With me, I have Dr. Alexandra Swenson-Ridley, who is a thought leader in outside the box and natural approaches to women’s health and hormones, focusing on what she has termed “selfless syndrome.” After suffering her own health challenges that resulted from focusing on everyone and everything but herself, her work turned toward helping other driven women navigate the world of fatigue, thyroid issues, anxiety, depression, difficulty losing weight, gut health, and more without the use of medications. Thank you so much for joining us today, Dr. Alex.
Dr. Alexandra Swenson-Ridley:
Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Dr. Eric:
Excited to have this conversation. I usually start off by asking people to share their background. How did you get started in doing what you’re doing? I know you have a wonderful podcast. Let’s share your background.
Dr. Alexandra:
I got started, a lot of us do, by my own health struggles and challenges in my earlier to mid-30s. I’m originally a chiropractor. I built a big practice and hit this point where it was not the dream, and my health was really suffering.
In terms of thyroid, I developed some anxiety. I was having panic attacks. My hair was falling out. I was going hoarse at the end of every day. I was exhausted. It was all I could do to feed my kid before I fell on the couch. I learned more, educated more, did continuing ed stuff that was related to women’s hormones. I understood stress and how that all interacted.
I ultimately took myself on a journey, where I knew I did not want to take medication. A) I don’t think I would have been diagnosed as having a thyroid issue because of lab ranges and how they look at that. They wouldn’t have looked at enough things. B) I wouldn’t have taken medication anyway. I was left with how to figure this out on my own.
I am happy to say that today, I have gotten there. Now I help other women do the same, whether it’s thyroid or something else. I really get to the root of why our bodies aren’t functioning the way they should and how we can get them back.
Dr. Eric:
I really want to address the cause of the problem. We will talk about your decision not to take medication as far as how that translates to others you work with. Before we talk about that, can you dive into selfless syndrome and maybe tie that into thyroid health?
Dr. Alexandra:
Selfless syndrome, most people have an idea of what it is by the label, but it applies to both men and women. I don’t know if your show is predominantly women.
Dr. Eric:
Mostly women, yeah.
Dr. Alexandra:
It’s that innate desire we have to take care of everyone and everything except ourselves. We are constantly putting ourselves last. We are the last thing on our schedule, the first thing to go. Before this, I was teaching a workshop around brain health related to this as well. Over time, the more we don’t make time for ourselves, the less capable we are of showing up for the people and the things that we really love and care about. That’s in a nutshell what selfless syndrome is.
I really talk about, especially in our modern world and society, where as women, we have taken on more roles. Some of it is self-perpetuated, and some of it is societal and generational. We have added to the plate but not had anything taken off. We have this very high level of stress that we’re always running through. We can get into the nuances of how that affects the thyroid, but it’s going to impact your thyroid function, your gut health, which has a lot to do with thyroid, and a bunch of other things.
Dr. Eric:
Essentially, doing too much. It’s something I ask when I have patients fill out their case history. Most of my patients are women just because, as you know, it’s mostly women who have thyroid conditions even though I was one of the lucky men who was diagnosed with Graves’. It’s obviously very common. Let’s talk about how selfless syndrome relates to the adrenals. Stress has a great impact on adrenals. We can perhaps tie this into thyroid health as well.
Dr. Alexandra:
We all have stress. We all know there is bad stress. The truth is we need some level of stress. Our body does need to produce some level of cortisol, and it’s supposed to rise and fall in a certain way throughout the day. When we’re living under constant stress or toxic stress-
For example, I had one woman who came in early on when I started doing this work. She said, “I’m not stressed.” As we kept talking, we got into how she actually has a daughter who is severely autistic and lots of appointments and PT and fighting for her at school. All of that is stress. Because it’s just her life, she doesn’t relate to it that way.
The first thing I would say is just be aware that just because you don’t feel it doesn’t mean that you’re not actually experiencing stress. Most of us are functioning in a way where we don’t know anything else. That’s just normal. If your body starts to break down, that’s a good sign we have some stress happening.
As that’s happening, your adrenals get more taxed. We have what’s known as the HPA and HPT axes in the body. They run parallel to each other. The hypothalamus tells the pituitary to do something with our hormones. It either talks to adrenals to produce cortisol, or it’s telling the body to produce sex hormones. It also talks to the thyroid. The pituitary then tells the thyroid, “Hey, make some thyroid stimulating hormone.” It’s released. All of that chain starts.
When you have stress, it’s taking away from that happening. That’s where we start to see a lot of breakdown, especially with hypothyroidism or even developing into Hashimoto’s or Graves’. Hypo seems to be more common from what I’ve seen.
