What does burnout have to do with testing positive for high risk HPV? What does cortisol have to do with getting an abnormal pap smear result? 

If you’re wondering whether stress, burnout, and cortisol have anything to do with why you have an abnormal pap smear and potentially abnormal cells, you’re in the right place because that’s exactly what I’m going to talk about here.

I’m Dr. Doni Wilson, a naturopathic doctor, certified professional midwife, and clinical nutritionist. I’ve been helping women for over 25 years to resolve abnormal pap smears and high risk HPV so they can get HPV to negative and keep it negative. You don’t have to be on the vicious cycle of repeat procedures and never-ending high risk HPV (human papilloma virus).

A Different Perspective on HPV

I talk about high risk HPV and abnormal pap smears completely differently than what you’re going to hear in a standard gynecology office because I’ve been studying this virus for decades. I myself had HPV 30 years ago and have been able to clear the virus to negative and never had it come back again. 

Research shows that our immune system has the capability to clear high risk HPV to negative—all different types, including the 14 high risk types—no matter how long you’ve had it, your age, or when you were exposed to it. I’ve seen women from around the world who’ve been able to get rid of HPV, get a negative test result, and keep it that way.  

The approach I take is to look at it from the perspective of susceptibility. If you’re testing positive right now to high risk HPV, it means there’s something overwhelming your body’s ability to protect you from it. That’s the truth you’re not being told in the medical community.

We need to ask a different question: Why hasn’t your body cleared the virus, and what does your body need to support you in clearing it? From there, we can get information about how to support you specifically as an individual. 

Stress and trauma affect each of us differently, which is what I wrote about in my book “Master Your Stress Reset Your Health.” The book explains how stress, trauma, and burnout affect us on a physiological level in our biology and biochemistry—how they impact your immune system, hormones, nervous system, gut health, and vaginal health. 

When we understand how stress is affecting you, we can address it and reverse engineer health so that your body can protect you from high-risk HPV, even if you’re exposed over and over again.

Recognizing Burnout in Your Life

The term burnout means that the stress you’re exposed to is piling up and you’re really starting to feel it. And if you’re starting to feel it, that means it is disrupting biochemistry in your body. 

Have you ever thought you might have burnout? How would you know? 

Maybe you feel like you don’t know if you can do another day. Women often describe it to me as being so overwhelmed, burning the candle at both ends and in the middle, working from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to sleep. If you’re getting less than eight hours of sleep on a regular basis, you’re likely burned out.

Sometimes we dismiss it and think it’s not going to happen to us, yet it happens to all of us. We’re under tremendous stress. We’ve come through a pandemic and are still recovering from it. As women, you’ve been under pressure in your family, taking care of loved ones, parents, children. Maybe you have a job and financial stresses, relationship issues, divorce, separation, toxic relationships, or death and loss of loved ones. 

These stresses add up. Many women say they didn’t even think stress was affecting them until we do tests to understand their biochemistry. Then I can show them that the stress is affecting their body on the inside, even if their mind thinks they’re not affected.

The Connection Between Burnout and HPV

If you’re testing positive for high risk HPV, it tells me you’re likely burned out to some degree. You’ve been under stress without the opportunity to recover from it. That’s how I define burnout—being exposed to stress without the opportunity to recover. 

Burnout leads you to experience fatigue, like waking up in the morning still feeling like you need more sleep or needing a nap in the middle of the day. You might have disrupted sleep, bloating, digestive symptoms like stomach pain, constipation, or diarrhea. It can show up in your skin with breakouts, aging, rashes like eczema, or allergic reactions like mast cell activation, histamine reactions, sneezing, runny nose, or even migraines.

I had all of these things for many years and had to figure out how to solve them. The way to solve them is to solve the burnout. These symptoms are from your body trying to get your attention and say we need help in here, we need a break. 

