, be stressed. How do you do that? And now there are apps that tell us how to breathe. Are you kidding me? I was born breathing and now somebody I gotta pay somebody to tell me when to hold my breath and when to let it out. Wow, we've really gotten off track here. But all the doctors and all the scientists are telling us the same thing your neurological system is toast if you are too stressed. And if that happens, all of your organs go into a tailspin and you are screwed. Your mouths will blow your own brains out. And who wants to do that On purpose. Okay, this is not against anybody with mental illness, forget all about that. I'm just talking about those of us who are trying to manage stress. Well, I tell you what I found somebody across the pond over there in western Europe who has a simple solution. Yes, a simple solution that does not cost a lot of money. You don't have to clown through the top of your mouth, everest. Yes, thank me. Now You're welcome. Come on, come on, come on in. Listen and watch Parenting up. Caregiving adventures with comedian Daysmiles is the intense journey of unexpectedly being fully responsible for my mama. For over a decade, I've been chipping away at the unknown, advocating for her and pushing Alzheimer's awareness on anyone and anything, with a heartbeat Spoiler alert. I started comedy because this shit is so heavy, so be ready for the jokes. Caregiver newbies, ogs and village members just willing to prop up a caregiver. You are in the right place. Hi, this is Zeddy. I hope you enjoy my daughter's podcast, simple solution for stress a conversation with Kristen. Follow us on social media. Subscribe to our YouTube page, please. It really helps, hey, christian.

Hey, Jay.

Welcome to the Parenting Up family.

Thank you so much. Appreciate you.

Absolutely. You're coming to us from Portugal, Yep south of Portugal. So exciting. I love Port wine. That's not why we're here. I just had to say that out loud.

They do make a mean Port wine.

Yeah, they are the best at it. Now, you're not a caregiver you have not been a caregiver but you have some phenomenal information about how to live a life where you can manage your own stress, and that is so important to and for caregivers. You and I talked about how much on a daily basis, especially as adults, we suck at managing stress. Life is going to bring stress all the time, so talk to us about first how you came to realize that, since stress isn't going to go anywhere, let's get better at having tools to manage it.

Yeah, well, I think when I look back in my life I can see how stressed I've been for some three decades basically, and it really took me, I suppose around the summer it took me experiencing quote unquote, no stress, to understand how stressed I was and how stressed myself and my wife were, because we have a two year old and we are all alone here in Portugal raising her with kind of minimal help. So we're really on each other's asses a lot, you know. And so I ordered this supplement. I love to experiment with supplements because, you know, I am a health consultant and help people with their health goals, so I'm always experimenting with new supplements. So in the summertime not that I discovered it as a new supplement, but I'd known about it for a long time, but I never tried it so I ordered some. It's called pregnant alone. So I went on, I heardcom and I ordered one. It's like eight bucks for like a one to two months supply. So we started taking this, this with my wife, and the next two weeks after we both started taking this, we did not even have one quibble. That was unheard of in our entire relationship, you know. So I'm like what the heck happened that this thing could so profoundly change our whole demeanor. During the second of those two weeks, my daughter got quite sick. We were at the zoo and she was, you know, like they lick kids, lick dirty things and putting things in their mouth and she got super sick, had a fever for almost a week and we'd normally be like fighting off when. When do we give her ibuprofen? You know? If or should we give her, I'm always like no, don't give her that. My wife is like her temperature is too high, let's take her to the doctor, like the doctor is just gonna waste our time. It's the same story every time. So none of this happened. I'm like, how is this compound doing this? So anyway, fast forward to now and I'm actually writing a book. It's about longevity, but a big part of longevity actually is keeping stress as low as possible. If you go to Okinawa or any of these blue zones where there's like a really high proportion of centenarians, doesn't matter what these people eat. Some of them might eat more pork, others might more eat lentils. Hold on one second Christian.

You have given a few things that some people may not understand. You talked about blue zone artigianarians and you also talked about the supplement. Can you spell? The supplement for us and then talk to us about what is blue zone is artigianarians, meaning people in their 80s, but yeah, yeah, tell us about the supplement again.

