The Liz Moody Podcast - Top Doctor: This Nervous System Reset Stops Migraines, Sugar Cravings, Exhaustion, & More

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

 If you're dealing with a health issue, your underlying trauma might be the source, and this top doctor says if you don’t address it, it will continue to manifest in different ways. The solution? Resetting your nervous system. Dr. Aimie Apigian, a double board certified physician with master's degrees in biochemistry and public health shares completely paradigm-shifting ideas about the science of how all of us are dealing with trauma that's impacting our bodies at a cellular level and exactly what we can do to change that. 🎧 What you’ll learn: • The hidden link between chronic illness and stored trauma • How to read your nervous system's "dashboard" • The 5 patterns stored trauma creates in your life • Why talking about your childhood in therapy may not be enough  • The one language shift that can keep you out of overwhelm • The biology behind why trauma becomes physical For more from Dr. Aimie Apigian:  • Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/draimie  • Website: https://www.biologyoftrauma.com/  • Book, The Biology of Trauma: https://www.biologyoftrauma.com/book  Ready to uplevel every part of your life? Order Liz’s book 100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success now!  Connect with Liz on Instagram @lizmoody or online at www.lizmoody.com. Subscribe to the substack by visiting https://lizmoody.substack.com/welcome.Buy our cute sweatshirts, conversation cards, and more at https://shop.lizmoody.com/. Use our discount codes from our  highly vetted and tested brand partners by visiting https://www.lizmoody.com/codes.  To join The Liz Moody Podcast Club Facebook group, go to www.facebook.com/groups/thelizmoodypodcast. This episode is brought to you completely free thanks to the following podcast sponsors: • Timeline: visit Timeline.com/Liz to save up to 39% off. • PaleoValley: head to PaleoValley.com/LizMoody or use code LizMoody at checkout for 15% off your first purchase. • Lumebox: right now get 40% off, that's $260 off the regular price of $629, when you go to TheLumeBox.com/Liz. • OneSkin: go to OneSkin.co/Liz and use code LIZ to get 15% OFF for a limited time. • Pique: head to PiqueLife.com/LizMoody for 20% off + a FREE Starter Kit on $100+ of subscriptions.  The Liz Moody Podcast cover art by Zack. The Liz Moody Podcast music by Alex Ruimy. This podcast and website represents the opinions of Liz Moody and her guests to the show. The content here should not be taken as medical advice. The content here is for information purposes only, and because each person is so unique, please consult your healthcare professional for any medical questions. The Liz Moody Podcast Episode 434. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So what I'm going to have you do is I'm going to have you lift up a heavy rock above your head. I'll give you a rock. Here you go. Oh, like literally heavy. Whatever it is, like double that, triple that. Like, I want you struggling right now. Okay. So if you're struggling, but being successful, this is the stress response.

And you're like, yeah, this is hard, but I'm doing it. We're going to let that rock crush us. Exactly. Right there. What do you notice happening in your body is you let the rock crush you? Like a heaviness, a tightness in my chest. That's it. That's it. That's exactly what overwhelmed feels like.

And what would be thoughts that come into your mind as you let this rock crush you? Like more of a despair and helplessness. That's it. We can recognize our states based on sensations in our body. Our thoughts are just generated by our state. I notice the thought and be like, oh, isn't that interesting? That thought tells me where your physiology is right now. I'm not going to ask you to change your thought.

I'm going to ask you to change your physiology because then that physiology will change your thinking. So how do we change our physiology in that moment? If you're exhausted, if you are anxious, if you are depressed, if you're dealing with gut issues or autoimmune conditions, or bad perimenopause symptoms, if you're stressed and overwhelmed by day-to-day life, it might be because you have not addressed your underlying trauma.

And until you address it, it's going to continue to show up in your brain, in your body, and in your interactions with other people and the world around you. Dr. Amy Epigian, a double board certified physician with master's degrees in biochemistry and public health, has an approach to feeling good that I have never heard anywhere else. Her new book is called The Biology of Trauma. It features a glowing forward from Dr. Gabor Mate and completely revolutionary paradigm shifting ideas about trauma.

In this episode, she's going to share the science of how all of us, whether we feel like we had bad childhoods or not, are dealing with trauma that's literally impacting our bodies at a cellular level. And do not worry, she's also going to share exactly what we can do to change that. Welcome to the Liz Moody podcast, where we believe that there is always something that you can do to create a life that feels amazing. And we help you figure out how to find the lever to pull at any moment to actually do that. Amy, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. I have listened to your show for a long time. So I'm excited to now be the one that can share some thoughts, share some actionable steps. And you have some thoughts that are really, really different than what I've heard from anybody else.

So I think there's some really paradigm shifting stuff in here, and I'm really excited to get into it. So let's start with what are some signs, some things we could look out for on like a daily or weekly basis that trauma might be having an impact on our bodies? I want people to look for patterns. I want people to look for, is this a pattern in my life? is this a pattern in my relationships? This is a pattern in my health because stored trauma will always create patterns. So we're looking for patterns, not isolated symptoms, not, wow, I've never done that before. It's this idea of, I keep doing this, Liz. Man, I keep emotionally eating. I keep coming home and I feel lonely and I feel sad and I find myself on the couch and watching movies or I always pick

fights. Why do I pick fights around family and I always seem to have this reaction. to my family member, and especially as we go to want to change that and be something different, be a different version of ourselves, and we find it hard to change our patterns, that's when we know it's not just a habit. It's not just a personality trait. There's something deeper there. I also have heard you say that if you need caffeine or carbs in the morning, that might be a sign that you have some hidden trauma. Can you talk to me about that connection? Most people wake up in a trauma physiology. We would call that overwhelm. They wake up overwhelmed. They wake up, not wanting to wake up. And so they're in this state of heaviness, maybe hopelessness,

maybe like, ugh, that feeling of I am already overwhelmed by my day that hasn't even started. And in order to overcome that physiology, we have to create energy. We have to give ourselves adrenaline. This is where we can look at the pattern. What do you? you do to get going in the morning? Do you wake up and have that first thought or feeling of, ugh, and you're looking for that first cup of coffee? You're looking for maybe the morning exercise. You're looking for the stress and you procrastinate and delay until then you've really got to hurry. That's all a pattern of needing adrenaline to overcome this heaviness that stored trauma creates. And I've also heard you say that it's sort of a sign that we've,

grown comfortable with a lack of safety because lack of safety is what's familiar is what's comforting to us. Can you speak more to that concept? This is fascinating because when we look at our survival system and how we survive life, it always comes down to our nervous system. Our nervous system is our survival system and it will adapt to any environment that we are in. Just looking at our childhood, for example, our nervous system would have organized itself around who do I need to be in my family in order to survive this family. I see you're relating to that. Who do I need to be?

And I'm going to organize myself around being that, except that because our nervous system is organizing, it's what creates these patterns that last long beyond that environment. We take them into adulthood. We take them into our new relationships, our marriages. We take those patterns. and continue them. And so many of those patterns we can see, I organized myself around not ever really feeling safe, always having to be on guard, on edge, never really being able to relax

and feel good about resting. Always had to be productive. Always had to go, go, go. And if that's how our nervous system organized, Liz, here's the crazy thing. That's the what now feels safe, not because it's actual safety, but because it's familiar. And familiar is a degree of safety, even if it's unhealthy. So just to be super clear for anybody listening, like when we're reaching for that cup of coffee, when we're rushing out the door, that's because we find a certain comfort in chaos, because that's what's become the most familiar feeling for It can simply be because we are familiar and comfortable with that level of stress. And so we create that and we perpetuate that.

So that's a sign that everything in this episode is going to apply to the person listening. I want to go through some of the other sneaky signs of trauma that I've heard is a startle response, a sign of trauma. The startle response is the first step of the body's trauma response. There are five steps. they're very sequential, they're very predictable, they're very science-based. And the startle is the first step. Maybe it's an actual startle where you're jumping and it can be, I look at an email and I have

that like, something must be wrong. I wonder what's going to. Like you almost assume the worst case scenario. You assume the worst because that's what the start of response is. It's predicting danger just to be able to check it out and see is this actual danger. If you are having that to things that other people might view as more benign, that might be a sign that you're stuck in this first stage of trauma. You're stuck looping between the steps. Okay.

And the startle step will then trigger the rest of the steps. We're looking for patterns in this pattern of, I jump easily, I startle easily. That is a sign that your nervous system is always on edge and it's just looping between those steps of the trauma response. And we're going to get into all of the steps, but I want to keep going through these sneaky signs because maybe Maybe they'll come up in those too. Over-apologizing. Is that a sign of trauma? Over-apologizing.

Isn't that an interesting pattern? What is it a reflection of? It's usually a reflection of, I'm so sorry that I'm taking up space. I'm so sorry that I exist. I don't feel like I deserve to have a voice. Don't deserve to have needs. So I'm just, I'm so sorry. Whatever it is, I'm just so sorry.

