214 Dr Dani Gordon | Medical Cannabis, CBD and Resilience (stimulating forms of breath work)
AAngela FosterJan 27, 2023 at 9:20 am58min
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00:00Dr Dani Gordon
For some people who have really bad insomnia, they they try to take hemp CBD before they go to bed. It doesn't work as a sleep aid directly. Sometimes it can actually make people more wakeful. It can actually wake up some of the parts of the brain in that are involved with keeping us awake and alert.
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00:23Angela Foster
Hi friends. In this week's episode, we're gonna be diving into the world of CBD and medicinal cannabis. I'm chatting to Dr. Danny Gordon, who is a London based double board certified doctor and world's leading expert in CBD cannabis medicine and integrative medicine. She has an incredible book called the CBD Bible, which will give you everything you need to know about CBD that she published in 2020. And she has a second book coming out later this year called the resilience blueprint. She in addition to being dual certified by the UK and American boards in integrative medicine, she's also studied mind body medicine at Harvard, yoga, meditation, and herbal medicine extensively throughout India and Southeast Asia. She was also the founder of an EEG Neurofeedback Wellness Centre in Bali that was specialising in burnout and stress resilience, and she has been using mindfulness and Mind Body techniques with patients for over a decade. You're going to hear about some of these practices in this week's episode. And you'll also be hearing about when is the right time to use more stimulating forms of breath work like Wim Hof breathing? For example, when should you be using cold water therapy and sauna? And when aren't these things appropriate? When are they actually a bit too much stress for the system depending on where that person is, in terms of their their level of fatigue, or burnout, and Dr. Downey explains this very fluently for us today. I think it'll give you some really good insights and how you can begin to optimise your own practices. So without further delay, let me introduce you now to the lovely and highly knowledgeable Dr. Danny Gordon. So Dr. Danny, it's so good to have you here. I'm really, really excited to talk about integrative medicine resiliency, I think, you know, there couldn't be a better time really, when we look at the way the world is now coming, you know, the back of sort of two years of the pandemic, post pandemic. And now everything all over the news is all about the economy. And I think just globally, we've been under this, this volume of stress University for such a long time. So I'm really thrilled to have you on the show. So very well, Mark.
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02:38Dr Dani Gordon
Thank you really excited to be here.
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02:40Angela Foster
Yes. Can you look up with tonnes and tonnes of questions for you? So I guess, I think probably a really good place to start is resilience is a term, you know, I talk about a lot and lots of people are using. But isn't that well understood? So why don't we start there by describing what it what does it mean to be a resilient human?
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02:59Dr Dani Gordon
Yeah, it's a great question. So researchers, of course, are still arguing about the definition of what is resilience. It's kind of a nebulous term. But what I mean when I talk about resilience is really about health and well being resilience. And for me, there's some core factors that play into that. So the first thing is how well we can bounce back after we've had a setback, or a challenge or some kind of adversity, because everyone faces these things. And I always I like that phrase of bouncing forward. So not only have you my patients who are really sick, we're trying to get them to bounce back. But my patients were really well ready, we want to make them bounce forward. So they can use these challenges that they face as a building block for even more resilience. Because the thing about the how the brain works, is you actually need to have setbacks and challenges to build resilience. So this is great news. For everyone who's ever been under stress, we actually need some stress to get more resilient. The other thing for me that resilience is about is really about four different aspects of mental well being so our energy levels, how much energy we have, how energetic we feel, how energised our our cells are mitochondria, and then we have stress and anxiety levels. So how ramped up our nervous system is, are we able to return to that calm baseline easily. And then we have mood, which of course is our ability to interact with the world and putting our brain into that approach behaviour and not getting stuck in the the lows and in really like the the really down loops that the brain gets stuck in. And then the last sector of resilience for me as a doctor is mental function, cognitive function, including how clear headed we feel, you know, getting rid of brain fog, how well we can think and how we can execute on our life's vision. So for me, that is really what resilience is about.
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04:58Angela Foster
Yeah, great. I love that. It's pretty broad, isn't it? I mean, do you as part of that? Do you also factor in when you're looking at you mentioned there like the resiliency of the mitochondria and your energy? Do you also look at heart rate variability, because I find that's a really good indicator of looking at Adaptive reserve, right? When it's going down, you know that you just don't have that much available at this point in time, you need to kind of double down on that record. Do you also integrate that?
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