You’re eating well. You’re working out. You’re keeping up with everything. But you’re still tired.

You’re more irritable than you want to be. And it feels like your body just isn’t keeping up with your life.

You’ve been told everything is normal. But something about that doesn’t sit right.

We get into what could actually be going on underneath that. From stress that doesn’t switch off to the way your body starts to compensate when it’s been pushed for too long. The symptoms that get brushed off. The patterns that quietly build.

This is for the woman who knows something feels off, even if she can’t explain it yet.

Resources mentioned:

• Dr. Miranda Naylor's Website: https://drmirandanaylor.com/
• Free clarity call with Dr. Miranda: https://drmirandanaylor.com/schedule-now/

Work with me:

1. Breakthrough Intensive - You already know you should slow down, delegate more, stop overcommitting & be emotionally present. So why can't you? That's what we figure out in 90 minutes + integration call 2 weeks later. Book your Breakthrough
2. Exhale: Private Coaching - For women ready to do this work until it sticks and you can't revert back. 4 open spots: Work with me

Connect with Sam: Instagram | Facebook

Welcome back to Journal Entries. This week we have a very special guest, Dr. Miranda Naylor. Welcome to the show, Miranda!

Thank you so much for having me.

Yes, I'm so excited to have you here. And one of the reasons I'm so excited is because you have such a special expertise that I think is going to be really insightful for my listeners. My listeners and my clients often tell me that they are doing everything right. They are eating healthy. They are exercising. You know, they're also Googling all of the things, you know, but they're still

exhausted, they're irritable, they're snapping at their kids, they're exhausted already, but just like dragging at work. And so from your expertise and perspective as a functional medicine doctor specializing in hormones, what is your perspective or what do you think is usually happening when women are feeling that way?

Yeah, so usually that's a sign that something is out of balance in our body. And especially for women who are more high achieving, who are really driven, taking a lot on, that can be a sign that their body is in sort of overdrive and it's getting to the point where things are sort of starting to fall apart a little bit in a sense. Our body is not able to maintain everything and it's starting to compromise certain things.

and that can start to show up as symptoms. And so those are kind of like the check engine light, if you will. Like if you had a race car, you you're going like full speed ahead, the check engine light is gonna be those symptoms of like, okay, you're starting to feel a little bit more tired. I'm starting to have a harder time focusing or I'm getting more irritable. That's a sign that, you know, we need to recalibrate. We need to check in on something because yeah, there's some imbalance happening. And usually it is just our body feeling overall really stressed out.

Yeah, yeah, the check engine light and the focus as well is just so easy to get distracted on all of the projects and stuff. And I'm curious because when I talk about that, but also experience it myself, I often talk about the nervous system. And I think it's just because for me, that's what it feels like. It feels like a spike in nerves and emotions, but.

huh.

What are the hormones? Are there hormones beneath all of that? It might be a silly question. And if so, what is it? What is the thing that's causing it to be like

Yeah, totally not a silly question. And you're right, a lot of it is driven by your nervous system. Our nervous system has, you we have like a lot of different functions in our brain, but our fight or flight versus our rest, digest and heal system is our autonomic nervous system. And if we're in that go, go, go, always doing things, usually we are stuck in that fight or flight, that sympathetic nervous system. And that does come with hormones that go along with that. Typically we're thinking of our stress hormones.

Okay.

Cortisol is the big popular one there, which is also our waking hormone. So I'd like to mention that to people. It's also a normal hormone that gets us through the day. It wakes us up in the morning, keeps us awake throughout the day, and it balances out melatonin, which is like our sleepy hormone. But it also responds to stress. And we also have other hormones like DHEA that respond to stress. And yeah, those can be the ones that can be sort of stuck on pulling our resources and take away from our other hormones.

like our testosterone and our estrogen and progesterone, those sex hormones that then run the things that we're usually thinking about with hormones. Also our thyroid hormones, like all of them work kind of in concert with each other. And so if we're like going all cylinders on the stress piece and our body's like trying to really put energy there, then it can really take away from the other hormones that we also need for just a lot of great functions.

