Shownotes
What if struggling to cope isn't a personal failing, but a sign that your body simply has less capacity to draw on right now? In this episode of Mind Over Matter, host Swati talks with Dr. Jess Armine, a healthcare provider of nearly 50 years and founder of The Center for Bio-Individualized Medicine, about why resilience has more to do with physiology than willpower.
Dr. Jess walks through why comparing yourself to people who seem to "handle things better" misses the full picture, how a specific illness or life event can quietly lower your capacity to cope, and why setbacks don't erase the progress you've already made. It's a compassionate reframe for anyone who has ever wondered, "why can't I just handle this like everyone else?"
About the Guest:
Dr. Jess Armine has worked in healthcare for nearly 50 years, starting as a nurse and medical technician before becoming a Registered Nurse in 1978, serving in the Army in emergency and critical care, and later earning his medical degree in 1986. He developed the concept of bio-individualized medicine, an approach focused on identifying the physical root causes behind mental and emotional symptoms.
Key Takeaways:
- Resilience isn't a fixed personality trait or a measure of your character, it reflects your body's current capacity, which can shift based on physical factors outside your control.
- Comparing yourself to someone who seems more resilient isn't a fair measure, everyone's physiological history and starting point are different.
- A noticeable drop in your ability to cope often follows a specific event (an illness, an infection, a major stressor), and tracing back to what changed can offer useful clues.
- Basic body function, digestion, nutrient absorption, and cellular energy can meaningfully influence mental and emotional capacity over time.
- A setback doesn't erase your progress, it's often a temporary dip that resolves as you keep supporting your body's ability to recover.
- Look for practitioners who take the time to understand your full history and treat you as an individual, rather than relying only on symptom-based labels.
Connect With the Guest:
Website: https://www.drjessarmine.com
Podcast: Raising Awareness of Chronic Illness, One Condition At A Time!
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jess-armine-28790b10/
Episode Chapters:
[00:00] Cold open, questioning what resilience really means (approx.)
[03:00] Meet Dr. Jess Armine, nearly 50 years in healthcare (approx.)
[08:00] The biggest misconception about resilience (approx.)
[14:00] Spotting the event behind a sudden drop in capacity (approx.)
[20:00] Supporting the body's basic function to support the mind (approx.)
[27:00] Why a setback isn't starting over from zero (approx.)
[32:00] Finding a practitioner who treats you as an individual (approx.)
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Transcripts
00:00:08 Swati: We tell ourselves we should be able to handle everything. The stress, the uncertainty, the constant changes that life throws at us. And when we struggle, we sometimes start wondering, what's wrong with me? Why can't I just handle this like everyone else seems to? But what if the problem is not our capacity? What if we have simply been taught the wrong idea about what resilience is supposed to look like? Welcome, dear listeners, to mind over matter. When we explore the psychology of thriving in a complex world. I am Swati, and today we are having a conversation about what it really means to build mental strength and resilience. Joining me today is Doctor Jess Amin. Doctor Jess it's such a pleasure to have you with us.
00:01:10 Dr. Jess Armine: It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much.
00:01:13 Swati: So before we begin, I would love for our listeners to get to know you a little better. So can you introduce yourself and share a little about your journey and the work you do?
