Re-Air: Childhood Trauma Can Lead to Disease | Here’s How to Heal Now! | Dr. Aimie Apigian

This week, we’re revisiting our very informative episode with Dr. Aimie Apigian: renowned trauma expert who helped us unpack how emotional wounds can silently rewire your nervous system and impact your health for years. Could your chronic fatigue, anxiety, or autoimmune symptoms be signs of unresolved trauma stored in the body? In this eye-opening episode, the founder of Trauma Healing Accelerated reveals: - The biology of trauma at the cellular level—and why it matters more than mindset alone - The difference between stress and trauma and how your body holds onto past pain - The hidden ways trauma affects women’s health, especially during perimenopause and menopause - How somatic trauma healing can reset your nervous system and restore emotional safety - How trauma responses show up as physical symptoms and coping habits you might not recognize - The powerful link between trauma, alcohol use, and stress hormones—it’s not just about cortisol - Why comparing your trauma story to others keeps you stuck - How resolving trauma can unlock your intuition, clarity, and life purpose This conversation with Dr. Aimie Apigian is a must-listen if you want to learn how to finally get unstuck from survival mode, reconnect with your body, and begin your path toward lasting emotional and physical healing. Find the fall pieces you’ll reach for most at Quince. Go to https://www.quince.com/breakdownfor free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Go to https://helixsleep.com/breakdown to receive 20% off your Helix mattress. Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 0:04Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 0:06Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to our Breakdown. Today, we've got a super informative episode that we did with Dr. Amy Apigian. She is a renowned trauma expert who helped us unpack how emotional wounds are silently rewiring our nervous systems and can impact our health for years. One of the things she deals with most frequently with her clients is things like autoimmune conditions, chronic fatigue, anxiety. What are the signs of unresolved trauma that you store in your body? And how can healing from that reset your nervous system and restore a sense of emotional safety?

• 0:41Jonathan Cohen?

  We also discussed the difference between stress and trauma. It's very important to understand the big T and little Ts that happen in our lives and why trauma is often at the root of autoimmune diseases.

• 0:53Mayim Bialik?

  Conversely, why comparing your trauma stories to others can keep you stuck. She's got incredible insight on this. Please check us out on Substack. Jonathan, where can they find us?

• 1:03Jonathan Cohen?

  Mayim Bialik's Breakdown on Substack, where you get content you cannot get anywhere else, as well as conversations with Mayim and I breaking down the episodes.

• 1:11Mayim Bialik?

  And now, please enjoy our episode with Dr. Amy Apigian. Break it down.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  Thank you. I am really excited to be here.

• 1:20Mayim Bialik?

  We're so excited to talk to you about, you know, a particular lens on trauma that we find incredibly fascinating. Gabor Maté is a friend of the podcast, and he's been on here. And we see that he wrote the foreword for your book, which is incredibly significant. You know, I wonder if you can sort of get us started. Can you explain, you know, for people who want to start from kind of ground zero, what do you describe as trauma? And in particular, what is the biology of trauma?

• 1:58Speaker 02

  It really takes me back to when I thought I knew trauma and I didn't know anything about trauma. I had come through medical school training and been taught about the adverse childhood experiences. And so I had this lens of, I'm looking for something bad that happened to you, or I'm looking for gross neglect. I became a foster parent and then adopted, and my son had been through severe neglect. And so I was looking at it through that lens. But then I discovered in the process that my body was holding trauma. We can maybe go into how I discovered that. But it was at that point that I realized, wait a second, I don't know, I don't really understand what categorizes a trauma for the body.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  I've been looking at it more just a mental breakdown. What actually creates that trauma? But for the body, it's different. And as a physician, I started seeing all of these chronic health conditions, symptoms, diagnoses that are related to adverse childhood experiences. But people, including myself, were saying, I don't think my childhood was that bad. I mean, sure, my family had some quirks, but trauma, that would not be a word that I would use. But their body had a different story. So that's when I really went back into the biochemistry of it. I have a master's in biochemistry, so I love this idea of, show me what's happening. Help me understand, how is the cell responding to the stress?

