052. How to Supercharge Our Performance and Productivity By Mastering Our Nervous System with Andrea Johnson

00:05 Dr. Ann Tsung Are you struggling to advance your career and sacrificing time with your loved ones because of endless to-dos, low energy, and just not enough time in the day? If so, then this podcast is for you. I am your host Dr. Ann Tsung, an ER critical care and space doctor, a peak performance coach, a real estate investor, and a mother of a toddler. I’m here to guide you on mastering your mind and give you the essential skills to achieve peak performance. So welcome to Productivity MD, where you can learn to master your time and achieve the five freedoms in life.

00:52 All right. Hello. Welcome to Productivity MD Podcast. And over here, I have Andrea Johnson. She is a psychotherapist, a nervous system strategist, for ambitious woman. The reason why I brought her on here is because I met a lot of ambitious professional woman who are just go, go, go, and I feel like when we can take control of our nervous system and take control of our mindset, then we actually become more productive, more present with our family, et cetera. I think she has a lot of strategies that she can share with us when we’re trying to basically work at 150% all the time. So, thank you so much, Andrea, for coming to the show. Would you like to explain to the audience a little bit what do you actually do, what is a nervous system strategist, and why do you do what you do?

01:45 Andrea Johnson Absolutely. Thank you for having me. Yes, I actually have a history myself of go, go, going, do, do, doing, burning myself out, sinking into a lot of anxiety and depression. And so I, actually, in my personal healing journey, without even realizing what I was doing, I began regulating my nervous system. I started getting heavily into fitness and noticing these different habits and things I would put in place that would help me to manage my anxiety and be really present in my life. And so, from there, as I was in school to become a licensed therapist, I thought, well, there’s something to this. What’s the science behind all of this? So doing a lot of research on what’s called polyvagal theory — the founder of this being Stephen Porges. In his brilliant work, I realized, oh, my goodness. I’m actually regulating my nervous system, which was really cool. Because what that says is that it actually becomes really natural to us once we create intention around us. There’s a lot of really free resources in our everyday life that we can utilize. We just have to be conscious and putting these things into practice.

03:07 And so I became really passionate about working with ambitious women specifically because, as one myself, I found that a lot of the mentors and therapists that I would have really promoted taking more off my plate. Why do you need all of that? Can’t you just be content with what you have? While there’s some value and truth to that, when you’re an ambitious woman that’s really striving for big dreams, and you have these big desires on your heart, I truly believe those are meant for you. They’re meant for you to pursue. It doesn’t always mean turn the dial down on those things in order to feel good. How can we turn the dial up on those things and use our passion as fuel while also feeling good and present our lives? That’s just a little clip there. But specifically, ambitious women, I’m so passionate about because I love their heart. They’re often hert-led. They want to serve. They want to use their gifts. I think that makes the world a better place truly.

04:11 Dr. Ann Tsung Thank you. I wonder. For those ambitious women listening to this, if they’ve been going 150% for a long time, they probably don’t realize the effects that it could have on them. So why do they need to hear what you’re about to say? Why does it matter if they’d been functioning at such high capacity and they probably can for a long time? What are they saying no to what are the risks if they do not manage their nervous system or if they don’t back off and learn how to recover?

04:41 Andrea Johnson Sure. Well, I’ll start by sharing just some of the things women come to me with in their present day lives and things that they say. “A lot of my life looks good on paper, but I still don’t feel good.” Or, “I feel out of control with my spouse or my children in the way that I react to things. I’m not proud of how I’m showing up.” Or, “I thrive at work but don’t feel like I’m fulfilled at home.” A lot of these things, the root cause is a dysregulated nervous system and actually becoming what I call the active operator of your nervous system so that you can feel like you do have control over your responses, that you have agency over how you show up, and that choice becomes back online for you versus reacting to life. And instead of playing defense in life all the time, you truly become — you’re on offense. You’re leading your life versus life happening to you.

05:44 Now, as far as long-term effects, anytime we are in survival mode for a long time, what happens is your other systems of your body begin to shut down. And so if you’re running from a lion, for instance, if your body is perceiving that there’s a threat and you’re running from a lion, well, then you don’t need to digest the sandwich you ate for lunch. Your immune system doesn’t need to optimally function, right? Instead, your body’s going to borrow energy from other systems of your body in order to put towards survival. You get sick a lot. Those systems that are meant to operate at 100% capacity aren’t. And so there’s chronic pain, body issues, back aches. All of this can be stuck in stored trauma and emotion in the body. Nervous system healing really allows you to move that emotion and that energy out of the body so that it completes versus staying stuck.

