Latest / Gladden Longevity Podcast / From Trauma to Triumph: Mastering Emotional Fitness - Episode 309
Transcript
- 0:00People use this term nervous system regulation, but why are you regulating?
- 0:05So for example,
- 0:07If you're regulating a nervous system that's in a toxic relationship and you're using nervous system regulation tools to tolerate a toxic relationship better, that's a bad
- 0:17thing.
- 0:18We want to regulate the grief of leaving a toxic relationship.
- 0:22We don't want to regulate staying in it, right?
- 0:24We want to regulate the fear of going for the goal, not the regret of not going for it.
- 0:31And
- 0:32There seems to be something about people who are really good with emotional pain have a harder time tolerating physical pain and people who have a really easy time tolerating
- 0:41physical pain have a harder time with emotional pain.
- 1:13Welcome everybody to the Gladden Longevity Podcast.
- 1:15I'm your host, Dr.
- 1:16Jeffrey Gladden.
- 1:17And as always, we are here hacking our ages.
- 1:20we're also asking the big questions.
- 1:22How good can we be?
- 1:23How do we make a hundred to the new 30?
- 1:25How do we live young for a lifetime?
- 1:27How do we live well beyond one 20?
- 1:30And how do we actually create a 300 year old mind?
- 1:34And today we're going to be talking with Mastin Kipp.
- 1:37Mastin is,
- 1:39really a world famous gentleman who's been very, very much involved with the nervous system and optimizing life by optimizing the nervous system.
- 1:47And that's really in the psycho spiritual space.
- 1:49I think you're going to find this conversation really, really interesting.
- 1:52I joined it a little bit late, Autumn Calabrese, who is co-hosting some shows with me, begins the conversation and it really goes into some
- 2:01really, really cool areas.
- 2:02So I hope you enjoy this.
- 2:03This is really a highlight of the Gladden Longevity podcast.
- 2:07What's up you guys, I'm Autumn Calabrese, co-host of Dr.
- 2:10Gladden's Longevity.
- 2:11I am so excited.
- 2:12Today we are joined by Mastin Kipp.
- 2:15I've followed Mastin, been a huge fan for so many years.
- 2:19I'm really excited to get to start this conversation with you.
- 2:21So welcome to the Gladden Longevity podcast.
- 2:25I just think this absolutely incredible that you're here.
- 2:28Thanks for having me.
- 2:29I'm super excited and I've been in mutual admiration society also.
- 2:33So same.
- 2:34Yeah.
- 2:34So, Masson, first of all, named one of 100 forward thought leaders by Oprah.
- 2:40You've been on Super Soul Sunday.
- 2:42Like, what an incredible accomplishment.
- 2:44You're doing so much amazing work, really helping people, not just through trauma, but past the trauma into living this beautiful, joyful life.
- 2:57So we're gonna get into all of that today.
- 2:59ah Let's just start.
- 3:01You had a book come out last year, 2024, reclaiming your nervous system.
- 3:06I just want to talk a little bit.
- 3:07Can we talk first just a little bit about reclaiming our nervous system?
- 3:12What happens when we experience trauma?
- 3:14You and I were just talking about the fact that, you we went through the pandemic and what kind of trauma that could have left on all of us.
- 3:21Well, think ultimately, if you think about anybody in the world, what's our ultimate goal?
- 3:26I don't think our ultimate goal is to survive.
- 3:27I think we all have something in us that wants to come forward, wants to be expressed, wants to be put out into the world.
- 3:33We want great relationships.
- 3:35We want financial abundance.
- 3:36We want a healthy body.
- 3:37And it's important to understand how we've been injured, right?
- 3:41So if you're an athlete on, you know, trying to play at the highest level and you get injured, you're not going to ignore the injury.
- 3:46You're going to go and maybe get a
- 3:48a surgery of some kind and do a rehabilitation process.
- 3:50And then when you go back out in the field and perform again, you're not going to pretend like the injury never happened.
- 3:54And so I think that in the field of, in the fields of coaching, there's a big focus on the future and a big focus on goal attainment, which is important.
- 4:03But we pretend as if the injuries that we've been through, emotional injuries or relational injuries don't exist.
- 4:08And sometimes in the fields of therapy, what happens is we get so focused on the past that it's like what happened to the beautiful life I was trying to create.
- 4:15And so
- 4:16Really, our focus has been about really bringing the past, present, the future together to understand where are you now?
- 4:23How did you get here?
- 4:24But where do you want to go and why?
- 4:25And bringing all that together, I think the most important thing is understand that the way that you experience life is through your nervous system.
- 4:33And if you don't understand how your nervous system works, if you don't understand how your nervous system interpreted things in the past, and because of that is interpreting
- 4:41what we think is gonna happen in the future.
- 4:43it's gonna be really hard to live the life that you wanna be living.
- 4:46so understanding the first principles of the nervous system to me is the foundation of not just healing, but also having an incredible life and certainly longevity because the
- 4:56nervous system is how we experience life.
- 4:59Okay, so let's talk about the nervous system because that is so crucial.
- 5:03I know I come from a childhood with trauma in it.
- 5:08And I think for a long time personally, like I would just suppress it and be like, I got it.
- 5:13I'm good.
- 5:14Let's go not realizing sort of the damage that that was doing even to my body physically where that landed my gut health and things like that.
- 5:22So can you just explain that a little bit for the listeners like
- 5:25What do they need to understand about the nervous system and how it's going to be affected?
- 5:30Well, the first thing to understand is we have evolved over millions of years and we are highly resilient as a species.
- 5:38So people have been through some of the worst things in the world, can still create beautiful lives.
- 5:43So the good news is, is your biography and your biology does not have to become your future.
- 5:48That's the first thing to understand.
- 5:49The other thing to understand is, that the way our nervous system works is that if we go through experiences that are intense, whether you label it trauma or not is irrelevant.
- 5:58If you go through highly intense experiences, the nervous system is highly efficient at keeping things out of your awareness if they're super intense as a way to protect
- 6:06yourself.
- 6:07However, over time, if that doesn't come into awareness, it can start to cause all kinds of problems because what happens is that when we go through something traumatic or intense
- 6:18and it's called dissociations and becomes out of awareness, that gets kind of stored away.
- 6:23until we bring it forward and deal with it, it's going to manifest in all kinds of behaviors, physical symptoms that we may not want, lifestyle choices that we may not want.
- 6:33And so it's important to understand that, you know, we all have childhoods.
- 6:36mean, name one person that's come from a functional family.
- 6:39I don't know one person who's come from a functional family.
- 6:41Everyone's come from a dysfunctional family on some level.
- 6:43Certain people definitely had more egregious experiences than others.
- 6:46But we all have something that we're holding out of awareness and
- 6:51you know, our prefrontal cortex doesn't develop until we're 25.
- 6:54So after 25, you start getting to 30s and early 40s, some of the strategies you use to be successful aren't working as much, right?
- 7:02You start to see some wear and tear in the body.
- 7:03You start to see some dysfunctions, maybe the symptoms like you used to be able to push through.
- 7:07Now you can't push through as much.
- 7:08We have to start to adjust and there's different adjustments that we make obviously in the functional medicine space, longevity space.
- 7:14You guys are geniuses at all of the internal.
- 7:17biochemistry that has to happen, but there's a lot of psychological pieces that has to happen too, in terms of recovering parts of yourself that were fragmented or left behind
- 7:26and bringing them into awareness now.
