#421: Trauma SCIENCE: How Hidden Stress Hijacks Your Health (Autoimmunity, Brain Inflammation, and Unlocking Resilience) | With Dr. Aimie Apigian

Welcome to Longevity. I'm your host, Natalie Knidham. I'm a nutritionist, a human potential and epigenetic coach, and I created this podcast to bring you the latest ways to take control of your health and longevity. We cover it all, from new technology and ancestral health practices to personalized interventions and a very special interest of mine, peptides and bioregulators. Enjoy the show. Hi, I'm Natalie Knidham, your host, and we are back with another fantastic episode. In this episode, Dr. Amy Epiglian unpacks how trauma lives in your nervous system, how chronic stress isn't what you think it is, and why your body may just be stuck with the emergency break on, no matter how hard you press the gas. And most importantly, how this may be showing up in your health. We get into autoimmune disease, brain inflammation, mold exposure, attachment patterns, and how your capacity, not your willpower, determines your resilience. This is science meets lived experience and may help you or a loved one finally understand what your body's been trying to say. Dr. Amy has a great new book out, The Biology of Trauma. If any of this episode resonates with you, I highly recommend getting your hands on it. And you can also go to TheBiologyOfTrauma.com to learn more and explore her programs for individuals and also training for professionals. Again, she does incredible work. Next, I'll thank a couple of the sponsors who make this podcast possible. And then we are going to dive in. Are you looking for something simple, delicious, and all natural to add to your wellness routine, especially this time of year, when everybody's trying to stay healthy through the winter months? Because let's face it, winter is when immune support really matters. More time indoors, more travel, more people, more exposure. And I like routines that are effective and enjoyable. And this is why I keep Manukora Manuka Honey in rotation. 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Timeline has run more than 25 human clinical trials and holds over 50 global patents. This is longevity science, not wellness fluff. So stop blaming willpower. Support your cells. Go to timeline.com forward slash Nat 20 for 20% off. Mightopure gummies. Dr. Amy Epiggan, welcome to the show. I am really so excited about this conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time. Yeah, thank you. I'm really excited to see what has shifted for you since starting to read my book. So I'm excited for this conversation. Well, I mean, awareness realization and holy shit. Sorry, guys. Given all that you know, Natalie, like you're going to come at it through a very different lens than most people. So I really am curious about your thoughts. You know, I mean, if I was going to say one thing at the beginning of the podcast is its depth. It adds, it adds another dimension to what we know, right? It builds on the body keeps the score book. Like it it enhances it, it enriches it, it brings different contexts to it. That was my intention for writing it really is yeah, body keeps the score. We know that we believe that we see that how yeah, why well, and it brings science to it. That's the thing like you're tying in the physiology. And guys, we're just jumping in here. But like you're literally like I've been reading this book and I've had some health challenges over the last month. So I've been reading the book on the backdrop of really intense stuff and detecting patterns in my own history that tie back here. And it's and it just kind of it makes you sit and go really like and I said this to you before we started recording, couldn't I just take a probiotic and fix my gut like it would be so much easier. We want to be able to do. That's what we want. Anyway, listen, let's let's back up to the beginning of the podcast now because now that we jumped into the middle of it. And can you share with us that that moment when you first realized the traditional medicine just wasn't going to fully explain what you were witnessing in your own body, in your patients in the in your loved ones like just something was just missing. For me was the moment sitting in my rheumatologist's office. I adjusting the lab results. I have autoimmunity and I asked him what can I do to not have this progress in the full blown lupus. And he said there's nothing that you can do. We just wait for it to happen. What? Okay, that's not what we want to hear. That's not what I wanted to hear. Nobody wants to hear that and especially not anybody in the health field. I know. And but that was all I knew. So here I was a third year medical. No, I was a third year general surgery resident at that point. And so I had now been working with a lot of thousands of patients doing different surgeries. And I knew the body's capacity for healing. But I had also seen this mentality in medicine of symptom management. Let me find the right medication that will just manage those symptoms, let you have a good enough life and tell you pass away. Yeah. And this was coming on the backdrop of me having worked the last six years with adopted children. And I had worked with some of the toughest children who had trust and attachment issues. Yeah. Most of them being adopted from countries around the world where we knew that the environment and the orphanages was such that it was not promoting healthy neuro development, let alone attachment. Yeah, my uncle adopted a baby from Russia. And he would be they would tie them to potty. Yes, rather than put a diaper on them. Right. Right. Yeah. So Russia, China, Guatemala, these were the kinds of kids that I was working with after my experience of adopting my son from the fascia care system and realizing that here also we're just trying to manage symptoms. Yeah. Oh, they have behavior issues. Let's give them an anti psychotic. They wanted to put my son on saracval at age five, rather than look at how do we actually solve these attachment issues that are driving this behavior. But we didn't have answers for that. That was felt to be you had a rough childhood. There's nothing we can do about it at this point. And so it really is just symptom management. So here I come along and for my son, I had said, hell no, I want more for him and his life. I actually want him to be happy. And so I am going to keep searching for answers until I find his healing path. Yeah. I don't think Natalie that I would have treated myself with that same kind of persistent hope if I hadn't have had him first. Yeah. I think that that experience of doing that for him, standing up for him, then allowed me to say, why wouldn't I do that for myself? Why when I'm being told this is what you can expect for the rest of your life? Why wouldn't I have gone along with that? Because that was my medical training. Yeah. And as a young woman and you're being told, yeah, right, right. Wow. So that was then how I got into all of what is now biology of trauma. I started to search for answers, found functional medicine, started getting trained in functional medicine, became a functional medicine provider. And then I started trauma therapy. At first I started seeing a therapist. Things went very wrong. I started having my immune system started having violent explosions like yours in response to these therapy sessions that my brain was like, Oh, that was amazing. We went so deep. I cried so much. We must have released a ton of shit. And then my immune system was like, Oh, yeah, you think that was good. Let me show you. Let me tell you how to think about that. Exactly. This