• 3:26Speaker 02

  What is exactly happening? And that's when I saw, actually, there is a very specific biology of stress and a biology of trauma. And they are very different. And so we can categorize what constitutes a stress for our body and what constitutes a trauma based on the internal experience, which ultimately is what people have been saying for the longest time. Even Gabor Maté, one of his famous quotes says, "Trauma is not what happened to you. It's what happened inside of you in response to something." And that's exactly what we see in the physiology.

• 4:00Mayim Bialik?

  You know, one of the notions that Vandercock and that, you know, Maté talk about, Peter Levine talks about, and we had him on the podcast talking about it as well, what does it mean that the body holds trauma?

• 4:14Speaker 02

  I thought that when I adopted my son, that he was out of his trauma. And so he'd be able to move on, he'd be able to have a great life. I had rescued him from the foster care system. And so his life now had a bright future because his trauma was in the past. And what I came to realize was that the body needs specific things in order to repair what's been broken, in order to resolve what still feels incomplete and what still will

• 4:57Speaker 02

  create patterns of responses. That doesn't go away just when you are done with the experience. It doesn't go away if you move out of your childhood home and a family and toxic environment. It doesn't, it doesn't just go away. It doesn't automatically stay in the past. So this was a big question for me, for why does the body hold on? And it's actually the whole second section of my book, because I feel it's so important for people to understand this, so that we then know what to do. But why does the body hold on? Why does the body keep score? Why do, in the words of Peter Levine and somatic experiencing, why does this charge

• 5:41Speaker 02

  and this activation in this somatic implicit memory stay here? And it really comes down to the nervous system's role in keeping us alive. And the nervous system is designed to remember things so that it can protect us and predict the future. And it runs an equation in the background. If you've heard Steve Porras talk about his polyvagal theory, you might know the word neuroception, this idea that our nervous system runs an equation in the background. And that equation is constantly running, even when we're sleeping, even when we're eating, when we're socializing.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  It's always running in the background, and it's the equation of danger versus safety. And when we have experienced a trauma, our body is not usually getting what it needs to reset to safety, which means it stays in danger mode. And that means that it sees danger everywhere. It's almost like it puts on glasses, and these glasses see danger everywhere, so that a person can be, like my son, in a good home now, in a stable home. I love him. He has everything that he needs, but he still saw danger everywhere, because that was his

• 7:04Speaker 02

  nervous system had not received the reset to safety. This is actually one of the first things I learned from Peter Levine in his training, is this idea that the body has a response that it needs to complete. And we haven't always been taught that. Even in medical school, I was not taught this aspect of the body and the nervous system, that when it starts a survival response, it needs a sense of, oh, and it's over, and a sense of completion. And when it doesn't get everything that it needs to reset to safety, it stays in danger mode, seeing danger everywhere.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  And that is how we bring our past with us. So our past is still our present moment. We're still living the experiences of our past.

• 7:56Mayim Bialik?

  So beautifully explained. Now, I want you to go one level deeper. What's happening on a cellular level that is producing this? Because so many of us, especially if we're on social media, we're seeing trauma this and trauma that, and autonomic nervous system this, and regulate like this. But you know, on a deeper level, not just that we can prove that someone is experiencing trauma versus stress, but you're also proposing that there is a way to understand a cellular mechanism for repair, so that we get out of that frozen, terrified, hypervigilant state and can try and actually heal trauma.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  This is one of the things that, for me, excites me the most. And I love to talk about it, because it brings in the hope. Trauma can be otherwise a very bleak topic to talk about. And here I am, I'm like, I love to talk about trauma, because once we understand what's happening at the cellular level, it brings in tools that we can use. It brings in levers that we can change the outcome of what has been up until now, just this is what's going to happen to you. Going back to the adverse childhood experiences studies, these were studies that came out of Dr. Vincent Piletta's work in San Diego at Kaiser, working with people who were obese and they were losing weight.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  And he found that so many of them had these adverse childhood experiences, but it exploded into this huge research project that's now, I mean, papers are still being published all around the world about this idea that what happens when we're younger becomes our adult diseases. And it all comes down to what's happening at the cellular level during a trauma response. It's one of the aspects of how the body holds on to trauma. And when we look at a cell in a microscope, it's like a busy metropolis city. There is so much that's happening, and everything has its proper place, and its systems, and