And so this is part of the belief. beliefs that we conform about ourselves based on our previous experiences that show that we still have adapted to a certain way of surviving life. And we think that in order to survive and be okay, I just can't have any needs. I feel like this is one that you see more often, not exclusively, but more often in women. It is. And I feel like there's so much of our environment that we are born into and were raised with this idea still that women, girls are supposed to be kind and sweet and soft and you're the caretaker. And if that's how we're groomed to be, then when that anger shows up, what do we do with that? We stuff that down. No, no, no, I'm supposed to be only nice. I'm not

supposed to speak up for myself. I'm not supposed to set boundaries. I'm not supposed to say, that is not okay to do that to me, to talk to me like that, to treat me like that. I feel so much of that is still a cultural environment. We simply adapt to the environments in which we are in. Yeah. And one of the things that I really like about your work is, I think a lot of people hear the word trauma. And they're like, no, no, no, like my childhood was fine. I can't point to a specific incident. I'm comparing myself to other people's trauma and being like, no, no, I was, it was totally fine. And you're like, trauma can come from so many places. It can come from the culture that we're raised in it, can come from the societal rules that we're ingesting at any given moment. And you're like,

we don't need to focus on the history. We need to focus on the felt sense in the present. If you have these felt sensations, you have trauma and there are things that can help. Yes, 100%. Most of my patients coming in, sitting in front of me with chronic diseases, and they're coming back and saying, I don't relate to the word trauma. I don't think that I have stored trauma. And yet I'm seeing that they have a trauma body. Your whole body is yelling at me that it has so much stored pain,

fear, overwhelm. That's what trauma actually looks like. It's not going to look like a big bad event necessarily. So when you're looking at somebody you're like, they have a trauma body. What do you mean specifically by that? is a biology that our nervous system both creates and is maintained by from the changes that happen. And so we're looking at disease. And disease is the fifth pattern that is very predictable when we

have stored trauma. Now, disease doesn't mean a diagnosis. It means symptoms, means conditions, maybe, maybe a diagnosis. But I'm talking about something that has become chronic. your insulin resistance, your metabolic syndrome, your high blood pressure, anything that you take supplements or medications for on a chronic basis because of a chronic health issue. I am of the opinion now that all chronic health issues are really a biology of trauma. The more health issues that a person has, then the more that their body is yelling, we are living from a place of pain, fear, and overwhelm. We don't have what we need to get healthy.

Yeah, that's interesting. So we're going through these sneaky signs, and maybe we can come back to some of these, but you're saying one huge sign that you have trauma is that you have this physical health manifestation of it. When we're talking about IBS, when we're talking about migraines, when we're talking about autoimmune conditions, we should be talking about trauma.

Is that correct? We should be talking about stored trauma. We should be talking about nervous system, safety, regulation. Absolutely. It's a huge hypothesis that I haven't heard from anybody else. How did you come to this? What evidence do you have for it? This started with the adverse childhood experiences.

The study was first published in the 1990s by Dr. Vincent Folletti. And by now, Liz, every single chronic health condition has been associated with adverse childhood experiences. And when I look at the adverse child experiences, they did a phenomenal job of saying, what seemed to be the biggest situations, scenarios that a child would have been affected by. I also see that there's so much more that they don't ask about. It would be way too complicated. But the idea that every chronic health condition has been associated with adverse child experiences tells me that there is a connection. And what we get to do, do is figure out how can I repair that after it has created that biology or even better yet.

How can I prevent that? But again, looking at patterns, that disease is the last pattern to show up. There's five patterns. We have four other patterns that if we could recognize those in our life, then we could possibly prevent the actual progression of that last and fifth pattern of disease. We have a lot of hanging threads right now. We have our sneaky signs. We have diseases of the fifth pattern.

What are the other four? So if you're listening, if you're watching, I promise I won't forget about any of those. But I just want to like stick with this mechanism by which these diseases are happening because it's so different than any other thing that I've ever heard anybody say about disease. So you talk about on a cellular level, on a what's happening inside our body level, this is how trauma is impacting us. And that's how that's leading to these diseases. Can you explain that as simply as possible?

Yes. I talk about the body trauma loop. And the idea is that trauma becomes your biology. I think that we all know that by now. I don't think that that's a new concept per se. It still hasn't really gotten into medicine because you're going to go to your provider. It's not necessarily what they're going to talk about.

But this idea that your past does shape your biology. So trauma does become your biology. But then what's important to know is that it creates this feedback loop. That feedback loop says that same biology, that inflammation, that sugar dysregulation, that hormone imbalance, those are now going to become signs of danger to your nervous system. Am I safe right now or am I in danger? And if I'm in danger, how much danger so that I know what to do? It really doesn't matter whether that's coming from outside of us or from inside of us.

And that is what I would want people to know, is that that biology is now creating the ongoing sense of danger simply because of its effects on ourselves, on our energy, on our metabolism, on our nervous system. So that's the idea that, like, let's say you have a migraine. That migraine is making your system feel unsafe, which is perpetuating the cycle of trauma. Is that correct? Let's take migraine as an example. A migraine happens when you start to feel over.

overwhelmed by something in your life. Is that true? I feel like I have a lot of friends who get migraines and they have no root cause or reason. They're just like, I got a migraine today. I've taken my meds, blah, blah, blah. Maybe. I would love to have a conversation with them. I'm just wondering, does the literature show migraines are connected to feeling overwhelmed in one's life? Yeah. What's happened is that at the cellular level, things have reached a point where we feel like we are overwhelmed. Now, that will not necessarily translate into emotional overwhelm. It depends on how aware a person is on the sensations in their body and what's going on.

And oftentimes, the body is creating these symptoms in order to avoid the emotional pain associated with these symptoms. Whether migraines or chronic back pain, there's something going on that our nervous system says, I am feeling like this is too much. and I talk about being too much too fast being a trigger or also too little for too long. What do both of those mean? Too much too fast means that things are happening too much too fast for me to be able to know what to do to be able to respond. And I kind of freeze and shut down.

But then there's the other reason why we go into overwhelm or why our nervous system says, this is overwhelm and I'm going to shut down or create some of these sensations. too little for too long is the idea that we have needs, whether that be touch, love, support, connection, or magnesium, zinc, B6. All of these are things that we need. And if we've just had too little of what we need for too long, then that will be another reason why our nervous system says, I can't do this anymore. And I need to go into self-protection mode, self-protection.

reservation at a deeper level. If it has progressed to something like a migraine, it's because our nervous system has gotten data that says, I need to shut down. I need to slow down. This is all too much. And I need to create something that will force this person to slow down so that I can catch back up. I need to catch my breath. Why would that manifest for some people as migraines and other people as Hashimoto's and other people as lupus and other people as chronic fatigue. What is the difference happening in one's body? I think of this is a soup and each one of us has a soup and in that soup goes our epigenetics, our generational trauma, our environment, the exposures that we've had, everything from our diet to the places that we've lived and our

genetics. A lot of those other elements are what create our vulnerabilities. And so each one of us is walking around with a vulnerable place in our health. Maybe it's our detoxification system. Maybe it's our immune system. Maybe it's our circular, vascular system. Maybe it's our lymphatic system. But we each can have these vulnerabilities that in good times, they're not a problem. but you stress test it, you put your body through a certain level of stress, and it's going to stress those vulnerabilities. And at some point, you're going to reach a breaking point. So trauma is essentially the straw that breaks the camel's back. Trauma is what stress tests your vulnerabilities.

Okay. So my friend who has Hashimoto's, perhaps they had a vulnerability towards that, But are you saying that if they hadn't had trauma, they might not have tipped into Hashimoto's? This is what I'm saying. There are requirements to create something like Hashimoto's or other autoimmune conditions. And we know that some of those requirements involve the gut and the impact on the immune system. But then you also have this aspect of the nervous system. And stored trauma is what lives in our nervous system. Our nervous system is what is the operating system for our body.

And given what gear it's driving in, if it is in what we might call parasympathetic, ventral vaguel, I call it calm alive state, your operating system is one of repair, it's one of health, it's not stress testing these vulnerabilities because it's allowing your body to have the healing and repair that it naturally will do on its own. It's when we're not in that state. And we're either in stress state or the overwhelm or trauma state that it never has a chance to actually engage in its own repair and healing. You said at the beginning that it was well established that trauma is having these impacts in our biology.

I don't think that's true. Like I feel like most people listening are like, no, I didn't think that. that car accident I got in a year ago had any impact on me today. I feel better. It's fine. I don't think that my dad yelling at me when I was a kid had any impact on me today. Like I've done my therapy work. I'm fine. Can you say like that initial impact that trauma has on our biology? Yeah. So the initial impact is the cellular changes that happen when we experience overwhelm. I'm going to use a different word now, Liz. I'm going to use the word powerlessness. It's specifically being powerless or feeling powerless in the face of an inescapable life threat,

something that feels like, I don't know if I'm going to be okay, if this happens. And there's nothing I can do about it, though. When that specific scenario happens, that's what shifts our physiology into these other survival strategies. No longer is the survival strategy to fight or to flee, right? we hear fight or flee a lot. That's the sympathetic stress response, but that's not going to work once you realize that there's nothing you can do. You can't run away. You can't fight this. This is way too big for you. So powerlessness is then that moment when it triggers a trauma response.

