Unlocking Wellness from the Inside Out with Delaney Dill

00:00 - Delaney (Guest)

It's easy to think about fitness, nutrition, sleep, these things that are tangible, that you can see. You can physically see yourself building muscle, losing fat, all these things, but EMF is invisible. And I think because so much of us, or so much of the time we spend in fight or flight, really keeps us from being in tune to all the things that are disrupting us, because if we're always in the state of chaos, we don't really know where it's coming from and we don't know anything else.

00:24 - Michaela (Host)

Welcome to The Wave Forward, the podcast that dives deep into how technology shapes our health and well-being From digital wellness to tech innovation, to the effects of electromagnetic fields, we cover the environmental, social and physical implications of technology. Ready to navigate the digital landscape with confidence? Set your dial to discovery and tune in. You're listening to the Wave Forward, Delaney. Thank you so much for being here.

00:49 - Delaney (Guest)

Thanks for having me.

00:50 - Michaela (Host)

You have a famous person's name, like Delaney Dill. That's just a vibe, did you take your husband's last name?

00:59 - Delaney (Guest)

Not yet actually. Okay, so I've had a hard time because I love being Dee Dee. We've been married for three years now. I always tell him when we have kids I'll change my last name to make it easier. But I'm holding on to this aspect of my identity just a little bit.

01:11 - Michaela (Host)

No, Delaney Dill is such a good name that would be hard to change. My sister has a really good name like that, and she kept her last name too, cause I'm like it makes sense If you have a famous person's name, you got to just keep it, you got to roll with it. Okay, so tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and we'll get into your, your story a little bit.

01:34 - Delaney (Guest)

Yeah, so I'm Delaney. I am, by background, a health and wellness coach. So I went to traditional health and wellness coach certification route - a major - did it in college and ended up going into a corporate health and wellness coach certification route after school and that was kind of my first big girl job, if you will. I realized I hated it because the scope of what I was allowed to do was so limited. You're dealing with a lot of behavioral work with people who don't necessarily want to make behavioral change, so it's just a really limited impact and I realized that I wanted to do something more, be able to reach more people and also be more authentic to all the research and learning that I had done through my own health and wellness journey. So I ended up going into full-time health and wellness content creation.

02:20

So I do a lot of UGC work and marketing work for brands that I align with. A lot of them are in the biohacking world, in holistic wellness, fitness, EMF protection, and then also last year, beginning of last year, I co-founded an all-natural wellness and skincare company called Shula. So those are kind of the two plates I have spinning. I could talk about Shula for days, but it's really fun. We're all about getting rid of all the chemicals that you have on your bathroom counter to prevent and reduce the risk of so many diseases, but also to have beautiful skin, because in that you're balancing your hormones more, you're getting rid of a lot of the things that are disrupting your body.

02:57 - Michaela (Host)

I love that. Literally right before we hopped on this call, I was writing about how the skin is the largest organ of your body and you really have to treat it well, and that's something that my mom, luckily taught me when I was like 17. She was like, stop using the Victoria's Secret lotions and like all of this stuff. She's the one who really cracked down on all of that.

03:16

And like if you wouldn't like eat it - I mean it might not taste good - but if you can't eat it you probably shouldn't put it on.

03:22 - Delaney (Guest)

100%, oh, absolutely. It's pretty scary. The more you dive into what it goes into the cosmetic industry, the more you're like - I do not want that it is. It's pretty scary.

03:35 - Michaela (Host)

Yeah, and how quickly things get into your bloodstream and stuff.

03:39

So going into your work. You obviously spend a lot of time on technology. Kind of, based on what I know of you, after reading your blog, which you guys, she wrote a guest blog that you can go read on wave.airestech.com. but reading that it was like, okay, so when you went into the corporate side of health, you were working with a lot of tech. But I'm sure you still work with a lot of tech. So like, what has that journey been like and how did you actually really come to discovering EMFs and even noticing them? Because that was one of those things that was just invisible, so it was just hard to like really wrap your head around. So how did you kind of come to understand it?

