Think Like a Nurse: A New Season

Default to Yes Is Growing Up: Welcome to Think Like a Nurse

There has never been more health and wellness information available—and yet it can feel harder than ever to know what to believe.

Is cortisol causing your symptoms? Should women over 40 take creatine? Are seed oils inflammatory? Is hormone therapy safe? Which supplements actually work? And how do you tell the difference between good science, an interesting theory, and great marketing?

Welcome to a new chapter of Default to Yes: Think Like a Nurse.

You don’t have to be a nurse to think like one.

In this episode, nurse and nurse coach Juli Reynolds shares why Default to Yes is evolving and how learning to think like a nurse can help you navigate conflicting health advice, wellness trends, social media health claims, and your own health decisions with more confidence and less fear.

Instead of giving you another list of rules about what you should or shouldn’t do, Think Like a Nurse is about learning how to ask better questions.

We’ll use the Clarity Loop: Notice, Narrate, Nurture, Navigate to explore what we know, what the science actually says, what we don’t know yet, and how evidence applies to an individual person.

Because evidence-based health isn’t about getting everything right.

It’s about becoming curious enough to learn, discerning enough to question, and flexible enough to change your mind when better information becomes available.

And for women over 40 especially, there’s another goal: letting go of some of the second-guessing, self-judgment, and pressure to constantly “fix” yourself so you have more energy for the life you’re actually here to live.

In this episode:

• Why Default to Yes is becoming Default to Yes: Think Like a Nurse
• Why you don’t have to be a nurse to think like one
• How to evaluate health and wellness information without becoming overwhelmed
• The difference between being told what to think and learning how to think
• How the Clarity Loop can help you make sense of conflicting health information
• Why uncertainty is part of good science
• How curiosity can replace fear, perfectionism, and second-guessing
• What to expect from future episodes on hormones, metabolism, cortisol, supplements, nutrition, healthy aging, nervous system regulation, and popular wellness claims

Ready for more clarity?

If you’re a woman over 40 who is ready to get curious, let go of some of the pressure and second-guessing, and get clearer about your health and what you want your life to be about, schedule a Clarity Call with Juli.

When you’re ready to stop collecting more information and start making sense of your information, you’ll find the link in the show notes.

Stay curious. Think like a nurse. And keep saying yes to your extraordinary self.