- 7:28But not so that we can just like let the youngest, most traumatized parts of ourselves run the show.
- 7:35We wanna bring them into consciousness and then let who we are today decide what we wanna do with it and be able to bring them forward into the future.
- 7:42And I think that it's important to understand that without doing that,
- 7:45you're going to have some maybe mystery illnesses, right?
- 7:49it's like, you know, we, we, that falls into the label of like fibromyalgia, right?
- 7:53It would be a great catch-all diagnosis, right?
- 7:55Or borderline, right?
- 7:57Would be another kind of like catch-all diagnosis.
- 7:58What is the borderline of fibromyalgia?
- 8:00What does that really mean?
- 8:00Right?
- 8:00There's a lot of these strange illnesses and you start to look at the biology of what happens in the body when those things are out of awareness and you start to see
- 8:09sympathetic overdrive.
- 8:10You start to see low vagal tone.
- 8:12You start to see
- 8:13downregulated parts of the prefrontal cortex, where maybe the left side's not as active, which is where seeking and goal attainment and joy and gratitude live.
- 8:22More overactive right side, which is more rumination, more active limbic system.
- 8:26And that becomes a biological kind of a component to these parts of ourselves that we fragmented away.
- 8:33So we want to be able to bring all that stuff into awareness and, you know, take a multimodal approach to be able to do that.
- 8:39But it's important to understand that, yes, we've been through things and our goal is to
- 8:43is to basically rescue those parts of ourselves and bring them into consciousness so that we can be fulfilled, not so that we can let the most traumatized parts of ourselves run
- 8:52our lives.
- 8:53Yeah, I think that's a great point.
- 8:55I think that's a really great point.
- 8:56I think we end up living in reaction to those experiences, traumas or whatever.
- 9:01And a lot of times we do it unconsciously.
- 9:03There are things that we are conscious of that we're living in reaction to, like we're angry about something.
- 9:09But there's also things that are imprinted into the nervous system through those experiences that we sort of normalize.
- 9:16This is how the world is, right?
- 9:18And everybody must think this way or be this way.
- 9:21And therefore we go into life, what I call being on tilt, right?
- 9:25Like a poker player that just lost four hands, you you're on tilt and everybody knows you're on tilt.
- 9:29Everybody in the room knows you're on tilt, but you don't know it because for you it's normal, right?
- 9:34So it's being able to kind of see what it is you can't see as well as see what you can see.
- 9:40and that's, that's actually
- 9:42For me anyway, I started with what I could see and then it was, okay, now I need to get to what I can't see, right?
- 9:48Somebody else tell me what it is I'm not seeing.
- 9:50And then there's lots of people that are happy to do that.
- 9:52So.
- 9:54question is there a way like you said it earlier, massive like it basically like, you know, so many people will get into therapy and they spend so much time in the past and
- 10:02what happened and let me let me dissect it.
- 10:05So is there a way to bring those experiences those heavy heart experiences, those traumas to conscious, but to also live a joyful life at the same time?
- 10:16Like, do we have to analyze it all?
- 10:19and then we get to be happy or how do we do it at the same time?
- 10:23Totally.
- 10:24So a few things.
- 10:25First of all, you must start with the assumptions of the practitioner that you're working with.
- 10:32Okay.
- 10:33So in any field, whether it's a coach, a therapist, a doctor, Whenever someone gives me a prognosis on anything, whether it's achieving a goal or, you know, if I'm helping a family
- 10:44member through an illness, right?
- 10:46And someone comes to me says, this is what's going to happen.
- 10:49In my mind, I put in parentheses,
- 10:52Yeah, with you, with you, right?
- 10:54Because there's this thing called the Pygmalion Effect where we tend to live up to the expectation of people around us, right?
- 10:59And so the first thing is you wanna be able to make sure that your team, the people that you're working with, believe not just that you can get better, but that you can thrive.
- 11:08If they don't believe that, there's no such thing as false hope.
- 11:11Hope is binary, you have it or you don't.
- 11:13False hope doesn't exist.
- 11:15So the number one thing is you wanna start with a hope-filled team who can see you.
- 11:20thriving, not just coping, not just surviving, but thriving.
- 11:23That's so critical.
- 11:25And then the other thing to understand is we don't need to go digging for things unless it's actively getting in the way of what's happening for you right now.
- 11:32Like if you're not able to get out of bed, if you're not able to achieve a goal, if you're not able to connect with your partner or have a great sex life, whatever the block is, if
- 11:40there's something that's presenting, we want to find the root cause of that.
- 11:44And there's lots of ways to bring it to consciousness.
- 11:46In functional coaching,
- 11:47uh we have a process of just, you know, looking at a behavior and tracing all the way back to like the original incident of where that came from.
- 11:54But then working to what we call create a corrective emotional experience, which is let's look at the dynamic of how this happened.
- 12:01And then what did you actually need to start to give yourself what you need?
- 12:04Because I think sometimes within the trauma conversation, we get so focused on regulating stress or, or, or, or, you know, like not being depressed.
- 12:12There's a, there's a negative association to it versus
- 12:16Well, the stress or depression exists.
- 12:18What if there's a lack of nutrition?
- 12:20Maybe I have a oxytocin deficit, which means I need a hug.
- 12:24Maybe, you know, someone was dehydrated.
- 12:26You're not going to say, well, when did you first get dehydrated and what happened?
- 12:30And let me just show you the mechanism.
- 12:31You just give them water with electrolytes, right?
- 12:33So we have to understand what is the nutrition, the relational nutrition, the self-care, what is the corrective experience needed?
- 12:40Because our nervous system starts to expect things unconsciously.
- 12:44And if we can break that expectation, it's called a disconfirming experience or corrective emotional experience, we can understand what happened, what was missing.
- 12:51And then it's interesting.
- 12:52Once you give someone something that they need that they didn't have, the nervous system starts to correct, especially if you can do that multiple times, right?
- 13:00And so there's lots of different ways to do that that make it less painful, right?
- 13:05A lot of the psychedelic assisted therapies that are out there help with this.
- 13:08A lot of the longevity treatments, if you have a PTSD, for example,
- 13:12There's a whole field of research coming out now that's looking at PTSD as a metabolic issue.
- 13:17So maybe with your PTSD treatment, maybe you want to do some psychedelic assisted work.
- 13:22Maybe you want to find purpose and meaning.
- 13:24Maybe you need some NAD also because your energy is super low, right?
- 13:28So there's lots of ways to do it more intelligently than we could before, but it starts with the, with the team that you surround yourself with.
- 13:36Because if like their baseline is
- 13:38My assumption is you have a mental illness and I'm gonna give you a diagnosis and I'm put you in a symptom cluster and that's it and your job is to cope.
- 13:45That's as far as you're gonna get with that person, right?
- 13:48So you gotta make sure that your team is on board.
- 13:50And then also, is it practical, is it pragmatic?
- 13:53Is this needed?
- 13:54We don't need to go digging for stuff just to dig for it.
- 13:57We wanna dig for it, find it, but then create the corrective emotional experience.
- 14:00What people sometimes do is they find the trauma and they go, well, I can't now because I'm a trauma.
- 14:05And it's like, hold on a second.
- 14:07If you got through that,
- 14:08You can get through the healing.
- 14:09You know what I mean?
- 14:11So yeah.
- 14:12People, it's a, it's an identity thing, right?
- 14:15People tend to identify with their traumas.