06:45 Dr. Ann Tsung Got it. And so, I like to move on to like the what, the vision of what they can actually achieve, what you touched on a little bit. First, on your vision, what do you envision yourself to do, to accomplish with this? Say, in 10 to 20 years, what are your goals for these for your work? What can these woman anticipate to achieve? What does that mean? What is that vision when you have agency?

07:17 Andrea Johnson I love these questions. Because while I believe in long-term vision, what I have found is that when you are a true embodiment of this work and you have so much safety in your own body, what happens is you become really flexible. You become someone who allows yourself to evolve and change. And so it’s really funny even a year from now where do I see myself. Well, I can create that 5 years from now, 10, 20. It’s almost like an adventure. I wonder who I’m going to be in in a year from now? Because I allow myself to grow and evolve and change versus staying stuck in who I think I should be in life. That’s part of what creates so much beauty in life. It’s that you have safety in your body in order to be you. It’s like truly connecting to that core self and knowing your truth and your limits, and living in alignment with that versus the conditioned-self, the self of who we think we need to be in order to be loved and accepted and acknowledged. I always like to say that. I’m like, my true answer to that is, I don’t know. We’ll see. We’ll see what in 20 years life looks like and what this work is.

08:38 Ultimately, the really big vision and the thing that drives me is, I truly believe that the nervous system is the heart of our daily experience. When we become safe in our bodies and we have regulated nervous systems, we truly heal the world. We truly heal the world. The reason for that is, we are able to maintain a calm nervous system and help other people in our lives co-regulate. They actually feel safe around us, to be themselves, to express, to be vulnerable. Or even in really simple interactions, you go into your local Starbucks to get a coffee, and you’re safe. So your social system is online, and you’re smiling at people. You’re engaging with people. And these days, sometimes that feels almost jarring. Like, whoa, this isn’t the norm. We are social beings. We’re meant to be connected, and I think it’s time we get back to that.

09:42 Dr. Ann Tsung Yeah, I think if you don’t do it for yourself, if not for yourself, then you can do it for your kids. You can do it for your spouse so that even young little kids, when you’re emotionally stable, when you and your spouse’s relationship is you, guys, are stable, then that doesn’t cause a fussy kid. The kid feels safe, wants to eat, wants to sleep, et cetera. So if not for yourself, then for the people that you love. I wonder. I do want to get to the how. Because a lot of these, I’m sure the audience is very curious. Do you have any examples of one of your clients maybe before, how they were before and specific tactics they use, and how they are now?

10:30 Andrea Johnson Yes, absolutely. I get a lot of women into my world who desire to start their own businesses. Or, maybe they have started but it feels like they’re kind of on a hamster wheel, or they’ve plateaued and they can’t seem to actually get it to a place that they want. While I don’t call myself necessarily a direct business coach, I often do a lot of business coaching. Because while 20% of business is strategy, if you can’t implement that strategy, then strategy does no good, right? And so 80% is really creating safety. Because success, often the reason people struggle to achieve what they want is because everything that it comes with doesn’t feel safe. It’s very vulnerable to put yourself out there. It’s very vulnerable to be seen and to use your voice. And if growing up, you learned that expressing your opinion wasn’t safe and you got reprimanded for that, or being imperfect wasn’t safe, and the way that you got approval and love was through basing everything and being perfect at everything — I mean, there are so many examples of this — then you’ll struggle in your business to make those moves which are often risky and messy, and put you on display for judgment and rejection.

11:57 One individual client I had came in. She had just this huge passion to start her own coaching business. She knew what she needed to do. She had spent thousand of dollars on business coaching, like strategy on how to do business, how to show up on social media, except she couldn’t actually implement the strategy. And so, anyway, lo and behold, we get underneath the surface. All of this applied to her understanding that how she was raised was really getting in the way, and she had some stuck trauma in her body. So what we did is we actually not only gave her an understanding of how her body was working for her. Because I think a lot of times our tendency is to judge ourselves, to say we’re broken. I should be able to do this. What is wrong with me? Maybe I’m not cut out for this. We judge, judge. We judge.