Then you start having the symptoms. You can’t lose weight. You’re tired and cold all the time. Your hair is falling out. All of the fun that can come along with thyroid stuff. Going hoarse. That was my big one. I kept losing my voice by the end of the day. I couldn’t talk. We start to see those. But it starts somewhere. It’s not like you just wake up one day and have these issues, unless you have some genetic thing that has led to that after developing over time.
Dr. Eric:
You had a thyroid condition. Was it Hashimoto’s that you dealt with, or not autoimmune?
Dr. Alexandra:
On the scale of looking at it from a more functional standpoint, I did have antibodies toward Hashimoto’s. It wasn’t at the level where Western medicine is going to diagnose it as such. I look at it as if your body is producing any antibodies that is affecting an organ, that’s generally not a good sign.
My diagnosis on myself was subclinical hypothyroidism, meaning my levels looked more or less normal, going beyond looking at TSH, but TSH and free T3, free T4, reverse T3, and antibodies. My reverse T3 was high, which is another indicator of hypothyroidism. I had symptoms.
My rule of thumb, in all the research and reading and learning I have done and working with other clients, is if you have symptoms, it doesn’t really matter what your labs say. If your thyroid isn’t working, it needs to be for your body to feel good. That’s how I look at that.
Subclinical is everything is normal, but you still have symptoms. I don’t know how much you’ve talked on the show about the ranges they use for defining what normal thyroid is. They have bene arguing about it for about 50 years. It’s way too broad, and nobody ever changes it. By the time you hit a point where in Western medicine, they will say, “Your thyroid is off,” you are really not doing well. This is what I’ve seen.
Dr. Eric:
I’m glad you bring it up because a lot of doctors blow off subclinical hypothyroidism. The TSH, in your case, maybe it was well within the reference range or on the higher side, but either way, it was outside of the optimal range. With the conventional medicine, it’s a waiting game. They will say, “Let’s just keep an eye on it.” Maybe sometimes, if the person is experiencing symptoms, they might put them on thyroid hormone. Most of the time, they usually won’t do anything unless the TSH is overtly outside of that reference range.
Dr. Alexandra:
Mine as well. They very rarely look at anything beyond TSH. That’s the other thing. TSH is only one part of the picture. That’s what’s happening with your brain and the pituitary. You also have to look at the thyroid itself, which mostly releases T4. That goes to your gut, which is converted into T3, which is what your body can actually use.
My subclinical hypothyroidism, my T3 levels are what was hypo. Even though my brain looked normal, my body itself was experiencing being hypo because there wasn’t enough usable thyroid hormone available. That’s what’s going to help our metabolism and help regulate a bunch of stuff in our body.
Dr. Eric:
You said you also had an elevated reverse T3. Correct?
Dr. Alexandra:
Yes. That’s the one thing I haven’t totally impacted yet. I ran labs on myself recently. The other thing I experienced was I put on 50 pounds overnight and couldn’t get it off. That was a combination of I had some stuff that happened with my estrogen. I was estrogen dominant. The thyroid was also being impacted and causing part of that, too.
That’s something I see with a lot of my clients: It’s more common for women, especially in their 40s and 50s, to be in that place where,“ All the things I used to do to get weight off aren’t helping anymore.” There is a breakdown at the hormone level. Until you deal with it-
Dr. Eric:
Speak about weight gain and weight loss. Obviously, you need to get the thyroid hormone levels in balance. That free T3 is very important. Is there any specific diet that you recommend? Does it depend on the person?
Dr. Alexandra:
It depends to an extent. I’ll be honest: Food is something I love. Designing nutrition stuff isn’t my wheelhouse. I’ll leave that to the nutritionists. From my own experience, last year, I lost about 30 pounds all through eating. I didn’t exercise at all. I was exercising, but that’s not how I lost the weight.
Just recently, I found a book by Haylie Pomroy, The Fast Metabolism Diet. I will reach out to her to see if I can get her on my show. If you’re looking for something and are tired of doing Weight Watchers and all that stuff, I love her book. Her definition of “diet” is Did I Eat Today? This is a common thing I see, especially because with thyroid, if our thyroid is off, our metabolism will be off as well. If you are hyper, which is much less common, you’re eating a ton, but you’re losing weight. If you’re hypo, you probably don’t have much appetite, and you keep packing on the pounds. Those things go hand in hand.
Her approach resets all of that and is one of the first things I found that resets the thyroid as well. I guinea pig myself on everything. I think in a week, I lost about five pounds just following her plan, which has more variety than most of your diets out there. You’re eating, which is very important. It’s counterintuitive to think you need to eat in order to lose weight because we have been so trained to eat less and work out more. We have taken that way too extreme. That stuff impacts the thyroid as well. If you’re dealing with hypo, you have to train your body to eat again so that your metabolism turns back on, and it starts producing like it’s supposed to.