But what is that response like in your body? Like what I'm just trying to get to in as clear of terms as possible why feeling powerless would impact my cells in a way that would cause my thyroid to a certain way that would cause my gut to behave a certain way. That would cause my mental health to behave a certain way. Yes. As long as we think that we can do something, then what's happening in our physiology is that adrenaline is driving our cells, our mitochondria specifically, to make more energy. And then it's changing everything else in our body to be able to use up that energy in order to do something in order to respond, in order to overcome this danger. So you go from a very high energy state to this trauma response. And what happens with that moment of powerlessness

is that our whole cellular system shifts into this different state and it's mediated by communication down the vagus nerve that says it's better for us to just stop, to shut down. That is now our best strategy at surviving this. And so what happens is that our cells now go from the state of high energy production, high energy utilization to, we're going to do the bare minimum to stay alive. The evolutionary strategy in that, of course, is that if I'm barely alive, maybe the monster won't see me. And that's where we see the cells even shifting themselves. And you'll see the say if you look in the microscope, this is coming out of the work of Dr. Bob Navajo down in San Diego, and he sees the cells and the mitochondria actually change shape.

When they need to make more energy because they're responding to a stress, they have the shape that allows them to be more efficient at energy production. But the moment that that overwhelm happens, then that overwhelm makes things fall apart. We call it the cell danger response. and this idea that the danger has now reached a toxic level. And that level of danger says it's not worth my energy to try to fight this, to try to overcome this. I tried that.

It's not going to be enough. So instead, I'm going to just fall apart and hope that just by giving in and giving up, not dying, but barely staying alive. And so this is where we see even our metabolism being shifted. We have this whole range of metabolism that our nervous system drives, and the moment that we sense that powerlessness, our nervous system dims down the lights of our metabolism to say, we want to be cooler,

because if we're warm, that monster might sense our warmth. So we need to actually change our core temperature. People have been measuring this. In fact, this is one of the latest things that I've been measuring with my wearables, is how much does my core temperature change when I am in freeze or overwhelm versus when I am in calm alive and I'm creative or I'm in stress mode? Because we can actually measure these changes now. It's quite fascinating. And the other aspect then is with that metabolism shifting, everything starts to feel hard. Because our body says, I only want to do the bare minimum to get through this moment, let alone through the day.

And so things just feel really hard if we're now in this chronic state of overwhelm. So this is where that pattern of depletion starts to settle in. We constantly feel depleted. And that's because literally our metabolism is not working as well because it's trying to protect us from being seen, from being too big, from being too loud, from breathing too much. All of these physiological changes happen. Yes, even to our breath where our breath will go more short. shallow and less frequent in order to not take in as much oxygen. But if we're making less energy, we don't need as much oxygen.

And so it's this whole body system reorganization that, again, the driver for all of this is the nervous system. And the driver, just like if you're driving your car, the driver can shift gears in split seconds of time. So I can go from high energy stress to overwhelm or this trauma physiology in a matter of a second. These are split second decisions that our nervous system is making to help us survive in the scenario we might encounter. So the idea is that when we are exposed to these traumas, if we are unable to complete a stress response, then our cells feel overwhelmed. So they feel powerless. go into essentially like a hibernation state and they really close down. And then depending on our

epigenetics, our other exposures, et cetera, those cells aren't able to function the best that they could. So epigenetically, if we're predisposed to a disease, those cells aren't able to prevent that disease anymore. And we might tip over to more of a state of disease. And that's how this trauma in the moment can lead to something like Hashimoto's or IBS or something like that. Yeah, the idea is that if I'm no longer able to be in repair mode. Yeah, because your cells are hibernating because they feel powerless and they're so overwhelmed that they're like, we got to just, our best move is to shut down in this moment. So they are out of repair mode. Everything is out of repair mode. Okay. Cells, systems. Okay. Then whatever is my vulnerability is going to show up

first. If we are able to complete that trauma cycle, our cells never go into that little state of shutdown and then we're able to not fall prey to. these predisposals that we might have otherwise? The idea is that if we want to be in our best health and prevent the disease that comes from trauma, we need to learn how to shift gears into parasympathetic ventralvagal come alive so that our body can do the repair that happens during both a stress and a trauma response. Why would something show up years later? Like let's say somebody had childhood trauma and then they get an autoimmune disease as an adult or they suffer from really intense anxiety or depression

as an adult. What dictates when these things actually rear their ugly heads in our lives? I think of it as having some type of injury that never gets better. So if I break my collarbone and I never reset it right or maybe I injure my leg and I never actually allow that wound or injury to heal. At first, I'm going to work around it. May walk with a limp, I may protect it in some way, but I can do that for a little while. It's the fact that it never then heals. And now I've got to reorganize my whole way of getting around. And I'm never going to lift anything with this arm because that causes pain. So I'm going to learn how to do everything

with this side of my body. And so we can see that it's just the accumulation of time adapting around this ongoing wound that I don't want to poke because it hurts. And I'm trying to avoid pain. The initial changes in our cells, decreased energy production, the metabolism being off,

the immune system, being on guard, all of these are changes that at first we can adapt to. But then when the next vulnerability comes or the next hit comes, and now it's on top of that original wound, and then it kind of starts this snowball effect, and now what started as a small immune imbalance is now a big immune balance.

Now it's autoimmunity. Now it's migraines, chronic pain. We see this a lot even with the sugar levels and insulin and that whole metabolism or metabolic syndrome, that is a key feature of biology of trauma as well. Did it start that way? No, no, no, no. It started off as just kind of have some imbalance in your metabolism.

Your thyroid hormones are going to work as well. Myotronia aren't going to work as well. Because your system and your cells are like shut down a little bit. And then over time, that builds into something bigger that we notice and recognize as a disease. I also really appreciate you using the word powerless. It was very clarifying for me. Something I wonder often is like, you go to therapy all the time and they're like,

let's talk about your childhood. Let's talk about your childhood. And I'm like, I'm so sick of talking about my childhood. I had a traumatic childhood and I'm over it kind of. But you using the word powerless clarified for me why we root so much trauma back to our childhood because if you have trauma as an adult, often you feel like you have agency. But when you have trauma as a child, you don't feel like you have agency. so thus you are more likely to enter that powerless state and have this cellular and systemic effect.

Is that correct? That's correct. And then again, just accumulate that over time. When you think about strength and resilience, like your ability to feel energized, to recover well, to stay strong as you get older, what do you think that actually comes from? Most people say working out or good nutrition, and yes, of course that matters. But there is a biological foundation underneath all of that that that most people are completely over. looking. I have been diving deep into this lately with the team at timeline and what I've learned has genuinely shifted how I think about my own health. Every single movement that your body makes every step, every workout, every muscle contraction depends on energy produced at the cellular level. And at the center of that is your mitochondria. Here's the thing that nobody tells you, certainly nobody told me, starting around age 30, our mitochondria naturally become less efficient,

more get damaged, more become sluggish. And over time, that impact. your energy, your strength, your recovery, and your resilience. Most of us respond by pushing more. We're like noticing these things and we're adding in more protein. We're trying to fix it with more supplements. We're trying to do harder workouts. And those things do help. But timelines research suggests that we also need to be supporting the cellular machinery

underneath. And that is exactly what their supplement, Mitopure, does. It contains Erolithin A, which helps your body clear out damage mitochondria and support healthier ones so that, that your cells can produce energy more efficiently. Because this is happening to your cells, it's going to impact your entire body, your immune system, your muscles. One study found that taking mitochondria increased muscle strength by 12% in four months with no change in exercise routine, it's going to impact your energy, your sleep, your skin, your cell health impacts all of this,

and urolithin A keeps your cells healthy. Timeline has done over 15 years of research and testing on this one product, Eurolithna, which, by the way, most of us lack the gut bacteria to synthesize naturally. That's why many of us need to supplement it to get the benefits. This has become a staple supplement for me. It is my top way to sport how I want to look and feel as I age. Timeline's clinically proven formula is now available at a new lower price, and the gummies are so delicious. That's what I take is my after lunch dessert, and I look forward to it every single day. Save up to 39% by going to timeline.com slash Liz. That is timeline.com slash Liz.

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caveat. Most of the devices on the market aren't actually powerful enough to make a difference. But if you get one that is, it can transform your skin, your pain, your energy, your hair, even your mood. I know it sounds too good to be true. So here's the science in the nuttiest of nutshell. Red light targets your mitochondria, the powerhouses of your cells, giving them more energy to repair, regenerate, and function better. That's why you get the local benefits wherever you're using the red lights. You get less knee pain or cramps or better skin or thicker hair. But also, because you are helping your mitochondria, you get general benefits like more energy and less anxiety. There are literally thousands of studies spanning everything from faster recovery

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HSA, FSA tax savings vary. Again, though, go to the loombox.com slash Liz for that 40% off. I think a lot of people feel quite powerless on a day-to-day basis right now with the political situation, with things like climate change, with just feeling like there's things that are out of their control happening in the world that really don't feel good to them. Is that causing daily trauma? And if so, what do we do about that? So here's where I've really had to go back and look at my own language.