- 14:17So the way I think about it is we end up telling ourselves stories, right?
- 14:22And those stories become an identity.
- 14:25And part of the healing is ultimately to die to those stories.
- 14:29Right.
- 14:29And kind of be resurrected.
- 14:31Z is almost a Christian paradigm here.
- 14:32It's almost died of those stories.
- 14:34We resurrected into a life where you're unencumbered by those stories.
- 14:37Right.
- 14:38So the question is, how do you, how do you die to those old stories?
- 14:41Well, part of it, since the way we think about it is that people have different genetic predispositions to be more or less impacted.
- 14:49So one of the first things we do is what somebody's genetics, right?
- 14:52Whether it's alcohol use or trauma or PTSD, the genetics will actually tell you a lot.
- 14:57And then from there, it's, know it was an experience and it's nice to identify cognitively kind of what went on.
- 15:04So at least people know what we're talking about.
- 15:06They can articulate it and that's helpful in, in the initial healing, but to actually really heal it, takes another experience to overwrite the software.
- 15:15You've got to rewrite the software, right?
- 15:17And so the hug, the whatever, what did you need?
- 15:20What's, what's the corrective experience that you're talking about, Mastin?
- 15:23I think is exactly right.
- 15:24And one of the things about psychedelics is that they can create an experience that can rewrite the software, right?
- 15:31And that's, that's how psychedelics work in this space from, you know, the work that I've done with them.
- 15:35So, I think, I think there really is a path forward.
- 15:38think what's interesting to me, and I think you made a beautiful point there about the fact that you're, you know, your ultimate outcome is going to be a function of the
- 15:47limitations of the person you're working with.
- 15:49Yes.
- 15:49really kind of what you were saying to paraphrase it.
- 15:52And so it's really important to be working with somebody that sees you as an unencumbered, whole, free, fully expressed human being that you're here on the planet to be and become.
- 16:03And that's who you want to work with.
- 16:05Let's talk about the psychedelics for a second because I do think that people are gonna be really curious as to what specifically you're referencing how that might work and Like dr.
- 16:17Gladden you said that could create an experience Can you because I am NOT I mean I'm familiar with people talking about ketamine therapy But I this is not something I've ever
- 16:27tried so I'm curious what that is and how it would work
- 16:31Totally.
- 16:33Dr.
- 16:33Gladden, you want to go or?
- 16:35Yeah, I'm happy to, but I'm also happy to follow you since you're the guest.
- 16:38oh
- 16:40and I study the research and I have experiences.
- 16:43So first of all, psychedelics are ancient.
- 16:46So this is shamanistic work we're talking about.
- 16:49And what's happening now is we're getting empirical data to back up what shamans have known for a very long period of time, just so we're super clear.
- 16:57Psychedelic and shamanism have been for tens of thousands of years.
- 16:59The DSM has been around since 1952, just so we're really clear about that.
- 17:03So this is, we're tapping into ancient wisdom.
- 17:05If anything,
- 17:07Traditional medicine is alternative because this has been around a lot longer in a way.
- 17:11This is the ultimate traditional work in a lot of ways.
- 17:14Now, different psychedelics have different what we call mechanisms of action, which means how they work in the brain.
- 17:19And so depending on what your goal is, but you have to understand when you experience trauma, the first thing to get is that the state of trauma is what's called a non-ordinary
- 17:29state of consciousness.
- 17:30So when you're in a PTSD experience or when you're in something that causes
- 17:34overwhelmed, especially if it's consistently or chronically over time or if it's, you know, something in war or neglect or whatever it might be, you put yourself into a
- 17:42non-ordinary state of consciousness that becomes habituated or normalized over time.
- 17:49So what do psychedelics do?
- 17:51Fundamentally, they put you into a non-ordinary state of consciousness also, and there's a lot of different mechanisms that happen, but some of the overarching universal mechanisms
- 18:01that happen in the brain, for example,
- 18:03If you're a jerk to yourself, you say bad things to yourself, anyone's ever been a jerk to themselves and they talk bad to themselves, right?
- 18:08That comes from what's called default mode network in the brain.
- 18:12The default mode network is self referential processing.
- 18:15It's what you think about yourself.
- 18:16It's your internal working model to who you think you are, right?
- 18:20Psychedelics lessen the connections in the default mode network.
- 18:24So who you are, who you think you are tends to lessen, dissolves, meaning you're not so much of a jerk to yourself anymore for a period of time.
- 18:32With ketamine specifically, which you talked about, ketamine is also an anti-glutamate, so it basically pauses the sympathetic nervous system, so stress just kind of stops.
- 18:40So Xanax will flood your brain with GABA, which creates all these new receptors and creates dependency and stuff like that, which is bad.
- 18:48Ketamine just kind of says, time out on stress for a second.
- 18:52It calms the limbic system.
- 18:54It calms stress.
- 18:55And it creates a dissociative effect, which means you're further away from something.
- 19:00You're not associated to it.
- 19:02And that impacts the salience network, which is your awareness of your body is also lessened.
- 19:06So with ketamine specifically, who you are tends to dissolve a little bit and what you are, your body tends to dissolve a little bit and you're less stressed.
- 19:17And by the way, it boosts prefrontal cortex activity, which is where all this stuff gets put together.
- 19:22So you get this kind of like mindfulness experience and depending on how much you do, you could, you know, meet God or something like that too.
- 19:29So it depends on the dosing.
- 19:30Right.
- 19:31But, and then also there's usually like a three to 10 day post-Ketamine experience of what's called a neuroplastic window where you can kind of make new decisions because
- 19:39there's a little bit more lubrication in the brain and stuff like that.
- 19:42And so like there's different mechanisms depending on the goal with say psilocybin, it's more a serotonin boost.
- 19:48So there's more of this like kind of this big heart love type energy, but it also amplifies all emotions.
- 19:55So sometimes if you really want to get in touch with emotion psilocybin might be something that you want to do.
- 20:00If your heart is closed and you don't feel joy, MDMA tends to be more of a joy amplifier.
- 20:06So these different psychedelics have these different mechanisms.
- 20:09They're slightly different, but they all act on the default mode network.
- 20:12They all tend to boost prefrontal activity.
- 20:14They all tend to calm the amygdala on some level, but they just have different neurotransmitter pathways that they work on depending on the goal.
- 20:22And we're understanding this more and more and more as the research is emerging.
- 20:26Does that make sense?
- 20:27Yeah, and so as you're doing these therapies, you, you're doing them, I'm assuming a doctor's administering?
- 20:34Yes, I mean, you hope so.
- 20:36You know, and some of these some of these things aren't legal yet, but some of them are decriminalized.
- 20:40You know, MDMA is on the brink of FDA approval.
- 20:43It's phase three right now.
- 20:45Psilocybin has been given breakthrough designation by the FDA.
- 20:50In fact, just last week, 5-MAO-DMT nasal was just given breakthrough designation by the FDA also.
- 20:57So ketamine is a schedule three that's been around for a long time as an anesthetic and for surgeries and stuff like that.
- 21:05the thing about ketamine though is that there's no established protocol because it's already a schedule three.
- 21:10So the drugs that are being queued up now, they're coming out with protocols also.
- 21:17the ketamine stuff is a little bit of a wild west.
- 21:19So you definitely wanna make sure that you're with the right practitioner because in all the psychedelic research, what's clear is,
- 21:25Yes, these agents work, but the actual mechanism of change is the safety and the relationship between you and the practitioner.