12:55 Understanding from a science-backed research level, people start to realize, oh, my gosh. My body is just protecting me. It loves me. It’s not working against me. I’m not broken. I’m actually operating the exact way I should be operating given the context of my life. That creates a really compassionate environment for healing, which is the foundation for all healing. And so, not only do I have an understanding of myself, I have an understanding of other people. I have this lens to look at my life through. Then we can begin using what’s called regulation resources. I’ll talk specifically about what some of those are.

13:39 So often, people cope instead of regulate. So they feel discomfort. I’m going to use a random example that pertains to this client. She struggled to show up on Instagram to really market herself, which is a great platform. Not the only way to market but a great platform to market for free, right? And she struggled. She wanted to utilize it but didn’t feel safe. And so what we did is, we noticed the discomfort that would come up in her body. She would get pressure behind her eyes like she wanted to cry. Her heart beat would increase. The heart rate would increase. She’d get a lump in her throat, often get a warm face and clammy palms. Really clear signs of dysregulation happening in the nervous system. What her tendency to do in those moments was to either completely check out of business, and go on Netflix or completely just shut out of business completely. Or, she’d get into the scroll hole, as what we call it. She’d go compare herself looking for “inspiration” on what she should say and how to show up, which only exacerbated the issue. What I call that is just coping. We’re using coping mechanisms to turn away from our experience. The body speaks to us through somatics. It speaks to us through sensation. And when that discomfort comes up in the body, a lot of people don’t know how to hold it. So they turn away through scrolling. They check out in certain ways.

15:20 Now, when we begin to notice those tendencies and notice when there’s dysregulation in the body, we can actually choose tools that help us turn toward our experience and change our experience versus turn away and check out from our experience, only to find ourselves in the same place again and again. And so, specifically for her, she was living in what’s called the ‘sympathetic state’ of her nervous system, which a lot of ambitious women learned to live in. That’s that go-go-go, do-do-do cortisol, adrenaline. This is the body’s saying, hey, there’s a threat. But we can do something about it. We can fight it off, or we can flee from it. Good news, right? So we get cortisol, adrenaline in the body. Regulation resources for this specific state are going to be anything that releases energy from the body. A lot of this has to do with movement, shaking, using your throat to make noises. Exercise is a really common one, swaying your body, jumping up and down. So you can see that it’s really actually giving the energy somewhere to go and exit the body.

16:38 Now, sometimes, we end up in what’s called the ‘freeze state’ of our nervous system. She experienced this as well. The freeze state is half sympathetic — that go-go-go, lots of energy — and half-dorsal, which is an immobilized state. It’s our shutdown state. And so you get this sensation of, “I need to do this. I need to do it now. There’s urgency, but I can’t. I know I need to do it, but I can’t.” And so in this state, dorsal, that 50% dorsal is actually the opposite basically of sympathetic which is, there’s a lack of energy in the body. What we need to do here is, this is the body saying: hey, there’s a threat here. But you can’t escape it. There’s nothing you can do about it. And so what it does is it cloaks you in a self-protective, loving state that says, I’m actually going to separate you from yourself. I’m going to separate you from the world around you so that you don’t have to feel the perpetual pain of being eaten alive. It’s essentially what’s happening. And so you start to shut down. You immobilize. You get lethargic. Depression lives here, right? In this state, there’s a lack of energy in the body. And so we want to actually bring safe energy into the body. This can look like noticing things around the room that you’re in that are a safety cue — a picture of your family, or beautiful flowers, or maybe a funny video of an animal that makes you laugh. Maybe it’s lighting a candle and watching the flame flicker. Things that actually don’t use a lot of energy, right? Like I said, anything that can bring you into the present moment and help your system just go, that’s kind of nice.

18:37 I always say, what can make this moment 5% better? All of my clients use that tool. What can make this moment 5% better? Even when they’re feeling mostly regulated, I’m like, we want to anchor in that. So it can be something simple like opening the blinds or stepping outside for five minutes. But just asking your body, what do you need right now?

18:59 Dr. Ann Tsung I think there’s so much, and I kind of want to summarize at least from my understanding. It’s counterintuitive, actually, to me. When you are in fear mode, you’re in high cortisol, high sympathetic mode, you actually want to be more active to release that energy. I have a trampoline. And so I wonder, I could just use that trampoline. Maybe that’s why I like ecstatic dance so much because I’m just shaking everything out, and I feel so relaxed after.