Transcript

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Welcome back to Default to Yes. I took a little break, and now I'm kind of pivoting a little bit to deal with some of the health topics that, are on my mind that I wanted to get clarity around, and I thought it might be helpful for you, too. As we default to our extraordinary selves, part of that is taking care of our bodies in the best way possible. So maybe I should say welcome to what Default to Yes is becoming. So if you've been with me for a while, you know that this podcast has always been about what the possibilities are, about reaching our full capacity and seeing what is possible, about getting curious, about paying attention to the life you're actually living and asking what if there's another way. M- maybe something that I'm doing isn't working, I can pivot, and just celebrating the grand experiment of all of that. Now, I still believe every bit of that, but lately, I have realized that there's one place where we desperately need the k- that kind of curiosity, and that is our health because we've never had more health information available to us. As a nurse, it's almost overwhelming to me how fast information comes at us, and my patients, a lot of times especially in medication reconciliation questions, will ask me questions or bring up topics that I recognize that they're maybe get- getting some misinformation. And sometimes I don't have time to go into that, and it's just not the place. I'm not sure we've ever been more confused. If you open Instagram or TikTok for about five minutes, you'll hear, "Seed oils are killing you. your cortisol is too high. You have adrenal fatigue. Everyone over 40 needs creatine. collagen is a waste of money. Collagen will change your life. You need to heal your gut. Statins are dangerous. Everyone should be on a statin. Hormones are dangerous. Hormones are protective. Take this supplement. Never take that supplement." And usually, somebody has a study to prove it. So who's right? Well, that's a question I've been thinking about, and I realize that I don't want to create another podcast where I tell you what to think. I want us to focus on how to think and more specifically, I want to highlight how you think like a nurse. Now, what does that even mean? I've been a nurse for more than 30 years, and nursing has taught me something that extends far beyond the bedside or the hospital or the healthcare setting. When something doesn't make sense, we don't just... In fact, it is kind of the nursing process. It, there's a little tweak on the nursing process that I have brought into coaching and and the transformation that I see when people apply my tweak on the nursing process, which is what I call the clarity loop, is phenomenal. And so when something doesn't make sense, we don't just accept the first explanation. We assess, and we notice. We ask questions. we say what we notice. What I'm seeing. What am I not seeing? What has changed? What happened before this? What medications are involved? What is the physiology, the evidence, the risks and the benefits? That's probably one of the bigger questions, is the risk-benefit ratio. Like, what does that look like? And maybe most importantly, what's happening with this particular person? And this is the nursing process, and it happens almost automatically after years and years of practice. But sometimes we have to just back up and really apply this process and make sure, check ourselves on this to bring balance and clarity and confidence because people aren't research papers, and they're not averages. They're not algorithms. And they're certainly not Instagram posts. We are complicated human beings living complicated lives, and that's where I think the conversation about health and wellness has gotten lost. There's a nuance to this in that science doesn't always seem to embrace. but that's not a reason to abandon. It's a reason to ask questions and understand. Now we keep getting pushed toward extremes. Conventional medicine versus functional medicine, natural versus pharmaceutical, pro supplement versus anti supplement, trust your doctor versus do your own research, science versus intuition. But what if those aren't always the choices, or I would say not the only choices? What if we could get better at asking, what do we actually know, and how confident are we that we know it? What don't we know, and what are the potential benefits, what are potential harms, and what makes sense for me? That's clinical reasoning, and you don't have to be a nurse to learn how to do it. And that's what we're gonna do here. We're gonna take the health claims you hear every day and slow them down. We're gonna deal with cortisol, hormone therapy, creatine, collagen, GLP-1 medications, cholesterol, statins, peptides, supplements, essential oils, seed oils, gut health, mitochondria, vaccines, wearables, and longevity. These are all topics that I put it out there to, for you to message me or comment. I've been doing a couple Think Like A Nurse posts on Facebook and Instagram, and I just put it out there to have you send me topics that you wanted to cover, and those were some of them. So we're gonna slowly unpack those things, and might introduce, different regulations that come up, come across our, across media and whatever really the internet decides we're all supposed to be terrified of or buying next week. this isn't gonna be a debunking podcast, so I don't want you to think that I'm going to... I'm not, really just not interested in sitting behind a microphone and saying, "Wrong, wrong, wrong." Sometimes we'll look at something from the wellness world and discover there's actually pretty interesting evidence behind it. And sometimes we'll discover that the marketing has gotten way ahead of the science. Sometimes we'll look at something that we accepted in conventional medicine and realize that the evidence has changed. And sometimes the most scientifically accurate answer will be, we don't know yet. I'm comfortable with that, because uncertainty isn't the same as ignorance. Good science leaves room for the answer to change when better evidence arrives, and that, I think, gets missed a lot, is that we could have a good answer, because it's the only answer that we have. All evidence points in this direction. And then we learn more, and it's time to change our minds, and it's time to answer to the better evidence. So we're going to use a framework. if you've followed my work at