How the Hypothalamus Affects Chronic Pain, Hormones & Stress | Deborah Maragopoulos

Leigh Brandon (00:00)
Deborah, welcome to Beyond the Pain. Great to have you on the show.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (00:02)
Thank you, Lee. It’s very nice to be here.

Leigh Brandon (00:05)
Yeah, great to have you here. So before we get into the hypothalamus and its relationship with pain, can you tell us about your own journey and what led you to become interested in hormones, neuro endocrinology and the hypothalamus?

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (00:21)
Well, my journey actually began when I was twenty-three years old and I gave birth to a premature infant who turned out to be intersex. And at the time we didn’t even have the terminology intersex. So I had to learn how to navigate fresh out of nursing school the whole hormone system, cellular receptor sites, how hormones affect the brain and development to actually navigate the United States healthcare system and be my my child’s best advocate. That then led me into really a

focus and a specialty in hormones. I was known as the hormone queen in our county, you know, s back in the like early nineties and started using, you know, bioidentical hormones with my patients very early before it was even a thing. you know, at the time I think it we just had suppositories, is that’s that’s about it. And then I moved into an integrative practice from convet more conventional medicine into integrative practice in the mid-90s. And at that time, you know, I have a

I love to meditate on things and try to figure out what feels the best and I really wanted to learn more about neuroimmune endocrinology. Set my intentions and the universe sent me the sickest people that you could possibly imagine. They’d seen multiple specialists. They had not just hormonal issues, but neurological issues with pain syndromes. They had immune issues, autoimmunity, they had gut issues. And I was literally transferring all of their conventional treatments over to more, you know.

Know complementary therapies, bioidentic hormones, nutraceuticals, you name it. I was, you know, switching them over, but I felt like I was really doing it for them and making them dependent on me, just like conventional medicine was, and I wasn’t getting to the root of the issue. So, what I ended up doing is again, you know, show me show me what the root is, you know, set my intentions. I’m missing something here. I got a magazine in my office, Scientific American, which actually had a couple mice on it, one was

Very

overweight and had all the symptoms my patients had. Couldn’t sleep, was no longer reproductively fertile, had low adrenal function, low thyroid function, chronically anxious little little mouse. We assume it was in pain because it was always itching and scratching itself. It was just not, it wasn’t well. And when they sacrificed the mouse, they found that it wasn’t making enough of a hormone that hypothalamus makes, proopiumolanocortin, or POMC. That particular hormone controls glucose metabolism.

Metabolism, it controls adrenal function, it controls your day-night cycles through melanocyte stimulating hormones. What’s left over becomes endorphins, and that was one of many hormones the hypothalamus makes. That was my bingo moment, and that’s when I started focusing on the hypothalamus as the upstream driver of all my patients’ downstream symptoms.

Leigh Brandon (03:12)
Excellent. what did you, did you say that when you had your child, were, you were, you were a nurse?

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (03:20)
Yeah, I was twenty-three years old, about one year out of nursing school for UCLA. And then I be I ended up becoming a nurse practitioner because I wanted more autonomy. I had a family and I didn’t know any female physicians back in the late 70s or you know early 80s when I was, you know, volunteering in emergency rooms that actually had a family before the age of forty. So I wanted both. So in the United States, nurse practitioners are kind of a they they’re considered like a mid-level practitioner where we do everything.

A physician does except surgeries and really focus more on wellness and optimal optimal health. We look at the patient through that lens rather than the patheophysiological lens. We’re trained in all that, but we try to put it together. We’re really a kind of a the perfect in for functional medicine and integrative medicine because we look at the patient as a biological, psychological, social, and spiritual being. That’s how we’re trained.

Leigh Brandon (04:17)
And so did you do further training looking at things like endocrinology?

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (04:23)
I did a I was a road scholar at that point. there’s no neuroimmune endocrinology board specialty. So I had to really do my own homework. And what how I do it is I research as I get patients in. You know, I feel like, you know, the universe sends me what I need to learn from and what they need. And so I start doing, you know, research. At the point of discovering the hypothalamus, so I did like, you know, studies in quantum physics and functional medicine and gut healing. You named it. I mean, there wasn’t really too many, you know, classes at the

University level, it was all you know outside of that. So I did all that all of that work, but and let my kind of intuition kind of guide me into like what did I need to learn next. Usually I it would kind of land in my lap, and then patients would follow. Like as soon as I learned something, patients would kind of follow that pattern so that I could have practice, you know. Well, that’s what you know, medical practice is practice on these people and figure out okay, what is working? And are the protocols that were set by whatever the you know, wherever I was learning.

It

from whether it was more conventional or integrative sources, actually work for in real life with real people. And what I found is sometimes they worked and sometimes they didn’t, because oftentimes they were just band-aiding a downstream symptom. They weren’t really, you know, going to the upstream cause. So once I started focusing on the hypothalamus, my whole my whole practice changed. And a lot of the work that I had been doing with patients, I didn’t have to do as much for them because I was I developed a nutraceutical that focused on feeding the hypothalamus.

what it needed to optimize its function. And I was able to say, listen, take this for three to six months and let’s see what happens. And all the my patients coming in, if they’re already on it, now we can get down to like what caused the hypothalamic dysfunction in the first place and start going back and fixing that.

Leigh Brandon (06:10)
Yeah, very interesting. I I’ve had an interest in endocrinology for probably, I’m guessing 30 years? Where are we now? At least, no, yeah, more than that, probably 35 years. Slightly different than your initial kind of interest. I was just in, know, in the 90s, I was in my 20s, and like a lot of young men, I was into…

building lots of muscle and getting lean. So I’d buy all the bodybuilding magazines. And there was one

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (06:42)
Mm.

Leigh Brandon (06:43)
particular guy called Dan Duchesne, and

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (06:46)
Uh-huh.

Leigh Brandon (06:47)
I think he was Canadian. And his kind of nickname was the steroid guru. Not that I was

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (06:54)
Mm.

Leigh Brandon (06:54)
ever into steroids, but I was into hormones. Because I just found it really, really fascinating. And obviously, the hormones do so many things for the body, right?

So I’ve always had an interest in hormones ever since then. So studying things like functional medicine, I found really interesting as well because there was a lot of education on hormones. No doubt nowhere near to the degree that you’ve studied endocrinology, but it is a subject I find really, really interesting.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (07:25)
It is fascinating because hormones are the biochemical messengers that literally run your cell functions, all your cell functions. And by hormones, I’m not just talking about endocrinology, because neurotransmitters function as hormones as well, going through receptor sites, as would do cytokins from the immune system. So I think of the hypothalamus as the maestro of the symphony of hormones that your body makes. And oftentimes we’re tuning the instruments, individual instruments, rather than making sure the maestro has the right shape.

Yeah.

Leigh Brandon (07:57)
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We’re definitely on the same page there. So for the audience, know, they may not have ever heard of the hypothalamus or may have heard of it, but don’t really know what it is. Could you explain what it is, what it controls and, you know, why this relatively small area of the brain is so important for someone living with persistent pain?

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (08:24)
So

the hypothalamus is a very small gland, about four grams, about the size of an almond, that is centered right above your brainstem. So if you put your finger between your eyebrows and went straight into your brain, sitting right above the brain stem is the hypothalamus. Unlike the rest of the brain, it is not protected by the blood-brain barrier. So it is exposed to everything you’ve eaten, all the microbes you’ve exposed yourself to, all of the toxins, every electrolyte, your glucose, your insulin, all the hormones.