Dr. Eric:
I need to check out that book as well. Getting back to selfless syndrome, what do you do to help people with that? Do you tell them to slow down, block out time for stress management, incorporate mind/body medicine techniques? How do you handle that?
Dr. Alexandra:
I have come up with a proprietary combination of a whole bunch of stuff that I have done recently, grounded in a lot of neuroscience, and the concept of neuroplasticity, which is our ability to rewire our brain, what we think about all the time. Our habits are wired into our subconscious.
To really impact what I have defined as selfless syndrome, we have to go deeper than just trying to convince ourselves to do something differently. There is actually something that needs to shift in recognizing our own value. For a lot of women, there is a self-worth conversation that runs underneath all of that: we don’t value ourselves enough to take care of ourselves.
I do a lot of work there actually. I’m less in the nutritional and hormonal world. In terms of doctor hat wearing these days, I’m more in the how do we really rewire our foundation, so that it’s not such a challenge to show up for ourselves, and not in a selfish way, but to do it in a way where we are just the best version of ourselves because we are making time for ourselves?
I got there by looking at every woman who had a huge amount of success working with me. Came off medication, lost weight, balanced the hormones. It didn’t stop there. Their relationships were better. They made shifts in their career. They did a lot of the hard, challenging work. We do have to slow down some to take those steps. There is a level of having to foster some courage and confidence and clarity in yourself and where you’re going and what your values are to make those moves and make those choices.
That is a lot of what I did to heal as well. I made the choice to retire from chiropractic. I got divorced and remarried. I’m not saying you have to do those things to heal, but we have to be willing to look at what has been going on in our lives to get us to this point? Where can we start to make shifts and changes so that we have the life we love and the body to enjoy it with? That’s really what I’m about.
Dr. Eric:
It sounds like you go beyond the diet and stress management. I’m guessing you probably get people from other health care practitioners, not to minimize and say that’s all they did. Some people, that’s all they do. Maybe even on their own, they just read some books or listen to some podcasts like this one, but they just try to do things on their own from a diet perspective or stress management. It sounds like you go way beyond that.
Dr. Alexandra:
Yeah. Honestly, I’ve learned we really have to. If you’re constantly just in information accumulation, you’re missing- I’m a classic high performer who lives in my head, so this has been part of my journey recently that I’m doing with the women I work with, who are driven and in leadership roles but are struggling with their health: getting out of your head, tuning into your body, and asking it what does it actually need? As we start to do that, a lot of how you’re eating and sleeping might shift, as will exercise, in the way that they need to. We have to get out of analysis paralysis and take some action. Our bodies know a lot. If we just tune in and listen, it will tell us things that we need.
Dr. Eric:
Very true. Let’s talk about the medication. It was your personal decision not to take medication. When I dealt with Graves’, I chose not to take medication either. With hyperthyroidism, many people take antithyroid medication, but I chose to take an herbal approach while addressing the cause of the problem. Fortunately, that worked, and it’s worked for a lot of people that I have worked with over the years.
I do think there is a time and place for antithyroid medication, just like with thyroid hormone replacement. I’d like to know your thoughts on not necessarily your personal experience, but how you approach other people with thyroid conditions, more specifically hypothyroidism since it sounds like that’s who you mainly work with when it comes to those with thyroid conditions.
Dr. Alexandra:
Yeah, hypothyroidism and Hashimoto’s is more of what I see. My stance on this, with the caveat that I cannot give you any advice around medication legally under the umbrella of my licensing.
However, what I do like people to know is first recognizing you do have a choice. There is more than one way to handle it. As a society, once you’re on thyroid meds, you’re on them for the rest of your life. All of that is a myth. None of that is true. Realizing it is a choice.
Like you, there is a time and place for medication. It’s not like all medication is bad. If you are really struggling and can’t even start doing the things that are going to help start turning you around, that is a time where I might say, “Hey, let’s talk to your Western medical doctor and get some help for your body, so you start feeling better” with the understanding that it doesn’t mean you’re on it for the rest of your life.
Finding someone who will work with not just looking at- They normally give more T4 combined with T3 if we need to. The gut is left out a lot of managing thyroid. Most of your usable thyroid hormone is made in your gut. While you heal that, because that’s not a quick process by any means, could you benefit from some support if you’re really struggling?