is how unsafe I felt. And I'm going to let you know. And so I realized that there was this, I was obviously pushing my body into areas that did not feel safe because of the reactions that my immune system was having as well as my energy levels. They were just absolutely tank and I feel like I was in a coma or a days for three days. Yeah. Until I could come out of it. Well, so then I just started my own trauma training and I and now I'm in those rooms with the therapist and I'm getting trained not because I ever expected to teach this, but because I needed to find how to get my own life back. And I wasn't getting those answers where I was going. No. And it's really the power of your intellect trying to overcome the fundamental reality of your biology. Right. And in medicine, there's no what's that? This is what we've been taught. I know, but that's what I'm saying. Medicine keeps those two things in a silo in two different silos as if they don't. I mean, conventional medicine typically keeps those two things in two different silos because there's and it's fascinating that there's so little acknowledgement of the influence of one over the other. And yet there's yet so much evidence that the mind, the thoughts, the beliefs have everything to do with what gets expressed in the body. Like it's just mind blowing. But okay, so I want to talk about trauma because your explanations of trauma, the five stages, where the body kind of draws the line. And again, this is emotion translated into physiology. So what I want, what I would encourage the listeners to listen for here is those connections because this is not, we're not disconnecting the mind from the body. If anything, what we're going to help you guys to do is connect the dots between your emotions and what you experience physically. Right. So people talk about trauma intellectually. So when did that insight about the biological connection to it, like about to kill that theory and start to really figure this out, like really put it together? Well, how did that come together for you? Was there a moment or was it a process? I mean, maybe I'm putting you on the spot. No, what happened was that when I started my own trauma therapy, I realized that my biology was creating a ceiling effect. And I would bump up into that ceiling and be like, but I want to do more. But I want this resolved, but I want to release this, I want to process that story. But and it was happening enough times that my immune system was having these reactions. Natalie, it would wipe me out. But I would go and you have this at this point, or you just had autoimmune. You were waiting for lupus to come along. I think still just autoimmune because I don't remember ever clearly having the butterfly rash. That is what okay, the lupus is. And at this point, I was already doing some functional medicine to the best of my ability, knowing that what I do now with functional medicine is very different than what I was taught since what I was taught is like, it all starts in the gut. No, it doesn't. It starts in the nervous system. And there's a lot of nervous system like that, to be fair. So exactly. Yes. Yes. And so the moment for me was when I was in a somatic experiencing training. So again, I'm signing up now for these trainings to learn this stuff directly myself. And I'm in this training, San Diego, and I did not know that I had this mold reactivity. And it was in this building that's right on the water. And so a ton of mold, but not realizing this, I would walk in. And within five minutes, I would have such brain fog that I wasn't able to actually focus and learn and process. And then I'm becoming super sensitive and just crying or super reactive. And realizing that I'm not this way when I walked into this room. But somehow I walk into this room and I become this different person who has all of these trauma responses, realizing this is your biology. You didn't change, Amy, something changed in your biology that created a different state in your nervous system. And that's what you need to focus on. Figure out why these state shifts are happening in your nervous system based on what you eat, based on what you breathe, based on where you go. And then we can focus on if I'm going to be the best version of myself, what does that mean for what I eat, drink, breathe, how I sleep, how I run my internal biology, given what I'm noticing is that is directly contributing to either signals of danger or signals of safety to my nervous system. Yeah. And from there, it just continued to unfold. And so that was where I started. And then the next year I discovered that I had the brain inflammation. I read Dr. Dotte's Karazians book, Why Is It My Brain Working? And I was like, this is me. I've had so many head injuries. I've had a concussion. I've had different what's called priming events. And so yes, like this brain inflammation is a big aspect of what I was now calling like my biology of trauma. And then the year after that, I got into a car accident and I noticed that I was not bouncing back. I was even falling back into the fatigue and the depression and developing chronic pain. And so what I noticed was that, wait a second, something is happening, something is blocking my healing. What is it? So that's when I discovered these biochemical imbalances. And so there's just been so many layers now. It didn't come all at one big download. It was one layer at a time. And noticing I've been able to get up to this level of internal self-regulation and capacity and resilience. And I want to be up here. But there's this block and every single time there's been a block, it's on one of the three levels, mind, somatic or body or the biology. So the immune like an immune flare or whatever the case may be. Exactly. Yeah. Which is so it's nuts, right? Because this is where you go to the doctor and they tell you it's all in your head. Yes. Right. There's no reason why you should be feeling this way. There's no reason why you should have no energy. There's no reason why you should be in pain all the time. I can't, there's nothing in your labs. There's nothing in your this and right. And we call it being gaslit and ultimately it is being gaslit. But it's unfortunately for most physicians, it's what they've been taught. It's what they know. And I think this book is so important and this information is so important to share to just help people to at least get rid of that trauma. You know, at least right. You know what I mean? Like it is medical trauma. It's medical trauma when you like you know in every cell of your body that something is not right and yet you can't see where you're going to find help or a solution or validation that this that every time you I don't know. I mean, you have such a great example at the beginning of the book of that guy, Alex, when he goes into work one day and they announced that they're restructuring the company and four other he's one of five people in the room. Four people are like, Oh, okay, well, I guess we're whatever. I mean, don't know if I'm going to be gone or if I'm going to this guy, you may as well have had a grizzly bear sick on him. Like he completely shuts down. He can barely hear voices. And it turns out that he lived out of a car, a station wagon for like what months when he was a little kid. And so to him, this means holy meat, like me and my kids and my wife, we're going to be homeless. We're going to be living in the car. And that whole and but it expressed itself in him physically. Yes, right. And I just thought that was so cool. Okay, and this brings us to biological capacity. Let's talk about biological capacity and what it is and what it means like we might talk about it as resilience. But let's this word capacity really holds the secret to our resilience if you want to use that word. Yeah. But really, it is the possibilities ahead of us. And what defines how much is possible for you define it's determined by your capacity. Well, what is determined? What is what is our capacity? Our capacity really is our capacity to hold hard things. And if you have had the experiences where everything overwhelms you, you have a very small capacity just because your perception of your abilities is low, right? But we can also have a capacity that has been lowered because we have toxins, because we have had mitochondrial damage. And so when we talk about capacity, we're really talking about that activation or the stress physiology. And how much can we rev the engine and still be okay? Right. How much can we ride that edge of, wow, this is a lot that I'm going through. But I'm good. And not falling to overwhelm. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you talk about the line in the book. Right. I do. And how the line is different. Not only is it different for different people, but one person can have a different line for one type of stress versus a different type of stress. Like different things. It's really about pushing your buttons based on your life experience, like your foundations. Well, even with your experience right now, you have a different capacity in the morning. Yeah. Versus a different capacity in the evening. Yes. Which requires people around me to have different capacities as well. Exactly. Which requires a response by other people to know your capacity if they don't want you to cross your line. Yeah. Well, you know, fortunately, I'm a good communicator. So many people are unknowingly living in a chronic survival state. Like they don't realize it, but all they're doing is surviving. Right. How does that reshape the nervous system over decades? Like what's the impact on your nervous system when you're constantly pushing, like just living in that, I'm not going to die, but I'm going to die kind of scenario. Yeah. Yes. Now chronic stress is one of the biggest misnomers that has hurt us in the medical field. Yeah. We've labeled things as stress and stress is bad. We need to reduce stress. We need to manage stress. And then there's chronic stress and that's really bad. That's totally going to kill you. Yeah. And yeah, when we come back to the chronic stress has taken you out. Exactly. When we come to the when we come to the physiology, Natalie, we see that there's not that distinction in the body. Okay. Well, there's not this chronic stress state. Now that actually comes from a stress researcher. His name is Dr. Hans Selle. And he gave us the model of chronic stress. But what he was actually describing without having the words to describe it was that shift between stress physiology and then overwhelm. Okay. So let's make that distinction. Because I think where people are going to push back on this and they're going to say, yeah, but you know, when you're chronically stressed, your cortisol is elevated. You're in a catabolic state. Your blood sugar is going to be high. You know what I mean? Like this, these are the definitions we've put around chronic stress. So let's make, let's, let's appeal that a part a little bit. Absolutely. So what he noticed was that people could be in this acute response state, acute response state runs on adrenaline. Right. Adrenaline, its job is to help all your cells in your body make more energy and then use up that energy for self-defense or expansion, growth, whatever it is. And then he noticed that a line would be crossed. And he noticed that what happened in their physiology was what he labeled exhaustion phase. The body is exhausted and no longer is it able to do what it did in the acute response phase. Now because it's exhausted, it starts to fall apart. So now we have this inflammation and the acute stress response, we don't have that kind of inflammation. We have an acute response inflammatory state, but it doesn't look anything like the exhaustion phase inflammation. So even that is very different. And what he just didn't realize was that that exhaustion phase was not just chronic stress. It's, it's different than stress. And he acknowledged that he just didn't have any other words to use for it. So it got labeled as this is stress and this is chronic stress. But actually what's happening is that the body is reaching an overwhelm state when it crosses that line. And when it crosses that line, it does not matter how much adrenaline you have. It does not matter how much cortisol you have, because what's shifting is your nervous system state. So it's like shifting from driving your car in sixth gear because you're racing somewhere to throwing on the emergency brake. You can still have your foot on the gas pedal. It kind of doesn't matter because you have the emergency brake on. And that is often why we see high cortisol, not because cortisol is actually causing all of these problems, but because the emergency brake is on. And so the body's like, Hey, we're trying to create a different response. And so we're giving you all of this cortisol is actually supposed to be there to help buffer us from adrenaline. Okay, cortisol isn't bad. No. But again, what we've identified as, but high cortisol means this, but that's only because high cortisol is still there in these conditions. High cortisol is not necessarily causing that. What's causing that is this vagus nerve system shift. Right. And so that's where the focus needs to be is how are we helping our vagus nerve take off the emergency brake so that our body can come out of this chronic exhaustion phase and move towards healing. But see Natalie, most people don't even know that most people don't know that the vagus nerve can also communicate overwhelm and trauma. They've only heard the vagus nerve is great. You want to activate your vagus nerve. You want to stimulate your vagus nerve. And we've got all these devices and breathing techniques and humming cold punches and biohacking because vagus nerve is only good. No, the vagus nerve is just the train tracks. It's a nerve. A nerve is just train tracks. What is the train that's running down those train tracks? And you have two different trains that can run down the vagus nerve. You can have the ventral vagal, parasympathetic rest and digest. I call it calm and yet alive. You can have that train run down your vagus nerve. And that is when everyone, no matter what health conditions they have had, will be in their best health and their best self. But then you can have this other train. And this is the train that runs down the vagus nerve. When we reach a point where the life threat that we feel is in front of us is so big, we think we might die. It's that moment of feeling trapped, powerless. And yet my life is in danger or it feels that it's in danger. By the time we reach adulthood, Natalie, honestly, the most times that we are going into this overwhelm response is in interpersonal relationships. Yeah. Yeah. And yet interpersonal relationships is where we feel like it's a life threat. I'm going to die if you abandon me. I'm going to die if you don't love me anymore. It's not the bear. It's not the lion. No. For us, especially as adults, it goes all the way back to our early life and attachment issues. But most of the life threats that we perceive are interpersonal. Yeah. And it's about getting kicked out of the tribe. It's about getting kicked out of the tribe, right? Like, it's ultimately because we can't, we're not solitary creatures. Never intended to be