04:31 - Delaney (Guest)

Yeah, and I think it is so true. It's hard to wrap your head around. It's easy to think about fitness, nutrition, sleep, these things that are tangible, that you can see. You can physically see yourself building muscle, losing fat, all these things, but EMF is invisible and I think because so much of us, or so much of the time we spend in fight or flight, really keeps us from being in tune to all the things that are disrupting us, because if we're always in the state of chaos, we don't really know where it's coming from and we don't know anything else.

04:58

So when I started my health and wellness corporate coaching job, it was 100% remote and I was working with my personal laptop, my work laptop, my big monitor, my Wi-Fi router, my Bluetooth headphones, and I was dealing with HIPAA as well, because it was in the medical and health and wellness industry. So I was locked in my little office, just shut in these four walls, with all this technology, no light of day. It was aggressive, I will be honest, it was. It really was not good, and I think that was one of the things I realized. My anxiety was so high I was having panic attacks multiple times a week, sometimes even just during my lunch break. The idea of going back into that office and doing this again for the next four hours was such a point of stress that I would start bawling and I just felt like I had no energy. I would lay awake at night just with horrible insomnia, and so I was working nine hours a day and then not sleeping at night, trying to keep up with some sort of a workout regimen. All these things and everything kind of fell through the cracks. At the same time I was definitely dealing with so many other health issues in general. I was dealing with black mold in my apartment. That was definitely leading to a lot of other points of stress for myself, but also being worried about my family, and I was just dealing with so many other hormonal imbalances that came from so many other things.

06:19

But I realized something needed to change and it was pretty serendipitous that Aries Tech happened to email me one day while I was working this corporate job and just wanted me to try their products, wanted to see if we were a good fit for each other. I had heard of EMF to the extent of I knew some people would put certain stones in their home to absorb EMF. Or I knew that you shouldn't put your phone in your pocket and I was always getting on my husband - then fiance - about putting his phone in his pocket. I was like you're gonna kill your sperm. But I didn't know. I was always getting on him immediately. But I didn't really know much outside of that. But I was like, yeah, of course I'll try, it sounds like it could be a good thing. And I started putting it in my office. I did notice a difference pretty immediately, just in the overall anxiety, in the jitters that I felt, the fatigue.

07:10

And then, as I now work still in tech but with a lot more freedom, where I'm not locked in a little office, I can get outside, I can ground myself and I have my EMF modulators. I have several more EMF modulators than I did back then. I have one on every device, on my Wi-Fi router. I have them in every room. I've made my husband take some as well.

07:30

I feel so much more peace. It's interesting where I feel like I used to feel like I was constantly stressed, constantly in fight or flight and really just not embracing that creative, relaxed, feminine flow that I've always wanted for my life. And now, I think, the combination of having my own freedom and space to work on tech but then to go outside if I need to go outside, having the EMF modulators everywhere that really do work ,it's pretty crazy and then even having air purifying plants throughout, and then I also moved out of my mold infested apartment, which really helped. I think that whole culmination has really led to me being in a place of being able to relax, being able to feel at peace and, of course, you know you're still going to be battling all the environmental EMF, but you go outside and there are everyone else's devices and cell towers and all these things everywhere. But I feel like, especially in my home, just a sense of calm that I've never felt, and I didn't know what I was missing until I experienced the other side of it.

08:32 - Michaela (Host)

Yeah, I read that part of your blog. You were like - I didn't really understand that I was having so many responses to EMF until I used EMF protection and I'm like that's really profound, because I feel like there's so many things that people will say this is why everybody's sick and I think it is a culmination of things. There is chaos happening. I mean the food, like everything, the air pollutants, the water pollutants, like we're not drinking clean water, we're not eating clean food.

09:01

There's so many different contributors to why we are the way that we are as a society right now.