19:29 Andrea Johnson Exactly. And this is the thing. This is the power of knowing about the nervous system. It’s that, so often, we’re not aware of which state we’re in. And so we’re trying to use tools that don’t honor the state. And so if you can imagine. If I’m in sympathetic state, meaning, okay, there’s a lion. I need to run from this lion. If you try to meditate in that state, that’s going to bring you more dysregulation, right? Because it’s going to be like, Ann, you’re sitting under a tree meditating? You’re about to be eaten by a lion. What are you doing girlfriend? So it’s going to actually bring more dysregulation. This is why a lot of practices involve moving before you try to meditate, doing yoga before you try to meditate: to move energy out of the body so that you actually feel like you can sit still.

20:22 Dr. Ann Tsung Yeah, after a power yoga session, the Shavasana in the end, that’s like the most relaxed I get. Just lying in there.

20:30 Andrea Johnson Absolutely. Oh, that’s my favorite. But yeah, it’s like, oh, my goodness. I can actually feel safe to be still. So moving that energy is so, so important.

20:41 Dr. Ann Tsung And then it sounds like when you’re in more of that depressed state — it’s like half-sympathetic, half-parasympathetic. You have lower energy in action, almost like helplessness in a way — then you want to slow down, actually, and try to think of things to make things 5% better, either anything that brings you a little bit of joy: walking outside, sunshine, photos, videos, funny videos with your family, your child, et cetera, it sounds like. That’s what’s going to give you the energy to start moving.

21:10 Andrea Johnson Yes. And as someone who is heavily into weightlifting and physical fitness, this has been really helpful for me. Because one of my go-to regulation resources is movement. But even though I’m mostly my dysregulated self, it tends to go to sympathetic state, sometimes I absolutely will dip into dorsal. Knowing this has been so helpful, because what I used to do is just think I should always work out. Working out feels good. But that dorsal state, actually, I like to equate it to being in outer space. So you kind of float away. You’re foggy. You’re not fully here. It can even be apathetic. I just don’t care anymore. And so if you’re in outer space and you try to drop yourself right into Time Square, it’s going to feel way too overwhelming for the body. And so if you try to use these more intense regulation resources that are better suited for sympathetic, it’s again going to create more dysregulation. It’s just too much.

22:22 Think of a bear coming out of hibernation. They wake up. They’re slowly moving. You can gently sway, put your hand over your heart. Sometimes just cradling your face can feel really nice, or tugging on your ears, activating that vagus nerve in your neck. There’s a lot of therapeutic techniques that you can do, hugging yourself, just really nurturing your body. And what you’ll find is then energy comes into the body, and you’ll actually land in sympathetic. Then you’ll have a lot of energy. Then you can move. Then you’ll get to what’s called ventral. Ventral is your state of regulation where I feel present and good in my life, and creative, and in flow. This is the state where we’re actually more productive.

23:17 A lot of ambitious women, they almost rely on that adrenaline to get going, and they want to feel that sense of urgency. This can be a bit addictive. And to them, it doesn’t quite feel safe to feel regulated, which is interesting, right? So even though ventral is the state in which you feel safe, a lot of times, ambitious women’s bodies don’t actually feel safe being there at first. And so it’s using tolerable steps to really help their body learn how to be regulated. They’re worried too that slowing down means that their business or their dreams are just going to just go down the drain, that they’re just going to not do anything. That’s a very real concern as well. If I spend time outside of my sympathetic state, then am I going to be motivated to do anything? And the answer is yes. Actually, your work becomes more potent. Because your full brain is online, you have the capacity to really be in flow. Your creativity is there. This is by going outside, and going on walks, and being in nature or whatever feels good for your body. All of a sudden, you have all these ideas coming to you. And so even though sometimes it’s like, “I have so much to do. I need to sit here in front of my computer,” the best thing that you can do is get up and take a break. It actually is so productive for your business to get outside, to move your body, to be regulated. And my mantra is always like: what is good for me is good for my business. And when I feel good, I make more money.