- 21:32So if you don't have that, you're not going have much change.
- 21:35So is it like doctor and therapist?
- 21:38Sort of is it, is there a therapist walking you through, asking you questions?
- 21:43Are people tripping on them?
- 21:47Okay.
- 21:48So there are some other ones out there as well.
- 21:51You know, San Pedro is a very heart opening psychedelic.
- 21:55And and then you've got the DMT, right?
- 21:57The five MEO DMT and you've got Ayahuasca and which is a prolonged DMT experience.
- 22:03And.
- 22:05You know, the way I think about it is that they are each one is different.
- 22:09And each strain of psilocybin, each strain of mushroom is different, right?
- 22:13So there's lots of variation.
- 22:15think the difficult thing for somebody that's on the outside looking in is to say, where would I start and who would I, who would I work with?
- 22:21And that's where you want to find someone who's actually been trained.
- 22:24ah You don't want to talk to your buddy down the street.
- 22:27You want to, and there, there's a, there's a whole certification program for the use of psychedelic assistant therapies run by the international psychiatric.
- 22:36a society or something, but the IPI that's doesn't really rigorous training for people.
- 22:41So they actually understand how to manage if there were to be a complication, but also how to understand the medicines and how to appropriately apply the medicines and which
- 22:50medicine somebody is most likely to respond to.
- 22:53Right.
- 22:54So, yeah, it's it's very it's very nuanced.
- 22:57And then there's Ibogaine also, which is.
- 23:00a real heavy hitter in terms of PTSD and kind of rewiring the brain.
- 23:05You know, my sense of it, and I do have a number of experiences here, is that when you go into these spaces, it gives you a new set of possibilities to work with.
- 23:17All of a sudden, it's like you're not married to the past.
- 23:21You're actually seeing things through a different lens.
- 23:24You're experiencing quite honestly, the physical world through a different lens.
- 23:27You're experiencing your own mind through a different lens, your own body through a different lens.
- 23:31And all of a sudden you realize that everything that you thought was kind of hard and firm, and this is how it is.
- 23:37It's not, it's just your brain actually making that up, so to speak.
- 23:40Our brains create the reality.
- 23:42And so when you understand that there's that plasticity in what can be, it gives you...
- 23:47more confidence to say, you know, I can lead a completely different life.
- 23:51I can choose to be happy and live in gratitude and, know, from a loving place, create joy for myself and the rest of the planet.
- 23:57Right.
- 23:58And so it's very, very encouraging because if you haven't had the experience, how do know what it's like to laugh if you've never laughed?
- 24:05Right.
- 24:06I mean, it's you can look at something, tell you about it all day long, you know, just a laugh that you can't control.
- 24:11But if you've never experienced it, you've got to experience it.
- 24:14Right.
- 24:15So
- 24:15The psychedelics help open up that kind of uh experiential impact of reestablishing the experience, override the software to give you new hope and new ways forward.
- 24:26And then if you do the integration work, which I think is actually the most important thing to work with somebody on the back end of it to say, okay, what does this mean and
- 24:34how do we integrate it?
- 24:35And how do I, you know, heal the things that were there before and actually transcend them and become grateful for them because they've opened me up to.
- 24:42all this beautiful opportunity in front of me, that's kind of the full circle of it as I see it.
- 24:47So well said.
- 24:49So okay, another question I recently had brain imaging done to find out just how my brain works.
- 24:56Like I was very curious about it and not not in a like I wanted to know where's the blood flowing?
- 25:04Where is it?
- 25:05Is it flowing properly to the areas it should be?
- 25:09Is there actual physical trauma that has happened to my brain?
- 25:12Because I know I've had a couple concussions in my life.
- 25:15And so got all those results back and found out
- 25:19A couple of very interesting things.
- 25:20This is just for me, but I have a question.
- 25:22for me, the way the doctor explained it, based on the blood flow to certain parts of my brain, she could tell that there was actual physical trauma to, I wanna say it was maybe
- 25:32my temporal lobe.
- 25:33She was like, that's probably a head injury.
- 25:35I said, yes, the car accident.
- 25:37think my head hit the window.
- 25:38And then there was like a little.
- 25:41more blood flow to one area that they would not expect for a woman my age.
- 25:45Although she said my brain was super healthy, but she was like, you're a glass half empty kind of person.
- 25:50You're waiting for the, like that's how you're experiencing the world because this part of your brain is lit up more than it should be.
- 25:57So if you are positive, it's probably harder for you to get there because you're waiting for the other shoe to drop.
- 26:05So.
- 26:07When we're talking about this dealing with trauma and finding the joy past these experiences, we all have, know, I count my blessings that I'm able to go do a test like
- 26:19that and find that information out.
- 26:21She also told me I ruminate.
- 26:22She's like, you're a ruminator.
- 26:23I could tell because of what's lit up, which is also true.
- 26:26So if I have that sort of working against me a little bit, because those things are just how the blood is flowing.
- 26:34What if somebody doesn't know that?
- 26:36cause people will take that as your personality.
- 26:38People will say, well, you're just negative or, know, God, you get so fixated on one thing and you can't let it go.
- 26:46And they think that that's just you being stubborn.
- 26:49So one, how do we all start to realize and accept each other that, Hey, we have different ways that our brains work.
- 26:55And then also how do we start to move past those things to get to the joyful side?
- 27:01But.
- 27:02it's interesting approach.
- 27:03Matt, then you go ahead and then I'll chime in.
- 27:06first of all, it sounds like you did some SPECT imaging, I think, um not EEG.
- 27:11Yeah, okay.
- 27:12Yeah, yeah, not EEG.
- 27:14Yeah, okay.
- 27:15So if we just, so first of all, it's awesome.
- 27:17It's beautiful.
- 27:18I've sent people to Amon and they realized they were medicating the wrong part of the brain.
- 27:22So like, God bless Daniel and the work that they're doing there.
- 27:24It's amazing.
- 27:25So what I can tell you is that just universally, first of all, nervous system states,
- 27:31become personality traits over time.
- 27:34Neuroplasticity works both to make you a jerk and an angel, right?
- 27:38You can habituate to depression with neuroplasticity and you can habituate to joy with neuroplasticity.
- 27:44So the good news is until you're dead, your nervous system, brain has the ability to change.
- 27:48Everybody does.
- 27:49So we're clear about that.
- 27:51The other thing to understand is specifically about rumination.
- 27:54What we know in the literature is that rumination is a combination of an overactive limbic system.
- 27:59where the limbic system is just like on, meaning where the fight or flight system is, right?
- 28:03But it's paired with the right, not left, the right prefrontal cortex.
- 28:08So if you're in hypervigilance, which is what you're describing, your threat is always happening.
- 28:12First of all, there's body threat that's happening, which means vagal tone is probably low, sympathetic nervous system's probably habituated to being on, which means you
- 28:20probably have HPA access issues, I can imagine you've got digestion issues, all kinds of things that go along with that.
- 28:25So your HPA access is...
- 28:27kind of fried, vagal tone is kind of low.
- 28:29And if your brain is kind of stuck in this fight or flight place, what happens is limbic system is like has a six pack basically.
- 28:35And it connects to the right prefrontal cortex, which is creative and comes up with all of these what ifs.
- 28:41So it's fear, which is limbic system plus autobiographical memory, which is limbic system.
- 28:46So it's I'm afraid of my memories and I'm imagining more of them basically is what starts to happen.
- 28:50And it gets locked.