Yeah.

feeling great, having normal cycles, having sex drive and things like that.

Interesting. I may have heard this before, but it's interesting to hear maybe again or for the first time that cortisol is good for our bodies in that way. I've heard that there's good stress and bad stress. Bad stress is like the kind of stress that makes you in fight or flight mode and like overthink and overanalyze, but good stress is the one.

that makes you push a little bit harder and maybe like a deadline that makes you excited about something. You have to work a little bit harder and a little quicker. So I'm curious if like that is kind of similar. Maybe not because it's like the cortisol is also, I don't know, I thought of that because like it wakes up the body and that's the good type of stress. It's like ding ding, time to wake up.

Yeah, yeah, you know, yeah, we overgeneralize that stress is bad and that cortisol is bad, especially on social media. Be like, cortisol is the reason why you're gaining weight or whatever. It's very vilified. But in reality, it's a normal hormone that we need to function when you don't have cortisol anymore. For example, with chronic stress, cortisol can be high or be fluctuating at first.

At the end of the road though, if you continue to go and burn yourself out even more, then cortisol drops and that's when you really feel terrible. You have no energy to get through the day. You cannot focus. You can't do anything really. It just like bottoms you out. And so yeah, we absolutely need cortisol. We need all of these things together. Just we want a good balance of them. So absolutely. And with stress, when I talk about it, you know,

Our body perceives a lot of things as stress and there absolutely are good stresses too. Like exercise is my favorite example for this because exercise is literally a stress on the body that makes us stronger. It makes us adapt so that we're able to do more. We're able to run faster or keep up longer with certain things. That is a hormetic stress, a good stress. And there are other things like that too. Some of the biohacking things like cold exposure, for example, you know, I'll go into detail with those, but these are good stresses where it puts some stress on the body and then our body is able to adapt.

and go beyond that. But there also are a lot of stresses on our body in general. And good or bad, sometimes it gets to the point where it's just our body's like, stress is stress and I'm already maxed out. And so if I add one more thing, you know, it's taking care of the kids, taking care of my business, all this busyness, all this, you know, rushing around. And then we add on top of that exercise, especially hard exercise. Sometimes our body's like, nope, that's the tipping point. I'm done. This is way too much.

So I always remind people to be mindful about all the stresses and almost like what I call a stress inventory where you take all of it into account. OK, what are the things that my body could be perceiving as stress? Is the caffeine a little bit excessive and that's being perceived as stress? Is my body having to deal with a lot of toxins or an infection or something like that? Those things stress out our body. They make the immune system be activated. So all of those things kind of go into one bucket in a sense, especially when we're talking about

you know, being in fight or flight, getting burned out. If we're seeing signs in our body as a result of that, so again, the fatigue, the irritability, then looking at all the stressors in general could be really helpful to start to take certain things off your plate where you can, trying to mitigate certain stressors so their body is able to just get back into balance, get back into functioning.

Mm-hmm. This is reminding me when I went to a doctor's appointment. It was actually my OBGYN and she asked me about headaches and I was like, yes, I'm getting headaches. I have migraines. And she was like, before you do anything, start documenting your migraines. When are they cut? Like you said, the stress inventory is like an inventory of your migraines because

you need to know that, like that's the first thing they're gonna tell you to do. So if you can do that now, and if you know that now, you're just gonna get so much further. And so that feels like a great first step for the person who is like, I'm either already burnt out or I'm feeling everything that you two are saying right now is that stress inventory. So I love that. Is there anything else that you would say like the first step or now maybe second step of what to do, where to start?

Yeah, yeah, I completely agree with the advice that your doctor gave you. Doing an inventory or tracking symptoms can be a great first step because again, your body is trying to give you a signal. And so if you are tracking when those signals are happening, it can make a lot of sense, especially if it is around your cycle and you're trying to figure out like, am I more irritable before my period? Am I more irritable at a different time? Is it all the time? It makes a difference. And so starting to track those.