I understand how hard it can be to imagine creating any time for yourself. I finally learned I needed to take time for myself because I was getting severe migraines that put me on the bathroom floor with nausea over and over. I realized if only I could give myself small breaks in my schedule, I wouldn’t have to create a migraine to get a break. Our bodies find a way to get our attention, and they will cause us to literally take a break if we don’t give ourselves one.

One way your body is trying to get your attention is with high risk HPV and abnormal pap smears. HPV takes advantage of you being depleted, burned out, run down, and deficient in many different ways. That’s when HPV jumps right in and starts doing what it does. 

High risk HPV can hijack your cells, cause them to look more and more like cancer cells, and can even cause you to go through numerous procedures, surgeries, cancer diagnosis and treatment, and even lose your life to this virus if we don’t get the message to start looking at what our body needs to protect itself.

Stress Hormones: Cortisol and Adrenaline

Other symptoms of burnout include trouble getting pregnant, irregular menstrual cycles, perimenopausal or menopausal symptoms, vaginal symptoms, and frequent infections like bladder infections, sinus infections, or respiratory infections. 

I see burnout and high risk HPV as completely overlapping and related. You don’t even have to guess whether you have burnout—you can test for it. You could start with my stress type quiz that I developed to help you identify if you have burnout and how it’s affecting your stress hormones.

Our stress hormones are cortisol and adrenaline. They respond when we’re under stress, and we need them every day because they give us energy to wake up in the morning and do what we love. They improve our mood and make everything feel better when you have the right amount. The problem is that when we’re under constant stress and never have enough recovery, our cortisol and adrenaline are not optimal—they’re either too high or too low.

I recommend testing cortisol and adrenaline to determine your levels. You can test your cortisol in blood, but a blood test at one time of day isn’t very helpful. It’s much more helpful to measure your cortisol at different times of day—morning, midday, evening, bedtime—so we can see how it changes. That can be done with saliva or urine. 

Cortisol should be higher in the morning and gradually decrease through the day. We need to measure it at different times to see if your stress, trauma, and toxin exposure have affected your cortisol levels at any time of day or night. Is it too low in the morning? Too high in the afternoon? The treatment will be different.

Getting to Optimal Cortisol and Adrenaline Levels

There is no pharmaceutical treatment for cortisol being too high or too low unless your cortisol completely stops working. In most cases, it doesn’t go to zero—it’s just either a little too high or too low. We can use herbs, nutrients, lifestyle changes, and dietary changes to get it back to optimal.

We just need to know where it is so we can choose the most effective herbs and nutrients. The same applies to adrenaline. We can measure it in urine to see if your adrenaline level is too high or too low, then use appropriate nutrients to either raise it up or bring it down.

These saliva and urine tests can be done from home. You just need a practitioner like me to order it for you because it’s not part of standard blood tests, not covered by insurance, and not integrated into the standard medical system. There are different labs that offer these tests, and I prefer one particular lab because I see very good, accurate results.

They offer salivary testing where you spit in a tube at four different times of day. With this, we can see your cortisol levels based on the stress you’re exposed to. These levels are reflective of your stress exposure and lack of recovery over years—essentially your stress hormone set point based on your genetics and stress exposures over time.

When we look at your cortisol levels at different times of day and your adrenaline levels, we can see how your body has been affected by stress in terms of stress hormones. We can determine your stress type—whether you have high cortisol and adrenaline, low cortisol and adrenaline, or a combination of the two. Currently, this test is $500 out of pocket, and you can order it through my office as a patient or in one of my programs.

Testing for the Effects of Stress on Your Body

You can also measure other levels in your body to identify the effect of stress. We can look at your blood sugar levels, insulin levels, thyroid levels, and other hormones like estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and DHEA. We can also measure neurotransmitters like serotonin, GABA, and dopamine in urine.

We can look at your gut. Do you have leaky gut? Leaky gut is caused by stress, toxins, and trauma, so we need to know if you have it and how severe it is because that’s an effect of stress and burnout on your body. Then we can help you heal from it. Is your microbiome disrupted? Every microbiome—gut microbiome, vaginal microbiome—is negatively impacted by burnout. We need to know if your microbiome has been affected so we can help it recover.