How am I describing this? Rather than saying this is causing me trauma, what I'm saying is my body's having a trauma response. It's happening in my physiology. Like that's the feeling we get when we're reading the news and we're like, yeah. Yes. Okay. And being able to track your nervous system through those levels of danger, I find it one of the most helpful skills that a person can learn how to do.

Their life will change if they can read their own dashboard in a sense and know where is that line for them that they cross over from stress into overwhelm. Most people don't know how to read that difference in their body or let alone that they're approaching overwhelm and that, hey, I should stop doing what I'm doing right now so that I can pull myself back off of that ledge because I now know what it does to my body. body, what it does to my cells, what it does to my metabolism, when I cross that line into overwhelm. Okay, so can you teach us that skill? Absolutely. This is the skill that requires awareness. The more that a person can sense their own body, the more that this will become

natural. So for those in your audience who are like me so used to living in their head and analyzing everything, this is going to be harder. If you are maybe speaking directly to me there, is there anything I can do to like make it easier as a precursor? Like should I as a heady person be, I don't know, like breathing or dropping into my body in any sort of way? What we're going to do is we're going to use our mind to focus on our body's sensations. Okay. Not use our mind to let it think and analyze and question, well, why is this happening?

Okay. That's a challenge for those of us who love to learn, right? So what I'm going to have you do is I'm going to have you lift up a head. heavy rock above your head. I'll give you a rock. Here you go. Oh, like literally. Yeah. Okay. Yep. Yep. And lift it above here. Now it's really heavy. Okay. It's really heavy. Whatever it is, like double that, triple that. Like, I want you struggling right now. Okay. So if you're struggling, but being successful, this is the stress response. And you're like, yeah, this is hard, but I'm doing it. There's that sense of agency that you were talking about. I can do it. Now, this is stress.

We're going to let that rock crush us. Exactly. Right there. Now, just notice, like, what do you notice happening in your body as you let the rock crush you? Like a heaviness, a tightness in my chest. That's it. That's it.

That's exactly what overwhelmed feels like. And what would be thoughts that come into your mind as you let this rock crush you? Like more of a despair and helplessness. That's it. We can recognize our states based on sensations in our body and the thoughts that are generated. Our thoughts are just generated by our state.

I notice a thought and be like, oh, isn't that interesting? That thought tells me where your physiology is right now. I'm not going to ask you to change your thought. I'm going to ask you to change your physiology because then that physiology will change your thinking. So that, I mean, that literally is as simple as it is to have people be able to recognize

what state am I am right now. Do I feel like I'm holding the rock up? Or do I feel like it's crushing me? So how do we change our physiology in that moment? Like we're reading the news. We all of a sudden feel that like tightness in our chest, that feeling of despair, overwhelm. We recognize it. That's great.

We've listened to this podcast. We're like, yes, I got this. Thank you, Dr. Amy. What's next? Okay. So you noticed a sense of constriction. You noticed heaviness. Anything else that you noticed?

I often feel things in like my chest and throat. like a lump in my throat, a tightness in my chest. And then sometimes like stomach-y stuff, yeah. Yeah. Okay. So right now, what would have been the loudest? The tightness in my chest. Okay.

So let's go to your chest. And what I would want you to do is make some type of physical contact with your chest in a way that all you're doing is like connecting with a young version of Liz. and you're just letting her know like, I've got you. I've got you. Sometimes I even say that out loud just to help myself, not have my thoughts wander, but be able to say, this is what I'm really supposed to be doing right now. I'm not supposed to be saying, oh, Amy, why are you looking at the news again? We've decided that we weren't going to do, right?

Like all of those patterns right now don't matter. What if grown up me, though, is like I don't. got you because what if there's war? Like, you know what I mean? Like, growing up me is like, this isn't solving these very real issues that we don't have any power over. Yeah. I come back to right here right now.

Looking around this room, am I safe enough right here right now? Most often the answer is yes. If the answer is no, then it's like, well, then what do we need to do right now? and being able to move into action because it's the inaction. We call it thwarted movement. It's the inaction that will put us into overwhelm. There's nothing I can do. Is that why?

So I always say that action is the antidote to anxiety. Action is signaling your brain that you can like hold up the rock a little bit? 100%. And this is why I have loved that you share that. It's the idea of just reminding yourself that you can do something. So rather than saying, oh, this is too much, right? That's a common phrase that I will hear. This is too much.

What if I just change my language? I was like, ah, this is a lot. It's just a change of a few words. But if I'm saying this is too much, I am stating I need to be an overwhelm. I need to give in and give up because this is too much for me. But if I can just change my language and be like, whew, like, this is a lot. A lot still gives me the option of being able to have agency and do something. So I have become so conscious about the words that I choose in order to help support my body to stay in,

I can do stress. I no longer want to do overwhelm. And you think the best way to sort of walk it back in that moment is to bring yourself back into the present and connect with your body in that moment? Yes, and. Yes, and. Once we cross that line into overwhelm, there are some other things that we're going to need to do. The goal is to be able to catch ourselves before we cross that line.

Because then we can pull ourselves back from the ledge. That line is like a cliff. You fall over the cliff. That's a very different strategy than if you haven't quite yet fallen, but you're almost going to fall. Going back, you said that disease is the fifth pattern. What are the other for? We survive powerlessness by engaging three survival strategies.

Those survival strategies are dissociation, immobilization, and energy conservation. Let me walk through those. Dissociation. That's a strong word. The idea is that I need to put distance between myself and what's happening. My reality is so unbearable. I don't want to be fully present to this. So I'm going to disconnect.

So that first pattern then is this pattern of disconnection. If we're not able to resolve and process this experience, these three survival strategies become our five patterns. So dissociation becomes a chronic pattern of disconnection. What might that look like in the moment? In the moment in an acute freeze or trauma response, Dissociation looks like brain fog. It looks like feeling disoriented.

It feels like everyone around you seems very far away. Voices seem like they're far away. Like watching it from above. You can be watching it from above. Some people have those type of out-of-body experiences. That is all measures of dissociation. Another one is also people-pleasing or fawning. And the idea is that I'm just going to go along with what I'm told to do.

And part of that is because I'm giving in and I'm giving up. I'm no longer looking for my escape because I'm realizing that escape is not possible. Which sounds like a sign that you've succumbed to this feeling of powerlessness. Exactly. Okay. So that's dissociation, which is pattern one. Which then becomes your chronic disconnection and pattern one. immobilization is the next survival strategy.

We've talked about why we would freeze, and it's the idea of both the monster may not see me, but also if I'm dimming down my metabolism, it now is harmful to my survival to continue to take action and move. I'm needing to conserve energy. Oh, that makes sense. So the immobilization is our nervous system, in essence, throwing on the emergency break when our foot has been on the gas. Okay.

It feels like a whiplash effect to go from full throttle, do anything to survive to, I'm going to freeze. I'm going to paralyze. So this is, again, in the moment how someone might recognize that they've just crossed that line

of powerlessness is they went from, I can't believe this, and then just the heaviness, the sense of defeat, the immobilizing, Can I just clarify, are these showing up in the moment of trauma, but then also potentially They become chronic.

If you have this immobilization response to trauma in the moment, you might become maybe a person who has a hard day and then just goes and lays on the couch and stares into space. What would be an example for immobilization? What would that look like as a chronic pattern? Stuckness. Okay. And this is often what I ask people. Where do you feel stuck in your life?

Where do you feel like you've worked hard? hard and you just can't seem to have that forward movement. Whether it be projects getting done, so this is where procrastination can show up as a chronic pattern. This is where we can want to grow and develop ourselves maybe professionally or personally in some way, but we get to a certain point and then maybe we sabotage or something else happens that we don't recognize as sabotage, but in some way it's holding us back. Or our person. brain just can't see the option. I feel like one of the hallmarks of stuckness is just like, oh, it must be this way. If your brain function differently in that moment, if you gave it a little

more space, maybe it's see this option or this option or this option. Absolutely. So that's how the immobilization becomes a chronic pattern of being stuck. I call it disruption, this idea of disrupted movement. We're supposed to move through life. We're supposed to move through emotions. We're supposed to move through experiences. You have stored trauma. You're not moving through much. Okay. So that's the second pattern. Yes. The third survival strategy, we've talked about the energy conservation, why that would be so helpful in the moment. As that becomes chronic, that becomes a chronic sense of depletion. I don't feel like I have enough energy. You take those three and what those three create is the fourth pattern, which is dysregulation. Now, disregulation. Now, disreliance,

regulation is defined as your patterns of responding. So we call this in neuroscience a stimulus happens and then we watch your reaction, whether that's a stimulus of seeing a hummingbird or a stimulus of putting you into a cold tank. Whatever the stimulus is, that's all stimuli. And we get to watch what does your nervous system do with change? The more stored trauma you have, the less comfortable you are with change. And it's because dysregulation is this pattern of, I either react too much or too little given the circumstances. But it's never the right amount for that situation. So maybe I'm overreacting, but also maybe I'm underreacting or maybe I do both. But that ability to actually look at a situation and understand this is the reality of it

is very hard because we actually don't see reality when we have stored trauma. We have a filter. We have a lens that we don't even know that we have on. And so all we get is our perception of what's happening. And we are reacting to our perception of the science. of danger, not the reality. And this especially shows up in relationships. We can have these big reactions to things that a person will say or that they didn't say that they did or that they didn't do for us. Sometimes those reactions look like anger, but sometimes those reactions look like shutting down, isolating, just going silent, not knowing how to communicate. That really hurt. And so we're looking at our patterns of responses to see if we have the dysregulation pattern.