09:07 Delaney (Guest)

Yeah, I think EMF is one that is so overlooked and is one of those things where it's like a fundamental aspect of health, like it is one of those things that is going to I always I okay, I finally found out the right term because I had heard this story at one point and I was like, oh, that is such a good analogy for how EMFs are affecting our body. But he was saying how like okay, our cells are basically like the castle walls and EMF is like the battering ram that is like breaking down the castle walls so that other toxins can flow in. It's almost like on social media. Everybody has like their one thing that they think is the reason that everybody is sick. But the underlying aspect of a lot of that is the fact that emf is breaking through our cell walls and allowing for all of these toxins that we're being surrounded by every single day to flow in and to cause all of these disruptions.

10:07 Michaela (Host)

Quick break in the episode, you guys, because I got to tell you about the amazing sponsor, Aires Tech. Aires Tech creates cream of the crop, top of the line EMF protection devices that do not interfere with your signal, but all of their technology is actually backed by peer reviewed, patent and published research that has been going on for almost 20 years. They were originally funded a couple of decades ago by the military to create a medical device that would help protect men and women who are working on radio signal towers without interfering with the signal, and have since become a consumer product as we have become more of a technological world. They're also used by professional athletes like Tiki Barber from the NFL Giants and Macy Barber from the UFC for performance optimization tools. You can go to their website, airestech.com, and check out some really amazing studies where they've done some EEGs to show how these devices are affecting your baseline brain activity. It's really, really cool.

10:57

I personally have one on me right now near me, because I have my phone, my computer, my camera, everything going on all at once in an office building where everyone has their own wifi, so I don't mess around. Check them out, airestech.com. Use code Intune I-N-T-U-N-E 30 for 30% off your entire order. And what you were saying about mold. I feel like almost every single person that I have interviewed who has come to understand EMF has experienced mold and like got a crazy amount of symptoms. So, like what was it that you were experiencing? Like what was like the peak of what you were experiencing, with the mold and the EMF combination Cause, I feel like that's where it really gets crazy.

11:40 - Delaney (Guest)

Yeah. Well, I would have crazy migraines where I was just out for the day, I would have just like really bad jitters. I think a lot of it went in hand, and I also was experiencing at the time really, really bad cystic acne. I think that was a combination of mold exposure and hormonal birth control, which that's a whole other tangent. But I was dealing with all these things and I think actually a huge thing that got me to start thinking about what was in my home and how bad I was feeling was the cystic acne. So for that I'm grateful, because I think so many people do think of embarrassing symptoms like acne as something you want to immediately cure. I think of it, although it can be embarrassing, I think of it as a way of your body communicating with you, because if something on the outside is going really wrong, that's often an indicator that something on the inside is needing to be, you know, healed at a root cause. And so I think the cystic acne really caused me to start thinking about what was going on, like why, what was I reacting to the molds? Was I reacting to birth control? Was I reacting to EMF?

12:43

And then, as silly as it sounds, there was a lot of anxiety where I had, at the time, just adopted a little dog and she's my baby. I love her and I was thinking about what I was exposing her to. And I feel like so many people, especially women, you know, we're a very nurturing sex where we might not take the best care of ourselves but we want the best for those that are in our care, and I'm not a mom yet, but just experiencing that with her bringing her into my home, I felt this responsibility to create a safe space for her where she wasn't being exposed to a ton of EMF, she wasn't being exposed to mold, all these different things that were impacting my body but I was kind of ignoring, so I think that caused a lot of anxiety.

13:26

But the biggest thing to be the skin and these intense, intense migraines to the point where they were debilitating. It was horrible.

13:33 - Michaela (Host)

I was having the same. That's when I decided like, or I had the knowing. The knowing came up that there was mold in our home was the migraines I was having. And then my kids. Cause we found mold in our house, we just moved, but my kids were getting like sick back to back to back and like we are a very healthy home and so it didn't make sense to me. I'm like wait, why is my kids immune system just declining?

14:00

But no one really takes mold seriously unless you're in the right group of people. Like we had taken my son to the doctor and he basically was like, oh, insurance isn't going to pay for mold testing. Like it's not, we don't really consider it like a huge issue, like just you know, feed them well, make sure you get it remediated, blah, blah, blah. So I end up having to go to a chiropractor to actually get the mold testing and his levels were so high, but it’s one of those kind of an out of sight, out of mind type of thing. People do not really understand how much it can affect your health.