By testing, we don’t have to guess if you’ve been affected by stress. We can find out exactly how you’ve been affected by the stress in your life and make a very clear plan to help you recover. In doing so, we help your body fend off high risk HPV and protect you going forward. 

In my opinion, this needs to be part of everyone’s plan for healing from HPV. There’s research to show this as well.

How Burnout Creates HPV Susceptibility

Let me explain how burnout leads to susceptibility to high-risk HPV. 

When we’re exposed to stress and trauma and haven’t had a chance to recover—which most times we haven’t because we don’t prioritize recovery—we prioritize taking care of others, wearing ourselves out, pushing ourselves. Next thing we know, we come out the other end of our life depleted and dealing with HPV. 

This is your opportunity to pivot. To do a 180, and decide that now is the time to take care of you.

All that stress and imbalanced cortisol disrupts your immune system first. Whether your cortisol is too high or too low, the immune system goes lower. We become more susceptible to infections, allergies, autoimmunity, and cancer because of stress and imbalanced cortisol levels. To get your immune system to protect you from HPV, we have to address your cortisol. 

If we only support your immune system but your cortisol is too high or too low, it’s going to continue throwing off your immune system because it’s like a domino effect. Yes, we’re going to support your immune system, but we’re also going to get your cortisol back on track so it doesn’t throw your immune system off again. Let’s fix it correctly.

When cortisol is out of balance, it disrupts your other hormones—every hormone. Thyroid, insulin, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, DHEA—all the hormones get disrupted when cortisol is too high or too low. It keeps bumping your hormone levels off track. Yes, you can address low thyroid, by taking thyroid hormone, address your ovaries, even do hormone replacement therapy, address your blood sugar levels, but if you never address the cortisol, it’s going to keep disrupting everything and you never get anywhere.

When your hormones are out of balance, they make you more susceptible to HPV. We know very well that when blood sugar levels are fluctuating, HPV goes up. When insulin is all over the place, HPV goes up. When estrogen is either too high or too low, HPV goes up. We need your hormones on track. We can’t risk having hormone imbalance because hormonal imbalance is going to lead to susceptibility to HPV. In order to get your hormones on track, we need cortisol on track, which is also a hormone by the way.

Cortisol Affects Your Digestions Too

The same applies to your gut health. Cortisol, either too high or too low, directly affects digestion. It makes it so you don’t digest your food properly. You’re more likely to have leaky gut, and it disrupts your gut microbiome. Now you have disrupted gut health—all kinds of either reflux, gastritis, bloating, constipation, colitis, you name it. All of that is well known to throw off vaginal health. The gut microbiome issues and gut inflammation lead to vaginal inflammation and vaginal imbalance in the microbiome.

Yes, we can heal the vagina, and that’s a key piece of this. We’ve got to heal the vaginal environment, drop inflammation, improve the immune system, get the microbiome back on track and the hormones back on track. But to really make sure the vaginal environment is going to stay healthy, we also need to heal your gut. In order to totally heal your gut, we’re going to need optimal cortisol so it doesn’t keep on messing up your gut. 

Remember, it’s a domino effect, or a ripple effect. The stress and trauma that we try to deny and forget and hope will go away—we’re dismissing it, yet we’re under constant stress every day. That stress is throwing everything else off track, and then we wonder why we don’t feel good and why HPV is here.

Healing Beyond the Physical

I hope now that you’ve heard me describe this, you can see the big picture. This is not about a quick fix. This is not about just taking one supplement or just taking a mushroom extract. Yes, we might use some mushrooms to support your immune system, but that’s not enough. We’ve got to help you heal from burnout, get your cortisol to optimal, your adrenaline to optimal, and all your other biochemistry back to optimal.

What I find really makes a difference is when I help women recover on an emotional and spiritual level as well. Ultimately, the stress and trauma we’re exposed to affects us on an emotional, energetic, and spiritual level, and we need to heal that level as well. 

