THINKWELL

AGEWELL

The Mitochondrial Blueprint for Lifelong Vitality and Resilience

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (00:00.874)
Welcome back to the Think Well, Age Well Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Heather Sandison, and today we’re talking about longevity. But maybe not in the way you’re used to hearing about. My guest today is Dr. Stephanie Rimke. She’s a clinician, educator, and speaker who has spent nearly three decades exploring the biological foundations of brain health, mental health, and human performance. Her work sits at the fascinating intersection of mitochondrial function.

Nervous system regulation, metabolism, trauma physiology, and emerging therapies like peptides. We’re gonna dive deep on all of this today. At the heart of her approach is an important concept, however. When it comes to healing and aging, we can’t simply optimize the individual parts with a pill. We have to understand the system. And sometimes the sequence in which we address things matters just as much as what we do.

Dr. Remke is also a founding faculty member of Peptide University and the author of Receive, The Dance of Feminine Power. Today we’re gonna explore what happens when we stop thinking about longevity simply as avoiding disease or extending lifespan and start asking the bigger questions. What helps us stay energetic and resilient, connected, cognitively sharp, and fully alive as we age? Stephanie, welcome.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (01:23.35)
I am so happy to be here. I’m super excited.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (01:26.008)
So let’s start with this concept of longevity itself. So much of the conversation, right, is about early detection, preventing disease, extending lifespan, and then you know, this whole optimizing of biomarkers through the biohacking space, measuring, recording, and then fine-tuning. When we do that, what do you think we’re missing?

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (01:45.974)
Ha life, living, right? So most of that is not the conversation. I I would even say the direction longevity is going, I really resent. And I’m starting to not like the term because it’s it’s being overtaken by let’s say it like the biohacking bros, let’s say, that are don’t die, never die. Everything is basically

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (01:47.222)
Right.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (02:00.664)
Yeah.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (02:11.959)
Let’s try to live forever and I’m gonna download my consciousness into a microchip. Like I don’t know about you. Listen, I want to have a great time. I’m 53 and a half. I want to live long well, but I don’t want to just be a be a pulse breathing on and there’s nothing else there. I want it to be vibrant, joyful, ecstatic, connected. I want it to be full of play.

And I think the the people trying to take longevity down into numbers is a very left brain, you know, left hemisphere masculine way of

reducing it to to numbers. And that’s not what life is. Life is not about numbers. It is about love, connection, laughter, joy. It’s about people and humanity. So you can do all that and have a better if you feel good, right? If you’re strong physically, mentally, you know, cognitively, then you then you can travel. You can say, let’s take the cruise, you know, to Croatia. Let’s go play a new sport. Let’s take dance lessons, honey. Let’s have friends over and not sit around and complain and whine about our taxes

But let’s play tag. You know, imagine a group of 80-year-olds saying, All right, post-dinner, let’s go play tag. How fun is tag? How fun would that be? You know? So like so that’s what I want people to bring more. It’s like, let’s talk about what it really means to be alive, not just a

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (03:32.974)
You talk a lot about mitochondrial function. And what is the role of mitochondria in the, you know, I think we all have that phrase, the powerhouses of the cell, right? And what role does mitochondrial function have in this concept of longevity as you see it, of having fun and playing?

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (03:55.288)
Okay, I love this topic. So let’s talk about what our mitochondria. Just go back a little bit like sixth grade. And I apologize if the listeners are like, I already know all this silly, but maybe some of you don’t know.

So if you learned in sixth grade biology, cellular biology, you had a picture you had to draw and of what the nucleus, an ribosome, endoplasmic reticulum. You’re drawing this one-dimensional, like flat picture, not realizing it’s a round ball and what’s really happening. And one of those important things people were drawing was a mitochondria. And the term powerhouse of the cell is how we’ve learned to think of it. Here’s the misinformation, the miscommunication, the lies that we didn’t understand.

One, those are not really, I don’t consider it an organelle. Mitochondria are very clearly, we understand now, are not human. It is a completely different species with a completely different set of DNA. So you are walking around with two sets of DNA. You have the human DNA that your mom and dad gave you, and then you have this mitochondrial family. It’s a family of bacteria that we absorbed and made it a symbiotic co-relationship.

partnership with each other and they said, listen, this is a harsh environment out here and we’re having a hard time, but we’re really good at doing a few things. And we said, okay, why don’t you come inside of us? It didn’t really happen this way, but I personify everything. Come inside and you can take over a lot of function for us. You can make a ton of energy. You can make what’s called metabolic water. You can hydrate us, you can keep us fluid.

It’s whole lot more than ATP going on here. You’re gonna clean out hydrogen and deuterium separate things for us. You’re gonna do there’s a lot that’s going. You’re gonna make signal molecules and you’re gonna lend us some of your DNA at times, actually, because we’re gonna use it when we deal with viruses, bacteria. We’re gonna borrow some from you so we don’t have to have a lot of DNA in our nucleus. Okay, bet. We’ll protect you. You give us energy, you keep us going.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (05:50.552)
Mitochondria are this single, it’s a community of an entire other species inside of us that only comes from our mother’s line. So the highest concentration, and so inside the cell, we were drawing a picture and it had one. Well, there are thousands upon thousands upon thousands upon thousands of them depend in each cell, depending upon where you’re finding it in the body. Mitochondria, if they die, and there’s certain compounds that will kill mitochondria very quickly, like cyanide is one of them.

You kill the mitochondria, every single mitochondria in a person, you are dead within one to two minutes. They are required. Like that’s what really breathes for us. We don’t breathe, they do. So it’s a bug. So I I want people to understand it’s a not it’s not human. We’ve made an agreement with a whole species that has we don’t even know how many of them are in us. Inside a woman, the highest concentration is inside an egg.

inside her ovary. That’s where the most mitochondria are. Why? Because making a baby requires a tremendous amount of energy and support. After that, we have the brain and then the heart. We have these places where you need so much fuel, so much thinking. Actually, but you need so much communication. You need so much community. You need so much cooperation. It’s not just ATP. it’s no. You need a whole army of

A c this tribe that’s like we’re all here in it together. It’s it’s more than just your cells. So picture you got neurons, you got the glidal cells, you have all these different types of cells, and all these mitochondria that are in there saying, I’m gonna help coordinate, give all the energy, coordinate, they talk to each other. If you isolate a mitochondria from from its family, it starves and dies. It doesn’t do well. They are in constant communication and constant cooperation. That’s how we’re functioning. We are this.

Community. So that’s how step one. Thinking about it as a powerhouse of the cell is like calling a mother, you know, a woman who’s had four children and raised a family. Well, she’s you know, an anatomical female. What? No, that is not what she is. Okay. So I think it’s been, we’ve done a great disservice to how beautiful these creatures are and how much we I I I I love them. I respect them. I’m so grateful to all the mitochondria. So

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (08:14.313)
Everything pretty much at this point, it’s looking like starts off as a mitochondrial disorder. And when the mitochondria start to do well, that is the beginning of every disease process and everything that we have that’s going on. And so they are the ones to protect and take care of and start with first. So I start everything with mitochondrial health and helping protect them.

And once you’re inside the cell, you have to deal with them. They have two special membranes we have to deal with. And then you deal with the cell itself inside it and its membrane. If you do that, microcosm to the macrocosm, as it is healthy, everything else outside of it is healthy.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (08:55.886)
I was just about to say that. This sounds like the microcosm to the macrocosm. Risa, even in the way that you talk about community and collaboration and working together, and the my mind’s kind of been blown here in just the reverence that you have for mitochondria and why, and how we’ve really oversimplified this concept for so long. So I I hear you saying.

The like what is this mitochondrial dysfunction I I think the direction I wanna go is what does this mitochondrial dysfunction look like clinically? And I I wanna sort of put that in the context of, you know, I guess in my clinical experience, I’m sometimes nervous about revving up the mitochondria, right? Things we’re gonna talk about peptides, but like NAD and MOTS-c, and there’s a lot of times when I don’t feel like it’s appropriate to start there. And so I wanna understand the nuance of

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (09:35.631)
Mm should help.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (09:45.743)
All right, if there is toxic exposure and infectious burden and people are depleted and they’ve they’ve had had trauma or major stressors, they’re sleep deprived, or they have obstructive sleep apnea. You know, talk us through, you know, of course the mitochondria is going to be affected by that. How do you support the mitochondria? I think a lot of us, and I sorry, I’m kind of going tangentially here because this is such an exciting, juicy topic.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (10:09.333)
I did. I know what you’re saying. Yeah.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (10:13.1)
Right. I I I think in school I learned as a naturopath we support it with nutrients. Carnitine and cocu10 and ribose and you know, there’s these mitochondrial nutrients. But then we also s now think about red light and the cytochrome C oxygenase enzymes. And you know, even that is an oversimplification after hearing you talk about it. Okay, so you go. Like how do we think about this?