solitary. No. And as a little child, if you learn that anger means is bad and makes you bad and therefore you will be excised, you carry that through your life. Yes. And so now when you feel angry, you are going to not only stuff it inside, because there's no way that you can express your anger, but you are going to say, this is a life threat to feel this way. And so much of auto-muty is, I am the problem. I cannot feel this way. I need to shut this down. I need to shut myself down. Interesting. All of auto-muty has attachment patterns behind it. It's fascinating. It is fascinating. It's crazy, actually. And so when people stay in that chronic survival state that you've described, does that have, like, what is the impact on that on the nervous system over their lifespan if they don't address it? You know what I mean? Like, how does the nervous system, does it just get exhausted? Is it tapped out, loses capacity? Like, what's the, what's the impact on the nervous system? It is very predictable and consistent. And so what happens is that when we've had an experience of overwhelm, this feeling powerless, trapped, overwhelmed, if we don't have the full recovery, if we don't have that full reset to safety, our body stays thinking we're still in danger. Now, what most people think is that I stay always hypervigilant. I stay always stressed out. But actually what happens is that the body enters into this loop. And it's looping between those last two steps of the stress and trauma response. So sometimes it's in stress. And we're waiting for the next shoe to drop. We're super sensitive. Our nervous system is on edge. But sometimes our nervous system says, I'm exhausted. I can't keep up with this. And it's falling into that overwhelm. It's crossing the line. And it does that, Natalie, to get some relief. So it's shutting down, like you're exhausted. You can't deal. You can't cope. This is when you're also going to start emotionally eating, eating those things that you don't want to be eating. But yet your nervous system has to find relief from the constant sense of danger and bracing. But to do that, since it's truly feeling safe is not an option, the next best strategy is just to numb it. Right. And so we avoid, we distract, we numb, and there are all kinds of coping mechanisms that humans come up with to do those three, numb, avoid, and distract. And so that's the body trauma loop that the body gets stuck into when we talk about it being a chronic survival state. It's always either in stress mode or overwhelm mode. And it just loops between those two. And what happens over time then, the effect of that on the nervous system is that the nervous system loses its capacity little by little and it no longer is able to be in that stress response as much as long and it's reaching its line of overwhelms sooner. Right. Until a person like you and me, perhaps at some points in our life, have found ourselves just completely down. Yeah. My body can't even go into stress. It can't even generate the energy. It's just all the time down now. And that's where I landed and I would have kept trying to push through and be stuck in this loop if it hadn't just finally said, I completely give up and I'm not even going to let you get out of bed today. Jesus. I was like, oh, shit. I think I got to do something about that. Okay. That's not going to work. It really sucks. I got things to do places to go people to see. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not quite there yet, but wow, that's a wall to hit though. It's a wall to hit. And for me, I had never known any other way to live life other than going I didn't know or stopping. Yes. Yeah. Just push through. Yeah. I didn't I didn't know that other people didn't feel this way. I didn't know that I had a badge of honor. Right. Like I think it's it's true. I mean, I mean, you're you're a doctor, right? Like people who become doctors aren't generally people sitting around eating bonbons all day. Like these are people who are very driven. Productivity is rewarded. Yeah. And not to mention the fact that as a medical professional, you'd be like, dude, get out of bed. Right. It's all in your head. Yeah. Wait, these are the things that I used to tell my patients. Oh no, I became that patient. Because the universe decided you needed firsthand experience. It really did. Yeah. And so I feel that this work called me in a sense I didn't choose it. Yeah. It called me. Yeah, I hear you. So can you tell us a little bit about what actually shifts in the body when someone moves from survival biology into repair and restoration? Let's start looking a little bit into the light. I mean, I still have so many other questions, but let's let's talk. Let's let's give the audience a little bit about, okay, yeah, there's a way of getting out of this. Like so what's what shifts? Yeah. Yes. Now what's important for people to know is that how the body goes into a trauma response is the same way that it then comes out. Okay. And I say that because most people think I just want to go do that ketamine journey. I just want to do I just want to do I want to do ayahuasca and not realizing that that belongs in a certain phase, but that's not phase one. So there are three phases of this healing journey because we have to walk our body from where it's at to where we want it to be. Right. And it's not a shortcut. There is no way to do to make that jump without going through the anxiety and the grief and the panic that are all stored in our body because we didn't ever resolve it at that time. Okay. Because you do talk about and just at this juncture, you talk about some types of therapy just retraumatize the person. So how do you how do you avoid like what's the difference in approach between what you're talking about versus just relieving the freaking trauma and being just just as traumatized as you were before and going great. Now I know I've seen it. I've lived it again. Now what I don't feel any better. So if we really come back to our definition of trauma and say trauma is our body going into a trauma response, then if that's what I'm trying to avoid, I'm trying to avoid overwhelm. Right. I'm trying to avoid overwhelming my mitochondria, overwhelming my immune system, overwhelming my actual cells. That's what I'm trying to avoid overwhelming. And as we were talking before, it doesn't always give us the memo ahead of time. It really sucks. You know, life would be so much easier if you got a heads up. Which means that we often need to go slower than what we think we need to go just to make sure that we don't overwhelm our body systems that aren't going to give us that message ahead of time. Yeah. And so I liken it to a swimming pool where yes, I can say where we want to be is we want to be swimming and splashing and playing in the deep end of the pool. That's where everybody has the most fun. That's where we're the most alive. So I'm going to throw you into the deep end of the pool because that's where you want to be. That would create overwhelm. Yes, that is where we want to be. However, where we need to start to prevent overwhelming our body is we need to start in the shallow end of the pool. And then we need to even get our body to say, oh, water isn't dangerous because it's had that experience that water is dangerous. And then I teach you how to swim. And I teach you how to swim in the area of the pool where you could just stand up at any point to stay out of overwhelm. And then we get to the deep end of the pool. But again, many people not knowing this is what I did. I didn't know better. I'm like, I need to process my stories in my past, apparently, let's jump in and get this done. See, you get me, Natalie, you get me. So I jump in the deep end of the pool and I'm drowning in my own emotions. I don't know how to feel this anger. I don't know how to feel this grief. And so I'm back to my usual coping mechanisms of laying on my couch, watching a movie, hugging a tub of ice cream. Because I'm numbing, I'm having to numb these feelings because I don't know how to swim yet. And yet in the process of trying to heal my trauma, I'm actually reinforcing those very same responses that I'm trying to change. Right. And you know, with neuroplasticity, whatever you reinforce gets wired and even deeper. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's why these methods that are going to overwhelm us are not helpful. We have got to even learn that doing it gentle is part of the rewiring. Yeah. Treating ourselves with kindness is part of the reprogramming that has to happen because that is actually part of our trauma patterns is pushing ourselves. Yeah. And beating ourselves up. And there was one exercise I read about in the book. I mean, I haven't finished it yet. So, but there was one exercise you described, which is, you know, it's art therapy, right? But what really struck me about it, where you encourage people to draw out these scenarios, it's separating your today from your person from before, right? Speaking about yourself in the third person. Third person. Right. So creating, so somatically by drawing it, I guess, and emotionally by speaking it and all the different strategies that you use is really to separate that traumatized person or that person that's being traumatized from the person that you are today, which I found so, I just found that so powerful, right? Because I think any of us if, or many people or me, if there have been a couple of fairly traumatic events in my life, and if I go back and talk about them, my heart rate will go up. I'll get flushed. I go, and I'm like, dude, like this was decade, like get over it. You're fine. You got through it. And yet, physiologically, I feel it if I'm telling the story. So I guess I haven't separated myself from it yet. But it is, it's, you know, as I'm reading the book, I'm like, wow, really? No. But tell me this, like, does the body decide what system, how does it just like, for, you know, for me, I've decided, and I guess, and for you, the immune system is where it lives, your trauma, right? And that's the system, therefore, that expresses the overwhelm, the lack of capacity when you over push. Is it always the immune system or can it be different systems in the body? There tends to be a predominant system for each person. But Natalie, Chapter five of the book shows that every single system is affected. Okay. So it could be cardiobac. It could be the heart, whatever. Yeah, exactly. You and I both know people that when it comes time for their family reunion, they're breaking out in the skin rash. But for other people, it's their digestive system. That's been a big one for me. So for me, my primary has been both my digestive system and my immune system. I've got my immune system. I mean, just as I say that, I can think of many examples just this year where, no, I reached a critical line of anxiety, panic, and now overwhelm, and there was my immune system getting sick. What starts to shift in the body when you kindly, when you do this work, right? And you start to move your biology from this constant survival state into repair and restoration. Like, do we feel that? Or is it just that we start to have more capacity? You start to notice that things don't affect you as much. You don't get sick as often. You don't have an immune flares. I like, is it literally that direct? It literally is that direct. Wow. The first things that people experience when they work with me in the first three weeks, they have improved sleep scores. They have improved digestive system. They have less digestive issues when they go to eat. They have less anxiety. They have less depression. They have more sense of community and joy and a 60% increase in a felt sense of safety. Wow. And that's just in the first 21 days. That's amazing. So you take that, and now you extrapolate that for the next three months. If you feel 60% more safe in your body, well, what else is going to change? If you feel 60% more safe in your body that you're not needing to go binge on that tub of ice cream, isn't that also going to change your health? Yeah. And so it's just this cascade that starts to shift everything towards health, not just because that's your internal state now, but because that leads to different thoughts, behaviors, coping mechanisms that you don't need to use anymore. But regardless of that, the digestive system, the immune system, they are so closely connected with the nervous system, you cannot separate them. They are instantaneously co-activated. And thus, when you shift your nervous system, you will experience shifts in your digestive system, in your immune system. So I encourage people to do a somatic practice that will shift their nervous system towards safer every time they go to eat. Why wouldn't you want to improve your digestion and absorption when you're eating? For sure. And then being able to see that over time, what people will notice is that they can go through harder life experiences and not have their digestive system flare up like it did before. Not have their immune system flare up like it used to before. And that's where they realize just how much they had been tiptoeing around, afraid of stepping on eggshells of their own biology. Of themselves. Yeah. Of themselves. Yeah. And now it's like, why open this back up. And they're thinking, wow, well, then if I don't have to stay small to stay safe like I used to, what do I want to do? Yeah. Where do I want to go? What do I want to experience? Because now I have the hope that I can. Here's an interesting idea. Mostly problems aren't about being tired, they're about your brain never getting the signal that it's safe to power down. You can be physically exhausted, but if they're snoring city noise or random sounds pulling your brain back to alert mode, you end up half sleeping all night. And that's when mornings start to feel heavier than they really should. Oslo sleep buds have become part of how I close the day. I stream something calming, a meditation, an audio book, white noise. And once I fall asleep, Oslo sensors detect that shift and transition me into built in soundscapes that I get to choose designed to support deeper, more stable sleep. This isn't sound blocking, it's sound engineering. Oslo combines neuroscience, biometric sleep detection, and ultra comfortable design created by former Bose engineers. They're tiny side sleeper approved last all night and were recognized by time as one of the best inventions of 2025. Create a true sleep environment wherever you are. All you have to do to get yours is go to oslosleep.com forward slash not make sure to use code not and get $75 off your Oslo sleep buds. For people who are wanting something tangible today, right? Yep. And some people are listening to this and they're like, Okay, this is really good. I got to get the book. Maybe I got to get into your course or whatever. But if there's something I can do today, how can someone start tracking their nervous system state through a normal day to try and understand am I experiencing normal? Because you know, your nervous system is going to go up and down during the day. That's normal based on what's happening. Are there strategies or ways that you can give people that can help them to understand if they're spending maybe a little bit too much time in an