I tend to like talk a million miles an hour. So the this supplement, it's called preg nanolone, so PR EG, like pregnant preg nen en O L O N E. If you go to Iherbcom and type in preg n, preg n, it will come up. In fact, what you can do is my favorite brand that I use and I recommend to my clients is M. The brand is. Excuse me, the brand is MRM, nutrition, mrm. If you type in MRM, preg, a 50 milligram preg nanolone supplement comes up. It's like $8 or something like that. It's it's actually very cheap. And so what I was going, what I was the tangent, I was going off. Thank, thank you for stopping me. I just wanted to kind of wrap that up what you will find if you go to any of these blue zones, which are kind of regions of the world where there's the highest proportion of long lived people, like people over a hundred years of age or more. There's one in Okinawa, japan, greece, ikaria, costa Rica, loma Linda is another one, and then it was another one in Italy. I forget the exact place, but what you will. What I wanted to say is it doesn't matter what these people eat in those blue zones. The biggest factor they all have in common is they lead lives of very little stress, you know. So they kind of are simple folk living in the villages, have a great social life. Everybody kind of knows everybody in the village and but the most important thing is, yes, their food is clean, they're, they don't have plastics and all this crap and blah, blah, blah, industrial pollution. But the most important aspect is low stress, because when you're stressed, a lot, of, a lot of negative things happen in the body right. So, to tie it back to what I was talking about, preg nanolone, this supplement, it's actually just slightly modified cholesterol, cholesterol. So we make preg nanolone, our cells make preg nanolone and then when you take cholesterol, whether that's from the diet or you made it yourself in the cell, it can be part of the. It's kind of a part of the cell structure. But it's also the backbone of our hormones like testosterone, progesterone, estrogen and a number of other things. They're called neuro steroids or neuro hormones, I suppose you could call them that are in the kind of the brain and the nerve, the nervous system, and one of these is called aloe preg nanolone. So when you take preg nanolone it can become progesterone, which women usually will know about progesterone. It's kind of the female hormone. Yes, it's a really. It's actually a really good supplement for women to get progesterone cream. It really helps to lower the stress levels. Even men can use it, though it can in higher doses. It can be a bit feminizing for men, so I prefer preg nanolone. But here's the thing when you, when you get progesterone for either from preg nanolone or you make it yourself, or you take it as a supplement that can get turned into aloe preg nanolone. And, fun fact, aloe preg nanolone was, I think, the first FDA approved treatment for postpartum depression. So they approved that in 2019. And not so fun fact, it costs a treatment costs in the region of $35,000. That's not fun at all, but this supplement I told you about is a precursor to that. And these guys you have to go to the hospital or the treatment center, you have to be there multiple days, you have to pay for that stay. So it's clearly a money grab and to me it's quite despicable that they're preying on women. You know, new moms, postpartum depression. Some of them are literally suicidal. We're talking about this allopregnant alone. One treatment was enough to still have an effect a month later when they retest the women. So it's so incredible that we just increase our allopregnant alone levels in the kind of the brain and all of these things depression, addiction, just feeling low, sad, stressed they seem to go away. And so when I started digging into the science of it all, basically what happens is when you're stressed acutely, let's say, something scares you or you know today was very stressed and everything else is okay in your life your, these allopregnant alone, these pregnenal, pregnenal, all these other things, these kind of protective steroids. They go up acutely when there's an acute stress. They go up in tandem to kind of help us recover from the stress. So when we're under chronic stress, the cortisol and the stress hormones are elevated and gradually these protective hormones start to get depleted. So a simple thing like taking pregnenal alone it's to me the effect I felt it. Within three, four days I got a steady state where it was like wow, you know, and my wife she was like so calm like you couldn't perturb her in any in any way you could think of. So point, there is the chronic stress we run there and most of us listening are under this chronic stress. If we can replete these protective steroids in our body with the simple, easy, cheap supplement, I think most of us listening will get a great benefit. If you generally, if you feel nothing from the supplement, I just tell people you're probably not that stressed, which is great.