14:31

And then now there's so much research about how EMFs can cause mold to grow by like four to seven hundred times what it would be growing without the exposure of just like ambient EMF. So it's absolutely insane with the mold stuff and it's weird how every single person I've talked to has come to that same understanding through their journey with mold. But skin is such a really big indicator that something is going on. Like my youngest son had like some little eczema and like just things that were like - what is happening?

15:04

Something is going on. But yeah, I'm glad you're able to get out of the mold situation, because it's impossible to heal when you're in it definitely, and it's hard.

15:15 - Delaney (Guest)

I live in western Washington. It's a very wet side of the state and you know, we're still I feel like battling it to some degree. You know that might come up in an area that we haven't looked at in a while, like in a closet, and we're a lot better about it now but before.

15:29

I mean it was. It was black mold before versus now I mean a little mildew. It's not great, but I'm definitely grateful to not be experiencing that. It was so bad that it was growing through the walls. That's how I noticed I was cleaning behind the bed and the hole behind the bed was just black and I called my husband. I was like babe.

15:49 - Michaela (Host)

Oh no, that is horrible. So you just moved your bed out and then saw that the walls were -?

16:01 - Delaney (Guest)

Oh my goodness, I've been sleeping with my head next to all this mold for I don't even know how long. I lived there for two years, so I don't even know how long. But yeah, it is. It's crazy. People don't take mold seriously. And even you know, living in rentals - every rental I've lived in you have to sign a clause that they're not responsible for mold. And so yeah, it's our responsibility if we want to take care of it. And then you learn that so many people are cleaning it in a way that actually makes it work. So you know, putting bleach on mold can create more toxins and so many people are using that to clean it. So it's just a vicious cycle. Yeah, and people don't seem to realize how bad it is, especially in a home where you have tech devices.

16:36 - Michaela (Host)

Yeah, so if you guys don't know about this, we have written about it on the blog. If you go to wave.airestech.com, we've done a lot of deep dives into how mold and EMFs are kind of like the coexisting of those two things, how it's impacting people's health and the gut, microbiome and stuff. It's basically causing the mold to grow in our gut like much faster than it would normally. So insane. But okay, let's talk a little bit about your skin. I want to just like highlight your business for a second.

17:08

Because you said you had cystic acne for a long time. So what was your, what was your protocol? What did you do?

17:17 - Delaney (Guest)

Well, for a while I resisted what I needed to do. So I was on hormonal birth control. When I got married, I got the IUD and you know I believe that you know everyone can do what they want to do. But one thing that I have experienced I think a lot of women have experienced that has led them to become more holistic is just the gas lighting that we get from doctors.

17:37

I remember the first time I was on birth control I also had acne because I had gone on birth control for symptoms of hypothyroidism but nobody told me to test my thyroid. I went to the doctor. They said take a pill, and I went back with acne and she told me there was no way the birth control was causing acne. That's impossible. No way birth control was causing weight gain or all these mood swings. It was impossible.

18:01

I just felt so, so, gaslit and I went off of birth control for a few years and then, when I got married, I got an IUD and I mean almost a year later, so I didn't really connect the dots.

18:10

Almost a year later I started getting the worst cystic acne in my life. Lower face, so kind of my jawline and my cheeks and I tried everything.

18:18

I did hyperbaric oxygen chambers, I did facials, I did super expensive high-end treatments, products at home, I mean everything you could think of and everything worked marginally.

18:30

So something might work for a couple months and kind of get things under control, and then it would come back. And then I learned with tat that a lot of times if you have a hormonal imbalance or other internal issues causing your acne, topicals have a very limited scope because they're going to treat the current acne but they're not going to treat the cause. And then the other issue that I learned was a lot of these high-end products that you're spending, you know, $300 on these special creams and serums, whatever. They're actually full of endocrine disruptors. So they might work in the short term and they're going to help with whatever's on your skin, but they're putting more nasty chemicals inside your body that are going to wreak havoc on your system even more. And so I think a lot of these products I was using they were helping maybe for a couple of months, and then it would get worse because I was filling my body with endocrine disruptors via my skin.