Is our acute trauma response always directly linked to the chronic one? Or could we have dysregulation as our acute response? And then that shows up chronically as disease or dissociation. These are all patterns that come from stored trauma. And so to one degree or another, a person will have all of these in their life. what I like to do is I like to assess which one seems to be the strongest pattern for you right now because that may be where we want to start because if we can start to repair that pattern, it might be able to have the highest leverage for changing everything else. So like if you're somebody who really feels stuck, we can go back and look at that immobilization

pattern and then that will have the biggest payoff. Yes. And then that will help you with all. all the other patterns that I guarantee you that you also have. You are also going to often have a sense of depletion. You're going to have some degree of dysregulation. You're going to have some degree of disconnection. You can't have an isolated pattern because those are the patterns that spring from the root

of stored trauma. Could you give us like one starting action for each of the five patterns? Let's say somebody recognizes themselves or like, yeah, I feel stuck or like, yes, I have a disease that I didn't know until this episode was maybe rooted in trauma for each of the five patterns, could you give us one place to begin in terms of healing? Yes. For the pattern of disconnection, actually do an exercise like what we did earlier, which is to redirect our mind's attention to a body sensation. That's what the connection is, and we've got to rewire our ability to connect. And then what I like is for people to be able to take the next step, which is

responding to their body. So the mind-body connection is not enough. You can't. just connect to your body and be like, okay, I connected with you. You should be happy. Your body's going to be like, but I still have needs. I still need to feel held. I still need to feel safe. And so as we learn how to pay attention to those sensations, we start to get these messages from our body of, this would be really nice right now. And maybe it's a self-hug as just an example. But if we don't know how to get that message, then we've felt like we've given you the connection. Why do you not feel safe yet? What's the problem?

So this idea of it should become a relationship. So when I put my hand on my chest earlier, it'd be putting my hand on my chest and then kind of waiting to see if my body voices any needs after that. Yeah. Yeah. It feels so silly. Like I'm just like, buddy, what do you want? It's quite silly.

Okay. And I should just be okay with that? You're like, do you want to heal your trauma or not, Liz? That's pretty much it. That's pretty much it. Coming from my experience, being such an intellectual, medical school, surgery, this seems so silly. And it also seems so simple that it shouldn't work. It needs to be more complicated than this.

but if we're going to repair the pattern of disconnection, somehow we've got to create that connection. Okay, so you're almost running those neural circuits to wire them in. And it sounds easy and it's not. Again, for people like us who are so intellectual, this is actually one of the hardest things to learn how to do. And we also just have to get over the fact that it feels silly. What we want to do is be able to connect with our body.

Then we want to connect with our parts, Liz. So some version of a younger Liz. Or maybe that version of Liz, that's the one that tells her that she has to do everything right. Connect with that part and actually have a conversation, develop a relationship with that part. So that part of you can give you a message and it does. be in a way that it doesn't have to create a disease or a symptom or a migraine or I like, you could just pick up the phone. I'm right here. Exactly. You don't need to blare the alarm bells. Or burn the house down. Yeah. Okay. That's the connection. And when we start to repair

that connection with our own selves and our body and our parts, then that allows us to start to reconnect with other people as well. Okay. And so just for clarity, this is if you perhaps are experiencing in your life today, things like this chronic pattern of disconnection. And the chronic pattern of disconnection, the hallmark of it is that we are seeking escape. That's what dissociation is, right? The association is, I can't physically escape. So let me mentally escape. Let me just not be here emotionally and mentally.

So if that sounds like you, your first step is this, pay attention to your body and feel into it, tell your body it, say, and then see what comes up, see what it needs, and then also establish this connection where little you or these other parts of you have a safe space to express themselves. Absolutely. Let's step on a few toes here, Liz. The idea that how would you recognize this connection

comes down to how do you avoid, how do you distract yourself, and how do you numb? Those are all ways that we as adults seek escape. And I feel like, those are really prevalent right now. Like everybody's scrolling on social. Everybody's eating their feelings.

Everybody's drinking their feelings. Like we are all, almost every single person I know without exception is trying to escape from their lives in some ways. And let's just step on a few more toes then. What about the people they get the migraines? And they're just looking for what medication can I take to make this go away rather than what's the message here for me? I want to just.

linger on that for a second. Then we'll go back to the five patterns. You're going to push back on that a little bit. I love it. I love it. Please. I don't like the idea of suggesting that somebody who is in pain is just not listening to themselves well enough. Do you know what I mean? 100%. So how do you square that circle? How do you make it not their fault, but empowering for them? Yeah. Let me walk us through the example of autoimmunity. Someone who has full blown autoimmunity. am I going to sit here and tell you all they need to do is trauma work? No, no. But I am going to say that if they really want to get well, if they really want to be in their best health, trauma work needs to be part of the whole package. Because at this point, once it's becoming our physical health symptoms, it's now so much of our biology that's wrapped up into this as well that we do need support for our biology. and that will never be enough by itself because if we just do that, it will continue to drive symptoms. And so sometimes we can resolve this issue and then it shows up as something else.

And now we've got digestive issues. Oh, we solve those, but now it's showing up as acne. Oh, we solve that, but now it's showing up as depression. Oh, let's solve that. And now it's showing up as something else. So because these are symptoms that are driven by a nervous. system. That's in fear and danger mode. It will always create disease. So rather than saying, let me just try to avoid the emotional aspects of this or the nervous system aspect of this and let me

just take a medication. Let me just try to change my diet. That will never be the full picture that our body needs. You're playing whackamol essentially. Absolutely. If somebody has migraines, just bringing it back to that example. Like, maybe they need their migraine medication at this point. It is also not something they should be sitting there and being like, ugh, I didn't resolve my trauma. So now I have migraines. This is my fault.

I should have done to me about this earlier. Let's have more overwhelmed the file. Yeah. It's that unless you incorporate this tool, you're not going to have as good of results as you would want. Absolutely. Okay. What about diseases that aren't necessarily showing symptoms in the moment?

Something like Hashimoto's where it's just like my thyroid. isn't working anymore, we're not having these acute symptoms. Is that different? Even with those, you can have acute flare-ups. So that's what I'm looking at is you have this chronic condition. We're working towards repair and health. How are we measuring that for one thing? So that's the plan that I create with them is this is all the things that we're doing. We're doing mind, body, and biology work. So we're moving towards healthier. when you have an active flare-up and you're feeling like, oh, here we go again, that's the same scenario, is that something overwhelmed the nervous system that it made it retreat back into its

shell and say, I've got to recover, I've got to recoup. In those moments, it's going back to everything that we've learned to do to reestablish safety. Sleep is a big one. Prioritize sleep. take a few extra naps during the day. Really watch your diet during those times. Your body is in overwhelm and you've got to reestablish a sense of safety. And then we can get back on and say, all right, what do we think happen that triggered or caused that overwhelm? It can be something that's cellular.

We can get infected to a virus. And if we're struggling with our immune system or our metabolism, a virus can take us down. along the way there can be these changes, there can be these flare-ups, there can be these setbacks. And those have so much information for us to help us understand, what is it that overwhelms my body? What is it that overwhelms my biology? And is it more physical stuff? I haven't slept well for a week and that's then what's tipping me over the edge, or is it my amount of stress at work?

It's interesting because I often hear about like the, stress and disease connection. And this is the first conversation that I've really understood on a mechanism level, that that is because your cells are kind of going into this dormant, like we are overwhelmed, we are powerless mode. Is that correct? It is. And that's why I am coming around and I'm saying it's not actually the stress disease connection because stress is not going to cause disease. Stress is we think we can hold the boulder up. Exactly. Overwhelm is the boulder is crushing us. Exactly. It's the overwhelm that creates disease. What is your, bring us back to the patterns, I promise. But what is your autoimmune story? My autoimmune got triggered

one month after the greatest loss and grief of my life. What happened? You know that I adopted Miguel from the foster care system, got him when he was four. And I had him for six years. We, we. I worked really hard to find all the pieces that he needed for his healing and found them. However, I was single in surgery residency and I was drowning in the responsibilities now of actually being fully present for a son who now loved me and wanted to have a mom. and so I made the hardest decision that I've made. I still at times struggle with that decision that I made. But at the time, this is what I saw as my only option of being a single mom in residency.