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (10:34.659)
Okay, so it’s great. There was a lot of questions there. So let me start with this. And I’m just gonna sidebar before I get into there is a hierarchy of healing that goes on inside the body, right? People can come to you and say, well, my main primary concern is weight loss. But the body might go, that’s not my primary concern. Okay. When you start feeding it what it needs, it’s gonna take care of something else two, three months. But I’m not losing weight. Yeah, but look what else has happened. Because again, you can want what you want all you want.

The body knows best and it’s going to deal with it. It’s smarter than you. It’s the bot your body is smarter than me, smarter than you. Let it do what it’s built to do. Part of that is mitochondria. All trauma, by the way. So my specialty is mental health issues. Cut my teeth in a mental hospital with schizophrenics is how I started. And I my primary focus has been schizophrenia, bipolar, and autism recovery. That

makes you go into ADHD anxiety, PTSD, suicide ideation, you name it, DID, I’ve done it all. Okay. Dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, MS, Lyme. Okay. It just you kind of it’s you you kind of have to do it all eventually when you do autism. So I say all that to say I didn’t start my career 30 years ago thinking of trauma was a mitochondrial disorder, but I’m very clear. All trauma, physical, psychological, are mitochondrial disorders.

Trauma, it simply means the nervous system can’t sustain the level of activation that it’s in and it must collapse and go below the nervous system stress point, parasympathetic set point, and it’s energy depletion. The pr the thing that decides that that’s going to break the system is the mitochondria. Okay. End of story. Every single time, even when we talk about structure. So everything actually is this. You cannot get somebody better who looks that’s in a state three trauma dissociative state.

Until you repair their mitochondria. It’s why talk therapy is so terrible at doing this, because they ignore the mitochondria. And most talk therapists have no idea what I’m even talking about. They don’t understand the biology of trauma. They don’t understand state one, state two trust, state three, four trauma, and how the mitochondria are key to getting this whole thing working again. So that’s a sidebar. Okay. So

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (12:43.521)
How you have to talk think about it, you are 100% right. I’m so glad you at least understand, you may not understand why you need so much restraint with something like NAD, MOTS-c, even CoQ10 and Red Light. So let’s talk about this. The mitochondria are doing multiple things, and when you look at how you’re repairing them, you have to start at the bottom. And a lot of times the bottom of the the pouring a foundation of a house.

It’s not sexy. Everybody wants to get to the third floor bathroom and pick out the vanity in the paint color. I get it. Everybody wants to push energy, push, push, push. We’re addicted to more and more and more and more. That’s not how you can do it. You just can’t push, you can’t put. So let’s say I have a car, I’m from Detroit, right? So let’s say I got a nice, you know, Corvette, a 12-cylinder, but only four are working.

What do you think? I could put the most expensive gasoline in there. I can put nitrous. I can put race fuel. It’s still not gonna work because I have a broken structure. It’s you I can’t get the other cylinders going. In fact, I will probably over-rev, overheat, and structurally break it even more. That is what many clinicians are doing by pushing NAD, MOTS-c, things that they should not be pushing. Even carnitine, even CoQ10, even red light.

Because what you’re doing, let’s talk about what the mitochondria need. We have an inner membrane and we have an outer membrane. We have these two membranes. Step one, structure dictates function. The first thing you have to do is deal with the structure. You must repair those membranes. Of those membranes, hands down, the inner membrane is much more important. So you have the first thing I always want to do is slow down and do that.

So this is where we bring in what are the membranes made of, right? What do we need? I flood the system with phospholipids, omega-3s, and this is where one peptide is extraordinarily good, SS31. Okay. But you have to have the substrate. So you got to basically, that’s like the architect and the repair. You have to, you have to give the system. So I’m board certified in neurofeedback, right? So I rewire brains. I can’t do that if I don’t have substrates. I need the materials.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (15:05.651)
And I need the workers and I need the director to tell everybody what to do. So SS31 is kind of the architect. It’s not gonna magically fix and bind a cardiolipin and fix the structure unless it has everything it needs. So one, you gotta make sure they’re eating enough food of the right things. But most people have, as you know, have a very d imbalanced omega-3, omega-6, you know, fatty acid ratio. So usually I have to kind of

Look at let’s get the right foods in there. I want a lot of animal fats, fatty foods, and I you I’m usually using phosphatidylcholine, phosphatidyl serine, DHA, EPA, because I have to kind of flood the system to repair itself. Cause inside those membranes, inner and outer in the cell membrane, that’s where the trans fat seed oils get embedded. That’s where microplastics are getting embedded. You know, a lot, there’s a lot of things getting caught sticky inside. Your membrane should be fluid, you know.

Like you’re just like your body. You know, you want to be f flexible movement. You know, the older we get, we get a little more rigid, we get a little bit stuck. As your body gets stuck, so does your brain. You know, my mom is 81. And sometimes my conversations with her, I’m like, man, I remember her when she was my age. And I’m like, why is mommy so stubborn now? This is like I mean, what is wrong with you? But you know, you get older, you got a way you like I like it my way. And this is the way I’m doing it, and I’m not changing, Stephanie. Okay, I I get it. But can I maybe get you to change a little bit?

Right. So I know and it happens to me too. I’m not as flexible physically or even mentally as I was when I was 17, because I’m got my ways, right? This is how I do it. I like it like this. I like my coffee like this, not like that. You’re right. So I understand it. The cell membranes are no different of the mitochondria and your cell. Right. So they want to be fluid and we have to get the get the bad stuff out and flood it with the good stuff. So we want we start with structure, just fixing the structure alone.

So how much do you care do should I talk about electrons in the transport chain? Do we want to get into that much science? Okay.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (17:06.452)
Yeah, let’s do it. I mean I I also want to have time to talk about peptides and like this stress stress trauma distinction. Like there’s so much I want to go into. It’s just so fun. but

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (17:17.037)
Well, that’s the SS thirty one, I’m gonna tell you it’s only been around like three years. That has been the most profound upgrade to my practice in decades as far as a molecule, like other thing, TRE trauma releasing exercises. I think everybody should go to that website, trauma preventing ghosts. I’m certified in that too. Game changer. Right. So there’s certain things you want to start stacking in to start doing. This is something everybody can go to a clinician who’s certified in that.

start doing it in an office a few times and then you have the skill to do at home yourself two to three times a week. You want to start getting things you can take home and do yourself and anywhere. You can do it in an airport in a gym, you get at your at your kids’ house with the you can get you get in the floor with the grandkids crawling on you and you can shake. You know what I mean? So these are ways you’re going to keep yourself young, vibrant, vital, flexible, and and get the stress out of the system that your body’s going to hold on to that maybe you’ve been holding onto to 50, 60 years.

So that’s a sidebar for you for the pro tip. Okay, so we have to get that structure in place. That could take two to three months before I’m doing anything else, right? So the structure, inner mitochondrial membrane, why it matters. There’s a thing inside of there, some of you might remember, the electron transport chain. It is not called the carbohydrate transport chain, it’s not called the fatty acid, you know, protein chain. That’s not what happens. You really

Only digest one thing, electrons, right? Everything you’re chewing, swallowing, drinking, doing is trying to get electrons into the mitochondria to go through this chain, to be moved along, transported from place to place to place to place. And in that stepping, skipping of from step one to step two to step three, we’re skipping along, things are happening and

Ions and hydrogen, things are being moved and passed. All that to say it helps flush energy. What they’re doing is creating electrical charge changes. We’re creating what’s called a concentration gradient to create a battery of sorts. So like, listen, here’s energy. Just like when you see the three-year-old, the four-year-olds are like, wow, where do they have all that energy? Their mitochondria can move electrons super fast. So their charge is super high.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (19:36.314)
When you’re 85 and you don’t have much energy, your mitochondria are not moving those electrons the same and your concentration gradient isn’t as strong. You literally don’t have as much charge as a three-year-old. If we can create that you can make as much charge, you will have the same energy as a three-year-old. That’s the key here. So that’s what’s happening. Now there’s different things that carry this electron along, and lots of mistakes can happen with moving the electrons. When mistakes happen, we call it

We call it slip, we call it proton leak, electron slip, slip and leak happen. That creates friction and damages this membrane, as well as created what we call reactive oxygen species, ROS, which are fantastic, actually. They’re communication. But if you make too much, you need a little bit of smoke, right? When you put on a fire in a fireplace. A little bit of smoke is okay. It goes up the chimney and you’re good. But if you close the flu and you make too much, throw paper.

