Healing Is The Default

Healing shouldn’t feel like a coin toss, yet we’ve all seen it: one person bounces back in two weeks, while someone else stays stuck in pain and fatigue for months. We believe the body is built to heal, and we’re here to remind you of something most people forget along the way: healing isn’t something a doctor “creates.” Your body does it naturally. The real problem is what quietly slows the process down.

We break down what we call the seven healing killers, the everyday factors that block recovery even when you’re doing “all the right things.” We talk chronic stress and constant cortisol that traps you in fight or flight, poor sleep that shuts down growth and immune repair, and chronic inflammation that wears the system down over time. We also get practical about nutrition for healing: protein as the foundation of your plate, healthy fats for cellular repair, and hydration to keep circulation and recovery chemistry moving.

From there, we connect the dots between movement and rest, the wellness continuum seesaw, and why hormones and nervous system function act like the communication network for repair. You’ll also hear our take on recovery tools that can help, like sauna, massage, mobility work, and nervous system focused chiropractic care, plus a few myths we want to put to bed: healing isn’t always fast, pain doesn’t always mean damage, older adults can still recover, and there’s no single magic supplement that replaces solid habits.

If you’re frustrated with slow recovery, take the seven day challenge: pick one habit from this conversation and do it consistently. Subscribe, share this with someone who needs hope and a plan, and leave a review telling us which habit you’re starting this week.

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Transcript

Why Healing Gets Stuck

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Have you ever wondered why one person recovers from an injury in two weeks while others struggle for months? Or why some people bounce back after surgery, illness, or exercise, while others seem stuck in a cycle of pain and fatigue. The truth is, your body's designed to heal. Healing isn't something doctors create, it's something your body does. The real question is, what's getting in the way? Welcome back to Living a Full Life Podcast. I'm Dr. Enrico Dolce Corey. And each and every week we drop tidbits for you to live healthier, happier lives. With also guests. I gotta get some more guests on here too. But uh, we've been on this recap of overall health this summer, and we're gonna continue that trend. Your body is built to heal. And I think this podcast is more of a shout-out and a PSA to reminding people your body does heal. I think we lost that. We lose that sometimes. We think we're falling apart or we're broken, and we're not. A paper cut heals on its own, whether you put a band-aid on it or not. A broken bone knits back together. A virus is fought off by your immune system, whether you concentrate or not, and muscles rebuild after exercise. These are laws of how the human body works. Healing is the body's default setting. You can't override it. It's going to heal, it's going to survive, it just wants to thrive. Think of your body like a construction crew building a house after a storm. If the crew doesn't have enough workers, materials, electricity, power, or clean, a clear plan, the house takes much longer to repair. And that's what we're doing. Organizing a good crew so that it can do what it needs to do. Here I are the seven healing killers that I could come up with for this podcast. And this is what it's all about. Chronic stress is number one on the list. These are not ranked in any order, but I think chronic stress has to come up first on top and with a lot of power here because constant cortisol is one of

The Seven Healing Killers

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the biggest reasons why our body cannot heal the way it's supposed to. The nervous system stays in survival mode when cortisol is on

Chronic Stress And Constant Cortisol

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high alert. It's what makes us go high on high alert. Early become healing becomes a lower priority because now fight or flight becomes the priority. We're constantly being chased by a lion if that cortisol stays high. And there's no way to override that program. We're just constantly chased. Uh imagine just constantly running away. I mean, for a few seconds to get away, climb a tree, whatever it is to for survival makes sense. We can sprint, we can do that. But to constantly be jogging away from a pack of lions, that that's a stressful way to live our lives. So deadlines, finances, relationships, emotional stress. This is all this stuff we're talking about with chronic stress. It's what builds up each and every day and each and every week. And before you know it, you're celebrating your 50th birthday. You're like, man, I life's been pretty stressful, right? And we and we wonder why we end up where we end up. It's stress. The earlier you find out this, the better. I think Gen Z, watching them, they're they're they're fatigued, they're tired of stress, but being younger in their 20s and now, you know, approaching their 30s, uh, the way they just don't like it. They don't like stress. Not that they don't like the world or how it operates, it's that they don't like stress is something that attracts me to them. It attracts me to talk to them more. Um, I like that about them. It's a cultural, it's a generational thing. I think they're just watching their grandparents, their parents, you know, the boomers, the millennials, and now they're like, this doesn't make sense. Why are you constantly constantly stressed? I don't want to be like that. And I like it. And I like it. I'm watching them. I'm like, okay, well, now let's see how you navigate this. How are you gonna do this? Because the world still operates the same way it operated for me, um, with inflation and and things costing more. And each time I thought I'd get ahead, I was behind. And now I'm watching them do it and navigate it. And I'm like, okay, it's the exact same thing that happened to us. And uh, but they're just approaching it a little different, which is great. Uh, which is which is great. I'm gonna keep an eye on them over the next 10 years, see how they raise their families because they're on to something with the stress thing. They're just not accepting it, which is different than my generation. That's like, yeah, no, you work hard, you accept it's just the way it is. Uh pucker up, buttercup, right? Uh, poor sleep. So we got chronic stress and we got poor sleep. The growth hormones in the body cannot regulate properly if we don't sleep. Immune repair becomes impossible. Brain can't detoxify properly, hence the brain fog and the chronic fatigue. Tissue regeneration gets cut short because we shorten our sleep. And