00:01:26 Dr. Jess Armine: Thank you. Well, I've been in healthcare for about fifteen years in different capacities. I started out as an emergency medical technician in New York City with Non-emergencies, and then I became a registered nurse and graduated in nineteen seventy eight. I spent about six years in the Army as an Army nurse, where I did mostly emergency department and critical care nursing. I actually ran two mass casualty events on my own. I led them real ones. Um, I decided I want to become a doctor. And then I decided to become a doctor, which I graduated in nineteen eighty six. I had a, you know, real interest in traditional medicine, but then developed an interest in alternative medicine. And since one of my children developed a mental illness, I began to learn an awful lot about, um, the actual reasons for mental illness. But the expressions were. I realized that in this day and age, uh, the treatment, the traditional treatment of mental illness or whatever, what are we talking about? Depression, anxiety, all the way up to the nasty things it's been symptomatically or in other words, treating symptoms without consideration of any root causes or even having no belief that there are root causes. In other words, if you have anxiety, well, that's just the way you are. And there's reasons for it. And we have been given the impression that things like anxiety, depression, OCD, any of the nice little letters, the number one, those are diagnoses, which they are not diagnoses should point you to a root cause. So if you have a sore throat. Okay guess what? That's a symptom. But if you have strep throat. Now, if you have OCD, it only tells me that you have a certain set of behaviors. Just tell me. Okay. So I delve into that and developed a large area of expertise in genetics in neuro endocrinology, which is a study of how the nervous system interacts with the immune system and interacts with the hormone system. Uh, I have a large training in mitochondrial function, which are your energy creators. In other words, if they're not working very well, they can't heal. Okay. And so, so cell membrane integrity and developed a thought pattern called bio individualized medicine. Because if we consider all those things and then attending to the patients and the patient's individual physiology, These issues, my subspecialties in psychiatric areas, treating it naturally. We found that we found. When doctors use the royal. We. Okay. I found that my colleagues found that we were able to help people reverse loads of different things and live better lives. Um, we often work with psychiatric psychiatrists because you don't just pull somebody off the medicines. That would be appropriate, but you can fix the body. And everybody should realize that any kind of mental illness of whatever name you put on it is based in your physiology. It's not your inability to handle things. Can you get overwhelmed? You bet. But is it really doing? Why can somebody like us? Why do you handle something that I can't? Same. Same triggers. Well, it's a lot more to it than just the event. It's what's come before. It's how your body is able to function. You know, if you don't have enough energy and you're just running around because your mitochondria very well, my ability, my bandwidth, my capacity is physically less, hence mentally less. So I might not be able to do to handle a particular event differently than somebody else. I mean, as well as somebody else. And don't be, don't be fooled by a lot of people look like they're handling things, okay? They all have a physiology problems. But that's where my expertise lies. And I treated thousands of people over the years who've lost hope, especially in this neuropsychiatric in this mental illness world, and realize that the first feeling they didn't have any control over anything And this is just in one way and figuring out why something happened and how it happened and what's the pathway to healing gave them back their power and hope. And many, many of them are living their lives.
00:06:33 Swati: Doctor Jess, it's really good to have you here. So before we get into the practical side of resilience, I would love to start by unpacking what we actually mean when we say someone is resilient. Because I think when, like most people hear the word resilience, they imagine someone who can just, you know, keep going no matter what happens. They don't break down, they don't like bounce back quickly. And somehow they always seem to have it together. So what is the biggest Misconception you think people have about resilience?
00:07:18 Dr. Jess Armine: Resilience. First of all, it's conceptual. In other words, it's your constant. You. When you're feeling terrible, you look at some. Some people who seem to be handling things better and you say, oh, what is that? Okay. Your ability to get over your ability to regain your strength, your energy. And if you're not doing it, given what you're seeing, you know, instead of presuming that that person is better than you, more resilient does not mean they're better than you. And it doesn't mean you're broken either. It means that your bandwidth, your capacity has been lessened, made less by a series of issues in your body. So when you look at somebody and say, I'm not well. It's not your motivation. It's not because you don't want to do it. It's because you don't have the ability to do so. And that is something that can be treated. So when you talk about resilience, it's first of all a very individual thing. And it's based on how much, how much bandwidth, how much you're able to bounce back from things. And that has a lot of different factors that you can control. You know, comparing yourself to other people makes you start feeling, I just can't do it. Right. I'm just, I'm just not, you know, I'm not as resilient. I'm not as smart. I'm not as miserable. That's the wrong way. And sadly, society looks at us and says that especially with anxiety is a horrible statement, not looking at the reason and why somebody has it worse than others if someone didn't have it. So it's really interesting and you should only compare you to you, not you to somebody else. And when you feel like this, you're like, you have to look inwards. Like, what the heck is going on? That took my bandwidth, my, my ability to, to respond. And that's the direction. That's what I feel about this.
00:09:36 Swati: So let's make this really practical. So for someone listening right now who feels like they are barely holding everything together, like then why it might resilience are being tested actually look like in their everyday life? Are there are small signs that tell us we are reaching our limit?