Yes, and then you could just stop taking it.

Keep it. Keep it for when you need it in that case, and when you, when we take pregnenal alone, you take it for like, let's say, a month, you're good, and then you just take it during periods of more stress or when you can preempt stress coming up, let's say, around Christmas or a trip, like when we took a four day trip a while ago. I had to drive, you know, multiple days every day, driving in new country, whatever. So I was pumping the pregnenal on the candy and yeah, that's, that's how you maintain your health as you age, keeping stress low. The problem is we cannot keep stress low because of the environment we're in, the jobs we have, the care taking duties we have. So we can't fix those things out there. We can change them. So with these we can sort of tweak our biology or biochemistry. That's kind of what I like to, to help people do.

I tell you what you? You got a winner in me, I tell you that, or a believer, I should say. You nailed it when you talked about chronic stress as a caregiver. A major thing for us Christian is even on days when nothing negative or catastrophic has occurred, there's this little voice of but what if? Did I think about this? Is my? Is my cell phone charged? Did I get a text? Are my alerts on? Is someone foot from the facility going to call? Is my sibling doing their part? If you are part of a care team, then you're wondering are the other members of the care team doing what they're supposed to do? You're never off. It's like being an emergency room Position or nurse where they are constantly on call, or a fireman, or a police officer who is a detective, or the individuals who actually you've been charged with saving people's lives and you're the emergency team. That's what it's like when you're a caregiver, especially for someone who has a cognitive disorder or disease where you know they can't speak for themselves. So there's this extra element of responsibility where you have a fiduciary duty, like if I don't damn show up, if I don't answer the phone or the email or the text message, well, I don't get this alert or answer the group chat that my mama, dad, sister, cousin they're going to be or experience some irreparable harm. So there is this.

Yeah static.

This, this white noise that is consistently happening, that I know has been eating away at me and I, you know, I do the best I can to manage it, but you don't, at a point you don't even realize that just dressed you know, there's been times where I'm walking around or I'm on vacation, or I'm with friends, or I'm out on a date and the guy says Jay, where are you? I'm like, I'm right here To me, I'm looking at you, we're eating, I'm trying to give you romantic eyes. You want to.

What's your name again, andrew.

And yes, I'm there, you see me giving you my bedroom eyes. It's not working. So if there's a supplement that can give me a chance at curbing that edge, of balancing my those levels of that, basically that fight or flight set of my nervous system, let me ask you this have there been any noted negatives or downfalls to taking this supplement? Has anybody suggested that there's some negatives?