Sleep And The Repair Switch

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even one bad night can affect recovery and performance. So, consistency, consistently sleeping is the most powerful thing you can take charge of in your life because you can turn off the lights and lie down in a bed anytime you want. No one can stop you from that. So, by doing that, you can take control of inflammation. Chronic inflammation in itself is its own stressor. Last week we went right into chronic inflammation. Inflammation is necessary for acute processes, like repairing a cut or fixing a broken bone or recovering from a workout we did yesterday. That's okay. It's the chronic inflammation that becomes

Inflammation And Food Building Blocks

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too destructive over time. It just wears down literally everything. And we went through it last week's podcast. Listen to that one. A little bit longer, but a good deep dive into chronic inflammation. Poor nutrition. Protein is too low. The micronutrients are not a vast array of them. The healthy fats are barely in the diet. Hydration, not even happening. You can't rebuild tissues without building blocks. And the building blocks are amino acid chains, triglycerides, and simple carbohydrates, simple sugars. Barely need any of that, too. Protein, amino acid chains, and fats, the triglycerides, build every single cell and tissue in your body. It's the two things that they need. Carbohydrates are strictly a fuel source, a fuel source for your cells in your body. And when we have low protein diets and bad fat diets, or no fat diets, or low-fat diets, we don't give ourselves the building box that we need on a daily basis to heal and repair. And hydration. Hydration is really important as well. Truly being hydrated, drinking enough water per day. So that's where nutrition fits into this. Lack of movement. Talked a little bit about this last week, but lack of movement equals, so movement equals circulation. Things don't move in your body if you don't move outside of your body. Does that make sense? If you don't move your body, nothing in your body moves. Circulation, lymphatic flow, cerebrospinal flow, oxidative stress, oxygen, CO2,

Movement, Rest, And The Health Seesaw

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waste products, nutrient flow. All of this stuff is dependent on your movement. Circulation equals nutrition, nutrients, and nutrients equal healing. So complete rest often slows recovery after the acute phase of an injury. What does that mean? After the acute phase of an injury, which means the inflammatory phase of an injury, rest now becomes important to help repair. So what ends up happening with the acute phase is we pump all the white blood cells, the plasma, any it depends what the injury is. Let's say it's a soft tissue injury, like a muscle injury or tendon sprain, strain. And we send out the plasma, we send out the white blood cells, we send out the nutrition to the area to heal. After that acute phase, rest becomes the most important thing for the full recovery of that tissue. So these so movement and rest go hand in hand. The more we move, the more important our rest is. So you can kind of see how we prioritize the things in our life. When we're sitting for too long, working for too long, stressing for too long, not eating well, not sleeping well, not keeping hydrated, our priority list is completely inverted. And we, I always teach the when I teach lectures, the the wellness continuum is like a seesaw. We're either moving the health continuum, sorry, health is like a seesaw. Health is just the structure. Health is the seesaw itself. And we have to keep this balanced. Uh, we're either moving towards wellness with the choices we make, or we teeter towards illness. Illness and wellness. Those are two ways we can gravitate with our health. Our health is just, it's a thing that's given to us naturally in the body. It's just the health, it's just function. But we either make choices towards illness or we make choices towards wellness. And that compounds each and every day. And we can switch. We can have one week where we're sliding towards illness, uh, bachelor party week, whatever it is, smoking cigars, drinking alcohol, whatever it is. We can slide towards that. And then the next week we can reset and be like, okay, back to back to wellness. We got to slide this back to wellness, get back on our diet, our exercise, uh, sleeping well, and slide back to wellness. And it's the seesaw every day, every week, every month, every year of our life of just trying to balance this and maintain what we call health. Health is the thing. Can't buy it, can't replace it, can't change it, can't do anything. You either move towards wellness or you move towards illness. Hormonal imbalances. Hormonal imbalance is tough. Sometimes we need some help with this. Insulin is a hormone. We forget about that. So blood sugar, thyroid, testosterone, estrogen, cortisol. These hormones all play a major role in our overall function. Hormones are chemical messengers coordinating healing throughout the