And I adopted him out to another family. A family that I knew well, a family that was perfect for him. But it still didn't change the amount of pain that it caused my heart. I had no idea how to grieve something like that. I had no idea how to feel all of that. My pattern was, I'm just going to throw myself into work. I'm going to avoid, I'm going to distract myself, and then I numbed with a lot of food.

I was already on two mood medications, and one month later was when I woke up and I could not get out of bed, and we started the medical workup, I got diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome in the process, but then we ultimately found the autoimmunity. And I remember sitting in the rheumatologist's office being a doctor myself and saying, look, I can see that, you know, we haven't really developed all the symptoms of autoimmunity. Got the fatigue. That's usually the most common symptom of autoimmunity. Don't have all the rest of the

stuff. My labs look like they're headed in that direction. What can I do to prevent this from progressing further? they looked at me and said there's nothing you can do. Just wait for it. And when it happens, come back and we'll start you on some medication. So that was a life-changing moment for me of realizing that they did not see the emotional component to this that I now clearly saw, was clearly associated in my mind, and that they didn't have any answers for how to help my body get. healthy. And that was where I started studying myself, found functional medicine, got trained in functional medicine, and that's what then ultimately inspired me to go into studying trauma and the body to be able to bring this to medicine. We know these associations, but what do we do about it?

What do we do about it as physicians? What do we do about it as a medical system? And also, how do we bring more of this biology stuff into the therapy side of things? so that a therapist knows to ask about sleep and sugar levels and magnesium and all the stuff that they haven't been trained in either. So we have all of these silos. And that's why it can feel like guacamole where I'm going to go over here for this, over there for that, but they're all talking a different language. And I'm left having to piece it all together. And I don't know how to piece it all together. Even if I had the energy to do that, but I'm stuck in this pattern of depletion and I don't even have the energy. Knowing what you know now,

what would you have done differently in that moment when you made that decision? I mean, I want to say, Liz, that I would have figured out a way to keep him. Is there anything that you would have done, let's say you made the same decision to prevent the trauma response? At that point, Liz, since I had never known how to feel feelings, there was so much. accumulated that that was just the last mountain. It was too late, essentially. I think so. So if I could have had it all over to do, I would have learned how to feel my feelings and not need to avoid numb and distract a long time ago so that I could navigate something like that differently. And also, I see the overwhelm and the trauma response is something that.

that's natural, not as something that's bad. And there are times, especially with grief, that your body is just going to shut down. And that's okay. The idea is if we can even allow that and become comfortable with that, then we can even move through that and it not be something that we have to avoid numb and distract. And that allows this completion. We don't complete a trauma response by avoiding it. We allow the completion by allowing ourselves to be in it, to feel it, to connect with these parts that are showing up that feel like their whole life just got turned upside down. And they don't know how they're going to be okay. And being able to develop that sense of more adult true self that can come in and just hold them, not talk to them, just hold them.

I didn't have any of those skills back then. I went into that situation so ill-equipped to manage the emotions that I was going to experience, even as part of the identity shift. I see this happen a lot with other people as well, whether leaving a family or leaving a church or religious group that they've been a part of. It's not just the leaving or the change. It's the whole loss of identity. This is how I have known myself. This is how I've seen myself. I don't know who I am without being Miguel's mom. And that it can be a very hard thing to sit with and to move through. But that's the skill. I mean, that right there is the skill, is to be able to move through life experiences so they don't get stuck and stored. What's the state of your autoimmune condition today?

This has been very hopeful, very inspiring to be able to see all of my numbers completely reverse. So there was no autoimmunity in my blood levels when I checked. It took me a while to figure all these pieces out, Liz. So this was 2015 that we discovered this. It wasn't until 2020 that I had found. enough of the pieces to be able to reverse so much of this biology of trauma in myself. And what were the biggest needle movers for your process of reversing that biology of trauma? There were things that I see as my biology that was keeping me stuck and in danger mode.

And even as a physician, I didn't see these. I didn't know that I had brain inflammation, for example. as I'm starting to learn these aspects of functional medicine and neurology and neuro-automunity and realizing, oh, those head injuries that I've had actually did impact my biology and my nervous system. And this is partly why I'm more susceptible to foods that I'm sensitive to or lack of sleep or these different types of stress is because I have these primed microglia or these immune cells in my brain that have a lower threshold for stress. Here I am trying to push myself to the degree that I always have and then I'm getting brain fog and decision fatigue and just that cloud that comes over my brain where I can't even think, forget things and I'm clumsy, had no idea that this was actually

not only so much a part of my biology, but so much a part of me getting stuck in these trauma patterns. So that was a big needle mover for me. The biochemical imbalances, recognizing that I had copper excess, low zinc, something called pyrolyria, under methylation. These were things that were again creating these ongoing signals of danger to my nervous system. There are so many pieces that we can bring in that will open our capacity. And we can only heal as much as we have the capacity to do so. And we have the tools and the skills to build our capacity. The physical stuff you mentioned is really interesting because I do think when people think

trauma, they think like, oh, I got to feel my feelings, whatever. But you're like, no, I had excess copper. And that was causing my body to feel unsafe and causing this sort of cyclical trauma response. Is that correct? Yes, because just taking the copper as the example, copper actually stimulates more adrenaline release. And the more adrenaline you have, the more that your body is like, wow, we must be in danger. But also, the more adrenaline, the more we have to move, the more we have to discharge or

metabolize that adrenaline. Adrenaline is quite powerful. Here I am in a more sedentary job. I'm not moving as much. I'm not exercising as much because I broke my collarbone. all of these things then came together to create this adrenaline toxicity that put me into overwhelm. And so we understand the science of why these aspects of our biology are so closely related to our trauma patterns that it has to be all part of how we're supporting our body to create the change that we want. We're never going to be able to just talk about our past and resolve it, because, well, in the meantime, it's created biology changes, and those changes are now feeding back signals of danger to your nervous system.

So the trauma can be my parents got divorced when I was a kid, but it could also be I haven't been getting the nutrients that I need for my body to thrive. It could also be I have copper access. It could also be my microbiomes really messed up. And no matter what the original source is, then it can cause all of these other things. Like if your microbiomes mess up and your body's in a state of trauma, then you're going to have these other trauma responses.

It's sort of self-perpetuates. Self-perpetuates. That's a great way to say it. Okay. That's very interesting. I very rarely get genuinely excited about skincare, but this is one of the most innovative products that I have come across in years,

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It's very interesting. And that was actually what triggered it for me. But it was until I tested my copper levels and my zinc levels that I saw what my copper levels were. And that was when I said, I have to get this copper IUD out. And so for some women, copper IUDs are not a problem. But again, it goes back to you, what are your genetic vulnerabilities? I have a genetic vulnerability, a snip in my genetics that says, I don't metabolize and release copper as well. and if that's my vulnerability, then if I'm exposed to more copper, guess what's going to show up?

All of this copper, which is going to drive all of this adrenaline. So this is a perfect example of how our genetics creates these vulnerabilities that if everything is well, we're probably okay. But you create the perfect storm and that genetic vulnerability is now going to help create a state of overwhelm. This also shows up a lot in women who have postpartum depression and postpartum anxiety. They've shown that over 98% of those women all have excess copper. They're not being able to release, discharge the excess copper that comes from higher estrogen during pregnancy. And if we knew this, like, we could nearly solve postpartum anxiety and depression. How do we know that that's causation and not correlation?

98%. Yeah, so this is coming out of studies from the Walsh Research Institute. And so the idea is that we can test other women who are postpartum and see that their levels of copper are decreasing after they have their baby in the way that we would expect. These other women, their copper levels are not going down. And they're the ones with postpartum depression or anxiety. And then how do we get rid of excess copper in our bodies? What did you do? Yeah, so a big way that we can do this is with zinc. So there are different forms of zinc that we can take. Zinc orotate, zinc pecolonate are some of the better forms of zinc to take. And it's frequently that we find a zinc deficiency with a copper excess. There is also B6 that can be very helpful for that process of lowering the copper. So we're going to give you zinc and B6 and then retest because we want to do this slowly. We live in a culture where we want everything fast. but if we lower our copper too fast, it actually also creates a lot of problems that feels like

the flu, that feels like malaise. Rapid changes are not ones that our body can adapt to. We have been living in this culture that wants the fast track to everything. Even a good thing can still be too much too fast for our body to be able to adapt well and it will go into overwhelm. Let's go back to the pattern. So the one pattern we've done is disconnection dissociation, correct? Yeah. What's the next pattern? What might that look like in our life? And then what's the first thing we could do to begin to feel better? So the next pattern is that immobilization. So immobilization is what happens in the acute moment. And then as it becomes chronic, it becomes that chronic stuckness or just disruption of natural forward flow. In order to work with that, again, we're going to be looking at how is that showing up

in my biology, where is their lack of movement? Where is their lack of flow? Can I move more? How is my circulation? How is my lymphatic flow? That's how it shows up physically. And then we also want to look at how is it showing up in my thoughts? How is it showing up in the different parts of me? Do I have a part of me that just says, fuck it. I'm just going to give up. How do I work with that part? Or this idea, of I only have this option. I don't feel like I have other possibilities for my life. Right. How can I show that part of me that actually we've grown up. We're different. We know more things now. We have other people in our life that are resources. So we've got other options. We're not that stuck, powerless child that we used to be. With the third pattern,

which is the depletion, this comes from that energy conservation mode. This is a is primarily going to be that focus on the mitochondria, our energy production on the biology side. But we do have parts of us that easily go into that, well, I shouldn't use my energy for that. I need to conserve my energy because it's lived that way for so long. That's how it always is programmed to try to protect us. So even if we had the energy, even if we've been working on our energy, metabolism and we have increased energy, we might still be stuck in this pattern because we have parts that hold us back and slow us down in fear of overdoing it since we've overdone it so many

other times in our life. Okay, so what would be the first step to begin to shift that relationship? Again, you're working with the whole pattern. So the pattern would be you're going to need to help your mitochondria make more energy and be able to identify why is it not making more energy. we need to do some form of mitochondrial repair, cellular repair. And then with the parts work and the body work, it's that sense of when I think about feeling depleted, how is that showing up on my body? And how can I create the felt sense of, I have enough, whatever it is, I have enough. I have enough time.