Okay.

you know, ideally cycle tracking along with that can be great to pair those things together, but even just starting to write them down. When are those things happening? Are you feeling tired all the time? Are you feeling tired just at the end of the day? Is it after a heavy meal? Things like that will help you start to make sense of what are these signals telling me. If you can see a pattern, find a correlation with something, it can give you a lot of information of like, maybe then this is what's driving it. If you're not sure, at least you could also go to your

practitioner or your doctor with that information and then they can help you make sense of it too. yeah, it does seem like it's happening here. You know, what's going on in that part of your cycle or at that time of the day to start to tease those apart and to understand again, like decode what your body is trying to tell you basically. Beyond that, I definitely do recommend testing and this is one that I feel like can feel sort of controversial.

Nowadays because there's so many voices again on the internet on social media and some people are saying Test you like you have to test everything and other people are saying, you know You don't like testing hormones is useless because our hormones change in reality. Yes, our hormones change every single day, know speaking of cortisol It is fluctuating wildly throughout the day But seeing that it is in a normal range It's in a normal pattern, especially if we're testing at a certain point in your cycle or certain point in the day And we can start to make sense of things

If your cortisol, for example, again, is off the charts in the morning, wow, OK, yeah, we're not seeing the big picture of what it's doing throughout the day, but at least we know it is really high. Or if it's really low, OK, you're on the other side of the spectrum. Again, maybe you're farther down in that transition of getting really burnt out because of chronic stress. So that gives a lot of information. And also just looking at other things like your thyroid and your sex hormones in general, iron levels, vitamin D levels.

Those pieces that also can really affect how our body is able to produce hormones, create energy in our cells, all of these important things that oftentimes are looked over. They're not necessarily always on a typical blood panel that you're doing on your yearly physical. So doing a little bit of a deeper look, even through a conventional lab, they can still be done very easily. They can be covered by insurance, all of that. very approachable. Can be really helpful to start to understand.

Mm-hmm.

Again, what is my body having to deal with? Does it have all the things that it needs to function optimally? And especially if you have, you're putting a higher demand on your body, you're expecting more of it, you're really high functioning, then you wanna make sure that your body's also keeping up with that, that it's really, like has all the ingredients it needs, it's able to function optimally so that you can show up optimally too.

Mm-hmm. It makes sense that the, I was going to say women, I guess people, but this podcast is for women. So women that are the, you know, go-getters and high achievers and like they put pressure on themselves to perform. They are the ones noticing the deficiencies because they are, you know, working hard and then feeling tired and their bodies are like trying to keep up.

So it's starting to make sense too of why they're the ones probably that are doing all the Googling and whatnot. And I'm curious too, because I have gotten a hormone blood panel before and I have a friend who is super into hormones and whatnot. And I think she's mostly self-educated and I sent my results to her and then obviously my doctor has got the results and my doctors.

both my OBGYN and my primary care were like, you're in the normal range, you're good to go. My friend was like, hell no, you're definitely not. Because the age, she was like, the range is just so vast, it's so wide. And my numbers were like on the very low end or high end or something. So I'm curious what your thoughts are on that for somebody who's listening that.

may have gotten the blood work or is thinking about it, but may have heard stories like this where they've already been told, like, you're normal, it's not your hormones. What would you say to that or suggest?

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's a great point. There's a difference between normal ranges and optional ranges. And the conventional medical system is really geared towards what's really pathologic, what's going to be terrible and kill you, unfortunately. I mean, that's where medicine was designed, right? Back in the day, that's what we were most concerned about. We saw these illnesses or things, and that's what they were treating. that's where we're still, that's where our medical system still is.

Yeah.

In functional medicine, what we're doing is really looking at the whole spectrum of health and rather than just keeping people from feeling terrible or dying on one side of the spectrum and not just dropping them what we call the line of fine, like that middle line on the spectrum of things are normal, you know, like there's nothing terrible happening, but you still just don't feel good. We're looking on the other side of the spectrum of how do you really feel great? How do you feel optimal? How do we make sure that your body is able to do all the things it could do at the highest capacity?