In the work I do, I also help you heal the relationship with yourself, with your body, with your life, with your future. By starting to learn how to love ourselves, connect with our true passion and purpose, and let go and forgive and release what no longer serves you—that’s actually healing from the stress, trauma, and burnout so it’s not going to continue to affect you in your life going forward.

Resolving HPV at ALL Times of Women’s Lives

When I help women fully recover, our goal is to resolve the HPV, prevent cervical cancer, vaginal cancer, and all of the other health issues I mentioned above. At the same time, we want to get you to your most optimal health because that’s when you’re going to be able to protect yourself going forward from HPV and from other health issues.

This is true for women who are working on fertility and finding out why you’re not getting pregnant while also discovering that you need to address HPV. What we need to do is help you recover from burnout, which is going to help your ovaries start functioning better so you have improved fertility, and at the same time it’s going to help protect you from HPV.

This also applies to women who are perimenopausal—within that decade or so before the period stops. In that decade, a lot of women experience burnout. That’s when we’re likely to have been working a job for many years, maybe been in a difficult relationship, maybe been raising children, and we get burned out. 

There’s no shame about it—it simply happens as humans. I want to release you from the shame of burnout and say no wonder. Just say out loud: I’m burned out, I need to recover, I need to prioritize my health. That’s very common for women to get to that point in perimenopause because that change in your ovarian hormones—the estrogen dropping, the progesterone dropping, the menstrual irregularities—really activates, and you start feeling so awful that you start to realize you’re needing help while dealing with HPV. No wonder it’s all happening at the same time!

In post-menopause, I see a lot of women contacting me who are in their 50s, 60s, and 70s. You’re postmenopausal and really feeling the burnout. You’ve done so many decades taking care of everybody else, your menstrual cycle is gone, yet you’re still dealing with vaginal issues and cervical issues. 

You thought you weren’t going to have to think about this anymore, but we do. We need to be thinking about vaginal health our whole life, even into your 80s, 90s, and over 100. The vaginal area is an important part of a woman’s body. We tend to take it for granted and dismiss it and sacrifice it, meanwhile wondering why we’re dealing with issues.

Taking Control of Your Health

I’m here to share that your vaginal area is not a separate part of your body—it’s part of your whole body. What’s happening vaginally is reflective of what’s happening everywhere else. If you’re having vaginal infections including high risk HPV and abnormal pap smears, it says we’ve got to start paying attention not just to the vaginal area but to your whole body—to your gut, your hormones, your nervous system.

Burnout can also show up as a dysregulated nervous system. If you’re feeling anxious all the time, nervous, worried, your mind racing, you can’t sleep because you’re constantly worried about HPV, it becomes a spiral and you can’t even get your brain to stop. It goes to the worst case scenarios.

I get it because you’re dealing with a high risk virus and you don’t want to deal with another visit to the doctor’s office scaring you about another procedure. At the same time, I know that a dysregulated nervous system having anxious, unending, relentless thoughts is going to end up making you more susceptible to high risk HPV. HPV itself and the stress of it can cause burnout.

We need to realize that this HPV is winning here. It’s not only taking advantage of the fact that you’re burned out, but it’s causing more burnout, and it’s not fair to you. This is your body, your life. You get to decide. You get to say I’m not okay with this anymore. 

Now that you see it, now that I’ve pulled back the veil and showed you what’s really going on here—it’s not just that someone exposed you to HPV, it’s that you’ve been depleted and HPV is taking advantage of it. It’s your turn to start taking care of you because ultimately, you’re the best one to take care of you. You’re going to take better care of you than anyone else could, and you’re going to do it by reaching out for help.

Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help

It’s really hard for women to ask for help. I get it for myself as well. It’s not easy to say: I need help with this. I want you to know there’s no shame in asking for help to recover from burnout, to help get your hormones back on track, get your immune system working for you instead of against you, and get your nervous system out of dysregulation into regulation. 