I have enough energy. I have enough. that needs to become a felt sense. So that would be the somatic work. The parts work would be identifying and working with and then learning to negotiate with this part that believes has come to believe that I never have enough.

I should always be in conservation mode and helping them see that things are different now and that you don't need to protect me in this way anymore because things are different. What are your favorite? ways to support your mitochondria from like a biology level? I do so much. I do a lot of red light therapy. Okay. I do a lot of the, certainly the repair with the co-Q10, the ubiquinol, the PQQ. I ensure that I have enough nutrients though, because this is where you can throw all the fancy stuff at

it, but if your cells don't have enough magnesium, if they don't have enough of the nutrients and the co-factors that they need to make ATP or energy, the red light therapy isn't going to help. So I always make sure that I have enough of those, so I'm frequently getting labs about every six months just to make sure that I have resourced my cells. And then I also use NAD. So I do a lot of NAD, IV injections when I'm traveling. And that has always been a go-to for me, even though I consider that the thing to do after I've resourced them. Okay, so that was the third pattern, which is depletion. What's the fourth pattern? So the fourth pattern is dysregulation. This idea of do I overreact, do I underreact? Do I do both? And when I look at the reactions, again, I'm always looking at it

from the sense that it makes perfect sense why my body's reacting this way. It never does anything weird. It never does anything that it's not seeing that this is the best for my survival at this time. So if I see it overreacting, which still happens a lot, if I see it underreacting and just kind of shutting down, going silent into overwhelm, then I'm asking, what is this really about? Because this really isn't about what's happening right now. What's happening right now is just what pulled on that thread, and that thread goes way back. There's some deeper fears here. And when I can identify those deeper fears that's driving that overreaction or the underreaction, now I can work with it. If I'm just trying to work with, well, you made me feel this way,

and so I'm going to snap your head off now, I'm missing the whole value of what I could learn about myself and the layers that I haven't yet seen, that could be layers that are ready for healing now. So I'm always asking, what is this really about? So the first step for that pattern might be like a sense of curiosity? The curiosity, the pausing. I also want to use the word grace. The grace for myself to say, I see that you're having a big feeling right now and being able to recognize that it's not all about this person and this situation in my life right now. The pausing then can look like, do I go for a walk? Do I take a moment to journal? Do I connect with my body in some somatic way? What can I do to get a sense of what's the deeper fear here?

when have I felt this way before? What is this experience that is showing up right now that is so deeply etched that I'm having a big reaction when it really doesn't call for this big of a reaction? How does your approach to trauma make you see perimenopause and perimenopause symptoms differently? This is fascinating because we do have the research that shows that the more trauma that you've had in your lifetime, often the worst perimenopause symptoms you have. When I look at that, I sat back and I'm like, why? What is going on here?

And what I've come to understand is that it so much comes down to this idea of that dysregulation pattern. Disregulation is our response to change. And isn't perimenopause a change? perimenopause is a change in our internal biology. Our hormones are changing. And so our nervous system that has come to say, no, I need predictability. I need to be able to control things. I need to be able to have everything in order and know what's going to happen. And all of a sudden when estrogen doesn't show up for you until several hours later than what it used to.

And it was always so predictable on those rhythms, it throws our nervous system. back into that sense of danger. And any time that we are in a state of danger, it will make whatever symptoms we're having worse. Whether that's perimenopause, whether that's autoimmuny, whether that's migraines, whether that's IBS. It does not matter. It's when our system is in the operating mode of coming from fear that our symptoms,

whatever they are, will always be worse. Given all of that, how would Dr. Amy treat perimenopause differently? What I would do is I would do the same that IBS and autoimmunity and all the things now. I'm looking at it from a whole picture of you. And I'm saying, how can I help your body, support your body, navigate change and not be so afraid of it, not experience that degree of danger simply from change. And it's going to take body work, parts work, as well as. biology because maybe if I can just slow down some of that change and we can do some bioidentical

hormones. We can work now with your metabolism in a different ways so that the change is not as big or as abrupt. Just soften the edges. Make it a little more manageable. Then that even will be a big help. And we can then have the capacity to do some of the emotional, the trauma work, the body work, whatever you want to call it, but this idea that all the other pieces, if we can work on that as well, it will also then help our body be able to adjust to these changes and not freak out. I have a hypothesis. We ran a really large research study about this. My next book is about novelty. And one of my hypotheses is that microdosey novelty helps us better deal with larger, unexpected change in our lives.

100%. From a biological standpoint, do you think that would bear out? I think this is how the nervous system works. And whether you're microdosing novelty, I microdose safety. Well, I'm wondering if like microdosing novelty in like a, almost like a fun way, like it makes it feel safe. Yes. Like how we talked about at the beginning, when we get used to chaos, chaos feels safe. This is saying, okay, you can get used to change these small doses and make change feel safe. So when these larger changes come about, your nervous system is prepared and it's like, oh, it's safe. This is safe here. This is like the secret to life, Liz. You've just discovered the secret to life, which is...

That's good because this was my whole next book's about. So great. Love it. Love it. It's the idea that how do we make it safe? So we want to create change in our life. Well, that's fine, but you can either create that change from a, from force, forcing the change, or this invitation to the change because you've created the safety for it. So by creating the safety around novelty, let's bring in some curiosity.

Let's make it small enough. that it doesn't freak us out. But that then allows this adapting to, I can deal with change. And now you're going to be able to deal with larger changes in your life because you've built those neural pathways by making it safe enough to do along the way. I love that.

I'm very excited about this book. There's so much out there about trauma on social media. I would argue it's like a very overused word and an incorrectly used word on social media. Can you bust some myths, that you think you commonly hear about trauma? There's a lot of misinformation out there. I see that one of the pieces of information that gets spread

is even the idea of how to release trauma. And this idea that you can release trauma with shaking or a psychedelic journey. And the idea that once you understand what trauma is, you understand what the body needs to repair that. And those are more the words that I use. It's not release. It's repair.

Exactly. The way that a trauma response has happened is that it's become chronic. And because it's now chronic, the whole system has reorganized around this. All of the highways in your brain are organized to live this way. and if you try to come in and you just wipe that all away and you're going to release all of that, well, that's fine, but you still need a highway. You still need a whole system of communication and a system of organization for, but what do we do in these situations?

What do we do in these situations? And so it's this idea of we need to reorganize the maps, not release, because release, release what? Well, and at the same time, though, you talk about sort of completing the trauma cycle. Yes. From your work, I kind of understood more that shaking or something like that could be helpful

in the moment of acute trauma. Yes. But maybe not in this, like, chronic, I have this built up trauma. My system's reorganized in this way. I'm going to shake to get rid of it. Is that correct? Absolutely.

And as we look at an acute trauma response, shaking is not going to be the only thing that you're going to need to do in order to reset and complete that response. What we have to do is first establish the safety. So if you think of a child who falls off a high place at the playground and they're laying on the ground and they're just stunned, right? Like that's the immobilization. And you come over and if you try to suggest that we'll just shake right now,

that's going to actually block the process of what needs to happen first. they need to just be able to lay there. They need to be able to have the space to orient themselves again. Like, did I survive that? Am I alive? For someone to be able to just sit next to them during that time and say, you're not alone. That's the safety that's required to then complete that response. So once they now feel completely safe, I'm not alone. I'm not alone. Okay. Then what you see happen is that they start to look around. They don't get up yet. They just look around and they're looking around oftentimes first at their own body like, did I break any bones? Can I move my legs? Can I move my feet? Can I move my arms? And then they're looking around to the larger world around them.