So that's really the difference. So looking at more optimal ranges, yeah, there can be a big difference with that. Some of the normal ranges, particularly like thyroid markers and some of the vitamin D, some of those markers have a really wide normal range and people could be hanging out on one side of that spectrum, like on the low end or high end, and it could actually be a sign of a problem, even though it's technically normal.

So yeah, looking closer, again, especially for this population who is probably wanting more out of their body, or the most out of their body. They wanna show up the best in their life and in their work and everything. Then yeah, looking more for the optimal ranges of things is gonna be helpful, even on some of those basic markers that you could get a lot of insight from that.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, vitamin D was actually one of mine where I was deficient in it. And so for the past two years, I've been taking a supplement in a certain quantity and I finally just tipped into the, you know, where they have the range. I tipped into the range, you know, so I'm like very, very low end. And I got a note from my doctor that said, you can stop taking the supplement now. And granted, I am not a doctor. I'm not. I know nothing. But in my head, I'm like, huh?

Shouldn't I at least continue my range to maintain or at least like bump up a little bit more? So yeah. I'm curious. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, it's, you know, yeah, it's, hard with with what their scope is and what their knowledge base is. Yeah.

Yeah. What? Well, how do I ask this? I was just on a call with a client and it was really interesting because we were talking about the how noisy it is in her head and like the to-do list items and we were kind of excavating what it is keeping her from paying attention to like what it's keeping her from. But then we pivoted because she was like, you know, Sam, what I really want to know is

once we like work through this and I have this space in my brain and space in my day and on my calendar, what will I be able to do with it? And that's what I'm feeling now is like, if these women listening, and if I am able to actually balance my hormones or get into the optimal range, what will I be able to do or what will I actually feel like?

you

And it's almost like what the feeling that I got after reflecting on that call and that I'm getting now is like, we almost need to convince ourselves that it's worth it, that it's worth having that space in our day, that it's worth taking the time because we do have to advocate for ourselves in our health in order to, especially with hormones, there is a lot of buzz around it, but that's literally what my doctor said when I asked about it. She said,

It's a lot of buzz on social media. You're not in perimenopause. There's a lot of buzz on social media. That was her excuse for why I shouldn't look into it. So guess my question is, what is on the other side? Why is it that I should and we should be taking this seriously?

I love that you bring this up. You know, I think that's, it kind of brings up one thing first that like change is hard and it can feel scary, especially when we are in a place where, you know, again, assuming like the high, you know, driven person who's been pushing a lot and expecting a lot out of their body, they've been doing this pushing for a long time. And it can also, it can literally feel scary to not keep pushing. So sometimes we need to scale back. We need to have more rest, more recovery time.

And that can feel really scary. So I it is an important thing to talk about, of like that could feel like you could have resistance to that. Even though you really want to feel better, you want to get rid of these symptoms, you can also have internal resistance of like, why can I not just give myself the time to rest? Why can I not give myself the time to recover? And I think that's really important to be aware of.

so that you can keep your mindset in order while you're going through something of like, this might be uncomfortable. This might feel really weird to me to have to create space and to have to create rest time. That is going to feel like a hurdle on its own. But on the other side of that, the thing that we could get out of that is kind of like what you already mentioned, like feeling clear minded, having space in your day to actually be able to think or focus a little bit more clearly. For a lot of women, it looks like

being even more productive, even though it feels like we're afraid that we're gonna be less productive because we're not, you know, just spinning our wheels all the time. Oftentimes, it can look like being able to show up and be more efficient in our work rather than, you know, spending a couple hours on something, really pushing through and not being able to think clearly. You can think clearly, you feel energetic enough to be like excited about working on a project, get it done more quickly, and then have more time to do other fun things like insert.

fun and joy in your day, which most of us, again, aren't really thinking about as a priority a lot of the time, and be able to show up in the things that you enjoy doing more fully. So with more mood stability, feeling more just content in general, weight can be an issue where we're feeling really gross in our body, being able to just feel more liking how we look, but also just feeling more energetic and at home in our body.

you know, on the other side, can, you know, we can feel amazing even through perimenopause and you know, all these things that, yes, there is a lot of buzz about how terrible it could be, but honestly, you can feel really awesome through these different transitions. You can get a lot of like really great things out of them. And when you are able to, again, like have your cells working the way they should be and having everything really in line, then you can just rise to the occasion even more to get the most out of life.