Hormones, everything that goes through your bloodstream actually bathes the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus has receptor sites for all of it, and that’s how it gets some of its communication. Now, some of the communication to the hypothalamus is via your senses. Four out of your five senses feed into the hypothalamus. One in particular that affects pain is your preoptic nerve. So your what’s coming in through your eyes actually feeds the hypothalamus, and we know that pain actually is circadian. You have daily rhythms of pain perception. That’s the hypothalamus.

Controlling that the hypothalamus controls pain through one of its nuclei called the supracasmatic nuclei. There’s quite a few. So we won’t use a lot of big terms, but I’ll throw them in for the nerdy people in there and then explain what they what they do. But think of it as the master circadian clock and the master biological clock. So everything that happens in your body from you know your growth, your pubescence going through the shift at the you know at the end, middle age, the rate of aging, your

metabolism at the cellular level, how you metabolize glucose, your satiation, whether you’re hungry, hungry or satiated by food, communication to the gut is via the vagal nerve and it talks directly, the hypothalamus talks directly to the microbiome. It communicates through a lot of the aspects of the body through the autonomic nervous system. It controls both the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the nervous system. So that which speeds you up and that which calms you down.

And it also gets information from the limbic system, the emotional center. It gets information via the brainstem and the spinal cord, and that’s how pain perception travels to the hypothalamus. It then either dampens that pain perception or it heightens it. So there’s actually neurological effects from the hypothalamus via the autonomic nervous system that helps you with your pain perception. But the hypothalamus is also kind of the gateway of your subjective your

Subconscious and conscious mind. So it helps you process your emotions, and so the emotional aspect of pain is also controlled through the hypothalamus. And then there’s the hormonal aspect. So pain is considered a threat, and the hypothalamus will react to it through the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis or the HPA axis to either get you away from the danger or fight the danger. And so that chronic activation when you’re in chronic.

Chronic

pain can actually disrupt hypothalamic communication, which will affect other hormonal controls like your reproductive system, your thyroid, glucose metabolism. And then we know that pain has a metabolic effect. We know that glycation and glucose metabolism affects how you perceive pain because it causes inflammation. Well, glycation is actually controlled by the hypothalamus because the hypothalamus controls glucose metabolism. It has receptors for both insulin and glycogen.

And glucose, and it literally is reading your glucose levels all the time to determine whether or not you need to release more cortisol to release more stored sugar so you have more glucose in the system. And it controls thyroid function, and it’s the T3 hormone of the thyroid that actually affects how fast you burn energy. And so it’s controlling all the metabolic processes. So when the hypothalamus becomes inflamed, you become you get dysfunction, and that dysfunction

causes pain to be more chronic, to be perceived at a greater level. And so you see most of the hypothalamic dysfunction in centralized pain issues like fibromyalgia, trigeminal neuropathy, headache disorders, but even organ-related like pelvic pain and cystitis, interstitial cystitis, you’ll see the hypothalamus related to that, but it also controls your pain perception

in structural pain. So the structure we can’t the hypothalamus doesn’t control the structure, but how you perceive it from the structural pain, whether there’s an impingement, fasciitis, it’s going to basically help you dampen the pain sensation or heighten it.

Leigh Brandon (13:14)
so doesn’t do much

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (13:15)
No, no, it’s very it’s a lazy organ we don’t really need.

It’s ignored in medicine. And it’s ignored

Leigh Brandon (13:22)
Yes.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (13:24)
in in all aspects of medicine. I’ve been doing this for over 30 years, specializing on the hypothalamus. Just now am I seeing research in the last few years that actually support everything I’ve been doing for 30 years. And most of that came from COVID. So long COVID is actually hypothalamic dysfunction. And we didn’t really realize how how the hypothalamus was affected by microbes until we realized that the same receptor sites in the lung and the heart, cardiovascular system that COVID was attacking and killing people

Are in the hypothalamus, it has lots of ACE2 receptors, and the hypothalamus picks up the COVID virus and becomes incredibly inflamed. But it also picks up Epstein Barr virus, Lyme’s Lyme’s disease. It’s very it all your toxins, all your microbes, the hypothalamus can pick up and it tries to respond accordingly, getting your immune system to fight these things off. But if it becomes infected, you get dysfunction. Or if you become toxic with like heavy metals, pesticides.

will see dysfunction. Or if your nutrition is out of balance, especially overnutrition with too much fat and too much sugar, you will get hypophalamic dysfunction. And brain injuries, any traumatic brain injury. You don’t necessarily have to have a full concussion, but just like a whiplash can cause some hypophlamic dysfunction. And it takes a little bit of a medical detective that’s what I’ve kind of call myself to like go back and figure out like where did this begin? Because oftentimes when I see people they’re really focused on the last you know few years of their issues and I

I go way back into their childhood, sometimes all the way to basically their mother’s nutritional status, to figure out why their hypothalamus is struggling so much.

Leigh Brandon (15:03)
Yeah, really interesting. It’s interesting. I recently did a Substack article about long COVID, which I’m going to send you. I don’t want to get into it now because it will take us off on a massive tangent, but I’m going to send it to you afterwards.

Let me know what you

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (15:21)
Yeah, I’d love to read it.

Leigh Brandon (15:23)
think about it because it’s probably quite different from your point of view at the moment but as I say I’ll send it to you and we’ll talk about it afterwards. One of the things I really liked that you said earlier was the word perception when it comes to pain. Because that’s what pain is right? It’s a perception. It’s not a

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (15:39)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Leigh Brandon (15:40)
thing, it’s a perception. And you’re probably aware of the story of, I think it was a construction worker who trod on a nail. Did you know the story?

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (15:49)
No, remind me.

Leigh Brandon (15:51)
So the story goes that this guy is a construction worker and he steps on a nail and it goes straight through his boot and he screams in agony and they call an ambulance and they take him to hospital and he’s screaming and he’s in extreme pain and they cut his boot off and the nail went in between his big toe and his second toe, didn’t touch him at all. But because he’s seen it go through his boot,

his perception was that it had actually

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (16:20)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Brandon (16:21)
gone through his body. Which in a way shows us how amazing our body is at protecting us. Because at the end of the day,

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (16:28)
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Leigh Brandon (16:31)
our nervous system, the number one thing is to keep us safe.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (16:34)
Absolutely.

Leigh Brandon (16:37)
But obviously when it comes to persistent pain, the fact that it works so well can also be a problem.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (16:44)
Well, but it also can be dampened, and that’s what I’ve seen in my patients. I I’ve

had fibromyalgia patients. I have one in particular in mine, who was in her fifties and she’d been suffering for at least fifteen years from fibromyalgia. She also had chronic fatigue. And she was coming to me because, you know, going through the change was making everything worse. So she thought she just needed hormones, and I’m like, We need to focus on your hypothalamus here. And once we started doing and I it’s not that I don’t do symptom control, I offered her the bioidentic so we can control some of the, you know.

Her circadian rhythm issues, etc. But once she started really supporting her hypothalamus at the nutraceutical level and doing my other pillars with her sleep hygiene, nutrition, activity, and mindset, that made a huge difference, not just in getting her hormones balanced, but her perception of pain changed, and she was shocked that despite all the fibromyalgia treatments she had gone through over the years, that she finally was becoming pain-free. And that the only time it really acted up is when she was.

under

stress and then we gave her some tools to deal with it at a biochemical level so that she could not be so you know incapacitated by her pain.