elevated nervous system state? And it's going to different different from person to person, right? Like that ceiling. This is exactly what I would want people to do. Actually start tracking your nervous system state. People will be surprised at how much they live in survival mode. And so that's why I created a journal for myself. I needed to track my own nervous system. I didn't know. And then that's how I discovered, wait a second, I'm always either in stress or I'm in overwhelm. That's all that I live in. But until you start tracking, you don't know, we can often fool ourselves. And so it's not until we start tracking. So I would encourage people to track. You can download my journal. That's fine. I've got it on my website, got it in my reference there in my book. Feel free to use mine. You can create your own. Do whatever you need to do, but start tracking the nervous system state. What's your level of background fear of anxiety? What's your energy level? If you've got high, high energy level, you're in sympathetic. Again, that's not bad. All of this is just, it is information. If you're in low energy, if you're exhausted, if you're finding yourself having to push through and drink a little more coffee just to get through your day, you're in overwhelm. And I would want you to know how much you're actually in overwhelm and you just haven't known it. Yeah. Yeah. Because the overwhelm is ultimately what leads to the breakdown. That's exactly it. Right. Because as long as you can sustain the sympathetic state, you can fool yourself into thinking you're fine. I got this. I'm getting shit done. Right. Yeah. All right. So we're going to go back to therapy a little bit. So so many people, I mean, because that's what people know, right? People get told you need to go to therapy. You need to meditate. You need to go do breathwork. And they're still stuck. So what's the biological piece that's missing out of those approaches? So medicine tends to forget the somatic level and these associations that even you mentioned where your mind knows that you're fine and your body is having a reaction. So medicine misses the somatic level. And therapy misses the biology level. And the biology level is this idea that therapy is stress. Going to the gym is stress. We call that good stress, right? We're going to work out our muscles or stress our muscles. And that's how we're going to get bigger muscles. Hormesis. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. So it's the same idea with therapy. We're stretching. We're building. We're stressing our nervous system muscles. And in order to do that, you need capacity. And if you don't have that capacity, if your immune system, if your digestive system, if your metabolism is in such a disarray that it can't even help you be present during your therapy sessions, if it can't help you integrate what you've learned, what you've done, well, then you might as well just take your money, put it in the toilet and flush because you're not getting the results from those therapy sessions that you could if your biology were at the level that it could support that growth. Okay. Then it ends up just being information, but information doesn't change us. Information doesn't change our neural pathways. Information doesn't create new neuroplasticity. Experience does. But if your biology says, I'm so exhausted, I'm so out of balance that I can't be fully present, you're not getting the experience that you need to become a different person. Well, it's almost like you're only doing half the work, right? Like you're taking yourself through the misery and you're not able to and you're almost no further ahead than when it first happened. Exactly. Because you can't break through to the other side to resolve or or I mean, I don't know or I mean, I don't know if you're resolving things or accepting things or moving past things or moving through, you know, I mean, accept all of those things depending on what those things are. You're just not, it's like you're not finishing and you just kind of keep banging your head against the wall. You're just stirring the pot. Yeah, which means that you're re-experiencing all of those emotions without actually being able to create a different experience with those emotions. Yeah. Yeah. So tell me this because sometimes the person, I mean, I know I would and I know you talk about this about yourself in the book as well. You're like, okay, I'm ready. I'm in. I'm doing it. My, we're all in all of me and your biology is like, no, we're not. No, we're not. Actually, no. And you're like, no, but wait, the my mind is the boss of you and we are doing this. And the physiology is like, no, actually, we're not. That was the biggest shock to me, Natalie. And when I say shock, I really do mean shock. Oh, I believe you. Not just in medicine, but in my religion growing up in my culture, society teaches us the mind is the master. Master your mind. Awesome. You master your life. Change your biology or change your thoughts and change your biology. And to realize that that is a lie. It's a total lie. It was a shock to me to realize, no, actually, my body is the boss. Yeah. My body is the boss. And if my body is in a good place, and by body, I mean biology, well, then my mind can do its thing. Right. But if my body and biology are not in a good place, they are going to go into survival mode. And my mind is going to be dragged along. Yeah, that's so realized that this overwhelm response is the emergency break that is more powerful than the gas pedal. And I had always thought that my mind was the stronger of the two. And it's simply not true. Well, it's so interesting you say that, right? Because that takes us back to you're not going to think your way out of this, guys. You still have to take care. Like you have to mind your mitochondria. You've got to watch your nutrition. You got to fix like you've got to fix the physical pieces so that you have the machinery to interact with the mind in the way so that they can work together again. There's almost like a disassociation, right? There is. And that dissociation is the first trauma pattern. So as long as we are still disconnected, that is still not healing. Good. That really sucks. And so it really does because so many people we think that all I need to do is I need to connect with my body. Okay, I'm going to use my mind and I'm going to connect with my body. I'm going to go to yoga. I'm going to go do chi gong. I'm going to do a massage. I'm going to connect with my body. That is not actually what we're talking about when we talk about the mind body connection that's going to lead to healing. The true connection is this relationship where I am hearing a message from my body and I'm responding just like when we are talking. I hear what you say and then I respond. Somehow we've gotten to this idea that all I need to do is I just need to connect. I don't want to listen. I just need to connect and send you love and then we'll be fine. And then you'll be fine, right? And then you'll shut up, right? Yeah, no, no, no. And the more disconnection that we have, the more that we want our body to just fall in line, the more tension our body holds. The more damage actually happens in our biology because of that disconnect of we're not listening to what it's saying and then being able to respond with what it needs. Wow. So let's distinguish between retraining the body versus managing systems because I think we could mix those up, right? Because the body's going to express whatever and now we're going to reach for whatever toolkit is at our disposal to make that expression go away. And sometimes you need to do