You get smoke in the house and now you can’t breathe and it’s uncomfortable. That’s what happens inside when you push electrons too fast, too many, and and and you can’t handle it. So when you put in NAD, you put in sloop, you put in Mot Sebing, you start pushing way too many electrons too fast, and either the road is kind of broken, the membrane might be damaged, you might not have enough oxygen at the end to catch it. There’s a number of things that basically that can go wrong. So you have to be really careful before you start.

Pushing, pushing, pushing. Because that’s why people, if you’ve ever feel worse after NAD, you were not ready for it. This they pushed you too fast too long. You had too much ROS. You basically smoked up the cells and you you you blew up blew everything out. Not good. That is not, it’s not detox. And so when a clinician says that to you, they’re being lazy or stupid, to be honest. And they don’t want to take responsibility that they push too much energy through and you couldn’t handle that charge.

You you you know, we all know if you don’t have a like if you plug something in and how we just blew everything. We we put too many things in and now I blew a circuit. That’s what’s happening, kind of. So you always start with the structure. And often you may not need anything else. You might not need to push anything else. We might microdose something like a MOTS-c, because MOTS-c is made by the mitochondria and it’s a communication signal. It’s basically like cell phones. It’s basic it helps that’s how they talk to each other.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (21:57.456)
Multi mitochondria’s not been doing well, the membrane’s damage is not making enough MOTSI. So we can give it a little bit, like a micro dose, 250 micrograms, not this one, two, three, four, five milligrams thing that people are out there trying to tell you to take. That’s a very different dose. So the dose and the why, the why matters to exactly why we’re dosing it. So I might bring my Matsy in right away, but it’s going to be at a very different dose than somebody who’s taking it as a pre-workout fat burner.

Like that’s how they’re gonna they’re they’re selling it to you. I can lose all this weight with it. Mm, maybe. If your microc

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (22:30.828)
Or just to like have more energy. I see that out there too. It’s advertised because it’s like, want more energy, took want C. It’s like

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (22:34.915)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. It’s dangerous. And it it’s a very dangerous concept of what’s happening. So that’s where we start first. That’s the hierarchy. Then you have to look at the things, the terrain is of the cell and everything else, right? That’s where the light, the the nutrients, like you gotta start with the diet, right? Minerals, minerals, minerals, minerals, like correct. And so we have to look at that. Like, are you able to make stomach acid?

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (22:54.264)
the gut, are you able to digest and absorb what you’re eating?

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (23:01.049)
Do we need to support that? Is the is do we have fatty liver? Are we unable to make bile? You know, is there leaky gut? Are we not able to get, you know, to absorb things? That’s why you have to slow down and you can’t just chase stimulation. But we are very addicted, at least in America, to stimulation and chasing a high and chasing a fast result. Well, you might feel okay for a little while, but that is not the same as actually having long-term health, going for longevity, having, you know.

Health without the negative consequence. You’re not looking to feel just good. You want to actually be functioning well. So that’s like the beginning basis. And that’s why we have to. So then you look, I look at the molecules and I classify them as to what they do. I’m like, is this a structural molecule? Is this a transport molecule? Is this an electron mover? Is this, does how does this impact voltage dependence? I mean, people, hormone replacement changes voltage.

So you have to, this is a this is a voltage game. And so you if you have to understand voltage and electricity to help the mitochondria. If you don’t understand that, you think it’s chemicals, you don’t understand it at all. And you should probably not tell anybody to take a supplement if you don’t know that CoQ10 is actually it’s it’s not actually a structural molecule. CoQ ten helps move the electrons. So it’s actually going to increase voltage, even though we do need it for structure. So you have to know when you’re bringing it in and why and what the so I teach an entire like

15, 20 hour course at Peptide University for clinicians on this and how to sequence just the mitochondrial repair and all the molecules that go into it. Because respiratrol matters, B12 matters, CoQ10 matters, L-carnitine matters, red light matters, hyperbaric oxygen matters, oxygen supplementation matters, hydrogen matters. You you know what I mean? Like where are you putting it? Well, what job is it doing? And you cannot just push energy, you can’t go for voltage increase before you deal.

With structure before you’re aware of redox potential. You know, that’s why things like molecular hydrogen are so great because of redox. You know? So every every molecule, ketones help mitochondria. There’s lots of things that are helping mitochondria, but why? What’s the problem? So when you ask that before, how do I know? We can get hi there’s you gotta say, are they hyperpolarized, hypopolarized? That’s very, very these are they these patients look

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (25:01.71)
Right.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (25:12.51)
Okay.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (25:22.348)
And do you test this or is this something that did is there a blood test for this or do you it are there questions you ask? Is there something you observe? How do you get to this?

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (25:24.908)
just

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (25:31.812)
Okay, so there’s some, there’s there now they’re trying to come out with these mitochondrial tests. I so far am not convinced any of them are actually effective. I’ve seen, you know, I’m hopeful that we will come out with some things, but some of them definitely seem a little bit more marketed and gimmicky. I don’t know any clinicians that have actually used any mitochondrial tests per se. I look at the DNA, so I do get when you when you do a DNA test, if you’re gonna do that, the haplotype is what it’s called. It’s the maternal haplotype will tell you a lot.

So L0 is considered the starting point of all mitochondria DNA. And then there’s L1, L two, and then it ch so it’s basically the theory is that Wallace came out of is that he is the world’s foremost mitochondrial expert. That the, you know, that we were more of an equatorial people. And as we started moving and migrating, our human DNA does not alter quickly at all. There’s basically no change ever in the human DNA whatsoever. So the the idea of like,

Alzheimer’s is genetic or cancer is genetic. No, it’s not. Now, mitochondria play a big part in this because they have their own DNA. They adapt and change very, very quickly. They are extremely sensitive to light. They are sensing light and electric electricity and magnetism all the time. They also radiate light and electricity and magnetic pulses all the time. Why? Yeah.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (26:56.536)
So for someone sitting at home, you know, not just the theory, but like how do they know the of their mitochondria?

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (27:03.415)
I’m gonna tell you, but so step one would be a lot of people have done their their DNA test. They’ve done their, you know, whatever that 23andMe or Ancestry.com. Go back to that report, and you probably didn’t pay any attention to your haplotype. Find that haplotype, right? I’m an L1. It is a very s I guarantee you probably you probably are not, right? Somebody who is L0, L1, L2, I am deep African. That means.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (27:09.42)
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (27:33.354)
Women in my family are black, right? I’m a black Pakistan I’m an African Pakistani Lithuanian. Well, the the white genes came from my father. So the body literally the egg throws them away. It’s the mitochondria. I don’t need you. It only goes from the mom. So my mitochondria need a ton of sunlight. And I don’t need a lot of cold because that the the look so you can take your haplotype.

And at this point, because of Chat GBT, Claude and Grok and everything else, you can say, here’s my haplotype. Can you tell me what this means in terms of how much sunlight, heat, and cold exposure I need? So like cold plunging is real big and popular and cold exposure, right? My being the way my mitochondria function, they you know, sixty degrees feels freezing to me because I’m not from Sweden.

Sweet the the further you go north, the the letters that they change, the haplotype changes. And it said, listen, there’s no cheetahs here to run away from. They don’t need to make she doesn’t need that much ATP, but they need to be warm. So those people’s mitochondria do something very different than mine. They s they they leak heat. They’re not efficient. They basically say, we’re not gonna be, you’re not gonna make a lot of like we don’t need to sprint. You know, the you don’t see a lot of

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (28:39.63)
Great.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (28:55.307)
Swedish people winning sprint races. You see a whole lot of Africans do, however, right? There’s a reason for that. The mitochondria are different. And I need a lot of sunlight, I need a lot of heat. I don’t need a lot of cold. My mitochondria make energy so I sprint. I run. I am a different type. I move differently because of that. Now, when you take a person who should live in Kenya and you move them to northern Toronto, Canada, it’s a huge mismatch.

From that mitochondria, from the light and the heat signals it actually wants. It’s like so whenever you see in lots of Indians move to Canada and they end up gaining weight, they end up diabetic and all of stuff and they they they feel like I don’t understand, it doesn’t make any sense. I eat the same, but my friend is thinning and it’s because actually where you you should live and where you live play a huge part in your mitochondrial health. So it’s a really important thing. So honestly, if they have that test, throw it in chat.

Now, not everybody can pick up and move. I get it. It’s why I moved further south to Florida. Like my body, my mitochondria, and their health are dependent upon the light and the signals I give it. And it’s dependent on the EMF. So everybody though is their your mitochondria is sensitive to EMF, non-native EMF. So your Wi-Fi in your house is killing you. Your lights, your your light bulbs in your house are killing you. Your the radio signals, the micro, all of that stuff because.

