Medical coaching for healthy leaders
Austrian-born pioneer in preventative medicine and burn-out prophylaxis specialist, Dr. Doris Eller-Berndl MD, talks to us about the importance of energy-rich mitochondria and how leaders can help themselves and their teams in times of heightened stress levels.
Interview by Armin Forstner
Dr. Eller-Berndl, could you talk us through the reasons for stress, fatigue and burnouts from your perspective as a medical doctor?
In 1976 Hans Selye said: ‘Stress is an unspecific reaction of the body to any demands.’ The number of stressors of humans is numerous and their nature diverse. For 250 million years, archaic stress systems have been active in us like in all living creatures. Charles Darwin stated: ‘It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.’ However, when stress becomes chronic, the organism can’t cope any longer with the permanent demands and burdens caused by lack of recovery and not enough energy resources. A multitude of individual genetic and epigenetic factors are influencing your personal resilience. Hence, deviations in neuronal control circuits develop with consequences for the body and mind.
From an evolutionary perspective, humans are embedded in nature, which provides energy and information. It appears life is based on a fast- communicating electrical conduction system in our bodies that uses quantum mechanics to speed up the reactions of life and to allow them to happen in real-time. The molecular cellular processes that life can make happen are too rapid and complex to be explained by slow-moving chemical reactions and nerve impulses found in biochemistry. The proteins and enzymes are the stage from which the story of life unfolds. The actors are very small and highly mobile, such as electrons and protons. Sunlight, food, which is nothing else but condensed light, and energy from the electromagnetic field of the earth supply us with the necessary electrons and protons. Now, that may sound a little awkward to you, but it is a scientific fact that human beings are also capable to perform a kind of photosynthesis with photons of UVB-light to excite electrons. Additionally, we need infrared radiation to enable our cell water to turn into a battery and store the energy we harvest from the sunlight. We can also gather energy from food by stripping it down into electrons and protons and using it for our mitochondria, the power plants in our cells. Carbohydrates deliver more protons while fat provides us with more electrons. Depending on where you live, carbohydrates are not naturally available all year round due to the seasons. Civilisation violates these laws. The same is true for the cold, which is a strong signal in times without UV light. In countries of northern latitude, there is no significant UVB light between autumn and spring. During those dark months, we can get neither energy from UVB light nor vitamin D, which is produced in the skin. By the way, taking vitamin D supplements can’t substitute nature’s own. While real vitamin D as a signal of harvested energy influences nearly 300 genes, the supplement can only support your immune system and bone metabolism.
Moreover, with our nutrition, it is important to live a seasonal life. When autumn arrives and trees lose their leaves because of a lack of sunlight, our mitochondria switch from carbohydrate to fat metabolism, a process triggered by the cold. In reality, we ignore the seasonal cycles and eat carbohydrates out of season and import it from warm and sunny continents. This disturbs our natural signals telling the body it is summer while our immediate environment sends us the signals of winter. This is confusing for our brain. The same happens with artificial light. In nature, we always have the whole spectrum of sunlight frequencies including UV and infrared. When the sun sets, the frequencies of blue light disappear, and this signals the body to prepare for night-time. Modern artificial light like LED, on the other hand, has a peak of blue light but no infrared, which again causes confusion and stops the brain from producing the night hormone melatonin. Your sleep cycle is disturbed and shortened, which influences the quality of sleep, which in turn is important for your recovery as well as a well-functioning immune system and metabolism. The repair process, called autophagy, is important for the organism as it is energy-efficient.
The fact that we spend most of the day indoors with artificial light in front of our computer screens means that we don’t get enough natural sunlight and therefore not enough energy. Even the brightest rooms with big windows won’t help with harvesting energy since glass filters out UV light. Each frequency of light has a specific function in our bodies. For example, UVA light is needed to release key hormones such as dopamine, thyroid hormones, and testosterone.
All these factors are important to how well we cope with stress. The easiest way to ease the stress burden on our bodies is by reconnecting to nature. Natural sunlight in the morning, protection from blue lights in the evening and seasonal nutrition will be helpful in countering stress.
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