00:10:05 Dr. Jess Armine: Here's a real good example. With the pandemic, we have people who were ill before. And then either got vaccinations or got Covid or got Covid through shedding, and they got worse and they never returned to where they were before. And they would be significantly more fatigued and feel horrible about themselves and their ability, their resilience to get lower. This is a very common scenario. They're calling it Covid. That's a that's a term. Okay. Now, if we start looking at that and say, and let's say that scenario is there, you need to look at it from, okay, what happened? Okay. If you're looking at an event that may either created something or made you worse and look at the event and what happened during that event. Okay. So in the case of Covid, so maybe the spike protein or the virus that occupies a bunch of receptors. And when it does that, it interferes and makes less your mitochondrial function. So your energy drops down and your ability to heal is not less. So what would the target be there? Target is not you. You're not. You want to handle it, but you just can't anymore. It's an accumulation of things. So you go to the last thing. You look at that and keep going backwards. The same thing if you starting started developing anxiety. You see this stuff used to make me anxious before. I used to be able to handle this really easily. Why am I so nervous? Why can't I sleep? You know? And yes, you can get panicky, but what should you really do? Start looking back at those times when you felt bad and felt good to see what events occurred. Viruses. I went to another country, came back with traveler's diarrhea, and things just haven't been the same. Parasites. You know there are physical things or you you are assaulted or you have, you know, you've had significant, um, emotional trauma, divorces and stuff like that. There was a study done in twenty thirteen on the cell danger response, which making it very short. Uh, the doctor identified all the things that injured cell and they were divided into toxins, microbes, viruses, and all the emotional, spiritual and psychological traumas. So if you were perfectly fine before and progressively got worse or had an event and got worse, well, as the event that caused it. And If it's a request, you have to go after that. So if you went to another country, you came back with travel diarrhea and you just weren't the same. After that, things started deteriorating. But what would have happened there? Okay. Let's say particular country that's known for parasites. That's what you should be looking for. It isn't you as a person. It's the parasites. And once you start cleansing them and fix your cells, give your body what it needs to fix. Go back to where you were. And with chronic illnesses, there's usually multiple things going on that have degraded your ability to respond to things over the years. So it can get pretty complex. But the fact is, it's an accumulation of things. And that's why I say it's very individualized. It's not you as a person. We have to get away from the fact that mental illness is the individual's responsibility, in that they don't want to participate in life. They don't want to do this or they just simply lazy and so forth. I've treated thousands of people. I can count one or two, maybe three in my entire career who really just did it, you know, faked illness for secondary gain. Most people want to get better, and most people are very confused since they don't have answers. And the traditional medical approach does not lend itself to giving the proper answers. And okay, you're taking antidepressants. Take that, take this. And yes, it may help for a while, but it doesn't really fix the problem. So it's eventually going to get worse and worse. And you can feel you feel worse and worse about yourself. And it's going to be, you know, fully tested negative. You must be everything's wrong. True, true tests can be all negative and you still have something wrong that has to be interpreted. Can I answer your question?
00:15:03 Swati: Yeah. So if someone wants to, you know, actually build their resilience, not just react when things fall apart, where would you suggest they start? Is there a practical practice or like, I guess, mindset shift that could that would be helpful? Yeah.