They disable and break mitochondria. So anything you can do to protect yourself from that, there’s clothing you can wear, there’s special sheets. I have special shirts, clothes, hats, underwear, bedding. I have so many devices in my house to basically push out unnatural EMF so they don’t displace and break the little transporters inside. There’s one at the end that’s really special that needs to spin.

And it knocks that and breaks that motor, but it’s it’s gonna we call it a motor, a nanomotor. It breaks it. You can literally pulse magnet the wrong frequencies at a person and just disable all their mitochondria and they’ll be dysfunctional. So this is where some of the frequency weapons are actually derived from. It’s to damage the mitochondria. That’s how you get destroyed. So

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (31:05.71)
And people feel this at varying degrees, right? And it’s the load, right? The stress and the trauma and the toxic exposure and the infectious burden. When you have a lot of that, you feel that EMF exposure, I think, more basically my clinical experiences that I’ve seen, right? People who can’t bring their cell phones close to them because that load is so high. And then other people are like rolling their eyes. Like, what are you talking about, Dr. Rum? Got this is I’m not sensitive to EMFs. I never have to worry about that.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (31:22.367)
That’s the bone.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (31:35.052)
And so how do you square that when especially when you have maybe a couple and one of them is really affected and the other isn’t? How do you give them this information in a way that feels digestible and actionable?

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (31:47.704)
Well, it’s very easy to fix a house. I mean, so I just have a variety of products that are like, listen, these are like one time purchases. We’re just gonna make some modifications to how the house is, then it’s done, and you don’t have to think about it anymore. And we just I basically stage things like month one, let’s handle the lights. You know, and the bedroom. The bedroom is most important. We go up to the bed first, because you’re gonna be in the bedroom. You know, turn the Wi-Fi off at night. That’s not hard. It’s not rocket science. Somebody, somebody your husband can do that for you, you know, whatever, like.

Simple things like I start with the sheets and the bedding and the lighting in the bedroom. Let’s I see what they can handle. You I do pace it and you can you know, I got listen, we got a list of twenty-five things to do. Nobody can do twenty-five at once. So we’re gonna just see what the pace is for you. doc, I got five done this week. okay. Then move on to the next one. Yeah, it’s that’s all everybody’s gonna do a little different. But the most important thing, if you got somebody who’s not bothered, good, I’m glad it doesn’t bother you. It’s not hard to get

couple a shirt and underwear for your wife, a little cap, a blanket for her, turn off the Wi Fi, change some light bulbs. This in the heart doesn’t affect your life at all. Right? Now, when I bring out the red light bulbs at night, guys are like, This Dr. Remcut put red light bulbs all over my house. It kind of looks like the house of Satan. It is a little strange when your whole house lights up red. So my whole house is red at night and you look from the out I’ve driven up and I’m like, wow, that does look that does look kind of creepy. But from the outside, they’re like, What is she doing in there?

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (33:08.43)
Like that orangey spectrum, it’s really warm and it feels good. And I some is that potentially a little bit easier for some people to wrap their minds around.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (33:17.099)
It. So we have so like you said, like I have multiple glasses all over the place. I can buy my fifteen pair of red blockers. I’ve probably bought and wearing a pair of glasses. So this is not hard. We can start right there. First thing we’re just gonna get you some glasses and you put on in the even when the sun goes down. The one who’s affected, now I want the other one to put on too, but whatever. I’ve s probably given away three or four thousand red light to every kid that comes in the office, right? Like everybody, everybody if you’re gonna watch TV, if you let watch something at night, these have to go on. That’s the new rule.

And parents just you they blame it on me. Dr. Rimka said, I’m like, yep, I’m the bad guy. That this is that this is the new rule. So you can always blame it on me. I’m always fine with that. So that’s how we start. We just start with things that it really then becomes just the way it is and you don’t have to think about it. Then we, you know, when they travel, there’s a hack for all of it. There it honestly is not that hard. I have a whole course on it. I’m rewriting my whole website store to basically teach you this. Like, if this is your problem.

Then these are the top choices, this second choice is this, third choice. So there’s devices you can put in the house that will harmonize and protect. You can sleep on pemp. There’s all and different price points. So you you cannot do everything at once. You just pick the lowest hanging fruit, hands down, turn your Wi-Fi off at night, keep the phones out of the bedroom at night. Start with the bedroom. And then I’m gonna start with listen, buying EMF blocking shirt Haven, H A V N, they have clothing.

silver based, you know, there’s a it’s really an interesting, it’s part of the conspiracy theory group of people. And I’m like, it’s interesting. Because you know what is a Faraday cage and blocks all the non-native EMF is lead paint. Sure seems interesting that lead paint started to be outbanned, it was banned at the same time they started raising all the electricity and the radiation in the environment with cell towers and you know so if you so you can buy special paint, they try to keep lead on it that

You can literally paint the bed. So we’ve had extreme cases of really electromagnetic sensitive people, and their bedrooms are completely turned into a Faraday cage. So we have this safe sanctuary definitely all night while you sleep, but it’s also a place they may need to retreat to throughout the day. And some people have had it so severe they’ve had to move. I mean, you know, having this and living in New York s in Manhattan might be a major problem for some people. And they there there’s places in the world where it’s highly restricted.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (35:39.763)
and people go there for refuge. So we try to avoid that. If we can repair the mitochondria and get things going, you are you don’t have to become a victim to any of this, but there are some basic things you can protect yourself from. So

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (35:52.431)
I I want to shift to peptides because you’re such an expert in that. I mean, you literally teach clinicians about how to use peptides in their practices. And you’ve been at this for 15 years, way before it was cool. And it’s it’s getting an enormous enormous amount of attention in the popular press right now. And it particularly in longevity medicine. And I know my algorithm is is geared in that direction, but I have patients coming in. Just yesterday I had a patient come in and she’s like, So should I be on the peptides?

And my response was, okay, we’re gonna need a minute to talk about that. And also, what is your goal with the peptides, right? There are great peptides for weight loss. There’s some great peptides for gut repair. There’s some peptides for cognitive function. They work, you know, at some level for some people, but they’re not a slam dunk and they really belong in the context of everything else that we’re doing. So to hook us through.

You know, when some random person messages you on Instagram and says, Should I be on the peptides? How do you respond? Yeah, learn more.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (36:58.543)
Take my course. That’s what I have. My response is take a course from somebody who has to learn. Yeah, you have to learn more. And so here’s the reality. I wish I could say, you know, talk to your clinician and and get help. It’s the same as saying talk to your clinician about HRT. Good luck with that, because we’re not trained in it. We have a very, very small group of people who are been trained to use peptides, therapeutic peptides.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (37:16.686)
Yeah.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (37:25.113)
So there’s a couple, so let’s talk about nomenclature naming to begin with, because this is what I find is super confusing for people. When we say peptides, people think of they think one thing. So I’m gonna be really specific. We never used to have to say therapeutic peptides, but I’m gonna say therapeutic peptides is its own classification and own division of peptides that are used therapeutically by clinicians and

Actually, most of them come with 50 to 75 years of clinical research behind them. So this whole nonsense that there’s no research, uh-uh, the fact that maybe an American study hasn’t been done doesn’t negate the 500 Russian studies. Okay. So they’re people don’t understand that science doesn’t share. Like I the lay people find that out. They go, wait, what? I’m like, no, there’s no sharing. Like we don’t talk to other countries and do things and it’s a very bizarre landscape.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (38:22.454)
And Google Translate has come a long way in the last few years.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (38:25.007)
Like when we were when I started 15 years ago and we want to talk about all the Russian stuff, it wasn’t easy. This was very hard. I I mean I have I wish I could bring up some of the group chats of 500 docs going, I don’t know, I ordered some from R can somebody help me r figure out the dosage on this, because nothing we didn’t have all that, right? It was it’s it’s a whole lot easier. So we have therapeutic peptides and of those there’s about five thousand that are used quite a bit.

Right. And we have a lot of data on actually. And but when you break it down to it, there’s like twenty-five that everybody kind of really uses, maybe fifty, right? And then we have the bioregulators, the cabinets and bioregulators, which are peptides as well. But that’s over there. Now, when you say peptides, people now what’s happened because it’s become trendy, and this all happened post 2020. that whole thing was a doctor during all of that.