Hormones And Nervous System Signals

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body. Look at it that way. The healing. Hormones are really important for us to heal, structure, rest, and repair. And if we look at hormones that way, rather than uh muscle development, uh, body fat percentage, and all the exterior things that really don't matter that much compared to what their true function is, then we can appreciate hormones a little bit better rather than just feeling tired all the time or all this. They're the messengers that coordinate healing. And the reason why we're tired or we're gaining weight or we're losing muscle is because we're not coordinating the healing processes that help us build muscle at nighttime, regulate hormones, and re-energize for the next day. Different ways to perceive this stuff. And the way we perceive it is the way we seek out coaching and helping on this and the people we choose in our life. So the fitness people will gravitate towards the muscular people that are truly unhealthy and do what they do. And the other people that are looking for health and function and vitality will find the vitality doctors that are there, not based on looks, but on function, who help you function better. Very different perspectives on how we look at this. And that's just a hormonal example on how we can get we can stray depending on where we think we're going to get our information from. Nervous system dysfunction. The brain sends all the messages through the spinal cord. That messages go through our nerves, our peripheral nervous system, and then it hits every single organ, tissue, and cell with information. If communication is not optimal, the body has a harder time coordinating repair. So spinal health supports normal nervous system function, which is the ground fundamental premise of optimal function and sliding towards wellness. Without a system that can't function well, your nervous system, the fundamental system in the body, the grounding system in the body, where everything starts, there is no circulatory system without your nervous system. There is no muscle system, there is no hormonal system, there is no digestive system, there is no, there's nothing works without your brain, the central processing unit of the human body. If that's not functioning well, then we're just set up for failure. So, some ways we can speed up healing. I think that's what this podcast is about. This is what you're going to walk away with how do we speed up the healing process of the body? Walking, resistance training, stretching, daily movement helps us speed up the healing process in the body. Sleeping