00:15:27 Dr. Jess Armine: Okay. Well, you know, I bet everybody has got a mental illness of whatever. When I say whatever ilk, I'm using a real broad category. Okay. Um, has been to some kind of therapy. Maybe you've taken some medications, that kind of stuff. It's not working. Okay, so here's what I found. Over the years, when I started treating chronic illness, I found there was one area that was consistently ignored, not because they because they don't realize. They didn't realize it was significant. And that's what's being called the terrain on the bottom of the foundation. Okay. The treatment of that, I'm one of the people that helped create. Now, what is that? It starts looking at the function of the cells and says, okay, let's support that function. Why is that important? Well, if you put cells together, you get tissues and tissues together. You get organs or organs in their body. So the area that was not attended to usually was that area. And if it was, it was kind of haphazard. So what does it mean to feed the to fix, support or feed themselves? When we were in our bodies run on biochemical processes. And you're not going to be impressed that I can pronounce words with lots of syllables. Okay, so I'm gonna make it real simple for you. Um, you have enzymes that convert one thing to another, to another, to another, either to excrete it or see if I can do. Those enzymes which come from your genes need co-factors, which are vitamins and minerals. Sadly, most of the vitamins you take don't really get involved, and most of the food we eat is very low, if not absent in vitamins and especially proteins. So one of the things you can do for yourself that is safe and many people will turn things around or at least make you feel better, is to take and listen to the word liposomal. L I p o s o n a l multivitamins and minerals. They're available on the market in capsules. And what those do is get directly into your cells muscles capsules break up. It gets it right through the mucous membranes. Go right into the cells. And what I have found is that when that happens within a short taking that or taking the bottle dose twice a day, something like that. The person starts feeling better because basically their body chemistry is working. The machinery is essentially okay. Why does it get that way? Well, we eat foods that are genetically modified, that are grown in soils that are vitamins and especially minerals. We, you know, because of our businesses, are more and more ultra processed foods, which have even less of what you need. Right. That's one big factor. The second factor giving those biochemical processes substrate, which means digesting foods because that's what if you if your foods break down completely and your body absorbs them, gives them to these biochemical pathways, so you can create what your body needs. If everybody talks about this anti-aging. But it converts. Well, if you can absorb folate in your gut. If you're not breaking it down so it releases absorbed, nothing's going to work in that particular pathway. And that's part of the methylation significance. Okay. If you don't break down your proteins completely, which proteins are just as big long chain of amino acids, if you don't break them down to the individual, they break down to short chain proteins, which are antigens. They get absorbed and they make your immune system work against you. So digestion is a big deal. The choice of foods obviously organic. You can get better because it's got more nutrient content. You know what I mean? And you already know that haven't been working. You've already been doing these things. They haven't been working. which I see is a lack of vitamins and minerals in the cells and the lack of breaking down your foods very well. There's also leaky gut syndrome. You know, that is one of the major reasons for continuing inflammation. Nevertheless, if you do like some multivitamins and minerals and digest your food as well, you might find that you start feeling better. And that's because you're giving your body what it needs to actually function. Is that going to do for your mental state? Well, remember that a lack of what I just said will make your enzymes not function. It usually creates inflammation, which is otherwise known as oxidative stress. And if you start decreasing that, your whole mental state is not changing and will cure completely. Depends depends very much because you have to start balancing transmitters and sometimes it's easy. Sometimes, depending on how long it's been. But nevertheless, if you want your basic body to start working, those two suggestions I made will get you on your way.
00:21:07 Swati: That is such an important point. So, Doctor Jess, as we know, life is going to, you know, keep testing us. Even when someone has built more resilience, they are still going to have difficulties and setbacks. So when someone feels like they have slipped back, so how do you help them see that they have not necessarily lost all the progress they have made?
00:21:37 Dr. Jess Armine: You make a really good point that I see with my patients all the time. I really do. So let's say they're down here. First of all, health is not a straight line. Health is okay as long as you stay within a certain parameter the body takes care. So let's say the way down here, you know, and they start working with me and they say it never goes like this. It goes do do do do do do do do. Okay. It's a little bit. So the first thing you have to say to yourself, am I having a bad day? Is it just a bad day? Or it's just it's just a bad day. Don't worry about it. Because the next day, okay, if you have if you backslide, did you get exposed to anything? Okay. So if you get if you're halfway up the ladder, so to speak, and you get a virus, you're going to crash a little bit. You might crash a lot. But remember your body, you've been building it, you've been filling up those buckets. There's a, there's thirty trillion cells in your body, okay. With about a thousand to one hundred thousand mitochondria per cell. It's a lot to fix there. Okay. So if you're kind of on your way and you hit something that your body has to fight, it makes sense that you're going to crash again. But what you can find is getting back to where you were is going to be a lot easier than it was before. Does he just keep doing what you were doing? Look back at what? What you're doing, what you're eating, what you're drinking. You know what, what supplementation, if any, you're taking. Did you start pulling away on it because you didn't see results right away? Very few things, especially supplements, are going to give you identifiable improvement like in a week or two. It just doesn't happen. Okay. You're bereft of a lot of stuff. And yes, you put it in what the body figure out where it goes, but bereft of a lot of stuff and your body is going to balance what it needs to balance. You don't have to worry about that. All you have to worry about is getting stuff in that the body can absorb. Absorbency is everything. Absorption is everything. So if you get the cells working, you get food that absorbs these things. You've been tuning in just that evening, you know, and you use, let's say, digestive enzymes to help you digest your foods. That's going to happen when you start getting better substrate, better building blocks and better ability to process and take a lot. So if you fell away from your program that you've developed either a professional or on your own because you haven't seen results in a short time, well, maybe just continue and try not to get, you know, sometimes a bad day is just a bad day. You don't have to know the reason why. And if you start trying to find the reason why all the time. You have a bad day. Let it be a bad day. Relax, get up the next day and just continue on.