So this is coming back into connection. In that moment of trauma response, we all disconnect. That's normal. That's natural. Not going to be able to stop that. And that is why when we watch animals or kids, if they are left undisturbed, they will go through this process of reconnecting with themselves, the world around them, back into opening up to life. Like, I can climb up the slide again. I don't need to avoid the slide for the rest of my life because I fell down once from the slide. Then after that, you'll see them start to cry. Then you'll see them get up and they'll be trembling and shaking. Often it's these fine motor vesiculations that are the best for discharging all of that adrenaline that had been secreted in the stress response. And that's really the key to

completing so much of these responses is that adrenaline because it's the high adrenaline, which is the equivalent of your foot on the gas pedal, high adrenaline, but you weren't able to go anywhere. And that's what needs to then be released, if you want to call it that release. I call it reset. So this idea of I can reset because I've now metabolized and discharged all of that adrenaline. It's not still driving me to action.

Wait, is this why working out after like a really stressful day feels really good? It was great. Because I'm discharging that adrenaline. Exactly. The amount of adrenaline that we secrete every day has to be equal to the amount that we are discharging. And most of us discharge that through physical exercise.

The more stressful your work or your day is, the more physical movement you need. Ooh, that's a very easy, actionable tip. I love that. This is why it's actually really helpful to be on a walking desk or I stand on my vibration plate. I have a whole body vibration plate.

I'll stand on that because that helps me discharge this adrenaline that I know that I'm secreting, especially if you drink coffee, right? Coffee secretes adrenaline. And so just being mindful of that, I can now know how much I need to just move because I need to reset my system. And if I'm going to bed with all of this unmetabolized adrenaline, you think I'm going to sleep well. So that's one sort of social media myth is this idea that you need to get rid of your trauma, essentially. They need to shake it off or whatever.

You need to complete the cycle. It's more nuanced, though. It's normal complicated. Is there anything else that you hear or see about trauma that drives you nuts? The people who say, I've never had trauma. And I say, if you're a human being on Earth, you've had a trauma response. I'm like, where do you live? Like, truly, I would love to know, like, what?

Because again, I see the trauma response as a innate, natural response of the body. So the response is natural. Yes. The way that we have started dealing with it is what's unnatural. Or not dealing with it. Yeah, or not dealing with it. But the response itself is natural. we just need to fix the way we respond to the response.

Exactly. And when we know how to do that, it doesn't get stored. It's the idea of I can experience something awful and I can reset my whole system back to safety with completing a trauma response. Before your cells have this effect and your system has this effect and everything rejiggers and then it becomes more of this chronic cycle. Well, my cells had that response just in the moment of overwhelm. Oh, bummer. Yeah. So that's, I mean, that is what happens at the cellular level.

Okay, I have a very quick speed round for you. It's just like a one thing. I would love one action step for each of these situations. What's one thing that parents can do to help their children deal with trauma better and not get stuck in these trauma cycles? I would think that a parent who could learn what their child needs to feel heard, loved, and understood are going to be miles ahead of the game. What's one thing that we can do right now in our lives to be more resilient to future trauma? Work on our health now so that going into the trauma, we are at a great place and have lots of resources. And what's one step we can do to work on our health now then?

Do one thing today that will build your capacity for tomorrow. And this is where I see this as very personalized. The one thing for me today is going to be different than your one thing today. and knowing, finding what is one thing that you can do today to build your capacity, whether that's connecting with a part of you, doing some somatic body work or maybe your biology work, it's all going to build your capacity. And I would want every person to have that clarity of what is one thing that they can do today in order to build their capacity for tomorrow.

Not that we need another reason to work out or to eat well or things like that or to give ourselves some sort of stress release or to connect with the people that we love. But it is a nice motivation that not only will it feel good, not only will it help prevent disease and all the other ways we know that it prevents disease, but it'll help mitigate this trauma response, both in the felt way in the future

and also in all of these other ways that shows up in your life and your body that we're talking about today. Exactly. What I'm doing today is not just for today. What's one thing that we can do in the moment of trauma? Like an acute trauma, somebody just broke up with me. I just found out about an illness diagnosis. What can we do in that moment to help break this response and not let it take hold in our body?

It's the simple, but the hardest thing to do. Stop analyzing and just feel it. What is that? Not to analyze that. But what does that look like? Yeah, that looks like, wow, I just felt something in my body. My heart just feels like. it fell apart. So I am literally going to sit here and hold my heart. I'm not going to try to

respond. I'm not going to try to analyze why did they just do that. What is going on? That's not, it's not the time for that. My heart is feeling like it's falling apart. I need to create the feeling that I'm holding you together. Does knowing all of this change the way that you help your friends or your family members when they're in a hard time? Like, what do you do if somebody comes to you and they're like, oh my gosh, my partner just broke up with me or like, I got this bad health news. How do you show up for them? It's been interesting to see that if I can show up differently for myself, then I've been showing up differently for other people. And now what I do is I don't try to solve their problems for them or tell them what to do. I just become this reflection back

to them of that sounds like a lot. Does that make our nervous? system feel safe to feel validated in that way? That's what I've seen. That's the safety that someone sees me. I'm not alone. So much of trauma, Liz, is not what happened, but that we were all alone in that. We felt all alone. And so just having that someone sees me breaks through that isolation and that feeling of loneliness, part of the repair. Are there any other like little hot tips? Like if you have more adrenaline during the day. You need to work out or move more at some point to discharge that. Are there any other like one-to-one little hot actions we could be implementing in our lives? One that many people don't know about is also with that high adrenaline, high stress,

if you lay on a heat pad on your back, that warms up your sympathetic nervous system, which is the nerve block that runs down along your spine. And that will release or decrease the amount of adrenaline and anxiety that's being generated by your sympathetic nervous system. So I call this my sensory rest and I do it every single day. And I usually pick the time between 12 and 2 p.m. Because I've had my morning cortisol and adrenaline. And even though I've gotten some movement in, I really want to focus in on, okay, and we're going to bring down that stress response.

And heat on the back helps specifically with that. of the location, the anatomy of the sympathetic nervous system. And I often fall asleep, which is not a bad idea either to get a daily nap in. All you need is about 20, 25, 30 minutes, and it can change the rest of your day. Is there anything that you just really want to make sure that people understand about trauma? I would add that so much of what trauma does is changes our beliefs about ourselves. And we can hear ourselves saying things like I don't deserve that or doing things that show that that's what we believe about ourselves. And just knowing that that's, that that's not you.

Like, that is just your trauma speaking. And it allows me to see it with compassion and grace without then letting it dictate what I actually do. Being curious, coming back to that idea of curiosity, and why would I be doing this? would I respond in this way or why would I choose to do this? It's often not a choice. Survival is more powerful than our logic. And we just don't recognize when that subconscious fear from our past is running our health, our life, our relationships, and the more that we can pull back the curtain and get curious and just start to ask some of these questions will allow

us to see more options that are on the table for a better life. What's one thing anybody can do the second that they turn off this podcast to begin to heal some of their trauma or the relationship with trauma? One thing that you can do is to stay in that stress mode of this is a lot rather than getting into the habit of using language around this is too much. to literally just change your language around it. This is a lot and I can handle it versus this is too much and I cannot. Yeah.

Yeah, this is a lot. If we just said that rather than, oh, this is too much, we might be able to avoid a lot of the overwhelm in our life. Amy, can you tell me about your book, the biology of trauma and your own words and also anywhere else that anybody can find you online? I wrote the book to be the manual for the human body and how it experiences and survives powerlessness.

and I do see this as a universal human experience of life. And so I wrote it for that person who really even doesn't see that they've had trauma, but able to now see that through a new lens and able to have more tools to be able to do something different in their life. It's very comprehensive. Also, the foreword from Gabramate is like phenomenal. And then if people wanted more from you, where could they find you? They can find me at biologyoftrauma.com. also on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn.

Perfect. Thank you so much, Amy, for sharing your really different approach to all of this. I've definitely, like, my mind is working in ways that it hasn't previously. And I just really appreciate everything you're contributing. Well, I really appreciate your presence and leadership in the field. So thank you. That is all for this episode of the Liz Moody podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, I would so appreciate if you would share it with somebody that you think would love it too. It is my goal to get as much life-changing information out to as many people as possible. And you sharing episodes with people is 100% the thing that makes that happen.

I would also love to hear from you in the comments, any thoughts or questions or opinions that you have on this episode. Make sure that you're subscribed to the podcast on Spotify, on Apple podcast, on YouTube, wherever you like to listen. You can find every single discount code that you heard in this episode and tons more at lizmoody.com slash codes. It is the best way to save money on amazing vetted products. Truly, our brand partners make the best. best products in the world. That is why there are beloved brand partners. And it's the best way to support the show and keep it completely free for you. And we so appreciate it. Okay, I love you. And I will see you on the next episode of the Liz Moody podcast. Oh, just one more thing.

It's the legal language. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, a psychotherapist, or any other qualified professional. This is genuinely one of the most innovative. things that I have heard of in a long time. So here's the deal. I hate getting my blood drawn. The appointments are hard to get. It's hard to know what to test for. I always end up waiting so long, so it eats up so much of my day. And then they like, stick this needle in your arm. And the whole thing is just miserable. It's terrible. I hate it. But knowing what is going on inside your body, like your vitamin levels and what your hormones are doing is so important to be able to make the right

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