No, not with, excuse me, not with pregnant alone. Funny, they I don't think they've been able to find like a lethal dose, right, Because usually with most of these things they they some poor unsuspecting lab rats or whatever they they usually find the, you know, turmeric, whatever, think of anything, salt water, they you will find a lethal dose of almost anything. I don't think they've been able to with pregnant alone. So generally the, the supplements come in like 20, 30, 50 milligrams. Some people take 100 milligrams, but I've taken a gram or like every day for multiple days. It just seems like it's so, it's like so it's so beneficial that the body, the cells, seem to accumulate it. So if you can do it topically, I've made my own topical sort of oil based pregnant, pregnant alone mixtures and you can just put it on the skin and they've done studies where the cells just accumulated. So it's like I don't know, I don't want to use hyperbolic type of qualifiers like magical or wonderful, but to me this is like this is this is a magical supplement. If you need it, it will, it will do some amazing things for you, right, and I totally, I totally relate to what you're saying when you're not. That it's a different sort of feeling. But when, when I became a dad, when I had to because my wife had a kind of tough labor, so we did a home birth, so my wife barely couldn't lift our daughter for the first couple of weeks. So the first couple of weeks I was weak. Every time the kid cried I was waking up, changing her, giving her to my wife, you know, putting her back to sleep, and that was like five times a night, I think at least, or around there. But so being switched on like that, ready to get up as soon as you hear like a murmur, geez, I can only imagine what it must be like to be like that for two, three, five years. You know, like some, some folks out there. So that is what really wears down your system being constantly that slightly activated, like the dial in the. In my upcoming book I call it stress mode. So you're in stress mode, but it's not a non off switch, it's a dial. So like when you're sleeping the dial is all the way down and let's say you're in a MMA fight, cage fight, then it's all the way up and in between there's all the permutation you know, from climbing the stairs to giving a speech and we all have a different. The things are in the different place on the dial. But the way I like it being in the state you described is you're kind of just into stress mode at all times to be ready, like in this ready state, and then you just kind of up and down, but only in the stress mode zone on the dial, which could be a third, the last third, so with something like pregnant alone we can turn it all the way down. And talking about side effects is one morning early in my kind of experimentation with this particular supplement. I made this, I ordered a bunch of it online, made this sort of oil thing, so I was rubbing it on my belly and kind of I was taking it orally, and it was maybe at 10 am and then my daughter woke up and my wife was out working, so my daughter was playing in the living room and about maybe noon I kind of started getting very sleepy. I was like on the couch, I was literally, literally kind of like lying back, my, my, I rested my head on the back of the couch and then I literally, literally fell asleep and my daughter was playing nicely and then suddenly my phone rang, dhl was coming and I just jumped out of out of the couch and I went and answered the phone and I was completely normal after that. But the for me it was surprising because at that point I could have had two or three coffees so that it can really. This compound can relax you so much, but yet if you need stress mode to get you out of a jam, to take care of an emergency, it's there for you, but you're out of it the rest of the time. So it's again like I use things like magical. I don't normally use words like this when talking about supplements, but this to me has been magical. And another thing is just to kind of. You know people can use this experiment with it. It's great for during the day. It's. Some of my clients love how it helps them to sleep. But there are two more I'm gonna talk about in my book. I might as well tell you these now. So pregnant alone is a great sort of it's like a shield against depression, against, you know, real serious stress. Then there's theanine, l-theanine, t-h-e-a-n-i-n-e, which is basically extract from green tea, which is probably the reason why when you drink green tea, even though it has caffeine, you don't get the jitters. So theanine, you can take that, especially if you drink coffee. Theanine with coffee is a match made in heaven. So I take that during the day for calm focus. And then GABA G-A-B-A that's an amino acid. I take that 30 minutes before bed and that is more sedating, but it's not sedating like alcohol or valerian or weed. You can still kind of if you need to be alert. You will get out of that sedated state. For example, I took GABA during kind of the day one time and I did get sleepy. But then as soon as you need to like let's say you have to go drive or whatever you just snap right out of it because it's a weak sort of inhibitor of the fight or flight nervous system, whereas these other things, you know alcohol, weed, whatever they exert a strong effect and then that takes a certain amount of time to wear out. The only thing with GABA is if you take a bit too much in the evening, you could be. It can be hard to get up in the morning Like you're rubbing your eyes for half an hour, but again, it's not this kind of drug-like sedation like a benzo or, you know, barbiturate or whatever. So these would be my go-tos Theanine during the day, gaba at night and prognonal on prophylactically once twice, three times a week, just to kind of keep those protective hormone levels up.

What was the one that comes from the green tea extract Theanine, Theanine. Now are you telling me that theanine is really has a chance to give me the benefits of caffeine without the?

jerkiness. No, it allows it, basically kind of balances caffeine right. So it has no tropic sort of and brain enhancing properties on its own, but it's more. It just gives you a little bit of a calm air, like everything is like, if you can imagine the dial, the stress mode dial just turned down a little bit, you know. But if you have coffee with it or an hour after or whatever the coffee, it will allow you to be focused, actually for comedy, stand-up comedy. Not that I recommend drinking coffee that late in the day, I don't know if, even if you like coffee. But theanine can really help to balance the jitters, the stage jitters, but it will still allow you to be, to amp yourself up. So because you need to for that performance aspect, you still kind of are a little bit in fight or flight. It's a little bit in stress mode I think most comedians are at least but theanine can really help reduce the stress.