00:24:35 Swati: I really love that perspective. I feel like a setback now does not erase everything that That came before it. Yeah. You are not necessarily starting from zero. You are just coming back with more awareness, more experience, and a better understanding of yourself. And maybe that's what resilience really looks like over time. So Doctor Jess, what's that one advice you want to give to our listeners?
00:25:06 Dr. Jess Armine: I want you to realize that you're not broken. That whatever it is you have, if you're sitting up looking at me, you're fixing, you're not broken and you're going to be told that you are. You're going to be told you have this X, Y, z. And that's your lot in life. No, no, because there's things that can be done. So keep investigating. You're not broken. Don't accept it. I can give you loads of examples, but we don't have time. Okay. The other thing I want you to know is that if you follow the program, I say, Okay. If it does make you feel better, then seek out a professional to work with for the complex things. Okay, I can give you loads of loads of advice, but it really is individualized. And be careful of practitioners, especially who make you get a lot of tests before you see them. That's, that's just a way of dragging you in. Okay. You can make it pay three thousand dollars for testing. You don't want to know the result in. I'll come in and I'll do my my salesman technique. I don't do that. Okay. Work with somebody who you trust and who looks at you as a person and treats you as an individual. That's the basis of okay, so you find a good practitioner to work with. If you find that the small suggestions I made make you feel a bit better. So maybe you're on the right track so you're not broken. Do a few things to help yourself. And if you find that that is a physiologic problem physiology problem, then seek the advice of a professional who does this all the time and has a reputation of doing it well and treating people like individuals as you. You deserve it. I know how you've been treated. I know you've been told that it's all in your head. I know that you've been told. Alright, here you go. And then every time you get a diagnosis like this, everything you have is looked at through that lens. Okay. You're just lazy. You're just this. No. And when you get when you run through a system like that, do an end, run around it and find somebody who works with you and understands that you're going to have to understand this stuff in order to say, oh, you know what that means. You see those lines in your fingers and white lines that can be a zinc deficiency, you know? Yeah. Somebody who really knows what they're talking about.
00:27:40 Swati: Thank you so much for sharing your perspective with us. So before we wrap up, if someone listening wants to learn more about your work or get in touch with you, where can they find you?
00:27:53 Dr. Jess Armine: Well, I can see over here, uh, Doctor Jones dot com, uh, that has the, uh, has a lot about me what I do. There's also a button on there where you can take a free thirty minute consultation. If you have a set of circumstances that is confusing you or you think I'm really good at is you've been here, there and everywhere and nothing's worked. I'm gonna help you figure it out. If you want to look at my podcast, it's, uh, doctor online seventy four on Instagram. Or if you want to see a lot of other videos I've done, go to YouTube and just type in online and I've done videos on all kinds of subjects over the years and hopefully you'll find them.
00:28:35 Swati: Thank you so much, Doctor Jess. And to everyone listening, you don't have to figure everything out today. Take what resonates with you. Sit with it and remember that building resilience happens one moment at a time. I'm Swathi and this is mind over matter. Until next time, be gentle with yourself.