25:06 Dr. Ann Tsung That’s awesome. I totally resonate with that. Because by studying the flow state, there’s a cycle of flow, actually. And when you are go, go, go and actually part of it is released and pulled back in recover, that’s how you can become even more productive for the next flow cycle, the next 90-minute flow cycle maybe. And so I often talk about to the audience, it’s not a luxury to recover. If you want to succeed, if you want to be productive, you have to actually have the grit to schedule in your recovery so that you’re ready for the next flow cycle or next push. I want to ask you. I know we’re a little bit short on time, but I’m curious. Because we talked about sensory deprivation float before. What is that an antidote to? I’m just curious neuroscience-wise. Because it sounds like it should be for the dorsal state, but I feel like we’re super relaxed, or I can create. Sometimes I’m active and they’re in my head. Sometimes I’m not. It just depends.

26:08 Andrea Johnson Actually, when you’re going to do something like that, it’s dark and you’re floating there, it’s really important to be regulated first. The reason being, if you are in dorsal, that kind of faraway land, even the meditation in the state and closing your eyes can actually take you deeper into outer space. I’m not here. Obviously, somebody in sympathetic wouldn’t feel safe enough to just be still in the dark. The state of stillness, that’s actually — we talked about ventral which is a state of regulation. We talked about sympathetic, dorsal, and freeze, which are states of dysregulation. There are two more states of regulation we haven’t talked about, and one of those states being stillness.

27:02 Stillness is actually majority ventral. I’m mostly regulated, but I have a splash of dorsal. This is the state in which we can actually relax when we’re getting a massage. This is the state where going and doing sensory deprivation would actually feel good and not more dysregulating. This is the state that we’re required to be in to really feel the benefits of meditation. The other one, just because we brought it up, is play. Play is the majority ventral, majority regulation with a splash of sympathetic. This is like if you see dogs wrestling around and playing, they’ve got that burst of energy, right? But they’re having a good time, and it’s playful. So those are states of regulation. It’s important that when you are going into something like sensory deprivation, that depending on what state you’re in, you regulate out of that in order to really benefit from that experience.

28:01 Dr. Ann Tsung So that means if I can tolerate it, I’m regulated.

28:04 Andrea Johnson That’s right. That’s right. That’s good news, Ann.

28:08 Dr. Ann Tsung That’s awesome, yeah. Because I love it. It’s the one thing that — it’s like my top recovery session, I think, my top recovery hack.

28:18 Andrea Johnson Yeah, I just wanted to say something that’s really important is that the goal for a healthy nervous system is not that you’re regulated all the time. It is really healthy to move in and out of regulation and dysregulation multiple times throughout the day because we’re human. We want your nervous system to work, right? And if you walked out in the middle of the street and there was a car coming, I would certainly hope that your system would alert you and send you into sympathetic state. We want that operating. If there’s a loud noise, it’s only natural to jump and for your senses to get heightened, right? That’s a result of sympathetic state. So if you’re doing too much, we want your system to send you into dorsal. Because it’s a signal to you that, hey, this is too much. So it’s communicating with you.

29:14 The goal is not to be regulated all the time. The goal is to be able to notice when you’re dysregulated, and know how to support yourself in that moment and have your nervous system be flexible. The unhealthy nervous system — nervous system that needs some of dysregulation work — is when you dip down into dysregulation and you get stuck there, or you feel like you’re spending the majority of your time there. So I just like to say that because, a lot of times, people who are doing this work and they feel like how I’ve progressed so much, we want to make sure that they’re not judging themselves for getting dysregulated. Of course, you’re not a robot. You’re going to get dysregulated. We literally live in a world that’s basically built to dysregulate us because we’re not living the way we should. So it’s just important to know that.

30:05 Dr. Ann Tsung Thank you. Thank you. And what would you say — I mean, I think I learned so much. There’s a lot to unpack there. What would you say will be three takeaways for the audience and one action they can take after this podcast episode?

30:18 Andrea Johnson Sure. So first things first is, I would begin observing how you respond to stress. That means notice your body. What does your body do? Do you feel like you get anxious or irritable? That would be more sympathetic. Because there are a lot of energy in your body where you feel urgency, and you need to do something, and you need to do it now. This is the state, by the way, I always laugh at this because so many ambitious women relate to this. It’s like when you rage clean the whole house. You’re so stressed that all of a sudden, it’s like you’re scrubbing everything around your house. But there’s a lot of energy in the body. Or, do you feel like you check out and you go into a shell that you become dysregulated in that dorsal state? It’s important to start noticing and naming your tendency. Usually, people can identify the majority of the time where they go. It doesn’t mean they don’t visit other states but the bulk of the time when we have like a home away from home.