It’s a choice. It’s absolutely one that I think every woman should feel empowered to make or not. Man, too. Recognizing who you are. Are you someone who can make lifestyle changes? With selfless syndrome, you have to show up and make time for yourself to journal, meditate, and ask yourself the hard questions. Have someone go on that journey with you. I provide a road map for that experience. Just getting clear on yourself. Are you willing to slow down? Are you someone who just needs the medication to keep going? In choosing that, you’re recognizing that you’re not heading in a good direction, we’ll just say that.
Those are my thoughts. It’s there. It’s a tool. You don’t have to be chained to it forever. There are other options out there.
Dr. Eric:
Can you dive into the core pillars? You might have already touched upon them a bit, but if you could dive deeper.
Dr. Alexandra:
I keep changing what they are, but they’re all similar. The ones I’m operating with right now, there are seven of them. Most of us tend to think of how I eat, how I move, how I sleep. That’s true to being healthy. I look at them as perspectives. What is your general outlook in life?
Nourishment doesn’t just have to do with what you’re feeding yourself, feeding yourself well, but also how nourished you are by your job, your environment, your relationships, your spiritual practice. It’s that kind of stuff.
Connection is a big one these days. Especially with thyroid, I see both in nourishment and connection, if you feel you are not expressing yourself fully, there is a lot of energy that is stored in your throat. I don’t want to get woo woo on people. I talk about energy centers, not chakras. There is a connection between not being self-expressive and hypothyroidism in particular. Connection is one of the places where we get that. Especially as women, we need to sit down and talk. We haven’t had a lot of that recently.
Rest is not just sleep, but also rejuvenating activities, like not killing yourself in the gym, but when you come down from deescalating.
Attention is how you are able to focus. This is another thing I see a lot of, brain fog. We focus on somebody else or something else or allow someone to focus on you. That can be a bit confronting for people.
Your purpose and contribution. How connected are you to your passion and purpose in life? Are you doing things that light you up, and you feel you are put here to do? Or are you going through the motions?
I look at that whole picture in how we define health and how healthy we really are. A lot of those are access points to having your hormones balanced, your thyroid working right, your gut happy.
Dr. Eric:
Wonderful. What are some of the steps people with thyroid and autoimmune thyroid conditions can take to get their life back? If someone is listening to this, they’re like, “Yeah, this is me. I have been dealing with selfless syndrome. Everything you said sounds great.” Maybe it’s not an order, but could you give some guidance about what some of the next steps could be?
Dr. Alexandra:
With every woman, the journey is a little different. Sometimes, when we help a lot with the physical side, there is an emotional side to healing. That’s the other piece I work a lot in: trauma stuff and other things that most of us have underlying. Either we feel better physically, and they are ready to let go of all of this stuff. Or they are ready to let all of this go, and the physical heals as a result of releasing that. It’s finding an avenue to work on that within.
If that’s super overwhelming, my first two things for anybody is to learn how to breathe again and drink water. Those are the two steps; we can keep it really simple. Twice a day, you take five deep breaths, breathing in five count, holding it five count, breathing out five count, doing this five times. I think we overcomplicate it often.
Water, our bodies are mostly water, so if you’re not drinking half your body weight in ounces of water, and I do mean water, not coffee or soda, etc. If you can start there, you will start to feel better.
From there, there is work we have to do, both emotionally and physically, like working through healing the gut and other things we are storing in the body. Thoughts are the power of the brain. Emotions are the language of the body. All of our experiences and emotions are stored there. Until we let them out, things don’t usually work right.
A little broad. Breathing and water are the easy places for everybody.
Dr. Eric:
I think that’s great. Everybody can start with that. Everybody can start with doing a little bit of breathing each day. Obviously, we breathe all day, but doing some focused breathing exercises, even five deep breaths to start out with.
Dr. Alexandra:
You don’t even have to count. You need to slow down your breathing and breathe a little more slowly and deeply than normal.
I was just certified in heart math. Bringing focus to the heart is another way to push reset on your nervous system and state. That will allow a lot of function to start to come back in your body.
Dr. Eric:
Can you quickly talk about heart math? I don’t think I’ve mentioned that yet. I’m familiar with it. Can you talk about heart rate variability and how you incorporate that into your practice?
Dr. Alexandra:
This is newer stuff I have been doing, but I really love it. Heart math brings a lot to the idea of coherence in our body. We are both chiropractors, so we have lots of background in the nervous system. When we are in a hyperaroused state or stressed, generally, there is a lot of chatter going on. We’re not connected between our head and our body. Heart math is a tool that allows you to start to build coherence. They have biofeedback devices that help you measure how often you’re in coherence.