Leigh Brandon (17:55)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So, pain is obviously much more complex than simply signals coming from injured tissues, We know that.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (18:06)
Absolutely.

Leigh Brandon (18:08)
But how does the hypothalamus interact with the brain, nervous system, and hormonal system to influence how strongly we experience pain?

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (18:19)
So your pain sensations travel up your spinal cord, into your brainstem, and then it enters into the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus then actually programs what’s gonna happen next. How are you gonna react to it? And part of that reaction is hormonal through the HPA axis, like your construction construction guy. He panicked, he went into panic mode. my gosh, and he went into full pain mode because he felt like he was being he was in danger.

That was his perception, okay? Even though there wasn’t anything to cause him pain, he perceived it beforehand. It’s the same thing with people who have needle fears and certain fears about things. they’ll have a full pain reaction and full HPA reaction with adrenaline surging and heart racing and you know shaking and they get a cold sweat and then they pass out, and the needle hasn’t even touched them yet. It’s all before they’ve even been punctured per se. So the

The pain perception is actually orchestrated by the hypothalamus. It also receives information from the limbic system, your emotional center, on you know, basically your past traumas and how you’ve reacted before to pain and processes it accordingly. Now it can be overridden if it’s inflamed. So if the hypothalamus becomes inflamed because of toxicity and malnutrition and all the other aspects that we talked about, it your pain perception is heightened. But the hypothalamus can also send down.

neural tracts through the autonomic nervous system dampening of pain signals as well. So a healthy hypothalamus will dampen pain signals that actually you need to have dampened in order to survive something. And I’ll give you my a personal example. I’m an equestrian. I was bucked off by a horse last January 2025, landed on my arm and fractured four ribs. Now I felt no pain from it in the beginning because of the

Adrenaline

surge, drove myself to the emergency room, got a CT scan. Really, I’ve always had a fairly high pain tolerance. I’m an athlete, so that’s part of it. But there was also this kind of a dampening effect that was happening. I had to get myself care and I was on my own. So there was this dampening effect that was happening until I got into the care situation. I could tell my ribs were broken. They did a CT scan just to make sure I didn’t have any other internal injuries and were surprised that I wasn’t.

asking for painkillers. And I said, honest to goodness, I don’t need them. I just need to know what’s happening and then I’m gonna start the healing process. And the healing process was fairly quick for me, even at the age of I’m 65 now. I I healed those ribs up very quickly and was literally pain free within a couple of weeks. And most people don’t realize how much a broken rib is affected by everyday movements like breathing. Every breath

Put stress on those that fracture. So I I can tell you it’s not as painful as childbirth, but it’s pretty painful.

Anyhow, the idea is that with a healthy hypothalamus, your perception of pain can be dampened for survival purposes. Now that doesn’t mean I don’t have other perceptions of pain that the hypothalam says, listen, you need to pay attention to this. There’s something going on here. And I have to act accordingly. And the same thing I see with my patients. When their hypothalamus is optimally functioning, their pain perception is dampened when they don’t need to survive. It’s not the pain is not saying to them, This is a survival mechanism, hunker down or don’t walk on that.

Ankle because you’re going make it worse. But you need to get away from danger. Let’s dampen the pain until you get away. So there’s this whole dampening effect, but there’s also a heightening when it’s necessary that you need to pay attention to this. So that’s what I tell them. When your body’s talking to you and it talks to you through pain, what is it telling you? What do you need to do? How do you need to either slow down, take some other healing messages, you know, methods that you need to be doing, or do you need to seek medical help?

Leigh Brandon (22:25)
Yeah, it sounds a little bit like the hypothalamus. It’s a bit like a computer processor.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (22:33)
It is the operating systems. It’s very good.

Leigh Brandon (22:36)
Yeah.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (22:36)
Your software are your hormones, your neurotransmitters, your immune factors. The operating system is the hypothalamus. Hardware is your body. So you can get all the s fancy software programs you want, but if the operating systems isn’t functioning functioning, they they don’t work.

Leigh Brandon (22:53)
Yeah, yeah, because that, it’s receiving information. It’s processing the information and then sending signals out to do certain things.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (23:03)
Absolutely, that’s exactly how it’s working. The signals could be hormonal, they could be neural, they could be nervous system signals, they could even be signals where the hypothalamus produces some hormones on its own that that travel via the bloodstream, like vasopressant, antidiuretic hormone, that keeps you from urinating in the middle of the night. So you can sleep and repair.

Leigh Brandon (23:26)
I know you’ve spoken about hypothalamic inflammation and dysfunction in relation to chronic health problems. What do we currently understand about how changes within the hypothalamus might contribute to persistent pain conditions?

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (23:43)
So there’s studies that have shown that the hypothalamus when you have chronic pain conditions, especially those, fibromyalgia, the headaches, the pelvic pain, that are, the traveling pains per se, as I call it, where you have it, all over your body, those chronic central are pain conditions are centralized in the hypothalamus, and you will almost always see a dysfunctional hypothalamus. When they look at the hypothalamus, you know, at a more cellular level, there is inflammation.

Most systemic inflammation begins with central inflammation in the hypothalamus. So you can get a you know an injury and you know have a local inflammation, but if it becomes systemic, which we see in in metabolic disorders, it’s actually starting in the hypothalamus itself because systemic inflammation is not biologically survivable over a long period of time. So the hypothalamus is going to try to control systemic inflammation. It’s not going to let that local inflammation.

From an injury becomes systemic. Your immune system’s going to take care of it. Your body’s going to try to take care of it so it doesn’t spread. Because when it starts to spread, your body tries to wall it off in that glycation process where it’s kind of walling off what’s happening to protect you. All the inflammation that you see, the swelling, the redness, the heat, is part of the response to the injury. We don’t want that kind of inflammation all over the body, and it bec can become that way.

When it’s metabolic, which the hypothalamus is controlling that as well. So if you have metabolic syndromes, and maybe you don’t even know this, you don’t even know that you’re starting with insulin sensitivity issues, and that your glucose is starting to elevate, and that you’re at and glucose is hydrophilic, it actually pulls fluids along with it. So whenever you have elevation, you’re going to see swelling in tissues, and the tissues of your body are not functioning normally. You start to see inflammation occurring. Your immune system is attacking where it’s seeing inflammation, but there’s not an

An actual injury or a microbe or a toxin there, it’s just kind of self attacking, and you get this major inflammatory response. With the centralized control of the hypothalamus, the hypothalamus actually controls the glial cells. The glial cells in the brain are basically kind of what clean up the brain, clean up the central nervous system. And when the hypothalamus becomes dysfunctional, glial cell activity can actually over respond. And it’s kind of like little Pac Man eating away at tissues, and you start to see distress.

destruction of central nervous system.

Leigh Brandon (26:16)
Yeah, it’s very interesting.

So the hypothalamus contains suprachiasmatic nucleus.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (26:28)
That’s one of its many nuclei.

Leigh Brandon (26:31)
Yeah, which helps regulate our circadian rhythm which you’ve mentioned before. How important is our circadian rhythm when it comes to pain sensitivity?

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (26:42)
So, if you have a discircadian rhythm, meaning that you’re not following your body’s biological clock is not following the sun, it’s not following light, then you’re gonna have an increased pain perception. And we see that in people who stay up all night, they have to, they sleep in really late, they have to have some kind of stimulant like caffeine just to wake up and get their day started. That whole discircadian rhythm will actually enhance your pain perception because the hypothalamus has not.