- 28:52So that state becomes a trait because neurons are fired together, wired together and you get locked.
- 28:57And so that's, so someone's in OCD or habituation of any, or reminiscence of kind, biologically, that's likely what's happening.
- 29:05What's this fix?
- 29:06Well, we want to down-regulate sympathetic.
- 29:08There's lots of ways to do that.
- 29:10My favorite way to do that is what's called a stellate ganglion block, where they do a nerve, an injection into the stellate ganglion, which is a nerve cluster on both sides of
- 29:20your neck.
- 29:21And they, it's an analgesic.
- 29:23It's a 15 minute procedure.
- 29:25And it's like an off switch for the sympathetic nervous system because the sympathetic nervous system goes up and down the spine and goes into the brain through the
- 29:31stelliganglion.
- 29:32With the stelliganglion block, it just turns it off basically so that that kind of like pattern stops.
- 29:38So you're not in this frozen state.
- 29:41The other thing to know is, is that if my amygdala and limbic system is firing and my right prefrontal cortex is like really strong and that connection has been happening, I
- 29:49need to boost the left side of the brain, the left prefrontal cortex.
- 29:52So there's a beautiful therapy called TMS.
- 29:54ah that basically stimulates the left side of the brain.
- 29:57And what happens is the left side of the prefrontal cortex, that's joy, that's goal attainment, that's where seeking comes from, that's where like optimism lives.
- 30:05So basically, the way I would describe it is likely your limbic system and your right prefrontal are like locked in there and they've been, it's kind of like you've ignored
- 30:14your legs, right?
- 30:15You've trained upper body, but like the left prefrontal cortex is like your legs.
- 30:19So you'd like practice.
- 30:21gratitude and like the ruminations like no, I don't want to do it stress, right?
- 30:25Practice optimism.
- 30:26Ketamine and some of these other agents can help lessen some of those connectivity uh connecting points also.
- 30:32But if you understand fundamentally biologically, my goal is to calm limbic activity and right prefrontal cortex dominance to calm sympathetic dominance and to grow the left side
- 30:44of my prefrontal cortex through joy activation, practicing gratitude, TMS, whatever it might be.
- 30:49it helps you understand it's not you, it's just the biology.
- 30:53And if you have that data, you can share that with others also and start to recognize, well, they're not grateful or they have a really strong right prefrontal and really strong
- 31:02limbic system and their left prefrontal cortex, just they haven't gone to the gym for that basically.
- 31:06And so when you think of it that way, it's less personal.
- 31:09And that's why I love saying the biology of things because every experience we have has a mechanism in the body.
- 31:14And if we can understand the mechanism, it's not an identity anymore.
- 31:18It's just something that's happened.
- 31:21think it's just so fascinating to know because I so many people we've said it, you know, the experience happens, they sort of become that experience.
- 31:30I can't move past this.
- 31:33I'm always going to only be this because this bad thing happened to me.
- 31:38And recognizing that there are so many things that are in our control to change it to improve it and to get to that joyful place.
- 31:48I think that that's encouraging.
- 31:50So, yeah.
- 31:53really.
- 31:53And the way that we go about it is very similar to what Madison is talking about.
- 31:58And of course, because we're starting off with genetics and everybody does kind of a ground floor, we can actually see who's predisposed to rumination, who's predisposed to
- 32:07depression and through what mechanisms.
- 32:09Like in my own genetics, I'm predisposed to depression.
- 32:13Right.
- 32:14And I, and I suffered with depression, uh, at various points in my life.
- 32:17And it wasn't until I did the genetics and figure out, Oh, I'm an MTHFD1, uh, snip that's homozygous and I don't methylate, uh, well through several other genes.
- 32:28And if I simply get myself on the right combination of B vitamins and some Sammy, right.
- 32:34help boost serotonin and dopamine production.
- 32:38Um, I don't get depressed anymore.
- 32:40So we can.
- 32:43We have to realize that it's really important for the listeners to understand that even though you were born with a certain set of genetics, it's a manipulable, manipulatable
- 32:52scenario, right?
- 32:53They're basically levers you can pull and know you're not going to grow from five feet to six feet, but you certainly can change the way your brain works.
- 33:00And even if you're predisposed to OCD or anxiety, because there are genes that predispose people to that, there are levers you can pull.
- 33:08There are supplements you can take that actually
- 33:11help you to make that transition.
- 33:13So it's not just you kind of trying to will yourself out of where you are currently.
- 33:17And then if you do that and you add in, you know, good therapy for deeper understanding and you add in some of these experiences, which can be, you know, they can be somebody
- 33:27giving you a hug or having a close friend or a really super close relationship with a loving partner or a psychedelic assisted therapy.
- 33:36Then all of a sudden you can actually
- 33:38really flip the script on yourself.
- 33:40And all of sudden it's like, what do I want to be?
- 33:44Right?
- 33:44I think if you're listening to this, you should ask yourself, how do I really want to be?
- 33:48Right?
- 33:49Because I don't necessarily want to be glass half empty.
- 33:52I want to be glass half full.
- 33:53Well, then, OK, if you want that, then the question is, how do I get that?
- 33:57And since everything happens, I think, with the questions you start asking, that's what's going to empower you.
- 34:02You don't want to identify with anything except
- 34:05what it is you want to be.
- 34:06I think that's a big step.
- 34:07So, yeah.
- 34:10Very important.
- 34:11So if we're talking all about this, let like, keep using the word joy.
- 34:16Masson, how would you define the word joy?
- 34:20Especially like from the nervous system perspective.
- 34:25Well, from, if we go pure nervous system, joy, you could call joy the ultimate purpose of the nervous system.
- 34:35So if you look at how the nervous system's evolved, we have these sort of like, through polyvagal theory, we understand we have these sort of three parts of the nervous system.
- 34:42We have the dorsal vagal branch, which is sub diaphragmatic.
- 34:44We have the sympathetic nervous system up and down the spine.
- 34:47And we have the ventral vagal branch, which is from the diaphragm.
- 34:50And part of the nervous system is also the brain.
- 34:53and the most advanced parts of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, have the most opioid receptors of anywhere in our body.
- 35:01What does that mean?
- 35:02It means that evolution prefers an opioid experience, and by the way, joy is an opioid, just so we're super clear, right?
- 35:11Those types of feelings are opioid-ergic, they're joyful experiences.
- 35:16So joy is kind of our best biological advantage.
- 35:19And if you think about,
- 35:21collaboration, you think about working together, you think about what gives us a competitive advantage.
- 35:25It is those joyful states, you come up with better solutions, better answers.
- 35:30You're also typically living with purpose and meaning.
- 35:33You're not in isolation, you're together.
- 35:35There's a lot of things that have to happen for you to have joy that's not coming from a pill, right?
- 35:39And so I think joy is our ultimate purpose.
- 35:42And I'm not saying that just like esoterically or just spiritually, though I do believe that to be true.
- 35:47The biology,
- 35:48the evolution shows that the joy receptors have been not just preserved, multiplied as we've evolved.
- 35:56And so that tells us that evolution, whether you believe in God or not, that's your, personally I do, but evolution, even if you're an atheist, you gotta get on board with
- 36:05this, evolution prefers that we're in a joyful state.
- 36:08Otherwise we wouldn't be seeing the multiplication of opioid receptors as our machinery becomes more advanced.
- 36:13We'd see the pruning of.
- 36:15It'd be hard, that wouldn't be about, so to me joy is the goal.