I have an Oura ring that I use. I don’t get anything if anyone buys one. I happen to like the product. It measures my heart rate variability and gives me a score for the day. It will measure things like how much restorative time you got. With thyroid and a lot of the more hormonal imbalances, if we try to push too much, it’s going to make it worse. I have been someone who has needed that information to be like, “Hey, so your heart rate variability kind of sucks, and you haven’t had more than five minutes of restorative time a day the whole week. Why don’t you chill?” The Oura ring will tell me that, and it’s helpful for those who need that kind of input.
The bigger point behind it is you give your brain a chance to slow down with heart math and find that coherence. The more you can learn how to shift out of a hyperaroused state into a coherent state, coherence is where our intuition lives, energy lives, creativity lies. There is a lot of health benefits, like heart rate variability will increase. We want it to be higher. Heart rate variability is not just measuring your resting heart rate but measuring how much it changes in time. A good healthy heart is able to flux a lot. If you are on the lower end of that, which I tend to be at times still, I am experimenting with how I make this better. And you learn. Maybe I shouldn’t have worked out like that on that day. Maybe this kind of exercise helps.
Heart math has techniques to bring that in. One is heart-focused breathing, where you focus on your heart. I like to touch my heart. Some people don’t like to touch. I bring awareness by touching my heart, the area over my heart on the left side of the chest. Either focusing on something or closing my eyes for a little bit, and just breathing, a little more slowly and a little more deeply. That’s something that will start to train that coherence.
We can talk about heart math, too. Whatever you want to bring up. I think it’s really cool and a great tool for people.
Dr. Eric:
I agree. I have been using the Inner Balance for a number of years. I know others who have an Oura ring. You use the Oura ring as part of measuring the heart rate variability, keeping track of that.
Dr. Alexandra:
Mostly because I haven’t gotten an Inner Balance yet. I really like the Oura ring for that. They keep adding stuff. Now it measures blood oxygen when you sleep. It’s pretty good at measuring sleep. I find it cool when I do a great job of meditating, it will register a nap, which is awesome.
Dr. Eric:
Yeah, that is cool.
Dr. Alexandra:
We have lots of tools available to us to start to tune into how my body is actually doing. How many of us pay attention to them is another story. Those are two that I like. I don’t like the Apple Watch because it just yells at me to move every day even if my body is not ready for that.
Dr. Eric:
I haven’t thought about getting an Apple Watch. I have thought about getting an Oura ring, but I haven’t done it yet. I use the Inner Balance. Everybody is different when it comes to stress management, and I find myself not doing meditation. I’m not a big yoga person. Honestly, I haven’t tried getting into the routine of yoga. I have been in the routine of the Inner Balance and using it to measure heart rate variability for years. It works for me. I’m sure there are some listeners who have been doing yoga or meditation for years. You can continue doing what works.
As you said, there are so many tools. If there are those listening who said, “I tried getting into yoga and meditation, and it wasn’t for me,” it’s just another tool, whether it’s the Inner Balance, or the Oura ring is another option. I know there are others, too. There is a newer device that came out that someone was talking about on another podcast recently. I’m sure there will be many others in the future.
Dr. Alexandra:
There is lots out there. You also don’t really need a device if you’re capable of just checking in with yourself. One of the most challenging things I had a business coach ask me recently was I was ramped up about something. She was like, “Where do you feel this in your body?” It really stumped me, both because I am a high achiever, and I like to have answers, and I didn’t know. And thinking about it, where am I feeling it in my body? What is that telling me? It allows you to tap into that intuition. There are a lot of ways to do it. It’s just figuring out what works for you.
Dr. Eric:
Anything else that I should have asked you that you wanted me to ask you that I didn’t? Anything else you’d like to share?
Dr. Alexandra:
No, I think we hit a lot for people to think about. Bringing it full circle, it’s looking beyond your symptoms. The answers to whatever you’re dealing with, thyroid or anything else, is you have to go beyond the symptoms and be willing to get to know yourself in a new way. On the other side of that is a lot of freedom: freedom from medication, symptoms, and feeling crummy. It is possible. It takes time, and it takes a willingness to do the work.
Dr. Eric:
Definitely agree. Dr. Alex, where can people find out more about you?
Dr. Alexandra:
I’m on all the social places. I hang out more on Facebook and LinkedIn. I’m @EmergentWomanCoaching on Facebook and Dr. Alex Ridley on LinkedIn. I’m also on Instagram.
I also have a podcast, which I’m currently rebranding to The Selfless Syndrome Show. We are getting into some of the nuances of how you really overcome that. Not that there is something wrong with you, but to transform it to live and exist in the fast-paced world we have and be healthy. You can check that out on all the podcast platforms.