all, you've heard me talk about the clarity loop. It's super simple. and you might wanna just write this down so you can kinda track it and learn it so that you can use it in your day-to-day, 'cause it really applies to everything. It's based on cognitive behavioral therapy principles. just in knowing that your thoughts produce your emotions. And sometimes we get that backwards. We think that our emotions or how we feel create our thoughts, but it's really the thought that creates an emotion. And those emotions create behaviors. The behaviors send us into action, and actions give us our results. It's always that way. We can process it in hindsight or in the moment, we can process it in different orders. which is what I call the clarity loop. So we're gonna notice and we're gonna narrate, we're gonna nurture and navigate. So first we're gonna notice actually what's happening, what is the claim and what are we observing? this is where we pull out facts and what we actually know to be true. when I say true, this means factual and everyone agrees on these are the facts. Not what somebody told us that we should be afraid of and not the story we already attached to it. All right? So that's noticing what's actually there. And then we're gonna narrate And this is where we can, bring in what we're feeling, what might explain it, what's the physiology, what's the chemistry, what's the research tell us? And just as importantly, what doesn't the research tell us? Then we nurture, and this is the part where we can get... that can get lost when we talk about evidence because we're not treating a spreadsheet. We're caring for people. We're caring for health, and not all humans are exactly the same. There are some things that are the same, And this is what makes healthcare confusing, I think, to a lot of people is that science deals with, replicable patterns of this compound interacts in this way in the body every single time. But it's not every single time. We're caring for a person. We're caring for ourselves. And what matters to you? What are your goals? What are the outcomes that you want? What's your history? What's your tolerance for risk? And what's realistic in your actual life? And finally, we navigate. Given everything that we know and everything we don't know, what's the next reasonable step? It's not the perfect decision, we all... None of us think that we're making decisions based on TikTok, but there are a lot of times you get ahold of somebody, and you start to listen to them. And then the algorithm brings you people that are like-minded. And then pretty soon you think you have a preponderance of evidence when really you just have maybe one person's TikTok influenced three others that are saying the same thing. So we don't always have that information, so what is the next informed decision? That's thinking like a nurse, backing up and seeing, just examining the facts, and then what we think about the facts or the story that we're telling ourselves and then how that's producing action and giving us results. I call it a loop because we can go about it in any order. So maybe this is where default to yes has been heading, headed all along because default to yes was never supposed to be saying yes to everything. I've struggled with the name sometimes because its origins were from, it was a saying that one of, our good friends and mentor used to say, in defaulting to yes and embracing the possibilities, embracing the adventure, embracing the mystery, and not being so quick to say no to opportunities, and that if you're not sure, and fear is standing in your way, to always default to yes. So it's not about ignoring wisdom, boundaries, evidence, or discernment. it is about refusing to let fear make every decision for you. It's about curiosity and possibility, agency, and I think that's exactly what we need in health conversations right now. Maybe we need to default to curiosity before certainty, evidence before fear, questions before conclusions, and discernment before blindly following anybody, including me. But I don't want you to replace one health guru with another, not that I would consider myself at a place where I could be a health guru. But I want you to become harder to manipulate. I want us all to become harder to manipulate, and I want us to hear a dramatic health claim and instead of immediately believing it or immediately diminishing it, think, "Hmm, interesting. That's I wonder what the evidence is. What's the mechanism? Does the mechanism actually translate into meaningful outcomes in humans? I wonder what the dose is. What's the risk? Who, who was studied? Who wasn't? And does this apply to me?" Those questions can change everything, and so this is the next chapter. The podcast is still Default to Yes, but this next season has a clearer purpose, and I'm calling it Think Like a Nurse. although you don't have to be a nurse. I'm just going to talk to you about how I think like a nurse, and We're gonna take complicated health information and make it understandable without dumbing it down, and this is gonna take some research on my, my part. I don't know all the answers, and when they come at me the same way they come at you, and sometimes I have to really back up and do some homework. and I'd love to hear your input too. Some of you really know these topics, and so I welcome your input. I'm gonna leave links to how to send me a voicemail, how to send me an email, and how to reach out and share with me your information. So we're gonna talk about, physiology, chemistry, research, risk, context, and we're going to leave some room for curiosity. my goal isn't that you finish every episode agreeing with me. Actually, I sometimes hope that you don't. My goal is that you finish an episode knowing how to ask better questions than you knew how to ask when you started. Because better questions lead to better conversations, and better conversations lead to better decisions. Better decisions repeated over time can change the trajectory of our health. So welcome back to Default to Yes. Welcome to Think Like a Nurse. And next time somebody tells you that one food, supplement, medication, hormone, toxin test, or health hack is either going to save your life or ruin it, Don't panic, don't automatically believe it, and don't automatically dismiss it. Let's notice, narrate, nurture, and navigate, and let's think like a nurse. until next time, Stay curious as you go out every day and default to yes, your extraordinary self.