I can teach you how because I’ve been there myself. I’ve recovered from trauma and burnout numerous times and have mastered it. I’ve figured out exactly the step-by-step process to guide you through so you can recover from burnout, clear HPV to negative, heal your cervix, and prevent HPV from causing abnormal cells ever again.

If this resonates with you and if you think I’m the person to help you, if you’ve been asking for help, if you’ve been praying, if you’ve been asking the universe, if you’ve been trying to manifest some way to resolve this and help you out of this situation, take this as a sign. Here I am. This is exactly what I’m here to do in this life and in this space—to say I’ve been there, I get it, I’ve recovered, and I know you can recover too. 

I have ways I can help you that are not available in the standard medical office. They’re just not integrated yet. I’m working to train practitioners so they can help you, but it’s going to take time. I don’t think you have time. I think you should get started right away. Don’t waste another minute allowing HPV to determine your future. It’s time for you to determine your future.

If this is resonating with you and you’ve been looking for help, I encourage you to reach out to me. You can go straight to my website doctordoni.com or to clearhpvnow.com. You can find more videos from me, come to a free workshop, or download my free guide so you can start to get information. It’s possible for you to watch success case videos from other women who’ve been through this and start to imagine what’s possible for you too. 

Then figure out how you can prioritize yourself based on your time and your finances and say enough is enough. Enough of you not being the priority in your family, in your life. Your health is more important than anything else because if you’re not healthy, if you’re not here, you’re not going to be able to take care of your family. 

You can say to your family: It’s my time to take care of me and prioritize me so that I am able to be here for you. If you’re not feeling well, you’re not going to be able to help anyone. It’s time for you to take care of you and to know that it’s possible.

There’s a step-by-step process I can guide you through. You can also find a lot of information in my book “Master Your Stress Reset Your Health” so you can start to see that it’s possible to recover from stress, trauma, and burnout and start to feel better. It’s not going to happen overnight. It’s something we start to choose into little by little each day. 

Little by little, you start to see what’s possible and how you’re going to start to feel better. As you feel better, that’s a clear sign to me that HPV is getting weaker and weaker. I see it time and time again. As women improve their energy, their mood, their sleep, their digestion, and they’re feeling excited to be alive and looking forward to the next day, then we do another HPV test and it’s negative. The way you feel in your whole body reflects how things are doing vaginally and on your cervix as well.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to my office. My team and I would be happy to connect with you and help you know what your next best step is to free yourself from the HPV nightmare. I really want for you to know that it’s possible. I see women achieving it every day.

You can also schedule a call with my team to talk about your case and your situation so we can help you understand what your options are, whether you may want to work with me one-on-one, or in a group program. Click here to set up a call with my team.

If you’d like to get a better sense of my approach, I welcome you to join my next free How to Get Rid of HPV online workshop where I help you to create a plan to get HPV out of your life for good.

Sign Up Now (Free!)

From there, you might choose to join the Heal HPV Kickstart Program, for the initial steps of my protocol, including diet changes and supplements, over the next 30 days.

Register Now

Or you can begin with the comprehensive Say Goodbye to HPV Program, which is 3 months and includes everything you need to implement my full protocol and address all 8 susceptibilities with live, group support, and access to testing and vaginal suppositories.

Visit my website at clearhpvnow.com to see success cases – video after video and story after story of women who have healed from HPV – to help you know that it is possible for you too.

My team can also help coordinate supplement shipping worldwide, and we can work within your budget to find the right starting point. You don’t have to figure it out on your own. My team and I are here to help guide you step by step. Click here to set up a call with my team.

Thank you so much for joining me for this video on helping you support your body to recover from burnout and clear HPV. I’d love to hear from you – please like, comment, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t already. I look forward to having you join me for the next episode of How Humans Heal.

We’re here to help you!

Disclaimer: This specific article and all other Content, Products, and Services of this Website are NOT intended as, and must not be understood or construed as, medical care or advice, naturopathic medical care or advice, the practice of medicine, or the practice of counseling care, nor can it be understood or construed as providing any form of medical diagnosis, treatment,  natural HPV cure, or prevention of any disease.