And we were all using therapeutic peptides and we all had no problem using them. And all of a sudden everything was gone overnight. We’re like, why can’t where’s why can’t we get anything? What just happened? What’s going on? What’s happening? boy. Because they work, they’re super potent. And we won’t get into necessarily why that was, but that was the the the pinnacle moment. And because they were taken away, things went underground so much, and all of us

started being so loud, I was on at least a hundred and fifty podcasts. I had my Twitter account shut down three times, Instagram shut down. Like if you were talking about COVID and the jab and la there was a lot of noise. And a lot of us were the peptide docs that were the few people who’d been trained and used them and we all knew each other and, you know, that this was no secret. And we all shared information and no one it was very cooperative, like a bunch of mitochondria.

Right. So we all were trying to help each other win in practice and help patients. That’s the primary goal. There wasn’t anything else happening. So now things went underground, kind of like prohibition. And so it was like, well, it’s illegal. We can make a lot of money, or we can’t get it. So like company and people, a lot of opportunistic moments happened. Lots more companies came, and now we got now we’re in the wild, wild west of what we’re at, where there’s a lot of scamming and faking. So peptides then is a term because they know they can market, and this drives me kind of

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (40:29.431)
Right.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (40:42.003)
nuts. I I really it it people are at a I feel bad for the consumer. So they pop peptides now. Collagen peptides. you know, this peptide, this peptide. And people say, we have, you know, like, you know, lots of things are peptides. Insulin is a peptide. So what is it but but it’s not really a therapeutic peptide because it’s a hormone. So it is a ner it’s a hormonal peptide. So let’s say what this is. Peptides are just mini proteins. That’s all it is.

It’s taking a small piece of a protein, you put a bunch of little Lego pieces together, and you put a whole bunch, put 300, you got a steak, you gotta, you gotta meat, you got a protein. We take it down to 20, okay, now it’s a peptide. I take it to to 100, that’s a polypeptide. You know, we just change the name, but at the end of the day, it’s a bunch of amino acids. Okay, and but when you eat food that have amino acids in them, you make peptides.

The body is making the greatest peptide company in the world is between your ears. It’s called your brain. It is making all of them. Your stomach makes them, they’re made all over the place. So the vast majority of therapeutic peptides, vast majority, not all, are just replications made in a lab of what the body is making. look, the body makes GHK copper.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (42:03.192)
You make it.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (42:10.593)
Maybe they don’t have enough or something happened. If we take make it, we give more of it to them, it’ll do with you know, it’ll help the body heal. Because GHK Copper does this healing thing that we know what it does. Great. It’s the same as insulin. So the first the first one we ever manufactured, we could figure out how to synthesize was insulin, which saved a lot of people’s lives. That’s a very big peptide, but it is a peptide. So at this point, people are getting scammed and they’ll think, I take peptides because I take collagen. yeah, collagen peptides.

Is not a therapeutic peptide. It is not going to do remotely what you think it’s going to do and what you’re seeing on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or whatever you’re seeing, right? So we have major classifications, grouping of peptides. We have the regenerative healing peptides. Many of them are used in gut health because we have, but they’re used in many ways, joints, all kinds, hair growth, all kinds of things. But they’re repairing. That’s its job.

Right? We have a whole classification that helps you make more growth hormone, which growth hormone does a whole bunch of things. We have a bunch of brain peptides, right? We have different classifications. We have things that are organ-specific and things that are systemic. But the most peptides are what we call pleotropic. You put them in the system and they have widespread impact. But because it’s something the body understands, it’s just a signal. It’s basically like picking up the phone. Hey.

I’ve been watching what you’re doing over there in the shoulder. It’s not working well. Now I finally can tell you what to do. I need you to grow more blood vessels. I need you to make more collagen. I need you to do okay, great. And it goes in there and it does it. And it it’s gonna figure it out. So if you’re doing let’s say peptides like a like a let me think of a common one. B G H K copper, because people, this one, it’s the skin one, it’s the pretty one, it’s that one people think about. And so they’re tak but I always use it for gut health.

We’re always repairing the because people forget your intestinal lining is skin tissue. It’s the same, right? So the same things that are gonna fix your gut do fix your skin. And it’s why so many people we look, can we just we have to start where we have to start? I know you might care about that mark on your face, but that is not the most important thing your body cares about right now because it cares about digestion and absorption of nutrients. And it can’t do that with you know the ulcerative colitis and that that’s happening or whatever, let’s say. So it must fix what it must fix first.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (44:28.793)
So I start with that. Like in general, I’ve been using peptides again twelve over twelve years with patients. I do put people on them pretty quickly. but I it it’s this it’s this fine dance of it’s like peptides are the sprinkles on the cake, right? But you you do need to make the the the batter and make the cake and make the layers and do what you have to do. However

Sometimes I need to use a little bit of sprinkles to even help us be able to make the batter. And things like that would be, let’s say, gut health, or something that is if they’re most of my patients are coming in with some type of mental illness. So if they’re in high anxiety, high panic disorder, I would much rather use a nasal spray peptide than a psychiatric drug, than a tranquilizer to give them some immediate.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (45:03.416)
Right.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (45:23.523)
quick relief and some sense of safety and bring hope into the system and start realigning, but letting them know, right, this is not, you don’t just take this. We’re not just taking C Link as you know, as the answer to your anxiety problem. We have to get down to what is the real issue because as you know, that could be coming from a strep infection or a staph infection in the brain or, you know, copper toxicity or mold illness. I mean, there’s we have to figure out why is that happening.

And and get to and that’s and I just want I may have to use a peptide as a quick short help. And in that process, teaching them, you know, 12 years ago, I never had to tell them I’m giving you a peptide. Nobody cared. They don’t care if it’s GABA, Ashwaganda or C Link or BPC. They don’t care, they just want to feel better and get better. Now they’re asking, which it’s a double-edged sword, right? Because now we have to say, well, in my in my opinion,

I wish everyone had access to a certified therapeutic peptides clinician and they and you get let them be make the clinical decisions of how to bring them in, how to layer them. Cause sometimes we’re gonna bring them in right away, but we’re gonna stack in a certain way. If you’re dealing with Lyme, like, man, you wanna bring these in right away because they’re super strong at helping the body deal with this. We have immune modulators that are so much better because of

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (46:28.438)
Yeah.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (46:51.151)
modulating is a different word. It’s ch it’s letting your body go, well, I’m just gonna auto-correct. Don’t need to turn it up. Don’t need to turn it down. Drugs don’t do that. Drugs are push it up or push it down. Like you take a blood pressure model, it’s just gonna push it down no matter what, even if you’re gonna pass out. That is not going to happen with a peptide. But it doesn’t mean you may not have a discomfort

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (47:05.13)
I graph that we yeah.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (47:13.015)
Yeah.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (47:16.695)
or a reaction or something that doesn’t feel good. Because if you just suddenly push someone’s immune system too strong and it starts working and it starts killing things and you don’t have proper drainage or detoxification pathways, you’re gonna auto-intoxicate and it doesn’t feel good. It does so, so there’s a lot to that. It’s little tiny baby protein. Most of these are just a a version of what you make already inside. We are syn synthesizing them. So when people say, but it’s synthetic.

So is the so is the candy bar you just ate. I don’t think you understand what synthesize means, you know. Insulin is synthesized, estrogen, testosterone. We we have to make it in a lab. We are not extracting growth hormone out of dead bodies. They did that before, remember? They were you know, we used to extract hormones from cadavers and inject them in people. What that’s a that’s not we don’t wanna do that anymore, but

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (48:05.942)
And desiccate I mean desiccated thyroid, desiccated brain, desiccated glandulars are are a a thing, but this is different from that.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (48:10.188)
Yeah.

It’s a challenging. Yeah. But that’s actually bioregulators, but we are synthesizing them. So you’re not having to grind that up from there and then clean it. So we’ve learned, we it’s just an amino acid sequence. It’s just A, B, C, D, L, Z, Z, Y, P. Put it together that way, and there it is. And every single time it does exactly the same thing. We know exactly what it’s gonna do. We this is its point and purpose. So I love using them. I like, but you can’t you have to go low, you have to go slow.

you need to stack them a certain way. I’m I’m I struggle with I want educated and empowered people knowing they are sovereign over their own bodies and they should not be dictated to or told what they should do or not do with their bodies. However but however, but what what I’m seeing people do on their own with peptides is frightening right now. It’s frightening.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (48:59.629)
I wonder if

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (49:06.904)
Yeah. Well, I and it could be traumatic potentially. So I want to talk about stress and trauma, this distinction between stress and trauma, but also just connecting the n autonomic nervous system into this conversation, because that’s also something you really focus on. You talked about using some sealing to calm anxiety, and that many people who come to you have a trauma history, are experiencing stress, maybe even a medical trauma history, right? Go trying to get through the conventional system.