that, right? Like, you know, I will eventually come out and talk about what it's been going on with me. But in my example, I have an immune system that went completely off the rails. We had to shut it down to stop the spiral. But now we're going to have to take it away and it's going to have to come back online. So, right? So that how do we get into this space where we're distinguishing between retraining versus managing symptoms? Because that's where chronic autoimmune issues come in, right? Basically, we've given up on the immune system. You can't do it. So we're taking over for you. 100%. I see it exactly as you say it. Stabilization first. These are principles of the body, Natalie. Yeah. This isn't unique to trauma healing. Like, oh, everything else operates by these physical natural laws, but trauma is something else. No, it's not. Trauma is also part of the body. And so follows these natural laws where the very first step, whether you're coming into the emergency room, whether I'm preparing you for surgery or whether you've just had your heart shattered and you're trust broken. Stabilization. Stabilize the system. Yeah. And sometimes that requires a heavy hitter. Something like we've got to use a device. We've got to use a medication. We've got to use something that we would not normally want to reach for. However, we have got to stabilize the system and stop the spiraling. Yeah. But here's where many people go wrong, Natalie, is then they're just like, okay, well, I'm fine here. We're good. I'm fine. They're so afraid of it going wrong again when that support is taken away. Yeah. That they would rather just stay right there, even though it's restricting them because at least I'm not falling apart like that anymore. Yeah. And so we stay small to stay safe. Yeah. And that's what I see a lot of people do who are trying to go through life avoiding their triggers. Oh, I can't see that person. Oh, I can't talk to my family anymore. Yeah. I see that. Oh, I can't do that. I know they trigger me or they're not safe for me. They don't respect my boundaries. This is about you. This is about them. It's about you and how you're showing up. Yeah. But if all we say is I'm not, I just want to stay right here, then that becomes staying small to stay safe. Or this I'm just managing symptoms. I'm just treading water. But there's so much more and there's so much more involves the slow removal of those elements that allowed for the stabilization so that we can become independent. We can become flexible, adaptable, and now be able to start building our capacity beyond what we've ever had before. But we can't build our capacity as long as we are still trying to avoid our triggers and stay small. Because here's where I'm safe. Well, yeah, I mean, we shrink our world down, right? We shrink our world down. And you see that in people's diet. You see that in people's social environment. It's a shrinkage, not an expansion. Yeah. And feeling is moving in the expansive direction. I want to circle us back to this, you know, the podcast name is Longevity, right? And so I'm going to bring us back to this whole space of aging and longevity, which sometimes I think, oh, longevity, Nat, you're so freaking shallow. But the thing is that it's all of this has got to be the underpinning of true longevity. Because when you talk to centenarians, who frankly, none of them are Brian Johnson, none of them are spending $2 million a year trying to be a centenarian, not a single one of them meant to get there. They've survived wars. They've some of them have survived Holocaust. Like, it's these are people who have lived life. Like they did not get there through sunshine and rainbows. But there's something inside them. That there's something in them that allowed them to weather all those crazy storms and thrive in spite of them, right? So, but and yet they still went through trauma and we can we can talk about trauma as a biological injury. So what distinguishes them from the next person? I guess it's capacity, but maybe you want to enhance that a little bit. It does come down to capacity. But then we want to look at again, what is making that capacity? It's going to be a mental level of capacity. What does the mental level of capacity look like? It means that when something hard happens, what's your default thought? What's the thought that you allow to stay? Whereas the other thought you're like, thank you, but you can go along now. For those people, the thought that they allow to stay is this is a lot. The person who ends up allowing that to just become overwhelming to them, like this is too much. This is too much for me. Right. And there's a big difference in just the energy between those words. Right. And so I even noticed that when I will have the thought like, oh, this is too much. I'm like, Amy, this is a lot. Like I've trained myself to catch those thoughts, redirect those in the moment to still acknowledge, yes, this is hard. I'm not going to be the positive psychology person to be like, only positive. Yeah. Right. No, because that's not helpful to my body. And my body is like, dude, like, do you not see what we're going through? So the lie is not helpful, but also reframing that to be like, this is a lot. And let me then be in that space where I can do hard things. And I can stay in the arena, even when it gets hard. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. And then we look at the somatic level. So how do I, how would a person like this use their body in order to go through hard things? Well, what is our posture? If we allow ourselves to just kind of curl up into the shame, like most of us are hunched over looking at our computers all day, we're in an overwhelmed posture that is contributing to our lower capacity. Interesting. Whereas if I intentionally sit up straight, bring my shoulders back, and I bring in any kind of support that helps my body be in this posture and be comfortable, well, then that allows even my, my body, my nervous system to be like, yeah, this is hard, but we got this. Yeah, it's that whole you're opposed thing, right? Exactly. Yeah. My nervous system is not going to have that response if I'm like, oh, this is so hard. So even our posture can be used to help us get through hard experiences. And then we look at our biology. It is very common when stress hits that we go for the carbs, that we go for the fast sugars. That's what our body is screaming for because it wants to be able to make fast energy for us. When we then start to tip into overwhelm, it will reach for those foods that help us numb feelings better. Foods that are more dense foods that are fatty foods that are dairy and gluten because they bind our opiate receptors. And so by intentionally saying, I know that this is where my body is at, how can I fuel it better to stay in this stress response and to not reach that end in its capacity? I know that I'm going to make different food choices than if I don't have this stress. I'm going to be eating foods that my body can process easier than something that is more complex and harder for it to just process and digest. I may be moving into even ketosis. What if I could support my nervous system with ketosis and allow it to have a larger biological capacity because I'm supporting it in this way? It also is probably a good idea that if you're experiencing a lot of stress over here that you want less physical stress. Don't go on the long runs or the long bike rides or don't do the physiological stress of the cold plunges. Your body can only hold so much stress and that might take up stress that you would want to use for the other situation in your life. It just helps