- 36:18It's the best survival strategy.
- 36:20It's the best place to come from in terms of any type of relationship.
- 36:24mean, someone's in a bad state, think about that.
- 36:26If you're in a negative state, you're not gonna have a great relationship.
- 36:29If you're in a negative state, you're probably not gonna be producing the best outcomes in your business.
- 36:33And this is not false positivity, by the way.
- 36:35This is like legit joy.
- 36:37We're wired for it.
- 36:38And it comes through relationship, it comes through purpose, it comes through meaning, it comes through knowing what you need, it comes through.
- 36:43how you communicate to yourself, comes through how you communicate with others.
- 36:47All those things help us live in that state and our biology prefers it.
- 36:52Okay, so to get to joy, we need a regulated nervous system.
- 36:58What does an actual regulated nervous system look like compared to maybe just, you know, I'm calm.
- 37:07Like right now I'm calm, but does that mean my nervous system's regulated because I'm calm?
- 37:12Yeah, actually it could be the opposite.
- 37:13So calm and regulated are not the same.
- 37:15Great question.
- 37:16You can be calm and dissociated.
- 37:18You can be calm and checked out.
- 37:20You can be calm and shut down, right?
- 37:21A regulated nervous system is no different than what does it mean to be like a highly efficient athlete?
- 37:29Okay.
- 37:29So if you think about best example, I'm a coach.
- 37:32I'm going to use a sports analogy.
- 37:33It's going to happen.
- 37:34Okay.
- 37:35So Tom Brady is the best example.
- 37:3745 was, I think he was 45 when he left the NFL.
- 37:40Okay.
- 37:41He trained his body to take a hit without being taken out.
- 37:46He could get hit and not get injured.
- 37:48A regulated nervous system can take a hit without being taken out.
- 37:52You can experience grief.
- 37:54You can experience disappointment.
- 37:56You can experience upset and not be taken out.
- 37:58You can experience the highs and the lows and not be taken out.
- 38:02So you are able to come back into some type of homeostasis.
- 38:06And so,
- 38:07A regulated nervous system is a nervous system that can tolerate and experience the wide range of human emotion and not get taken out, not get taken off purpose, not get taken off
- 38:17mission.
- 38:18So I think a lot of times we think a regular nervous system is numb or it's not feeling it or it's calmness where it's actually, no, I can actually feel anxiety and be okay.
- 38:27I can feel depression and be okay.
- 38:29I can feel grief and be okay.
- 38:31Cause I know I can come back.
- 38:33That's what a regulated nervous system is.
- 38:34And it's, it's, it's really about fitness.
- 38:37except for this is emotional fitness versus physical fitness.
- 38:41So really what you're describing and the way we would think about it is robustness and resilience.
- 38:46And robustness is basically having some part of yourself that's strong enough to take an unexpected challenge and actually be minimally impacted by it.
- 38:56And resilience is the ability to meet an unexpected challenge, to be impacted by it, but to come back from it uh as strong or even stronger in an antifragile sense, even stronger
- 39:08than you were before.
- 39:10One of the things that we can measure here in the office actually is how strong somebody's nervous system is.
- 39:16We hooked them up to a little device for five minutes and we can actually see how much power do they have in the vagus nerve, which is an indicator of how much power and
- 39:24resilience they have in the nervous system, not only to, to regulate internal organ function, but also to manage emotional and stress function, if you will.
- 39:34And one of the interesting things, and I'll just bring in the longevity piece of this is there were recent, a recent trial.
- 39:40published that showed that regenerative therapies like stem cells and peptides and things like that work better in somebody that has more parasympathetic nervous system tone and
- 39:51has a higher level of parasympathetic nervous system control.
- 39:56Because when you do have sympathetic nervous system dominance, it's putting your organs under a lot of stress and it's increasing in inflammation, it's increasing.
- 40:04So now you're trying to regenerate in a
- 40:06environment that's trying to tear you down, right?
- 40:09It's like people are trying to tear down the house where you're trying to build it.
- 40:12So that's, that's interesting in and of itself.
- 40:14I think, I think training the parasympathetic nervous system becomes super important.
- 40:19And Masson alluded to the cellulite ganglion injection.
- 40:22There's a, there's a company out there called Rezona that has a little pendant that hangs down in front of your heart that actually will.
- 40:29put signals into your parasympathetic, into your vagus nerve and actually strengthen parasympathetic nervous system tone.
- 40:36And then there's a device called brain tap, right?
- 40:38Which is basically binaural beats in your each ear and photobiomodulation.
- 40:43And if you use that on a regular basis, we see people dramatically increase the power in their vagus nerve.
- 40:50Interestingly enough, doing cardiovascular exercise, is like an athlete, like a marathon or has a low heart rate because they've got a very strong parasympathetic nervous system.
- 40:59Well, if you're doing cardio as opposed to resistance training, resistance training is important and good, but it's cardio that's really going to build that power.
- 41:06So these are ways that if you're listening to this and you want to get started, it's like, well, I could, I could pick up a brain tap.
- 41:13I could start doing more cardio.
- 41:14I could maybe go, you know, buy something that would actually stimulate my.
- 41:19biggest nerve to get stronger.
- 41:20and I think it's one of those things that feeds off itself.
- 41:23You know, when you start to feel it a little bit, you start to feel it a little bit more.
- 41:27It's like learning to meditate, right?
- 41:29initially you're keep falling off the bike because it's like, I don't know, I'm thinking about stuff, but then you get the little bit of that glide.
- 41:35It's like, Oh, okay.
- 41:37There it is.
- 41:38Everything is calm and everything I'm connected.
- 41:40And then you get more of that.
- 41:41It reinforces itself.
- 41:42So I think all those things can be, can be helpful here.
- 41:46Yeah.
- 41:46I love that so much.
- 41:48I want to say one more thing.
- 41:49I'm sorry, just on this topic.
- 41:50So just around nervous system regulation, and I'm gonna pick up what Dr.
- 41:53Lund just said.
- 41:54So I love the idea of being able to sort of like make peptides or whatever work better because you're in parasympathetic.
- 42:03I think that's so awesome.
- 42:05So let's riff on that for a second.
- 42:07People use this term nervous system regulation, but why are you regulating?
- 42:13So for example,
- 42:14If you're regulating a nervous system that's in a toxic relationship and you're using nervous system regulation tools to tolerate a toxic relationship better, that's a bad
- 42:25thing.
- 42:26You shouldn't, we won't want to do that, right?
- 42:28We want to regulate the grief of leaving a toxic relationship.
- 42:32We don't want to regulate staying in it, right?
- 42:34We want to regulate the fear of going for the goal, not the regret of not going for it.
- 42:41And
- 42:41so,
- 42:42It's also why are you regulating it?
- 42:44What's the purpose of your regulation?
- 42:46If you're regulating to cope with avoidance, that's a bad strategy.
- 42:51We want to regulate going for it, leaving, grief, expansion, joy, movement forward, not, hey, let me get all these tools so I can stay in this bad marriage longer.
- 43:03Does that make sense?
- 43:04it's a, it's a, it's a perfect comment.
- 43:07I think it makes a ton of sense really.
- 43:08It's basically using the power that you have to optimize your life as opposed to tolerate an existence.
- 43:14Right.
- 43:14So yeah, I think that's, I think that's super important.
- 43:18I think on the, um, on the joy front too, I think that, that can sort of really function as a North star in that.