Banging their head against that wall for years and feeling sick. So there’s so many different experiences of this. And I think sometimes people think trauma with a capital T, that ACES score is high, that childhood trauma score is high. But there can be other ways that we arrive at stress and trauma affecting our mitochondria, affecting our nervous system, of course, but affecting our physiology. So talk us through how you incorporate.

incorporate that. And I it sounds to me like that’s really part of the cake batter, right? That that is of the sprinkles on top, but really part of the foundational support that you provide patients. So how how do you do that?

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (50:11.737)
Well, step one, I I I I love I do a talk and it has pictures and I feel like it’s so much easier to show this with a graph because people visually I’m like, Okay, let me show you the four things. And then it’s like, so obvious. And I mean, I’ve had people, I’ve had audiences of two, three thousand doctors literally people come to me crying because they go, I finally get it. And so my point is trying to teach them, I’m like, listen, so many of you are very unknowingly and unwittingly, unconsciously actually

Stopping your patient’s healing because you don’t understand the difference of what you’re seeing. So let me explain it to you so then you’ll understand you’re not making the problem worse, but this is the I’ll explain the biology of trauma and how this happens and the distinction between stress and trauma. And this distinction as well. So yeah, big T, big trauma, death, physical things, rape, all kinds of things can happen. Just because a thing happened to you, though, doesn’t mean you actually are traumatized.

That does not guarantee that. I can show you so many patients that had all kinds of things happen, they were not walking around in a traumatized state at all. That’s a part of a history. It’s kind of like saying, you know, once upon a time, you know, Heather, my hair was past my knees. My hair was long my whole life. I had long hair once. Uh-huh. And now I don’t. What about it? and so for many people, yeah.

yeah, I had my parents were divorced. This happened, blah blah. They have allowed that process to move through their bodies and they are no longer holding on to it in any way that is causing any, it’s just a part, it’s a story they can tell. It doesn’t own them. Many people, however, small things can happen and it leads to them being in a state of trauma. The significant defining factor is the strength, the quality of their mitochondria, and this is why. So

And why this matters for all of you listening, you cannot heal anything if your body is in a fight or flight, high anxiety, high sympathetic state. The b the body cannot do the two things at the same time. So it can’t. So we we’ve artificially and arbitrarily, because our brains need to do this to understand things, turned the ner the autonomous autonomic nervous system, which means automatic.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (52:17.334)
Yeah, it’s not a healing state. Right.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (52:28.021)
unconscious you cannot really control it even though you can control a little bit of it actually yourself and so we split it into this fight or flight or rest and digest restore so I think we we we would say rest and digest rest and res rest digest restore heal you gotta like the heel that’s that’s where it happens so

We really should be walking around like that probably 96, 97% of the time. You should be in what’s called a parasympathetic activated state. That is this very wonderfully joyful i it’s not many people think of that as like it’s resty and it’s sleepy. No, it’s active, it’s relaxed. You know what you have to be. we have a very unique thing that we do. All mammals do this, very unique, and it requires

face to face contact and eye recognition back and forth, and it requires movement. It’s a thing called play. And every a mammal does it. It’s a very unique thing. Where we’re looking at each other in the face, we are moving, we’re checking eyes. I I I I think for people who don’t understand, watch a bunch of five to seven year olds play tag. It’s just they’re all or even I like to watch a bunch of watch five year olds play fight, watch them wrestle. And they’re checking this constantly to check.

Are we still playing? Are we still good? Are we about to actually not are we going sympathetic and we’re about to get aggressive and try to hurt each other? So it’s a very quick flip that can happen. And we’ve probably all been there when you see uh-oh, they that that got serious real quick. I’ve seen my brothers going, boy, now they’re really fighting. So you there’s a switch that can happen from parasympathetic, fun, relaxed, lots of energy, joyful to no. And you and it’s it’s very quick. It’s reflexive, unconscious, it happens.

And it’s wonderful that we can flip that quickly because it protects us. It lets us lets us see danger. So neutral is that parasympathetic state. It’s not asleep. It’s aware. It’s actually happy and fantastic. Yes. Yes. It’s fantastic. A state many people have never felt, to be honest, you know, really.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (54:25.452)
Relaxed but alert state.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (54:31.51)
know, I d for listeners, I we talk a lot about craniosacral therapy and it’s how I feel when I get up off the craniosacral table. Not a massage, right? After a massage, I’m like sleepy, really relaxed. But with a great craniosacral therapy session, I feel relaxed but alert. I’m ready for the day.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (54:48.951)
Yeah. I love that. That’s how I feel with chiropractic adjustments. It’s same. I would always get adjusted before games and I played a lot of sports, college sports. I’m like, and I was like, Woo, let’s go. You know, it’s fantastic. Yeah. Very, very centered. So what happens? So let’s just I’ll tell it in this way people can understand. Imagine we’re out on the in in Africa and we’re on the plains and the wispy, this the grass. There’s a whole bunch of gazelle. Okay. And they’re eating, they’re chill, they’re in there parasympathetic.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (54:52.437)
nice.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (54:58.658)
Ready, yeah.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (55:17.709)
You know, they’re chill, we’re eating, life is good. look at this. I hear the birds, da-da-da. And then someone one of or two of them hear some rustling off in the distance. Those one or two ears will perk. Suddenly, there’s activation. A little bit of activation. We call that state one activation. Energy must rise. Energy in the whole system. They perk up, look, and they’re like, and then and then they they that by doing that, they alert the whole team, hey, be aware.

But okay, we got it. And so they go like, look, there’s nothing. Let’s go back to eating. They do not go to neutral, however. They stay in state one activation because in case they’re wrong and something is over there, they’ve got to be able to move into state two quickly. So we’re in state one and we actually go, we have this biological, it’s a physiological trough that we can sit in that takes very little energy for us to kind of sit there. So it’s it’s a little bit ready to go.

It doesn’t really feel like a lot of anxiety or anything. It’s like, I’m up. I’m just ready. No, it’s okay. Just keep doing your thing. But I’m I’m I’m I’m checking like this. Next thing you know, they’re doing their thing and in comes the lion. And everybody’s, So instead of going from one, zero and having to skip one and go to state two, they’re they’re already halfway there, but in a kind of, you know, it’s like a it’s it’s just a little bit ready to go, but not not a big deal. Then they pop up. State two activation.

is again a sympathetic fight or flight panic. It’s all out running. Those gazelles have to take off like nobody’s business. They cannot sustain this for very long. It is short-lived to do every to sprint out 100%. So that’s what people would look at as a panic attack. Those don’t actually people say I was having a panic attack eight hours. No, you are not. That that is impossible. You can’t physiologically do that. So they’ll they’ll misinterpret sometimes what they’re saying.

But this low-level anxiety, some people, they’re just a little bit nervous, a little fidgety, move it around. And what’ll happen to a person who stays in state one real long is like, let’s say a car horn goes off or a no they’ll they’ll be jumpy. my god, their their nervous system reacts a lot, even if they don’t go to like panic, but they’re very reactive. They might yell at people more. They they they’re like they’ll so sorry. They find themselves angry a lot. so this can be.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (57:41.762)
A little bit of sweating, warm energy, muscle pain, as we’re state two can be headaches, hard time sleeping, irritable, like like that person’s, they know they’re on edge, tight muscles. It doesn’t have to look like a panic attack, let’s say. But that’s state two activation. This is the so this means the nervous system is putting out a lot of energy energy. What’s inside the nervous system? Mitochondria. They’re doing out the they’re putting out the energy. It’s your mitochondria doing it, even we say nervous system. Well, what’s in the nerve? Mitochondria.

Let’s say a lion catches a gazelle. Okay, now it’s got one. The group goes on. That we have a sudden moment and it can’t get away. It goes down in the mouth. Now we have gone into the nervous system, the mitochondria didn’t win. The lion did. We had something stronger than the mitochondria could handle. We are in state three trauma. The distinction here is that we go below.

The neutral. We’ve gone down now. The system in an act of grace, in an act of divine wondrance, the body floods you. It says, Uh-oh, we’re done. Kick it out. Force them into this low-state parasympathetic thing. What you’ve basically done in a state three trauma is made the body drop down, go limp, try to basically fake playing dead, but it actually does it chemically. Okay.

Give it a little bit of pain relief, let the system rest for a second because we I got nothing else to give. I can’t fight anymore. So flood it with some opioids, you know, give it some chemicals like burnt out, just done. So what happens a lot? So what this is like, so state two is hot. State one anxiety, state one and state two, anxiety, aggression, anger. It’s hot. It’s hot symptoms. This is like putting a cold blanket.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (59:22.636)
That burnt out. Yeah.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (59:39.714)
On top of the hot person. So you’re still hot, but now you got a heavy cold blanket. That’s depression. That’s the beginning of some partial dissociation. In that state three trauma, you can walk around for a really long time, by the way, like this. And you can easily jump up to state two if you get a little bit of repair. And then so you look like you have hot symptoms, you have cold symptoms. So you’re tired, you’re fatigued.