Been

able to do its job. Your hypothalamus is incredibly light sensitive, not just through the preoptic nerve, but also through cytochromes in your skin that are carrying light messages. So you could have a nice little eye mask on to sleep, but if you got light in the room, your hypothalamus knows that there’s light. Okay, and that’s a biological imperative because when we did dwell in caves, we needed to wake up sometime. We needed a pinpoint of light to tell us it was daytime. So your skin is sensitive to light as well. So once a hypothalamus perceives

That the sun has gone down, there’s no longer blue waves coming from from the sun. It actually starts its nocturnal mode and it turns the pineal gland on, tells it, okay, it’s time, let’s make some melatonin. Three hours after melatonin peaks, the hypothalamus then tells the pituitary gland to release prolactin that the hypothalamus has produced. Prolactin is a hormone that actually runs your immune system and cleans up some of that immune system, cleaning up some of that inflammation.

In an eight-hour window. And what turns it off is dopamine, which we call prolactin-inhibiting hormone, which is actually produced by the hypothalamus. So once the sun comes up and the melatonin levels drop, the hypothalamus says, okay, cool it, the sun is up. Now it needs some sugar, okay, because it needs some glucose, so it needs some cortisol released so that some stored sugar can be released. So the hypothalamus in the brain can function, the organs can function before you break your fast.

It’s going to start producing dopamine to turn prolactin off. If your prolactin is not off in the morning, if it’s not down to normal circadian rhythms, which is low, by at least 8 a.m., 8 to 9 a.m., then you’re going to feel like you’re sleepwalking. And I see in my autoimmune patients, in my chronic fatigue patients, in my fibromyalgia patients, they have dyscircadian prolactin levels. They don’t actually have a tumor, but their prolactin is elevated. And that’s a hormone that most providers don’t check unless you have.

milky discharge from your nipples, male or female, or you’re a woman that is infertile, do they look at the prolactin? But honest to goodness that is a that is a key disarcadian marker which we can look at hypothalamic function if it’s too high between 8 and 9 a.m.

Leigh Brandon (29:29)
really interesting. It’s funny as you were speaking I’m actually working with someone who I mean he’s getting better, he’s getting better surprisingly quickly actually but he has chronic fatigue and he was going to bed let’s just say very late and

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (29:47)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Brandon (29:48)
we started bringing his bedtime down gradually and

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (29:52)
Greg, every fifty

fifteen minute intervals to bring it down. But get those lights off,

Leigh Brandon (29:55)
exactly what I do yeah.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (29:56)
get off those screens after dust. That blue light is telling the hypothalamus

Leigh Brandon (29:59)
Yeah.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (30:00)
the sun didn’t go down. So you’re in one of those, you know, latitudes where you have those, you know, the longer days. So

Leigh Brandon (30:06)
Yeah.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (30:07)
yeah, the hypothalamus is is key to the light rhythms, you know. So if you’re in that kind of latitude and you’re staying up all night, okay, you will have a season during the year where you need to hibernate. But we don’t.

Leigh Brandon (30:19)
Hmm,

yeah.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (30:20)
We don’t. And so that causes that chronic dysfunction and inflammation because we’re not getting enough sleep in the dark. One of the causes.

Leigh Brandon (30:27)
Yeah, yeah,

I’m pretty stringent with my circadian rhythm. know, I’m sure most people, if they came to my home in the evening time, would think I’m a bit crazy because there’s no indoor lights on apart from

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (30:43)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Brandon (30:44)
I’ve got some Himalayan salt lamps and I’ve got some Himalayan salt lamp candle holders and I might put on some beeswax candles.

and I’m still walking around with blue block of glasses on, even though there’s no internal lights on. But I just, I mean, I’ve always been a good sleeper anyway, and I’ve been going to bed at a reasonable time for 25, 30 years. But even just changing the lighting, which I’ve done, I don’t know, last five, 10 years, still makes an even bigger difference. You know, if you’re just cutting out that blue light and you’re just really calming everything down, and then you go to bed.

As soon as my head hits the pillow every night, bang, I’m asleep.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (31:25)
Yeah, the same here. Although I spent the my early years as with Sombulence, I slept walk. So while I could fall

Leigh Brandon (31:32)
Mmm.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (31:33)
asleep easily, I was up and about and doing things, you know, cooking, taking showers, had no idea this was

Leigh Brandon (31:38)
wow.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (31:38)
happening. This happened for eighteen years. And it wasn’t until I started supporting my hypothalamus nutraceutically that that stopped. And my catch up was going from maybe three to five hours of decent sleep if I wasn’t out, you know, doing things. of course, unaware of what I was doing.

I was sleepwalking, to sleeping like 12 hours at night to catch up for the first few months and then went into a natural rhythm where you know I’m like a chicken. I get up with the sun, I’m tired within three hours of of dusk, and I need to go to bed, you know, my body is actually working with the light. During the full moon, because I don’t, you know, I don’t block all my windows, but I live out in country, so I don’t have lights shining as street lights. So during the full moon, I will have a lighter sleep during that time and sometimes wake up in the middle of the night like urine.

Because the moon, the moon is actually the light of the moon is waking me up. But I see that as a woman, especially. That’s kind of my that’s the old cycles for me, you know, and I’m perfectly fine with that kind of prayerful meditation time. I don’t turn on lights, I don’t look at my phone, I don’t, you know, check anything. But if I’m, you know, I can’t settle, I do a little meditation during that time. A little, I call it a contraction relaxation exercise, which they found, especially in menopausal women, where you if you consciously contract all your.

muscles from your feet up to your head, hold it for a few few seconds and then slowly release them and do that a a few times it burns off that adrenaline and reduces the the time the weight the wake to sleep time if you wake up in the middle of the night and it can also reduce hot flashes and night sweats as well.

Leigh Brandon (33:13)
Interesting. I actually sleep so I have French doors in my bedroom and they’re east-facing

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (33:21)
Uh-huh.

Leigh Brandon (33:22)
and I don’t have blackout curtains so when the sun comes up is when I wake up. I don’t have an alarm.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (33:27)
Yep. Mine I have east facing

windows too and it’s like I’m up. Nope. Yeah.

Leigh Brandon (33:31)
I don’t have an alarm. mean I have an alarm but I don’t ever use it unless

I don’t know I was going I needed to fly somewhere and had to get

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (33:40)
And it’s super early, yeah.

Leigh Brandon (33:42)
up two hours earlier while it’s still dark so I sleep more in the winter I sleep more

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (33:47)
Yeah, and that’s a normal thing to do. Absolutely normal thing to do. Unless in the summer. You don’t want to go to bed as early ’cause, it’s still light late.

Leigh Brandon (33:54)
or here

it starts getting light about 4.30am in the summer

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (33:58)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Brandon (34:00)
so that’s the time I wake up you know yes yeah quite a lot higher yeah I mean

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (34:01)
So you’re up. You’re just up. Well you’re at a lot higher latitude than I am.