Yeah, that seems worth it to me for sure. And a lot of what I talk about is mindset and my approach is strategic journaling. But I am totally aware too that you can journal all you want and even go to therapy all you want. But if you're not feeling your best physically and it's due to something like...

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

your hormones being way off, your cortisol being spiked all of the time, all that sort of thing, you can only get so far. I'm curious, what do you think or how do you think your mindset is related to or linked to your health?

Yeah, great question. You know, both are really important for the other. for one, like I was kind of talking about, mindset is super important for health to be able to, you know, believe that we can change our health, believe that we are deserving of good health, believe that we're able to have energy, like all of these things. If you have a mindset that is really stuck in, no, I just have to grind and I'm never feeling good, or this is just part of aging or something like that.

then it's absolutely gonna get in the way of you being able to have good health because you don't believe you can. You're not gonna, like you're gonna self-sabotage probably. You're going to put things in the way because you don't actually think it's a possibility. So that's huge and that can be a huge first step. On the flip side of that, you're absolutely right. We can do all this mindset work and at a certain point, if our body is just not there, our body has some sort of barrier that we're not able to push through, then that is gonna get in the way of that too because we don't have energy. We don't feel.

Like our mood is balanced, we don't feel great in our body, or we just don't trust our body too. Like that can come along with this too, where we're having symptoms, our doctor's telling us it's normal, but we just still don't feel good. We get this disconnect with our body of like, my body is deceiving me. It's doing something that I don't want it to do and I don't understand what's going on. So both are really important.

for the other one too, to kind of be doing both at the same time. Especially again, if we are having a lot of symptoms, we're feeling like we're not able to, you know, do life the way that we want to because we have things getting in the way, then both are so important. Usually mindset is a good like first step in that. Again, if we have a big barrier where it's like, you know, I'm not worthy of this or something, definitely tackling that first. But then on the flip side, as we start to make wins with how we're feeling, we're like, my energy is picking up.

I'm not so crabby with my kids, then that also just makes us like it gives us the proof that our mind needs to know, okay, yes, I can do this. Yes, I can feel this way. It is actually possible to feel really incredible, even if I'm in my 50s or whatever. So yeah, both are so important.

Yeah, for sure. Now, I know that you have clients and that you offer clarity calls. I'm curious when people call in and when you're working with clients, what is the number one thing that they tell you? What did they initially come to you for?

That's a great question. Well, so I, again, I specialize in women's health and hormones. So I see a lot of a big range of, you know, cycle issues, bleeding issues to perimenopause, menopause symptoms. I would say for this population, one of the things I see really commonly is sort of what we've alluded to, like feeling off, feeling like we're having a little bit of weight gain. Our energy is dipping. We're more crabby and everything's normal, quote unquote, normal.

Maybe they've already gone to their doctor and they're like, they don't have any answers for me. Everything's normal. That is a really big population that I see because again, they're not getting the answers that they need or want. they're really, they know that there's something more. They really have this intuition that they can do more for their health. So that'd be the most common.

thing that I see. And I love working with those people because again, they're so driven in their health and all they really need is some good information, some insight into their body, some strategy to move them through those pieces that are really like, we don't know how long things should take and what we're supposed to do, even though there's so much information on social media. And so just giving them then the support they need to do that paired with their drive, like

they end up doing so well and having such great results.

Yeah. That's I was going to ask you next is what is the next step, not even next step, but how do you help them? Is it like, do you coach them? Do you offer? I've just saw someone locally that they help you with like the hormonal blood work, but then she locally gives like peptide shot booster type. I don't know. So like for you, what is the next step if someone were to have a call with you?

and you guys chat, are the services that you offer, I suppose, that they would then, I feel like a lot of people are planners and they wanna know what the options are to keep working with you.