us navigate life differently knowing this lens of our capacity and where I choose to allow my stress response to be spent. It's so interesting you say that because definitely as I've gone through my challenges lately, I've allowed myself a bit more carbs. I'm typically a very low carb person, but I've allowed myself a bit more carbs just because I felt like it just feels better. There you go. But without going as far as saying I'm just going to dive into a pint of ice cream. I've brought in, I don't know, let's say the other night I made millet and I cooked it in bone broth. I feel like you kind of, to your point, and I didn't exercise for a long time, but now it's like I'm getting on the bike for 20 or 30 minutes just to bring the movement back without over stressing. Like it's very, so I feel like whether ketosis is the answer for you, which it can be for some people, but it is about navigating that these new parameters even temporarily to say my system's under more pressure. Exactly. So how can I support it without, yes. And then it goes back to what you said earlier, it's a little bit more kindness and to your towards yourself as opposed to a kick in the pants, right? Just saying get your button gear and get over it. Right. Which is a tendency. So in longevity, we talk about mitochondria, tilumia, stem cells. Do you want to talk a little bit about how trauma biology intersects with those systems? I'm pulling us right out here because. Yeah, now this has been one of the most fascinating areas of research in the last 10, 20 years where really the fastest way to die is to have unresolved trauma stored in your body. Yeah. And now we're understanding that it's because of the oxidative damage to the DNA, the tilumias, and the mitochondria. Interesting. Which interestingly enough, then that damage to the DNA can become epigenetic damage. And that's how generational trauma is passed on. Interesting. Which for me brings a lot of hope because all of a sudden, if I know this major mechanism of generational trauma, I have a new repair tool, anti-oxidants. It's not that there's nothing I can do about it. There's a lot that I can do about it. And there's a lot that I can do to reverse the damage on my DNA from my past now that I know that that damage has happened. So I love it. The effect inside of ourselves, even at the DNA level, is one of the repair tools that we will want to use. Let's talk about the gut microbiome for a second. Just for a sec. And how does the gut, and because we don't talk about this, right? Like the intersection of, or the interaction of the gut microbiome and stored trauma from a biological, and again, which is going to affect, like everything's going to affect your longevity, guys. I'm going to stop saying it. Amy, it's implied. So where do you see that intersection, that interaction happening between the stored trauma and the microbiome? It's a two-way street, as is so much in our body. Like everything, yeah. Like everything. And sometimes it's a chicken and an egg effect, which came first. Did you have an emergency C-section when you were born? And so you had an imbalanced microbiome, and that gave information to your nervous system that ended up being overwhelming responses because your nervous system is getting that, hey, we're in trouble here. We're out of balance. And the imbalance in inflammation and neurotransmitters and everything that happens when we have a microbiome that's out of balance. So what I know is that the nervous system and the digestive system are so connected. In fact, I feel ridiculous to even use that word because they're one and the same. You have so many nerves in your enteric nervous system that it is your second brain, if not your first brain. So the idea that everything that affects your microbiome to either bring that to balance or out of balance is going to be messages sent to your nervous system about your capacity. And whatever's happening in your nervous system is going to impact your digestive system, your motility, your absorption capacity, which is going to disrupt your microbiome. So it's so closely connected that it again brings a lot of hope then because whether you're dealing with digestive issues or nervous system issues, the result is that you use repair tools for both and you're going to see the difference. You can change it. I mean, this is the thing, right? Like, you know what, guys? This is the crux of the matter here is that all of this can, is under your power to influence. It's not easy and it's not a probiotic, unfortunately. But it might involve a probiotic at some point. But if you don't address that other piece, this piece that we're talking about, that is, yes, more difficult, but I would imagine the rewards are just like off the charts. So we are. Okay. I'm going to the end. I'm skipping whole chunks. We're going to have to have a part two. I want to ask you a couple of rapid fire questions before we finish off. If trauma biology had one core mechanism, what would it be? Off the date of stress. How do you define capacity in the context of longevity and resilience across the lifespan? Capacity is our resilience. Capacity determines your resilience. Love it. What misconception about trauma would you like most to retire? What do you want? What misconception about trauma just needs to die right here, right now? That trauma is the event that happened to you. Thank you. What frontier in trauma biology are you currently most curious or excited about? I am very curious and excited about some of the newer tools for mitochondrial biogenesis and how that will increase our capacity even for trauma healing. Nice. And how has this work changed the way you experience relationships and safety? This has changed everything. Even the ability to feel safe and know that there's an even deeper layer for myself ahead. Amy, this has been such a fabulous conversation. I want to keep talking to you all day. We need to do that sometime, Natalie. We need to do that. We're skimming the surface. But anyway, you guys, I hope you enjoyed this even half as much as I did. And if you there's an offer from Amy to our audience, we've got the link in the show notes. It's a seven-day somatic healing for stored emotions, which, you know, just reading this book and connecting with you, Amy, I think nobody would be left unchanged. And also, they offer 21-day journey, right? A daily live session program that helps participants understand how much trauma their body may be holding. And this could be the insight that you need to really move the needle, whether it's on your health or anything. And also, you're giving tools to address it in real time. So those links are in the show notes. But Dr. Amy, please share the name of your book, where people can buy it, your website, your Instagram handle, where all the fabulous things, please. All the things, yeah. So Biology of Trauma is the book. And you can find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble. And then I have resources that I mentioned like that art narrative exercise, the nervous system journal. And I have those for free download on my website, biologyoftrauma.com, forward slash book. Love it. Thank you so much. Thank you for the work that you do. The book that you've written and sharing your gifts with the world. Huge thanks. Thank you. Thank you for the work that you do. Hey, folks, just a quick reminder that all of the information presented in this podcast is for information purposes only. No medical advice, no diagnosing, no treatments suggested here. Before you try anything that you hear about or learn about here, make sure that you check with your medical provider.