Leigh Brandon (34:10)
I’m waking up a little bit before sunrise at the moment, I guess, because it’s changing quite quickly at the moment.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (34:16)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Brandon (34:17)
Yeah, I mean, at the weekend I was on the tennis court before the sun was up, that’s just because I had a busy day. Yes, it is so, so important, circadian rhythm, and I think a lot of people just don’t realise that. In the system that I use, we have what we call the six foundation principles.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (34:39)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Brandon (34:40)
Number one is your thoughts, most important thing. Then you’ve got breathing, hydration, nutrition,

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (34:45)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Brandon (34:46)
movement, and sleep slash circadian rhythm. And if you don’t take care of all six, you’re not gonna be at your optimum.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (34:55)
Absolutely. Well, one of the aspects of circadian rhythm that people don’t think about is when you’re eating. Okay, so it’s not just what you’re eating, it’s when you’re eating. So if you have a healthy biological clock, your hypothalamus is running healthy, you should wake up hungry. You should wake up hungry and want to eat within an hour of waking up. And so if you’re if you’re putting that off, I am not a believer in intermittent fasting where you’re not eating until 11, 12 o’clock. I’m a believer in circadian fasting. Don’t eat after dark.

Leigh Brandon (35:25)
Hmm. Yeah.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (35:25)
That’s that’s the key for two

reasons. One is if you eat a big dinner

And then you try to go to bed within a a few hours, you’re s you still may be in the digestive process, which actually requires a lot of energy that the hypothalamus is not going to be able to use to orchestrate your healing and get that growth hormone out there, get the immune system functioning, literally get your body into healing mode. So that’s a that’s an aspect of it. So start eating early and make sure the majority of your calories are eaten fairly early in the day. So we I actually did an experiment with my husband. We’ve been I’ve

Been preaching this to my patients for 30 years, especially if they need to lose weight. Just don’t eat after dusk. You can drink non-caloric liquids, nothing with caffeine. Don’t eat after dusk. It’s a little hard at first, but your body will get used to it. You’ll wake up in the morning and start your day with a heavier breakfast that will have to actually rev up that metabolism. But we did, just a based on a research study that showed that middle-aged people, if they just stop eating after five, after six to twelve months, we see a decrease in inflammatory mark.

And biological aging markers, which was incredible. And so we just tried it, and it was summertime. So five was like you know, mid-afternoon. But we tried it, and it was a little difficult in the first few days, but we did it for two weeks. And while I, you know, really don’t have any weight to lose, I dropped a little bit of weight, he dropped some weight. but what I noticed is I slept more deeply, and I know that because I remember my dreams, but I’m talking it was like it was like watching a movie all night. I was in

that deep dream sleep a lot longer than usual. So

Leigh Brandon (37:06)
I

mean it does sound like a form of restricted time eating.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (37:12)
It is, but it’s, if you think about it, if you think about it from our hunter-gatherer days, we may keep the fire up to keep the predators away, but most of our most of our cooking and eating was during the day. Okay, we may end the day with a little bit, but usually that was like a soup or a stew. But most of most of our calories we were taking in while we needed them when we were being active. Okay, restricting your restricting your food intake in the morning basically tells your hypothalamus that you’re metabolically, you just don’t need it.

So it’ll slow your metabolism down.

I’ve rarely met an overweight person, especially morbidly, that is hungry in the morning. They’re not. And that’s a good sign they have insulin resistance. So if you wake up and you’re not hungry, you’re not sensitive to insulin and glucose like you should be. That’s your hypothalamus not being sensitized. And that insulin resistance begins in the hypothalamus. The metabolic disorders begin there. And that will definitely aggravate your pain syndromes, whether they be a structural pain syndrome or a centralized pain syndrome.

Metabolic conditions which increase inflammation in the peripheral body will increase your perception of pain.

Leigh Brandon (38:24)
Yeah, talking of that, I’m just gonna share something with you. I’ve shared it multiple times before, I had a situation where, and I’ll keep the story relatively short, because it can be a long story, but I, about seven years ago, yeah, about seven years ago, I just decided I was gonna just change up what I was having for breakfast. And I started having some porridge.

breakfast and I didn’t put two and two together at the time but around the same time because I play lot of

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (39:00)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Brandon (39:01)
and I started getting knee pain when I was playing tennis and I couldn’t bend my knee fully so the knee flexes about 135 degrees but it can only flex to about 90

so you know 45 degrees short

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (39:13)
Mm. So you you didn’t have the mobility

you needed to play tennis.

Leigh Brandon (39:18)
Well, the knee was really inflamed.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (39:20)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Brandon (39:22)
And I didn’t put two and two together, but after quite a period of time, I thought I’m also feeling really tired. And I know, you know, in terms of my metabolic type, I generally don’t do well with carbs anyway.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (39:34)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Brandon (39:35)
And I thought, let me just, for energy, let me just cut the, I’ll cut the porridge oats out. And three weeks later, not only did I have loads of energy, but I had full range of motion and I didn’t have any pain in my knee at all.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (39:47)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Brandon (39:48)
just from one dietary food.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (39:49)
What one change. Absolutely.

Well, really your your plate should be, well

proportioned so at every meal or even a mini meal or even a snack you really should have protein a healthy fat and a carbohydrate that take that’s a slow burn carb so whether that’s a super whole grain vegetables etc it you should have a variety of produce in your in your diet so you have lots of color but if you’re not having enough protein and the healthy fat to balance it out with that carbohydrate your blood sugars are going to be all over the place and

And so when you start to have extra glucose in the system that you’re not using, it’s gonna head to the area where you’re already inflamed. So you probably had some kind of mild injury in your knee, an old injury that you didn’t even pay attention to, and there it headed, all that extra glucose got packaged up in there and caused crystallization and more inflammation and brought fluid into the area and heat, and the immune system says, What are we fighting here? Did he hurt himself again? And in reality, it was it was all this extra glucose kind of landing.

In that area, trying to be called to that area because there were some inflammatory markers from an old injury.

Leigh Brandon (41:05)
Yeah, it’s just fascinating, isn’t it? There are so many different potential causes of pain. In my book, can see over my shoulder there,

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (41:13)
absolutely. Yeah, but you’re on paint. Mm-hmm.

Leigh Brandon (41:19)
I talk about four main causes. And it can be one, it can be two, it can be three, it be all four. And one is structural, two is metabolic, three is nervous system regulation, which is kind of what we’re talking about today.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (41:33)
Yeah.

Leigh Brandon (41:34)
And then…

Well, the fourth one we’re still talking about as well, which is emotions.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (41:38)
Emotional. Yeah.

So and the hypothalamus actually is involved in three out of four. Not the structural, but the metabolic, neural regulation, and emotional. It’s that it’s the

Leigh Brandon (41:49)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (41:50)
operating systems behind all of that.

Leigh Brandon (41:52)
Yeah. Yeah.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (41:54)
So if

your hypothalamus isn’t functioning optimally, it’s not gonna it’s not gonna make a difference per se. it didn’t it didn’t fix my ribs that were literally broken by an injury. That’s a structural issue. But it did change my perception of the pain so I could survive. Okay, the initial assault. So

Leigh Brandon (42:14)
Yeah,

yeah. Interesting. So we often hear people talk about the HPA axis, which you’ve mentioned, becoming burned out after prolonged stress. What is actually happening physiologically when this stress response becomes dysregulated and how might that influence someone’s pain experience?

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (42:38)
So when you experience stress, whether it’s a real stressor, like you’re being chased by a tiger, or your bills are your bills are late, you gotta pay something. So whether it’s an emotional perception of stress or an actual real stressor, you have the same exact physiological reaction. So you perceive the stress, your hypothalamus is activated, you get an adrenaline response because the hypothalamus activates the sympathetic nervous system. Adrenaline gets your heart rate up, your blood pressure up, then the hypothalamus then tells the pituitary gland to release a C.