Practical Ways To Recover Faster

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seven to nine hours per night is what an adult needs to repair and recover every single night. Consistent bedtime in a dark room, no phone directly before bed, 30 to 60 minutes before, no phone, no light in the eye from devices. That includes televisions. So if you're going to watch a program and go to sleep, turn off the TV, go get a drink of water, turn off the lights, walk to the bedroom, take a few minutes, go brush your teeth, go use the bathroom in a dark room, sit on the edge of the bed for a minute, you know, just in the darkness, and then lie down. And then it should take you a few minutes, 10 minutes to fall asleep, which gives you enough of a recovery time. But these phones at bed, looking at the light, turning it off, rolling over, and falling asleep is too fast of a transition. You're not, it's going to take you longer to fall into that deep sleep or that REM sleep because the body's recovering from fight or flight from the dopamine hit you just had from social media or whatever you were doing on there. No phone before bed. Nutrition. Protein at every meal. That is the structure of your plate. What am I eating for protein today? Could be veggie-based, could be meat, could be whatever, but protein-based. Then you surround it with vegetables, fruits, healthy fats, water, hydration, all that stuff. That's how we surround the plate. Stress. Stress management is one of the most important things to do, one of the most difficult things to do, because we're offsetting the most difficult things in our life, which is work, finance, balance, all this stuff. And then we have to counteract it with de-stressing. But it's important. Just as important as your job is, just as important as your finances are, just as important as the health of your kids are, just as important as the state of affairs of the world is, and why you put those that weight on your shoulders, I don't know. Um, all those things, the de-stressing of them is just as important. If you're going to make these things so important, your work, finances, family, whatever it is, faith, then the de-stressing from that is just as important. Just as important. So prayer, meditation, breathing, time outside in nature, going for a walk, your family, your social encounters, and your community is how we offset and de-stress. Really important to have both. And then recovery. What are some real cheats in recovery? Cold plunges. Um, what are there wacky stuff's out there? Cold plunges, uh, sweat your butt off, uh, zap yourself, electrocute yourself. Crazy. I'm gonna tell you the best recovery things you can do. Asana is probably one of the best cellular recovery things you can do for 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 minutes, almost on a daily basis or a few times a week. Probably on the top of the list. If you're gonna add things to your time in your life, asana has been used for centuries. The Nordics and the uh Bavarians and even back to the Roman Empire and Greek, I think ancient Greece too. This stuff goes back a long time of steam rooms and saunas. The therapeutic effect of them uh just works really well for our bodies to sweat and recover and just forces uh waste products out of the cells and forces the body to circulate better. So saunas are great, infrared saunas. We've come a long way with these devices. Massage, a good lymphatic or deep tissue massage can help regenerate at a cellular level and helps with movement and circulation. Chiropractic to clear out the nervous system. I don't think there's anything better than proper nervous system-based chiropractic adjustments, tonal adjustments that help regulate and clear interference in the central nervous system better than craniosacral chiropractic, uh, tonal chiropractic, those are great. Mobility work with an athletic therapist or PT or even yourself, just working on mobility for joint and movement and stretching, having those recovery days, one or two days a week where you just don't stress the body physically. Those are really important too. These are tools that complement one another rather than acting as miracle fixes. Hence why I skipped cold plunges, uh, cryotherapy, um lasers. Uh, what else is out there right now? EMF mats and grounding. And I mean, if you're gonna make time for stuff, make it count. Some myths, some myths that we should go through. Healing should happen quickly. It's impossible. Healing is on its time, has its own time continuum. It can't be interfered with. Actually, you can slow things down, you can you can make it worse, you can make healing worse, but you can't really speed it up too much. It happens naturally. Healing often

Healing Myths And The 7 Day Challenge

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takes weeks or months, depending on the tissue involved. We know this. If you've ever broken a bone, it takes more than a month for the bone to heal. If you've uh hurt tissue like muscle, it takes a couple weeks, takes a week or two for it to heal. It's not just based on the pain. The pain will go away first, but then the muscle's still healing after. Uh, tendons take a little bit longer, ligaments take a little bit longer. So it depends on the tissue. Pain means damage, not all the time. That's not true. Pain doesn't always mean damage. Bad posture can create pain. Bad posture isn't damage to anything. Bad posture is how we carry ourselves due to stress. That's one great example. So just because we're getting muscle pain, back pain, uh, headaches, it's posture related. And when we go searching with scans and x-rays and ultrasounds, we don't find any damage. That's the most common thing. Pain is not because of damage all the time. Pain and tissue healing don't always move at the same pace. Myth number three: older people can't heal. That's not true. They can. They absolutely can. Healing can slow with age. It's true. But healthy habits dramatically improve the body's capacity to recover. And there isn't one magic supplement. Man, I get this all the time. What's the one thing I should take? I'm like, what just a healthy diet is what you should take, but there isn't just one. There's no magic ones out there either. There's just good supplements out there that can help facilitate things better. That's really it. There's nothing magical out there that you absolutely must be getting. Healing is about the whole system working together. And if you don't have a good fundamental diet that you've consistently consistently follow, then no supplement in the world is going to help you. So here we go. The full blueprint. The full blueprint. Are you ready for this? We're gonna go fast. Healing is influenced by sleep, food, exercise, relationships, stress, hormones, nervous system, and recovery. None of these alone create optimal health. Together we can make together, they can make enormous differences. So here's a little challenge for you over the next seven days. Choose just one habit that supports healing, just one of them from today's podcast. Go to bed 30 minutes earlier, walk every day, eat more protein, drink more water, practice five minutes of deep breathing, whatever it is. Pick something. You don't have to change everything overnight. Small, consistent improvements are what move your health in the right direction. Try it and let me know. Leave a comment, reply, send us an email, pop me a text if you have my number, whatever it is. Let me know what did you do from today's podcast? And if it's helped you, if today's podcast has helped you, better understand how your body stress, share it with someone who's been frustrated on slow recovery, or reach out to us at infulllifetampa.com. Sometimes your emails help me create new podcast topics as well. So it helps me. Stay well, stay healthy, and I'll catch you next week.