Gotcha, gotcha, this is amazing because you are giving various options on how to use supplements that will allow us family caregivers an option on how to manage that. Every day, that chronic stress, that day, life is too much. Something sucks. What can I do to make sure that, no matter what news I get, or if I don't get any news maybe I just had a bad night's sleep, or traffic was tough or my knee just started hurting because I was walking down the hall a little too fast but I know I got this thing in my purse or in my gym bag and I can take it and it's not going to harm me, but it will help me. Harm and not help. It's not going to have some wacky effect on my liver or my kidneys, and those are the things that we need. That's exactly what we need. Christian, I got to tell you this has been a phenomenal conversation. It's been extremely informative. I know that the Parenting Up community is going to be grateful for it. I can't wait to get the feedback. But before we wrap up, I want them to know where they can find you. You mentioned being an author. Let us know the titles of your upcoming books, anything you already have out and where they can follow you and support you.

Thanks, jay. Yeah, so my website is christianjordanoffcom it's just my namecom. And my first book was on autism. It's called Autism Well-Being Plan how to Get your Child Healthy. It's all about helping parents understand the health challenges that autistic kids usually suffer from, or the various different health challenges that they can suffer from, how to identify them and address them using lab testing, supplementation, sleep, hygiene practices, obviously, diet. That's the most important thing. And my next book I'm just kind of in the final stages of editing and polishing it up. I'm working with my editor now and hopefully in about a month's time it will be out. It's about how to live longer. Basically it's about longevity and, like I said earlier, the biggest lever to pull on longevity is reducing stress, right? So a large chunk of the book I devote to reducing not so much psychological stress, because I'm not your friend. I can't come into your life and tell you you know you need to get this person out of your life. You know, whatever, seek counsel with an elder in your family, I can't tell. I can't do any of these things. But I can, like we already discussed, I can help you nip stress in the bud at the sort of the deeper biochemical level and then when you do that, that allows you to experience stressors from a different lens. It allows you to, let's say, someone cuts you, for example. Just a quick example is I was driving like a few weeks ago. I remember I was driving and I don't know did I do something wrong? But somebody behind me was super pissed off, so he just kind of like he's swerved around me and he was like I could see his face. He was like going red, he's got like smoke coming out of his ears and I was like in a super relaxed mood. You know, I kind of just enjoying listening to some music, being kind of like in an awesome mood, and I just looked at him and I was like I felt so much compassion that someone can be in that so so amped up, so stressed out behind the wheel of his car on his own, and I'm like, dude, that's no way to live, you know. And I kind of a smiled but I was like you know, that was me, that was me for decades, you know. So I really am hoping to to kind of shed, shed a little bit of light on this because, I'll be honest with you, a lot of the health gurus out there they're promoting exactly the opposite of what people should be doing Fasting, low carb diets, you know, just pushing it, pushing hard, very cold plunges, wim Hof, breathing, all of these things. They're just adding more stress on our plates. So I'm hoping to help people understand the mechanisms of stress, how stress mode works, what puts us into stress mode and how to keep ourselves out of it with how we eat, what we, what we do and what we don't do on a daily basis. So that will be the book coming out, I'm hoping by the end of January or early February 2024, that will be volume one of how to live longer. That's working title. I'm hoping to do volume two and maybe a volume three. So that will links to that will be on my website. I also have a podcast and some other courses and you know all the everything is on the website.

Spell your last name for us.

Okay, so it's Jordan off. Y O R D A N O V Jordan off.

Thank you. Well, it is my pleasure. You're welcome back anytime, Certainly when you release the books you take care. If I get over to Portugal, you will be the first to know.

Amazing. I appreciate you so much, Jay.