CTH,

that’s the hypothalamic pituitary part of the axis, to tell the adrenal glands to release cortisol HPA, that’s the HPA access. Cortisol then releases stored sugar, so you can either run away from the danger or fight the danger. Now, if it’s a perceived danger, not an actual real danger that you need to get away from, you’ve got all that extra sugar in the body. You also have all this extra cortisol floating around. And cortisol gets converted into cortisone when it’s not used. And cortisone is actually great for inflammation, but it’s also

Very very degrading. It actually breaks up tissues. So, in your gut and your soft tissues, you’ll start to see tissues being being damaged by that high cortisol level because it was converted into cortisone, which is its downplay. And you’ll see that eventually the hypothalamus with this constant activation, because your eyes perceived something, the hairs on your neck came up, you smelled you smelled something dangerous, tasted something dangerous, it’s activated and tells the adrenals: okay, we need to.

Start the fight or flight mechanism, what will happen is it’ll start to become desensitized to your cortisol. It becomes resistant, just like you get insulin resistance centrally and peripherally. The way to think about desensitization is if I’m cooking in the kitchen and I’m like sauteing some onions, and then all of a sudden my husband walks in and says, Honey, are you burning those onions? And I didn’t notice it, but he did. It’s because the myofactory receptors were saturated by the smell of what I was.

doing and I didn’t notice the burning but it was new to him. So I have become desensitized, but he’s highly sensitive. Okay? That’s what happens at the receptor site level. If it’s overwhelmed with a hormone, whether it be insulin or cortisol or whatever’s happening, it will eventually become desensitized to it because those hormones tell the body to do the cell to do something. And it may not need to do that. Insulin for instance that insulin resistance is you need insulin to get sugar into cells.

It’ll

either make energy or though that cell will grow. If you don’t need the energy, certain cells like your heart are going to become resistant very quickly because they can’t afford to grow. A bigger heart is not a functional heart. Okay.

Leigh Brandon (45:20)
Hmm.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (45:21)
So insulin resistance is biologically something that we all do. We see this in animals and back in the day when humans hibernated. You have to become insulin resistant and lay down body fat, especially around your peripheral organs.

Visceral fat, which is an insulin resistance response, in order to survive a winter that you’re not eating anything, that you’re in a low metabolic mode. We become insulin resistance because we’re we overeat. And this is connected to the HPA access because cortisol is driven constantly, it’s gonna cause more sugar to be released, and you need more insulin. So, you know, overeating and not going into that hibernation, we end up not burning, burning that extra fat that we’re that we’re laying down. So

So that HP access being chronically activated can cause a resistance to cortisol. The hypothalamus says, okay, wait a second, we just need to slow this down. We’re not going to respond to the stressors in the same way. And it’s not that the adrenals can’t produce cortisol, it’s not low adrenal function. It’s not getting the message, the signal to produce the cortisol that it needs to. So at first it’s too much, and then it’s too little.

Leigh Brandon (46:31)
and how does that relate to someone’s so influencing someone’s pain experience

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (46:38)
So

when you have chronic, chronic activation of the HPA access and you’ve got too much cortisol produced, we talked about that cortisone actually, you know, kind of denuding tissues because you don’t really need it. So now you’re getting, you know, your joints being kind of denuded by the extra, the extra cortisone that’s produced. And the lining of your gut and your soft tissues kind of denuded, your nerves, your myelin sheaths actually, actually being, you know, worn down, that insulation so that the nerve

Impulses can travel appropriately is being denuded as well by that extra cortisone. And then you’re not making enough. So now your body is functioning at a lower metabolic level. So now you can’t repair and rejuvenate tissues that need to be repaired. So the hypothalamus becomes very inflamed during this period of time of overactivation and then not responding anymore. If it’s not responding to one hormonal signal, it oftentimes becomes kind of desensitized to others. And so it’s no longer dampening your pain signals. And so

Now you’re perceiving pain at a greater level than is actually biologically necessary to get away from the danger.

Leigh Brandon (47:44)
Yeah, that makes sense. And so I guess you probably look at it from two different angles. You’ve mentioned nutraceuticals to support the hypothalamus,

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (47:56)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Brandon (47:56)
but I guess you’re also saying, okay, but what’s stressing you, right? So looking at their lifestyle.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (48:02)
Yeah, so s stress is a big aspect

and it could be that it could be your diet, it could be your you know, the way you way you sleep or not getting enough sleep, it could be that you’re not getting enough activity or maybe even too much activity. It could be your mindset. You know, one of the one of the things I found when I developed my nutraceutical product to actually actually help the hypothalamus optimize its function is I could I was measuring in these subjects all of the biological measures, you know, the lab tests, we were doing body colors.

compositions, we’re doing pain perception, all of that.

But what came out first, before everything else changed, because that takes three to six months to see a change to reduce that hypothalamic inflammation and start optimizing its function, is I had them keep journals. And their journals were like, at first they every day they had to write something. And at first it was just like a lista to do. But as they as their hypothalamus healed, they started becoming more in touch with their their their own feelings and almost poetic and started changing things in their life, like changing jobs and relationships.

And the way they did things. It’s like they became more sensitized to what their body really needed. Now that the hypothalamus felt safe to say, okay, listen, I’m functioning at a good level. You’ve got some trauma you need to deal with. This relationship is not healthy for you. This job is sucking the energy out of you. You need to make some changes. What would really help you is to spend more time with your small child and be in the moment. And so it was really incredible. The journals were like the big eye opener that led me to wow, the hypothalamus is not, it’s not just all this.

biological stuff, it’s emotional. It ch it’s

Leigh Brandon (49:39)
Yeah.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (49:39)
changing their mindset.

Leigh Brandon (49:43)
yeah that’s their biopsychosocial motto isn’t it

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (49:46)
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Leigh Brandon (49:49)
Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it sounds to me like you’re following the same six foundation principles that I follow.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (49:56)
Yeah, I just come I c I compressed them into five.

Leigh Brandon (49:59)
What’s your five?

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (50:01)
Sleep, activity, nutrition, mindset, and nutraceutical support.

Leigh Brandon (50:05)
Yep.

Okay. Yeah, so the only one that’s missing is hydration, right?

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (50:13)
Well, hydration’s in the nutritional part.

Leigh Brandon (50:15)
There you go.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (50:15)
Yeah, yeah. I I have a definitely have a recommendation for how much fluids your body needs. And

Leigh Brandon (50:21)
What advice do you normally give?

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (50:24)
So I usually give about

a half ounce per pound of body weight and that could be a little bit much, especially if you don’t have enough electrolytes. So oftentimes what I’ll do is I’ll have patients do a salt test. So take like you know Himalayan sea salts and eat and lay out about two teaspoons and a little finger bowl. And I want that day I want you to record every every fluid that you drink. Hopefully it’s just water but all the every ounce and at the end of the day you’ll see how much salt’s left. What I want you to do is whenever you feel like you

You need some salt. I just want you to keep eating it through the day. Eventually during the day, it’ll feel like, my gosh, it’s too much. But you’ll be surprised how delicious and how much you crave it. And

Leigh Brandon (51:07)
Mm.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (51:07)
that’ll tell us your hydration, your hydration level. And if you really need like one to two teaspoons every day, you don’t have enough electrolytes on board. Your salt water balance is off. And we need to make sure you get that on because no matter how much fluid you’re drinking, it’s not getting into the cells. Okay. So the salt test is a good way to say, okay, you know, I can tell you to drink more.

fluids but it’s not getting into the cells you’re just diuresing it back out you’re urinating it back out if your salt water balance is not balanced so every

Leigh Brandon (51:37)
Yeah.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (51:37)
once in a while when I find that gosh I’m drinking tons of water and it doesn’t I’m not quenching my thirst I’ll redo the salt test and see if my electrolytes are back into balance again.