You’re drained. So the idea of telling a state three trauma person to go exercise is kind of cruel. They’re like, what are you talking about? Like they don’t even know what you’re talking about. Well, if you just would work out, you’d feel better. I don’t know something meaner to say to somebody who’s stuff suffering in a state three trauma state, honestly. Okay. They look hot and cold. That often is very commonly misdiagnosed as bipolar disorder when they’re actually in a state three trauma dissociative state. That is a function of the mitochondria and nervous system needing.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (01:00:26.35)
Mm.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (01:00:33.087)
Energy added. That person needs energy added to them as we’re one and two. I have to put the energy down. All right. So the lion has you go down. One or two things can happen here, and this happens in the wild all the time. And it happens your life all the time. The lion thinks you’re dead. And now it’s bored. It gets up and goes away. It gets look at that. And it literally leaves. And then the the gazelle is like, then the body takes over, like, uh-oh, can I actually get up?

And when you watch that gazelle, it goes, its body goes through a whole series of tremors and shakes. And it starts, this is why shaking, neurogenic tremors, are so healing. It resolves its own trauma. It’s why a gazelle doesn’t walk around traumatized after. It shakes its way out, it literally shakes that all off, starts repairing itself until then it can get up and run away. And it has to actually reverse that whole process to go be go down those states to get to neutral again with its with its pack.

So that’s state three trauma, giving that credits of what the animal looks like, but you’re no different. You’re an animal. It just looks different in life because you may have interpreted losing your job and gonna lose your house. We’re we’re that’s often people are stuck in a state three trauma over this, actually. It doesn’t have to be what you think it is. And it can be physiological, it come from lack of nutrition, can lead you to get here really quickly. Like it it’s like

Why people eventually seem real fragile and they can’t handle things. It’s because they got unhealthy. Now they you can’t handle it. And that’s why mom said it She’s like, My mom at eighty one cannot do physically, emotionally what she did at forty five. She just can’t, you know. So and I get it. Like I protect my mother now. Back then she protected me. And she told me that. Should she doesn’t live the same life. And I Mommy, why are you afraid? She’s like, Stephanie.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (01:01:57.836)
Yeah.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (01:02:01.259)
Don’t have the capacity. Yeah.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (01:02:18.691)
Think about it. I can’t outrun a dog anymore. I can’t I used to be able to run and I I the shepherd was chasing me. I jumped over a six-foot fence. Now what am I gonna do? It’s gonna kill me. And I was like, you got a point. I got I hear it. So she doesn’t want to go walk in the neighborhood because now she’s afraid, right? She knows I don’t have the capacity. But by not by not doing it, she’s losing more capacity. So it’s horrible. Well, let’s here’s this go. Now let’s say the lion didn’t let you go and it dragged you into a cave.

And four of its friends showed up. Now you know, boy, this is really done. There’s so that’s when we have full dissociation. There’s an absolute break and fracture. And this is that moment where you will probably be flooded with DMT, a near death death experience is happening, and you may feel nothing, no pain whatsoever. People who are walking around in a state four full dissociative trauma, they often think they’re totally fine. They feel completely okay because this.

Feeling numb feels a whole lot better than that heavy fatigue, depression. I don’t want to live. The people who are saying, I want to die, I want to kill myself, they’re usually state three, state four, not usually. They’re often like, I’m fine, what are you talking about? They’re just completely dissociated. They’re not in their bodies anymore. They feel nothing. So they feel no pain, but they also feel no joy, no pleasure, no orgasms. They don’t feel anything. So

They eat you, you’re dead, kind of a thing. So, this is where we have dissociative identity and other dissociative disorders, and it’s in real severe trauma can move into here. This requires making that connection from four to three, bringing connection. This is where I think the perfect way to do it is you have somebody who’s like you and me who’s dealing with the mitochondrial structural repair, getting the nutrition in there, getting the light and everything in there, knowing we have to feed energy, feed energy, feed energy. They are so depleted.

And you have a very skilled trauma therapist that’s coming in and helping connect. DBT is one of my favorite. but you must also work on the body. DBT, DBT therapist for a talk therapist, the only trauma therapist I like. Yeah. I I always say it like didactic behavioral techniques. I always say it wrong. But if you’re in DBT trauma, I’m always bad at those things. And then yeah, they’ll typically then eventually, but that person, this state four, state three.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (01:04:14.935)
T B T.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (01:04:20.524)
And what does it stand for?

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (01:04:29.654)
It’ll pop up. We don’t know that.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (01:04:36.601)
They can’t do something like trauma releasing exercises. They’re too dissociative. You don’t meditate. Meditating for these people will make them worse. Like, so you have to be careful. People think, then meditate. No, you’re gonna make that person actually feel worse. You’re gonna dissociate them more. So we have to bring them into their bodies. Well, going from numb, you have to to heal, you have to reverse this. You have to go from disconnected to connected. And that first connection does not feel good. It feels bad.

To feel this tired and feel this fatigue and this much pain and everything. Then when I start to get someone away from depression, I move them above the line. You gotta heat, you have to feed the mitochondria to do this. You gotta get this, get the trauma out of the body with shakes and somatic work. There’s lot of ways to do it. Lots of bioenergetics, lots of modalities can move it off your body, but you gotta address the body too. I also deal with the brain.

Function with neural feedback. It’s another thing. You’d have to deal with a nutrient therapy. You’ve got to run the labs and see what nutrients they need. How are they depleted? Get the zinc in. You there’s you know what I mean? You you gotta do it all. But then when the first thing they’re gonna feel in the healing is anger. So people sometimes think, you’re making them worse. Nope. I listen, I’m gonna use anger. Angry people, that’s some energy. I want the energy. So then I gotta go from anger down to anxiety. The thing that

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (01:05:36.974)
Mm.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (01:05:52.836)
That destroys clinicians, most practitioners is when somebody finally i is in cr the the chronic state one trough. To go from that trough back down to neutral is going to cause an increase in symptoms. You have to have an increase up the hill to bring yourself down. Too many people use distraction techniques all the time. Think, well, you know, and stop.

This. They use like, no, you’re using the tapping, the breath work, them you’re distracting them from discharging what they need to discharge, the activation. You’re not letting them complete the process. So that they get, it seemed like everything was going. No, you you don’t understand the physiology here. So you have to be careful with these distraction dis techniques. We all need them. We’re in a tough situation. You gotta be able to know how to handle, you know, your panic or your your stress. But then you have to be able to go home and get that out of the system.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (01:06:46.862)
Yeah.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (01:06:47.053)
And it’s why the biggest healing when patients, I’m sure you’ve seen this, things are going great two, three months into whatever therapy you’re doing, and then they think everything’s great. And suddenly at home, out of nowhere, anxiety comes or the breathing gets bad, or they almost maybe even feel like they’re gonna have a panic attack. Why why why was that? Well, because now your body finally knew it was safe enough and it’s trying to complete the process. It’s finally trying to take you from one to zero. Now I know that was a long explanation explanation, but I think if people can visualize.

You go up a little bit and there’s a little bit of a dip, and it just holds you there for your safety. This is not a disorder. This is not wrong. This is smart. The body says, Yeah. But see, unfortunately, instead of when you go home, you’re you’re after the little fender bender or whatever that happened, you don’t c let yourself complete this is zero because you distract yourself with wine, alcohol, you know, food, TV, whatever, instead of just sitting and letting yourself.