Yeah, yeah, great question. So I have a specific kind of plan that we put people through. It's a four step program called the resilience method. So we're focusing on nervous system, mindset to start, gut health, detoxification, cellular energy. And so again, we're using strategy to move people through this transformation and really focusing on that big picture to change their health and keep them healthy.

and feeling amazing long-term. So that's kind of the big picture of what we're doing. What that actually looks like is having long visits together. You we start with a long intake appointment where we're really talking in detail about, you know, their history and their symptoms, how they're living day to day, you know, what is on their plate, all of that, and really giving them a strategic customized plan after each visit. We do advanced testing. So we do...

kind of as I'm mentioning, a more comprehensive blood work panel that still is, you know, kind of the basic testing also, but going deeper, looking for optimal levels. We often do functional testing too, which is the name basically for sort of like deeper testing. So maybe looking at gut health testing, looking at, you know, functional pathways in our body, looking maybe at toxin levels, things like that, to really get that information, to know.

what's going on and pairing that with the symptoms they're having so that we have a lot of data to go off of and can really simplify things rather than just, you know, throwing everything at the wall or doing everything that they say on social media, like that could be helpful. We're really able to simplify and say, okay, for you, here's the issue, here's the issue. You don't have to worry about these other things. And then again, we apply that with the strategy that we have.

to be able to move through the different pillars that we know, okay, we need to address step number one first, step number two. So it's very systemized, but also customized to them, if that makes sense. So yeah, so that they can get those results they're looking for.

Mm-hmm.

that feels so supportive because as someone who is kind of going through light testing, I wouldn't even say that I'm like going through hormone, but I've been thinking about it and I've been going through some doctor visits and I just feel in like the primary care world unheard and like I really have to like advocate for myself and whatnot. So hearing you say long visits,

As someone who literally is so busy right now with my current schedule, I heard that and I'm like, finally, like someone to listen to me and like someone who actually cares. So, and I loved like the four different steps and whatnot. So to me, hearing that, I feel like the listeners too are gonna be like, wow, this is somebody who actually sees me, maybe not literally right now, but you know, hears me and is here to support me and to be my advocate. And maybe like,

They won't have to work as hard like you are on their side and you're there to help them and be their advocate for them.

Yeah, 100%. And that's, unfortunately, it's such a common experience to feel really unheard and dismissed nowadays. And so that is my ultimate priority. My number one priority is to make sure that someone's feeling heard, seen, understood, valued, that their insights are being valued because we know our body's best. Even though we do get disconnected, there is no test or anything else that's gonna tell us what's going on in our body better than how we feel. So really honoring that.

And then again, like giving the guidance to support that. Yeah, absolutely. And if someone takes nothing else away from this conversation, just knowing that that's a possibility, that that is an option, I think can be so helpful because again, we can get so discouraged of like, we're just having to advocate for ourselves so much. We're getting exhausted doing that. And so knowing that there are people out there who really truly do care about.

the outcomes are getting, they want to spend the time with you to go over those. And while it also like, you know, sometimes, you know, we're talking about long visits, this also can feel like, well, you know, that is an investment in time, but that investment upfront of spending some time together and really understanding you as a person, your environment, all of that, then someone can really walk with you and be able to give you that support that you deserve. So yeah, it's absolutely something that you can have.

Yeah, this has been so incredible and so insightful too. If someone listening wants to maybe work with you and set up a call with you or just learn more about your services, where can they find you?

Yeah. So I'll give you the link in the show notes where they can book a free call. Again, that's free clarity call where we can talk about where they are on their health journey, walk through kind of what our way of working is and all of that. And you can also find me on social media. I'm on Instagram at Dr. Miranda Naylor. And you can DM me. You can even just hit the word, like put in the word start and I'll send you information about how to book a call. You can also just start a conversation with me. I'm happy to talk about your unique situation.

Great, this has been so amazing. Thank you so much for being here Miranda.

My pleasure, absolutely.

stop