- 43:28in that scenario, right?
- 43:29So for me on some, actually, I will say in some deep meditative psychedelic assisted moments, I got directly in touch with consciousness and it was pure love.
- 43:39It's just pure love.
- 43:40And when you have that feeling of pure love, then the question was, well, why pure love?
- 43:45And it's like, well, what does love love to do?
- 43:47It loves to create.
- 43:48We have this unfolding multiverse all around us, right?
- 43:51It's love loves to create.
- 43:53And what is the
- 43:54What's the feedback loop on creation for love?
- 43:56It's joy.
- 43:57So I realized being part of this universe from a loving place to create joy is really my purpose here.
- 44:04And if you identify your underlying purpose of why you're here, then it becomes a North Star for you.
- 44:10It's like, well, if I'm not feeling joy, then I'm not in my, I'm not aligned with why I'm really here, right?
- 44:15So I think that's an important thing for people to understand too.
- 44:19Amen.
- 44:20Yeah.
- 44:20I think there's one other thing about what you were talking about leaving a bad relationship or whatever is that for a lot of people, we find that safety is the big
- 44:30issue, right?
- 44:31It's really, a lot of this boils down to safety.
- 44:33Will I be financially safe?
- 44:35Will I be emotionally safe?
- 44:36Will my kids be safe?
- 44:37You know, whatever we're going to do.
- 44:40And so it's a really interesting thing because I've had the realization that nothing external to us can ever make us feel safe.
- 44:49All of it can be taken away.
- 44:51I don't care how much money you have.
- 44:52I don't care where you live.
- 44:53don't care.
- 44:54I don't care about any of that.
- 44:55All of it can be gone.
- 44:57And so the, it becomes an inside question, right?
- 45:00How do I give myself not only unconditional love, but how do I give myself safety?
- 45:05And when you feel truly safe, when you feel truly safe and you have a strong, resilient, powerful parasympathetic nervous system, now you're actually able to walk into every
- 45:16situation.
- 45:18to receive and to funnel reception of loving energy into the room.
- 45:24It's a really phenomenal way to live.
- 45:27And it's really different than I'd lived for so many years of my life, but it's a phenomenal way to live.
- 45:32So this is where you wanna go.
- 45:33But it's important to have a clear idea of where you wanna go.
- 45:37And then you can get there.
- 45:38Then you start asking the right questions, right?
- 45:40So, yeah.
- 45:41So well said, yes.
- 45:43want to circle back just for a second, because what I want to make sure we're clear about, especially for listeners, is when you're referring to regulation of the nervous system,
- 45:53and then you said it's being able to handle those hits without getting thrown, without getting taken out.
- 46:00Okay.
- 46:01So I want you to maybe explain a little bit more what you mean by taken out, because if I lose a loved one and I'm sad,
- 46:10for several days or several weeks or even several months.
- 46:14Does that mean I've been taken out or is that just a part of the grieving morning process?
- 46:20Does that mean I'm dysregulated because I'm feeling those human emotions and now I have to re-regulate or is that, no, I felt the emotion and I came back from it.
- 46:30So what do we mean exactly by that?
- 46:32yeah.
- 46:32So it's great question.
- 46:34So first of all, just to go back to Tom Brady for a second, right?
- 46:37Imagine Tom training or any athlete training, right?
- 46:40And certainly in football.
- 46:41Okay, I wanna train to play, but nobody can tackle me.
- 46:47Like, you can't do that, right?
- 46:49Tackles come with the game, right?
- 46:51So like you're gonna metaphorically be tackled by a loved one passing or something ending.
- 46:56Dr.
- 46:57Gladden's point, everything will be taken away at some point, right?
- 46:59I think love in general to love someone is such a courageous thing, because that love will end at some point, no matter what, just the way life works, right?
- 47:06So when we talk about regulation, dysregulation, and re-regulation, are we talking acutely or chronically?
- 47:12So for example, again, back to working out, right?
- 47:15The way you build muscle is you go into a catabolic state, you train it, you wear it down, you create micro trauma, but then there's an anabolic repair process of recovery with
- 47:23proper nutrition and rest where you get stronger, right?
- 47:26That would be acute dysregulation and re-regulation.
- 47:30Completely different than I went in and I did a squat and I tore something and now I'm out for a year and I to go through a rehab process, right?
- 47:40So it's what degree of injury is caused in your system by certain things.
- 47:45So if a loved one passes, should you feel grief?
- 47:48Absolutely.
- 47:49But should it cause you to not care about life and not achieve your goals and...
- 47:54withdraw from relationships and just, you know, Netflix by yourself and eat food and go into this tunnel?
- 47:59Like probably not, right?
- 48:00So like there's a spectrum of normal human emotion that we want to be able to handle.
- 48:06And if something really intense happens, can I re-regulate in the moment, but also over time, right?
- 48:12Cause yes, you know, many traditions will sit shiver.
- 48:15There'll be an honoring process of a grief process and grief is a really hard emotion to deal with.
- 48:20But if it takes you out, if you stop,
- 48:23doing the things that you love, that's what we're talking about.
- 48:25It's like, yes, but we don't want to anesthetize ourselves from feeling.
- 48:32Because at the end of the day, it's just emotions that we're talking about here, right?
- 48:35So can I experience something and come back, and how long have I been out?
- 48:40the measure is frequency, intensity, duration.
- 48:44How frequently does it happen?
- 48:46How intense is it?
- 48:48And how long does it last?
- 48:49So if those markers are going down,
- 48:52good for negative experiences.
- 48:54And then conversely, we want frequency, intensity, and duration of positive experiences to increase.
- 48:59So if your frequency, intensity, and duration is making your negative emotion, is making you not able to live your life, causing suicidal ideation, making you withdraw from
- 49:08relationships, causing you to gain weight, whatever it might be, now we have a problem.
- 49:13Does that make sense?
- 49:13So it's chronic versus acute.
- 49:16That's how I think of it.
- 49:17really helpful distinction.
- 49:19Mm hmm.
- 49:20Yeah, I think I think that's a great, great answer.
- 49:23I also think that in losing a loved one and I've lost both my parents and a sister.
- 49:28What's interesting is that when you have a let's call it a resilient or robust nervous system, you're actually able to allow yourself to feel profoundly deeply.
- 49:39Yes.
- 49:40really deep.
- 49:41You can remember all the sweet moments.
- 49:43You could remember all the good things.
- 49:45You can be so grateful for the love they gave you and the love you shared together.
- 49:49Right.
- 49:50You can go so deep on that.
- 49:51So emotion was such emotional depth because you also on the backside have the confidence that even though they left, that you're not alone and that you're still safe.
- 50:03And so when you have this sense of safety, this internal sense of safety and and
- 50:08nervous system robustness, it's not that you need to mitigate your feelings.
- 50:13You're not impacted to where you curl up in a ball, but you're also not trying to minimize your feelings.
- 50:19You're actually, as an honoring to them almost, just go deep into those emotions, knowing that it's safe to do that and that you're going to come back out of it.
- 50:28So it enables you, quite honestly, to, I think, lead a richer life.
- 50:32You can experience more.
- 50:34than most people can because they avoid it because they're afraid of it.
- 50:38But you don't have to be afraid of it.
- 50:39You can step into the depths of love and sadness and joy and all of these things.
- 50:44It's a really makes for a very rich fabric of life.
- 50:47That's right.