Absolutely. Thank you so much. Take care, let's all 이런. And the person Number one chronic stress is real. It's serious and it's a part of being a family caregiver. I mean it builds up every day, every moment. It's not going anywhere, but we can manage it. How cool is that? How cool is that Unless you live in one of these blue zones that Christian talked about and I am personally not close to anybody that lives in a blue zone. I've been through some blue zones and I did feel remarkably light on my feet. Ah Well, for the rest of us, we need to take seriously the idea of chronic stress. We become so accustomed to stress that we don't know we're under it. Right, you get to the point where driving 10 miles over the speed limit is normal, and then driving 15 miles over the speed limit is normal. And then waking up and getting dressed within 20 minutes, shower and wash your face and eating breakfast and getting coffee and getting in the car in 20 minutes becomes normal. But there's an anxiety in your gut that really you shouldn't be living with. And now you're eating tons or taking rollades, or you're taking all of this other medication to counterbalance the acid in your stomach, or you have more migraines. Now you're drinking more coffee or you're taking something else. All of that is a sign of chronic stress that's piling up on each other. So first thing I want you to really consider is even the notion that you're under chronic stress. Just because you go to sleep at night or you appear to be functioning during the day does not mean that you've avoided chronic stress. Number two Pregnant alone. I hope that's right. That's what he said, but anyway, portuguese is his first language and it is not even my 12th language. Okay, pregnant alone baby. It kind of sounds like pregnant alone, which is what I would have to be at this point, because I'm 52 and if I got pregnant right now, I would absolutely be alone. All my family and friends would just on me. They would be like, first of all, j. What we know is you're not the virgin Mary. Have a high dream, get pregnant, all right. Anyway, that was just me with my own little side joke. There's a supplement that costs about $8. I did find it on IHERBcom. It's quite a few companies. You can research it for yourself. You can research it for yourself. It is a natural hormone that we produce in our bodies. I had not heard of it. Maybe some of you had, but it's a stabilizer, much like testosterone, estrogen, progesterol and all the odds and the ends in the stuff in our body. But it is a stabilizer in our stress levels. So it helps bring us back down and keep us here from all of the spikes. I don't know about you, but my life has a lot of spikes, has a lot of spikes. If the stock market crashes, I spike. If my mama has a bad day, I spike. If I don't get enough sleep, I spike. If I bomb at a comedy show, I spike. That's a lot of options for spiking. If I run out of gas, I ran out of gas recently. Y'all who runs out of gas now? I did Don't judge me, it already happened. But whatever, that was a stressor. I'm happy to know of another option in a supplement that's less than $10, that my body is already accustomed to having in it. But as we get older it doesn't produce as much. Look at that. And as we have more chronic stress, our body needs it more. Look at that. The more chronic stress, the more we need that particular hormone. But the older you get, your body makes less, because back in the day, the older you got the less stress you were under, because the kids were supposed to be doing that shit and you were supposed to be on the downhill sitting in a rocking chair on the porch watching them farm the land. I don't even have a porch Number three In the United States for sure. Heart disease, high cholesterol, remain silent killers. So you may say, jay, smile, I don't know nothing about this supplement and all this praying to the long crap you're talking about, and I wanna just offer this If you don't want to consider that you may have chronic stress or that you wanna add this new supplement, just think about this. Heart disease and high cholesterol create heart attacks, strokes, and they are silent killers and they still account for large proportions of death in North America and I know for sure a lot in the United States. We don't get a lot of warning. They don't have pain, you don't get symptoms, you don't break out in the rash, you don't get lumps and bumps, there's no mammogram, there's no poke up the butt, For you know it, you just pass out and you dead. So that's another reason to find something, some type of supplement, that will calm you down and make your life as a caregiver easier to manage. So maybe you don't have time to do self-care like a spa or go on vacation. What kind of supplement or maybe honey, lavender tea that you could do that could reduce some of your bodies natural precursors to something like heart disease or high cholesterol? Cause this is a thing. We know that stress kills, and we know that caregiving is stressful as fuck. Yeah, what's up? Family. Share this episode right here with a caregiver you love. Review on Apple Podcast. Follow us on social media and please subscribe to our YouTube channel.