Leigh Brandon (51:47)
Yeah, yeah, I recommend, because obviously we’re in metric,

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (51:51)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Brandon (51:55)
0.03 litres of water per kilo of body weight, which I think actually works out the same.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (52:00)
It’s about

the same math. It’s real close. It’s really close.

Leigh Brandon (52:04)
But yeah, electrolytes are so, so important. A lot of people are talking about electrolytes now, but it’s something that, you in the system I use, we’ve been talking about for decades.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (52:16)
yeah.

Leigh Brandon (52:17)
But I had a really interesting experience this year. I’ve always just drank water and then I take fruit when I play tennis and I might just have like

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (52:27)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Brandon (52:27)
a bite of an apple at every change of ends and that kind of keeps me

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (52:31)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Brandon (52:31)
going.

And this year I started using electrolytes in my drink and the first time I did it I forgot to take some fruit with me and I was thinking, no, I’m gonna be in trouble here. And I played a whole match and I was absolutely fine. thought, wow, my energy was so much higher just from using an electrolyte rather than fruit, which obviously has got calories in it, but electrolytes don’t have any calories in it.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (52:58)
Well, if you do a

zero electrolyte, some of the better electrolytes, true hydration will have a little bit of glucose in it because that’ll carry those electrolytes into the cell. And I’m not talking sucrose, it’s gotta be glucose.

Leigh Brandon (53:10)
Yeah.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (53:11)
So, but it tells you that it takes a while, even though you you have the bite of fruit, it’s gonna take a while for you to break that down into sugar. And

Leigh Brandon (53:19)
Yeah.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (53:20)
so having enough electrolytes, you get that fluid balance, and then your your hypothalamus is gonna trigger your cortisol release during the exercise so that you will release your

your

stored sugar. So it’s not that you don’t have sugar in your body. You’re storing it. You’ve got 400

Leigh Brandon (53:32)
Yeah.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (53:33)
calories worth in your liver and your muscles that you can use. But oftentimes we don’t go there if we’re not, metabolically fit. We just keep storing, we just hold that, hold that, and then we store everything else into body fat. So when you’re metabolically fit you easily go into your glycogen stores as soon as you need it.

Leigh Brandon (53:53)
So one more question for you. Actually I think you’ve pretty much answered this question actually. mean is there anything more that, know, someone’s got a dysregulated hypothalamus, is there anything more that you would suggest people could do to help them overcome persistent pain?

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (54:15)
Yes,

so try to get the hypothalamus optimized. See those five pillars, the sleep, the activity, the nutrition. My basic nutritional diet is Mediterranean, and it’s not just because my last name’s Margopoulos and I’m Italian, but it does provide a wide variety of produce, the usually enough protein and healthy fats and the monounsaturated fats to actually kind of balance out your meals. And make sure you have a circadian eating pattern and sleeping pattern. That is key. working on your mindset again.

it’s it’s helpful when you nutraceutically support your hypothalamus you’ll see that your mindset actually kind of shifts into the glass is more half full than half empty and that makes a big difference in your pain perception but I it’s very difficult you have to do a lot of you know downstream treatments you know with you know I manipulation you do you do body work on patients is that correct you know with that type of manipulation and it’s it takes longer to heal when the hypothalamus is not functioning optimally because you’re

Your

pain perception is going to be going to be off per se, and you’re going to be easily activated with your stress response. We can’t really control all the stressors in our life. I mean, we could try, but the way you respond to stress really has to do with having a a healthy hypothalamus. And then you can train yourself to respond to stress in a different way. it takes I have like a meditation that I use that actually can really help train your body to respond to stress in a little bit different way. And I didn’t even realize.

you know what that was until my husband had a an accident. He he was shucking oysters and he ripped his his went right through his thumb t tendon and couldn’t move his thumb. It looked like a murder outside where he was shucking him at the outside kitchen and so I immediately stopped the bleeding, got us to the emergency room, told me you’re gonna see have to see a hand surgeon like that. Emergency room can’t fix this. And you know just kind of handled it all, including getting the oysters back in the fridge, because I knew we were gonna

A while, and and at the end of this, he said, I don’t understand how you do this. He’s he’s a police officer, he’s retired now. He says, I’ve been trained to handle major stressors, and when it comes to strangers, I can do it, but I’ve seen you handle major stressors in our family, and it’s like you’re in a different zone, and I had to think about that-like, what is happening? And I had actually trained my body to produce GABA as soon as I perceived a stressor, so like I start to calm down and go.

into this zone where I can tap into my higher, all my knowledge, my thinking, respond appropriately, and not be in that panic zone. And it’s happened not just with family, with strangers. I mean, it’s just this automatic response. But it was through this training that I had been doing since I was a child and didn’t even realize it. So I wrote it down as a meditation, which will be part of what I’m gonna offer your your listeners

Leigh Brandon (57:07)
Hmm.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (57:08)
at the end. to actually like help other people train themselves on making GABA when you know, yeah.

breath work is great and that’s part of this training but you don’t always remember to take a deep breath and be calm when a major stressor happens but fire can break out next to me horses can stampede you can throw yourself down in a major seizure seizure I am in I’m in first responder mode every one of them

And it’s just this calm that I’ve just trained myself. And it is, it is, it is something you can train yourself, all your listeners can train yourself, following this this technique that I’ve that I’ve developed.

Leigh Brandon (57:48)
it’s interesting, it just reminded me, my friend who I mentioned lives not a million miles from you. He was actually bitten by a rat snake.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (57:57)
Mm.

Leigh Brandon (57:58)
I think it was last year. And he lives miles from hospital. And he said he was in an ambulance and he literally just calmed his whole body down. And I think…

By the time they got, I can’t remember if he did have one, I think he might have had one injection of anti-venom.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (58:19)
Uh-huh.

Leigh Brandon (58:20)
And they kept saying, well, are you gonna need more, are you gonna need more? And he was like, no, I’m fine, I’m actually fine. But from what I understand is most people would have died before they even got to the hospital.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (58:31)
Yeah, because you can’t get the anti venom fast enough. You really need it really quickly. But when your body’s in that calmer state and the parasympathetic nervous system has taken over and the hypothalamus has dampened everything, your metabolism is slowing way down so that it’s not that venom is not speeding through through your system. You know, it was kind of localized. So he didn’t need much anti-venom in order to survive this.

Leigh Brandon (58:54)
I think he said it was 15 grand a shot as well which is also why he didn’t want a second one.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (58:58)
yeah.

Better than dying of a snake bite, but yeah. So

Leigh Brandon (59:06)
But yeah, luckily we don’t have rattlesnakes where I live.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (59:09)
No, you don’t. Although we did see it on a T V show recently, a a series that’s based in the in the UK where they portrayed a rattlesnake in in the UK countryside and my husband’s like, my gosh, I hate these kind of shows where they don’t they don’t accurately there are no rattlesnakes there.

Leigh Brandon (59:28)
No, I’ve seen a few brown snakes in Australia, but…

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (59:30)
yeah.

Now yeah.