19:18 - Michaela (Host)

Yeah, Like once the cycle hits where it's like everything you've just been putting into your bloodstream is now coming back out through your skin.

19:26 - Delaney (Guest)

Yeah, exactly yeah. And so that kind of got me on an investigative journey. I was working with a naturopath at the time, which she's been amazing. So I did take out my IUD and within a couple of weeks, my acne went away. I mean, I dealt with it for over a year. Within three weeks I stopped getting acne. It was mind blowing. And then I started really focusing on things like balancing my hormones cycle, syncing my workouts, eating a more gut, healthy diet.

19:56

At the time I had been vegan and I totally swung the opposite direction. Now I'm. I'm on a very different crunchy diet, yeah, a lot more carnivore based, but the right stuff. Everything, just from regenerative farms and good quality ingredients, and that has helped me heal my hormones so much. So not only has my skin gotten better, but my gut, my energy level, so many other things. And so through that journey, I ended up founding Shula, which is my family's company. So I founded it with my family and it's all botanical, all natural, chemical-free skincare and wellness.

20:33

We moved a little bit into home as well, so we have a lot of great like face serums and oils, gua sha for lymphatic drainage, and we also have now some non-toxic, pure beeswax candles that help purify the air, even more so to replace those phthalate rich, nasty, endocrine disrupting candles we have. We're trying to really ultimately help people get all those chemicals out of their homes, out of their bathroom counters and out of their skin, because, at the end of the day, you don't need a million preservatives and chemicals to have a beautiful skin, to embrace beauty. You just need things that work, that are simple and close to the earth.

21:12 - Michaela (Host)

Yeah that, I love that so much and I've literally been preaching that for the last like 10 years.

21:20 - Delaney (Guest)

So I love it, we'll talk about it.

21:22 - Michaela (Host)

That's so awesome. Okay, tell people where to find you and how to connect with you if they want coaching or anything like that.

21:31 - Delaney (Guest)

Yeah, so I am on Instagram. I'm wellnesswithdelaney. I mainly focus on the marketing side of things now, so you can always reach out to me if you want to do coaching. I've kind of moved more into the marketing side just because I saw that there was a need for more authentic marketing. My goal is to create a space on social media that encourages people to critically think, and I definitely saw a gap in that. I think a lot of social media UGC content. So the ads you see are just to get people to buy a product and to be mindless. So I do a lot of educational content. I do a lot of just free, informational stuff on how to heal your body at a cellular level. And then Shula so that is my family's company. We are Shula Wellness on Instagram and then you can find us at shulanaturals.com. We do a lot of local markets and some retail as well in the Western Washington area. So if you're in the area, reach out to me and I can definitely point you in that direction. But yeah, those are the two places.

22:24 - Michaela (Host)

Is your family also on this journey of like health and wellness?

22:31 - Delaney (Guest)

Yeah, so my family, especially in the past few years, has gotten way more holistic. But I've always been more on the holistic end and so it's been pretty cool to have that community, especially living somewhere where I don't find that very often. I don't know, I live in a city and I don't want to live in the city forever. It's not the dream, but it's nice to have at least you know, my family's on that on that path. I've gotten my husband on that path for sure, where he used to wash his face with head and shoulders shampoo or something you know like and he's definitely gotten a lot more holistic as well.

23:06

So, yeah, that's definitely my little little community of all natural.

23:11 - Michaela (Host)

Really quick. You said you live in a city. What do you feel like for people who are living in the city so I mean, with all of the environmental stuff that you have going on in the city, like what do you feel like are, like, the top things that you liked, like that you try to do and be mindful of for your mental and your physical health?

23:31 - Delaney (Guest)

Yeah, well, I'd say a big one just because you're surrounded by so much noise and pollution and technology. The big one is I'm never without an Aires, and that is just the genuine truth. I have them on me at all times and I feel so much more peace about that. And then just getting outside, I try to as much as I can get out of the city. I try to. I've been really loving just visiting more rural areas lately, getting to the other side of the state where you have farmland, and just being in nature.