I don’t know, I remember I was in a car accident at 16. And when I went home, I remember I I everything was fine. I handled it, blah blah blah. And all of a sudden, when I went home that night and took a shower, I started shaking and crying. And I thought something was wrong with me because I was only 16. You’re like, my God, I thought I was weak. No, my body was completing the process. It wasn’t able to complete at the time because I had to attend to the other person and the police and deal with it. That happens all the time. So if you go home and let yourself complete the process, then it no longer owns you. But people

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (01:08:11.03)
And maybe work with a professional who can help you guide you through completing that process, through feeling it, not numbing, but really it it’s it’s a it is a process, right? Like you think that’s step one is acknowledging that this doesn’t go away overnight, that the our bodies are physiologically processing this. And a lot of times our society and the expectation is that it’s supposed to be over, right? That’s a thing of the past, get over it. And right.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (01:08:13.281)
Always. Yeah.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (01:08:35.853)
And it’s not the body has to complete the process. You you interrupted the completion. That’s all. You you sometimes you don’t. And so some cultures are not as they aren’t as weirded out by they’re not they don’t feel shame the same way. They’re okay with crying. You know what I mean? And so it’s a very different thing, of how they handle it. So that’s what’s really going on is that process. And I let me just add this when it comes to work with a person, yeah, I’m but please know that all trauma is nonverbal. It’s not

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (01:08:48.63)
Right.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (01:08:52.855)
Yeah.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (01:08:56.173)
Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (01:09:04.876)
Mm-hmm. It’s not about just talking.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (01:09:06.287)
So you cannot talk your way through this. Now talking will become a part of the process, but most of the stuff is nonverbal. So you can’t use a verbal technique to to deal with something that is nonverbal.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (01:09:17.356)
Yeah, the yeah, the spectrum of therapists and and and different interventions there is wide. And I I recommend that people, you know, reach out to a few or talk to others about different techniques. You know, you mentioned the trauma release exercises, there’s EMDR, there’s hypnotherapy. I there’s so many modalities just within therapy. and yeah, I’m sure that we could chat for a while about that alone. But I wanna I wanna wrap up our conversation with

So a couple of personal questions. I’m curious, what has changed in your own life as you’ve learned to think this way? Is there something that you believed 15, 20, 30 years ago that was essential for health and longevity for you that you now do differently, that you practice, that you see differently?

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (01:10:08.099)
Hmm. Wow, that’s a good one. I mean, there’s probably probably hundreds, you know, so so many. I I mean, whoo, if I could count how many ways I was wrong. well, I’ll say two things. One for the more left hemisphere minded. I had a huge shift on nutrition, diet nutrition. I am very strongly, I was a vegan for 12 years.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (01:10:14.882)
Then

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (01:10:37.159)
And you know, didn’t realize it was how easily I was manipulated by emotion into that. And how really I don’t think there’s anyone who’s more disconnected from circadian biology and the rhythms of nature and the land and the and the glory of nature than a vegan. So I had no idea where food was really coming from, how it was really harvested, how it was really done. I had tremendous judgment, and that really came from a lot of self-hatred and guilt. I think most vegans are wrought with.

feeling guilty about something. And so I had a lot of shame that even I existed. Cause just a long story where my father robbed a bank, my mom was pregnant with me and went to prison. And so I blamed my life on ruining their family. Right. Like if I had she had never gotten pregnant with me, they’d still have daddy, you know, that’s what a child can do to themselves. So veganism, vegetarian ways, horrific.

That was a huge mistake. So I think for longevity, I think animal-based, you are an animal. It’s very hard to turn broccoli into a human brain. You want to have a healthy brain. You need a tremendous amount of omega-3s and saturated animal fats. You want the least amount of polyunsaturated fats as possible. So I’m extremely animal-based. and that’s where I try to get everybody like, nope, eat more steak, eggs, have salmon roe, oysters, you know, live live that good life. So that’s one.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (01:11:54.488)
Good high quality.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (01:11:58.286)
The other thing quite significant would be about how the mitochondria and trauma and how this is really a connection issue, and knowing that even emotional things are going to take a highly physical role on the body. And just personally, what happened, I guess it was two years ago now, I guess, and that’s what I wrote the book about. Sort of, I wrote the book, Receive basically about the kind of classic patient I have of.

special needs women, parents who just were not taking care of themselves and they were coming in afraid one day of dementia, Alzheimer’s. So I’m like, well if you keep doing what you’re doing, I’m you have a high likelihood of creating it because you’re creating it right now with every behavior and every thought you have. So can we please talk about this? And I find people cannot get better if they don’t learn that they deserve to feel better. So the first thing is is that and in that process after I wrote it, I don’t know if I ever

Would have gone to the place of understanding like how everything that’s happening in the body and for me is always in my highest and best interest. And two years ago, you know, the love of my life, my boyfriend I was with for four years, he went into heart failure, had a heart transplant, and six months after that, he died in my arms after 30 some days in ICU in hospice. And in that space, it was the entire time as it was happening.

I just fell more in love with him. I adored him more on this ventilator, and I knew everything was gonna be okay. And I knew that it was time for me just to help open the door so he could go home. And I don’t know if I ever I certainly 20 years ago, I couldn’t have embraced death in such a way and saw that it was so beautiful and so significant.

And that this was a part of his story and his journey. And I was it was just an honor to be there with it. So as a part of that, we’re all in Thank you. It’s just all a part of the the the journey. And I think knowing it doesn’t mean living forever, but I do know he had the best last four years of his life. You know, I do know I gave him like, well, he had me until the I I wanted him till the but I’m like, well, he got he got what he wanted until the very end.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (01:14:04.574)
And I’m so sorry for your loss.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (01:14:24.767)
And it’s not the end for me. And so had to take that time and be okay with how fatigued I was for months, how exhausted I was, how I could, you know, and going through like, wow, I know I’ve teached people on this, but now that I’m feeling it, it’s unbelievable. It was an unbelievable gift to go through knowing what my mitochondria, I’m like, they’re damaged. And all I did for four to five months was focus on gentle mitochondrial repair. That’s I knew that’s all I could do. I’m like, I could barely eat, I could barely sleep.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (01:14:26.573)
Yeah.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (01:14:54.339)
But I was under red lights. I was inhaling molecular dry hydrogen, drinking hydrogen water, taking a piece of you know, eating when I could because it just you can only I can only handle so much. And after about four months of being so isolated, I realized, whoo, this isolation is killing me. Like I’m I’m in a lot of pain. I I’m not doing well. I gotta get out of this house and I gotta let my friends take care of me again. I gotta be around people. It is no different than the mitochondria.

So it is from the that place actually that I actually started talking about mitochondria in a very different manner and understanding we’re all a part of this, you know, connected community. And if we pull ourselves out too much, we’re not gonna do well. And that is probably as you know in longevity, that is the greatest risk factor of aging poorly is isolation.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (01:15:44.408)
Yeah.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (01:15:45.434)
Community and connection is everything. It is more important than your HRV, than your biometrics, than your sleep or a dumb ring. Throw that dumb thing out. You know what I mean? Like it’s are you are you eating dinner with the people you love? Are you laughing? Are you playing games? If not, let’s start there, you know?

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (01:16:02.127)
Well, you may have answered this next question then. I I ask every guest on our on our show here, what brings you joy at this stage of life?

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (01:16:13.619)
well, okay. I’m gonna go one I started playing tennis, so it’s a whole new thing. I’m learning a whole new motion, which is good. I always usually recommend older patients learn to take the ballroom dancing. That’s my favorite activity for brain health for someone aging. well, friends, you know, community. I love traveling. I love beach in the water. So I moved to Florida, so I’ve probably I’ve been to

About seven or eight countries in the last few months alone. so I’m doing a lot of that. But I will say this, and I think it gets mis not talked about too much, and I do a lot of lectures on it for clinicians. I talk about pleasure a lot as a modality of healing. And the greatest form of pleasure for adults, our greatest form of play is sexual intimacy. So I think people are negating that too much. I happen to be the doctor that I’ll ask about their sex lives and they’ll say, I’ve been to ten doctors in the last three years. Nobody has ever asked me that. I’m like, Well, that’s a damn shame.

Because that’s where we’re going. And I use orgasms as a tool for healing, physical issues with people, because too many people ignore that. So I focus really strongly on relationships, touch, intimacy. And obviously you must feel safe to be there, especially women. And again, I wrote that about in the book. So I like a lot of physical touch, a lot of massage, a lot of play, a lot of sports and sunlight with friends. And so that’s that’s what I spend a lot of my time and money doing.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (01:17:34.07)
Amazing. What an incredible conversation. So rich. We went deep, but Stephanie, thank you. I love this reminder that aging well is it’s not just about accumulating the perfect collection of supplements and therapies and biomarkers and biohacks. It’s about orgasms and mitochondria and doing things in the right order and community and connection. And our brains and bodies, they exist in relationship to everything around us.

And stress and safety certainly, but also purpose, right? Play, touch, connection, belonging, joy. I I really appreciate your emphasis on that. And there’s also a degree of deep sophistication in what you’re talking about in terms of the biology and the physiology. And I I love this marriage of those two and the analogies that you’ve shared today and how you’ve brought it to life. And of

I think everyone is showing up here because the goal is not about adding years to our lives. It’s about adding the the life to our years and building biological resilience to show up for that and be present for that, to think and feel like your example of losing. I mean, your life story of losing the love of your life. I mean, what a profoundly impactful story for many of those listening who have either been through that or who will face that. So

Doctor Remke, I cannot thank you enough for being here today and sharing your wisdom, your experience and your your person especially for the vulner vulnerability of sharing your personal experience. Thank you.

Stephanie Rimka @dr_rimka (01:19:09.879)
It’s been my honor.