- 50:48There seems to be a correlation out of between, there's two different types of pain in the body, well, more than two, but make it simple.
- 50:55There's physical pain that you get from the physical body and there's emotional pain, right?
- 51:00And there's some, this isn't always true and this is not research, this is my observation.
- 51:05There seems to be something about people who are really good with emotional pain have a harder time tolerating physical pain and people who have a really easy time tolerating
- 51:14physical pain have a harder time with emotional pain.
- 51:17Right.
- 51:17It's kind of interesting, but if you think about like pushing through the next set on a squat, right.
- 51:23Or, you know, Turkish get up or pushing through on like a race or, you know, at a, at a hard workout, it's the same concept, but just with emotional pain.
- 51:32And so it's also, what is your relationship to pain and can you tolerate physical discomfort so that you can get physical fitness and can you tolerate emotional discomfort
- 51:43so that you can get emotional fitness also is a way to think about
- 51:46Yeah, I tell people that all the time in my workouts.
- 51:48I'm like, we're training for life.
- 51:50You prove to yourself that you can handle the discomfort here so that when life throws you discomfort, mentally, you're strong enough.
- 51:57Like you push through in the workout because you're building mental strength and fortitude to do that in life.
- 52:05So I think it's a great pairing combination like training.
- 52:09oh
- 52:11Cool.
- 52:11I would say, I guess I have one more question.
- 52:14Like as we're wrapping up, we've talked about a lot of things like, Massen, what would be your advice to somebody just like what is the first step someone would take to try to move
- 52:25from like their survival to their thriving?
- 52:30Yeah, it's a great question.
- 52:32So in my observation and the research I've done, the literature I've read, the fastest way to regular nervous system towards something like that is to come out of isolation in the
- 52:44thing that you're struggling with.
- 52:45You can be surrounded by people and be not alone, but you're alone with what you're holding.
- 52:51Right.
- 52:52And so finding one person, it could be a coach, a therapist, a doctor, a friend, a trusted person, someone trusted.
- 53:01that you can actually tell what you're struggling to with.
- 53:05And they can be with you in that shared context.
- 53:07That's called co-regulation.
- 53:09Fastest way to regulate the nervous system.
- 53:10There's certain people, I just think of them, I feel calm.
- 53:13They walk into the room, I feel calm.
- 53:15They didn't touch me.
- 53:15There's no breath work.
- 53:16I didn't do anything yet.
- 53:17Just seeing them calms me down, right?
- 53:20Other people, I look at them, I get super stressed.
- 53:22Just the thought of them, we're seeing them, right?
- 53:24So I think not just the idea of loneliness, the loneliness epidemic, it's not just...
- 53:30about people being around you.
- 53:33It's about are you known?
- 53:35And if you're struggling with something, is there a person, one person that you can share something with that you're holding by yourself, even if you're surrounded by a thousand
- 53:45people, right?
- 53:46You're still alone in that experience.
- 53:49I think the first thing to do is to step into some co-regulation around that so you can have a shared context so you're not holding something by yourself.
- 53:55That'd be the first thing I would do.
- 53:58Yeah, I think that's, I think that's right.
- 54:00I think, you know, when I think about what's what a great relationship is, right?
- 54:04To me, it's to know and be known and to love and be loved.
- 54:07And if you can find someone that that you can, and that takes being vulnerable, quite honestly.
- 54:12So when you bring this forward, it's going to feel like a courageous conversation.
- 54:15It's like, I'm not sure if you're ready to hear this, but if you're willing to ask them or autumn.
- 54:20I've got something to share.
- 54:21And if you say yes, and it's like, you're going to get to know me better because I'm going to be vulnerable.
- 54:26So you have to realize that to make progress, you're going to need to make yourself vulnerable.
- 54:30And that's going to feel a little scary.
- 54:33And you may try with one person and then not the right person, but if you, if you realize that you will find the right person and then you can start to build together, that's,
- 54:43that's a really cool thing.
- 54:44And even that you learn resilience and you learn, you know, basically how to move forward.
- 54:49So, yeah.
- 54:51That's right.
- 54:53This has been fascinating for me, filled with so much information.
- 54:57It's given me a lot to think about, so I'm sure it's given the listeners quite a bit to think about as well.
- 55:01Massen, have any final thoughts for us?
- 55:04I'm just, first of grateful to be here.
- 55:06And just also, just, I'm so hopeful about the future because everything that, you know, glad longevity is doing in terms of understanding genetics, understanding gut microbiome,
- 55:16understanding like all the biological mechanisms and getting so precise on the data.
- 55:20It's like so amazing what can happen.
- 55:23And I'm filled with so much hope.
- 55:24And you pair that with, you know, the biological understanding of how to regulate the nervous system.
- 55:28the value of purpose and organizing principle to guide towards the understanding that we're wired for joy.
- 55:33The combination of all that to me gives me so much hope for the future.
- 55:36And you know, the world's becoming more trauma aware.
- 55:39But I think that, you know, surviving trauma and identifying that and working through that is a hero's or heroine's quest.
- 55:47It's a big deal to get there.
- 55:49And it's not the end.
- 55:50There's more.
- 55:51There's more joy.
- 55:52There's more buttons and there's more availability of all the good stuff possible.
- 55:56Now more than ever.
- 55:58And so I just, I feel more excited about the future than I ever have as all of these things are sort of coming together.
- 56:04We're starting to understand how we work and what we need.
- 56:06So that's, that's where I am in all this.
- 56:09Yeah, I would I would echo that.
- 56:12And I think that if you're listening to this, you should realize that each of us is on a hero's journey to reclaim our birthright, to live unencumbered, right?
- 56:22Unencumbered by things that have happened in the stories we've told ourselves and to live into a place of love, creating joy.
- 56:30And the interesting thing is that when you start to move into that space, you attract it to you.
- 56:34You'll find other people and you will have more love in your life.
- 56:38So I think, I think, you know, what I tell clients here and I had a client, I was a little late to this podcast cause we were finishing up with a client, was, know, I tell them to
- 56:46all of life comes down to one thing, right?
- 56:50And, know, in longevity, we say it's never about one thing, right?
- 56:53It's going to be a whole bunch of things that are going to get you there.
- 56:55But in life, I think it really does just come down to one thing and that's optimizing your nervous system.
- 57:00You know, how you think, what you feel.
- 57:02what you believe, what you think is possible, what you believe about the past, the stories you tell yourself, how you move through space.
- 57:08And so I really, really appreciate you being on the show, Madison, because I think it's the pinnacle of really what we do is to optimize the nervous system.
- 57:17Good to see you again, Autumn.
- 57:18Thanks for all your great questions.
- 57:20Yeah.
- 57:20both for letting me be a part of this conversation.
- 57:23really appreciate it.
- 57:24It's been so insightful.
- 57:25Mastin, where can people follow you, learn more about your coaching?
- 57:30I know you said you might have some events coming up for us.
- 57:33Where can they follow along so that they can stay informed?
- 57:36sure.
- 57:36Just Mastin Kipp, M-A-S-T-I-N-K-I-P-P on all the things.
- 57:40So just wherever you are, Instagram, TikTok websites, the places, know, whatever, all the places.
- 57:46Just Mastin Kipp.
- 57:47Yeah.
- 57:48omnipresent.
- 57:49Okay.
- 57:50Moved in a deity state.
- 57:52Yeah.
- 57:52Good.
- 57:54All right.
- 57:54Great to see you guys.
- 57:55Thanks so much.