The Science of Chronic Illness: Autonomic Nervous System & Trauma Response with Dr. Eleanor Stein

[00:00:00]In the autonomic nervous system, we have these survival responses. I've mentioned fight, flight, and freeze, but we also have the next sort of tail end, which would be shut down or collapse.

[00:00:12]And that element, coupled with the fight, flight, freeze, for many humans, Peter found and realized when those are all on at the same time, Ellie, that's what creates chronic illness. I'm being very general.

[00:00:28]>> Yeah.

[00:00:28]>> Cuz there's other factors.

[00:00:29]>> So they're all on at the same time? You can have fight and flight and freeze?

[00:00:34]>> And shut down and collapse.

[00:00:36]>> all together?

[00:00:37]>> Exactly. And so the old version of how we were taught, and it still gets taught today, um if you listen to even Andrew Huberman, he will say that the sympathetic rises and then the parasympathetic comes on to bring the heart rate down.

[00:00:55]In a perfect world, that's true.

[00:00:58]But what often occurs is there's a sympathetic, I'm using my hands to kind of depict this. It's kind of the graph of the Y X going up. You've got the bottom axis and the the the the vertical axis. And so as your sympathetic goes up, you're going along the horizontal, it's going up up up and then there's this thought that as you get excited and activated, there's this other system that comes in and then starts to calm.

[00:01:24]Now, that can be true. Obviously, if we do some jumping jacks, you and I right now, our heart rate will go up.

[00:01:31]>> Yeah.

[00:01:32]>> And then we sit and we start talking, our heart rate will go down.

[00:01:36]That's general healthy autonomic regulation.

[00:01:40]>> Okay.

[00:01:41]>> But what occurs, and there's a lot of layers to this, we'll keep it simple, when someone has this inability to fight or flight, like Nancy did when she was five, this other system comes on, freeze, but then, if she doesn't release that fight, flight, and freeze, the system then kind of goes into a bit more of we would call high tone dorsal of the parasympathetic nervous system.

[00:02:10]This is where the vagus nerve comes in.

[00:02:13]And it realizes, okay, this person isn't going to get rid of their fight, they're going to get rid of their get rid of their flight, they're kind of in this freeze thing. We're going to put the next layer of protection on, which is the shutdown.

[00:02:27]And so what happens on this graph, rather than it one going up and the other going down in a nice kind of X, you get both going up at the same time.

[00:02:39]You see? So you've got They're like competing with each other. Yeah, they're literally, if you draw it on paper, it's like um it's like two normal distribution curves from from one to the top, and then they stop up there. And so what happens is the sympathetic is high, but the parasympathetic shutdown is also high.

[00:03:01]And it's where those two cross on that graph, and again being very rudimentary here, that's where as Peter has theorized, you become syndromal.

[00:03:13]So this is where symptoms not just are negative symptoms, it becomes deeply embedded in the physiological systems that the autonomic nervous system regulates.

[00:03:26]I'm going to add one more layer.

[00:03:28]So the autonomic nervous system is responsible for our survival, fight, flight, freeze, shutdown.

[00:03:34]But it's also responsible for heart rate, respiration, blood pressure, digestion, immune system, endocrine, hormone release, um sweating. If it's too hot, we start to sweat. Too cold, we start to shiver.

[00:03:50]All of the regulatory elements that the human system and the mammal system and the reptilian systems need to survive.

[00:04:00]But if the system is being co-opted to survival and it thinks it's still under threat or it is under threat the housekeeping of taking care of the organ systems goes out the window.

[00:04:17]>> Right. It's not a priority.

[00:04:18]>> It ain't a priority and we [clears throat] know this. You know, people will say, "Oh, stress kills you.

[00:04:23]If you're not taking care of yourself, you're going to get sick." Yes, that's true. Um but it also can lead to a whole host of other chronic issues because over time and for many over decades, the system isn't repairing cells.

[00:04:39]The immune system isn't being enhanced.

[00:04:42]Um there isn't this sort of capture and kill of cancer cells that should be spat out. They kind of go to just become, you know, invasive and become problematic. Um and so this is what we see or I have seen with the the chronic illness folk I work with um is when you look at their history, Ellie, they've had a long-term usually long-term history of some kind of chronic stress, often early abuse, trauma um and a whole host of other things that puts their system into this constant state of fight, flight, freeze, and that shutdown.

[00:05:25]>> Yeah.

[00:05:25]>> It's the shutdown that really drives these chronic symptoms and syndromes in these folks.

[00:05:36]>> [music]