23:59

I think that living in a city, we can be so disconnected from nature and we're kind of fed this narrative that you know living in the city is so much better, there's more opportunity, there's more to do, and that is true to an extent, but it also lends itself to a lot of disconnection and I think our bodies really do crave just grounding, being in nature. And I think our bodies really do crave just grounding, being in nature. Yeah, so I try to get outside as much as I can in nature, away from the city. And if there was, I'm trying to think if there's one more thing honestly getting sunlight, like prioritizing circadian rhythm, it's easy to stay inside all day. Yeah, I live in a condo. That's kind of a cave, so I try really hard to at least be outside 15 minutes early in the morning, get sun, sun on my face, get sun in my eyes.

24:44

Daily movement. Little things like that, just to connect. I even I've gotten away from wearing sunglasses, which that's a whole other tangent but just little things like that to really prioritize connecting with sunlight, connecting with my circadian rhythm, being outdoors and then always having EMF protection, because even when I'm outside here in the city, I'm surrounded by everyone else's devices.

25:05

I'm surrounded by cell towers everywhere because it is densely populated. So just having that does it helps my body. But it also gives me peace of mind as someone who hasn't had kids yet, just knowing that I'm doing everything I can to not only make my life better and make my health better, but to optimize the health of my future kids and grandkids someday down the road.

25:25 - Michaela (Host)

Yeah, I love that you're thinking about that. I feel like it's so important that people like I wish I had done a little bit more of like, really like learning and and getting into a rhythm of self-care, because I do think that the things that I was doing consistently before I had kids, it was easier to continue doing those things. If you're trying to implement new things with small children, that's very hard.

25:56 - Michaela (Host)

If I was at home right now, you'd be hearing barking from my kids. Like, trying to implement like new things when you're also raising small children is very difficult. So I love that you're starting that journey now so that you can have those things being like part of your consistent, just like every day, and that way, if you do choose to have kids that like you already have that rhythm in place and you can go back to it really easy. That's awesome.

26:24 - Delaney (Guest)

Definitely. Thank you, and I think so many people do think it's fully on the woman, which I've been seeing. There's more and more studies coming out for the men out there listening to, I mean. There's more and more studies going out coming out showing how important it is for men to prioritize their health as well. It takes sperm a couple months to fully mature. So what you're doing, eight weeks before you know conceiving is really really important.

26:50 - Michaela (Host)

Oh my gosh.

26:54 - Delaney (Guest)

Yeah, because you know anything can happen and I've been learning more, even you know there's so many causes obviously for miscarriage and no matter what, it's always a really heartbreaking and tragic thing. And there's more studies actually showing that DNA fragmentation can be really strongly linked to sperm health and the sperm vitality. So I think that us women are starting to wake up to what we can do for our own health. But it's also on the men.

27:19 - Michaela (Host)

I definitely want my husband to be prioritizing that as much, and he really is, so I'm really blessed in that area, but that's awesome there's so much that we can all do yeah, because that is one of those things where it's like when, when the woman is experiencing that, it's very quick to be like okay, well, what's wrong with the woman, you know? Like what's going on with her hormones, what? And you're like you're trying to fix everything and it's like, oh wait, no, this might be an issue that is coming from the source.

27:44 - Delaney (Guest)

Yeah definitely the source.

27:47 - Michaela (Host)

Both people have to be actively working on their hormones and their health for sure. Well, thank you so much for joining. Okay, say all of your stuff one more time. I asked you a little soon for that, so say it one more time so people can come follow you.

28:06 - Delaney (Guest)

Of course, yeah, so my name is Delaney. You can find me on Instagram at wellnesswithdelaney, and that's where I do most of my work. And then Shulanaturals.com is my skincare and wellness company. We're on Instagram at ShulaWellness. Please reach out. If you have any questions. You can DM me on either account. I handle both, so the DMs are always open. I'm always happy to help people and, yeah, we just it's a lot of holistic information and education. That is truly what I'm passionate about is just helping people learn bite-sized information on how to get healthy, how to cut out the noise.