Leigh Brandon (59:33)
Yeah. So do you want to talk a little bit about the nutraceuticals that you use?

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (59:38)
Yeah,

so

I I actually had to develop my own nutraceutical. Okay. At the time in the late 90s, all that was available was was glandulars, hypoflamic glandular, which works for a few months, but then the body treats it as a toxin and it’s no longer going there. I wanted something that somebody could take for a foundational support, throughout their lifetime for a longer period of time, because it just wasn’t enough. And I wanted something that was more holistic and plant based. So not animal based. So I can, help my vegetarians, vegans as well.

And couldn’t figure out like what I needed to you know to put together. I would thought there’d be one thing. There’d be one thing that would fix it. And so again, it’s my intersex child who’s like super, super sensitive and said, Mom, why don’t you just meditate about this and see what comes in dreams? I’ve had very, very, you know, prophetic dreams. I dreamt my spouse, I dreamt my kids, I dreamt my business, I dream patients before they arrive. I’ve never met them and I know exactly what’s wrong with them. So I believe in my dreams.

I know that that what comes through is is a message for me. And I had the same exact dream every single night for three months, and these ingredients came through this, came through this dream, and I put it together. I started with just the amino acids, which are makes 21 amino acids that are that are blended in a hypothalamic proportion, not just basic protein. And then it has sea vegetation. What came in were sprouted whole foods, ancient grains, as well as like broccoli sprouts, digestive.

AIDS, detoxification AIDS, as well as different botanicals that have adaptogenic effects, not just with the adrenals, but with you know pancreas, thyroid, gonads. And it was a lot of what I was giving my patients in multiple bottles, and I put it all into one kind of synchronistic formula in a powder because I was treating children as well, and we needed to dose down the weight. And it’s like one green drink a day. It’s called Genesis Gold. And that has actually changed my practice from having to be really hands-on with.

People to saying, listen, let’s get this started first. I’ll work on your downstream symptoms while your hypothalamus is healing, and we can wean down a lot of these other these other treatments. And like I said, with my patients with chronic pain, they just have a different perception of pain as their hypothalamus heals. But we’re also changing their metabolism, we’re getting rid of their insulin resistance, we’re changing that chronic HPA activation, we’re tapping into the deeper emotional issues, maybe some PTSD that they didn’t even realize they had related to.

To a childhood experience that made, you know, that construction worker like scream in pain when the nail wasn’t even in his foot per se. You know, those the perceptions started to shift and change, and you know, they just have a different outlook in life. And they’re it’s like their body talks to them. They know how what they need to eat, they crave the foods their body needs, they crave the social interaction, they start going to bed earlier, even though I’m preaching at them. It’s like once their hypothalamus is, it’s like, gosh, I’m so tired. I’m like, I’m in, I’m asleep by 10 o’clock.

It’s like, well, that’s great because that’s what you should be. It’s time. You know, they wake up hungry, they’re eating differently. So I can preach at them and I do. I give them all the all the information, but they don’t seem to have the same success until the hypothalamus feels safe to like, and they’re listening to those messages. They’re hearing it, listening to it.

Leigh Brandon (1:02:59)
And how do you source the ingredients for the Nutrisuits? Because I’m guessing it’s very high quality.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (1:03:06)
yeah, absolutely. So everything is tested. Each ingredient is individually tested and then it’s tested after mixing, just mainly to make sure there’s no kind of contamination. We have F you know, the FDA and GMP approved manufacturing sites. It’s not FDA the the supplement isn’t FDA approved, but we’ve got the manufacturing sites that are approved to make sure that you know it’s super high quality. And then the sourcing is going to you know to the actual raw ingredient manufacturers that provide us with, you know, plant-based

not toxically grown. Some of it’s wildly harvested. The sea vegetation is wildly harvested. Some of it is organically grown, but not all. We can’t call it organic because of the wild harvest harvested sea vegetation. I change where we harvest according to what’s going on in the world. So when I first made the the supplement back in tw 2003 we were harvesting some of the seaweeds from the Pacific and when the tsunami caused or when we had that nuclear reactor effect

Effect in Japan. I we I changed it to actually, you know, source that’s similar species in the Atlantic until you know we started seeing some shifts, and that took like 10 years. So it’s been on the market for a while. But I changed things up a little bit according to what’s happening on Mother Earth.

And so it’s not always exactly the same the same sourcing because I need to, shift things according to what is available and also, you know, what is safe.

Leigh Brandon (1:04:35)
Yeah, yeah, that’s great. What’s next for you?

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (1:04:39)
What’s

next for me is I’m doing a lot of these interviews. I have, quite a few books I’ve written. And what’s actually next is I’m in the middle of developing an app that actually does what I do. It’s in me, it’s all my intellectual property rights in this apps to actually ask as a patient advocate so that they have, as my patient said, they have dev in their pocket. So

Leigh Brandon (1:05:01)
and

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (1:05:02)
yeah, just to you know, to help them through their not just their healthcare, you know, appointments, but also like questions they have in between.

And

it is not, sourcing any any open sources. It’s all it’s all what I’ve written, what I’ve put together, all my research. So it sounds like me, giving you the advice on, why can’t I sleep and why am I waking up at three AM? And, and it just helps

Leigh Brandon (1:05:26)
awesome.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (1:05:28)
you through the process and then provides you all of the lifestyle stuff that would be helpful and then what you need to ask your doctor or your healthcare provider, if necessary, to get

further testing or or this is an emergency, you’re not sitting on this, I need you to call nine one one.

Leigh Brandon (1:05:47)
Yeah, awesome. And where can people find you online? Where would you like to send people?

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (1:05:53)
So my website is called genesisgold.com, and you can find all my information, my YouTube channel, my blogs, my nutraceuticals there, information about me, my practice, how to how to schedule a root consult, consultation if you’d like to. We do that over Zoom. I do have a special offer for your patients, I mean your your listeners, that they can actually get more information about the hypothalamus. It’s called the Hypothalamus Reset Bundle. And what it is is is the Hypothalamus handbook, which is in an ebook.

But I take them through case studies and a video tour. So there’s six case studies in there. They’re quite complex, but it’s I use them to teach all of these different mechanisms like pain, like neurological diseases, that prolactin connection through the and gut connection through the case studies. And I do that as a video tour for someone who’s like not into just reading. But you’ll also get my calm meditation in there, you’ll get, you know, my my dietary recommendations, activity recommendations, it’s all

in there and it you can find it at the hormonequeen.com backslash beyond

Leigh Brandon (1:07:01)
That’s great. It’s worth following me just for that.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (1:07:05)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. So if they go there, they’ll learn more about the nutraceuticals, but they’ll get on my email list, of course, if they sign up for this. And I put out new videos every single week, new long posts every single week. I respond to the questions I get and concerns I get from and as well as research that’s happening. So and then I create posts to like connect the dots for you and you know what’s going on, what you know, with your blood pressure, with anything else that might be happening, I connect those dots.

Leigh Brandon (1:07:37)
Awesome, great stuff. Deborah, I’ve loved talking to you today. One of the reasons I started this podcast is because I love to learn and I’ve just learned so much today. It’s been really great and I love learning so I’ve really enjoyed the last hour and 10 minutes. been great.

Deborah Maragopoulos FNP (1:07:53)
Thank you, Lee. Thank you so much.

Leigh Brandon (1:07:56)
So that’s it from Deborah and me for this week, but be sure to tune in same time, same place next week on Beyond the Pain.