31:24 Then I would say another takeaway is to begin noticing what things feel good for your system. Do I like to be outside? In your day-to-day life, what feels good? Do I feel energized by going out in public and being around people? Do I feel like my body is telling me I want alone time? This is getting to know yourself and what supports your unique nervous system. Because while we are all human, and we all respond in some very similar ways, what feels good for me may not feel good for you and vice versa. For example, I could feel really supported by a weighted blanket, for instance. Meanwhile, you could feel like that’s claustrophobic and really suffocating to you. Noticing your unique nervous system would be really, really great. Then the third thing would be to use this lens for the people that you love. Start noticing their nervous systems. Noticing and naming is the first step in any of this so that you can actually start to implement some of these things. Because if we’re not aware, we can’t really do much, right?

32:36 Now, one thing I would encourage everyone listening to do is to create what’s called a ‘polyvagal playlist.’ This means open up your Spotify or wherever you create your playlist. I would create a playlist that actually starts with songs that are in dorsal, more of a dorsal vibe. These are those slower-paced. Think slow. When you’re really down, you want songs that would attune to your nervous system, right? It’s almost like if you’re feeling really sad and down and someone puts on a really peppy song, even if normally you liked that song, you’re kind of like, I hate this song right now. The nervous system needs attunement first. Meaning, it gets me. It’s mirroring where you’re at. You want several songs that really resonate with that dorsal system and bring you into that lower state. Then you want to transition into more of sympathetic songs, maybe those angry breakup songs that we all like to scream in our car — surely, I’m Not the Only One — those more energetic, angry, higher-paced songs that really have a lot of energy to them. You want maybe five or six songs there. Then you want to end your playlist with a ventral playlist, which are those feel-good songs, songs that don’t really amp you up, and they don’t really send you into a lower state, but they just have a nice solid beat to them, make your body kind of want to sway and bop a little bit.

34:14 Now, when you start to notice a name where you are in your nervous system, you want to start your playlist wherever you are. If you’re in ventral, start on song 15 or whatever it is where your ventral songs start. If you’re in sympathetic, you want to start the playlist in sympathetic. And if you’re in dorsal, start it at song one in dorsal. And what it’s going to do is, wherever you’re at, it’s going to lead you out of that. It’s going to attune to your nervous system. And song by song, you’re going to move up your ladder, which is the analogy we like to use. It’s going to guide you into your ventral state. So that’s a really fun tool to start with.

34:57 Dr. Ann Tsung That’s really awesome. That’s actually a very actionable way. And if you don’t have any motivation, you just have to be motivated to put on your butts and go. It’s really awesome. Thank you so much for your time. I got so much out of it. We might even have to do a part two and do a deep dive. Where can people find you? Where are you in terms of contact or social media, website, et cetera?

35:21 Andrea Johnson Sure. The best and easiest way to find me is on Instagram @theandreajohnson. I am super responsive in my DMs. I love for people to just pop in there and share with me what they’re working on. And yeah, any inquiries can come through there as well.

35:41 Dr. Ann Tsung Awesome. So that is @theandreajohnson. Just like how it is, J-O-H-N-S-O-N.

35:48 Andrea Johnson Yes, correct.

35:50 Dr. Ann Tsung Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time. This was really fun. We’re definitely going to have the links in the show notes, everything that we talked about. It’s going to be on productivitymd.com. So whenever this comes out, go check it out. Contact Andrea right now on Instagram, and just share maybe some of the struggles that you have going on. Or, maybe you don’t know of your own dorsal, if you’re in sympathetic state or not. Or, maybe you’re in ventral play, who knows? Sometimes, we don’t even know what state we’re in, right? So please reach out to Andrea. Thank you again. Remember that everything we need is within us now.

36:28 Disclaimer: this content is for general information purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine. No doctor-patient relationship is formed. The use of this information linked to this content is at the user’s own risk. The content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay obtaining medical advice for any medical conditions that may have and should seek the assistance of their healthcare professionals for any such conditions. The views are personal views only and do not represent any university or government institution.