• 10:03Speaker 02

  proteins are being made over here, and then they're being shipped over here to get tags, and then they're being shipped off to where they're supposed to go based on the tags. It is an incredible metropolis. And in a time of stress, what happens is if you're looking at that microscope in the cell, you'll see that it hunkers down. It hunkers down in a way, it's like, we need to be even better. We need to make even more energy. We need to be even more efficient at our processes. And the idea is that if we are in stress, there's some type of challenge, demand, maybe

• 10:44Speaker 02

  it's an actual danger or a threat, but we are hunkering in in order to overcome. That's what happens at the cellular level for stress. But there comes a breaking point.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  And I don't know how deep you want to go into the physiology.

• 11:01Mayim Bialik?

  Keep going, keep going.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  Because we understand what are the triggers for this crossing of the line. It's the breaking point. And emotionally, we can tell that we have a breaking point, but there is a cellular breaking point, and that's what creates the emotional breaking point or the psychological breaking point. And what is happening is that we have a sympathetic nervous system that drives the stress response. That sympathetic nervous system is a chain of nerves that runs down our spine, and it is releasing adrenaline. Adrenaline is what drives that stress response. People like to say that cortisol is the stress hormone. No, no, no, no, no.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  Adrenaline is the real hero of the stress response. And depending on the size of danger or threat that's in front of us will depend on the amount of adrenaline that our sympathetic nervous system generates. It's a brilliant strategy. If we only have to jump over a creek in order to be okay, I don't need that much adrenaline. But if I have to scale a mountain to outrun a bear, I need a lot of adrenaline because it's the adrenaline that's going to change the cells in my mitochondria to make more ATP or energy. And so it's responding to the size of the danger with the amount of adrenaline that

• 12:30Speaker 02

  then changes my cells and my mitochondria. But what happens? What happens to that adrenaline? Because adrenaline is actually dangerous. It's so powerful. It's dangerous. Adrenaline damages our tissues. Adrenaline surrounds our cells to give it that signal to go, go, go. And if our cells look at the amount of adrenaline and say, we can't go that far, we can't go that much, we can't up level ourselves to the degree that you're asking us to, then we're going to shut down.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  So adrenaline is coordinating all of this, and it is the signal that says that our body responds to and says, what you're asking me to do, I can't do. I can't give you that level. And if I can't give you that level, I've exceeded my capacity and I'm just going to shut down. And now this is the trauma biology, and you can watch it on the microscope, that mitochondria, those cells, they're no longer hunkering down to give us more. They're falling apart. Membranes are falling apart. Proteins are falling apart.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Proteins are being sent to our nucleus that are signaling to send out messages and other proteins that will just decompensate things. And that's, interestingly enough, what a person feels like emotionally.

• 14:06Mayim Bialik?

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• 15:35Mayim Bialik?

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• 17:00Mayim Bialik?

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• 17:14Speaker 03

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• 18:03Mayim Bialik?

  I was just, so I was just going to say that. I think that's sort of the, you know, for, for those of us who love science, you know, what you see, right? The, the, the kind of phenotype, right? It's actually just an expression of what's going on, on a genetic level, on a molecular level, on a biochemical level. And it's interesting, the words that we use to describe this. It's not a coincidence that what the person experiences is exactly that. I feel like I'm breaking down. I feel like I can't do it. But what's more interesting to me is that step before. When you talk about the difference between jumping over a creek or scaling a mountain,

• 18:43Mayim Bialik?

  what do people who are in a deep traumatized or PTSD or complex PTSD state, what do they act like? They act like every creek is a mountain because everything hurts. Everything is too much. Everything is too much. And, and other people will look at them and say, it's just a creek, like just step over it. And they're like, I cannot, my legs won't move, I can't do it, I'm going to start crying. And then they'll generate a whole list of other problems with the creek because their body thinks it's a mountain. So one of the other things that people talk about is, you know, like, being in this kind

• 19:24Mayim Bialik?

  of traumatized state or post-traumatized state, it feels like, you know, you're constantly being pursued by a predator, right? You have to maintain this state of kind of vigilance. I'm curious, like, why it's not enough when we see people having trauma and breaking down, why that hasn't been enough, right? For people to rally around this kind of support and why it's like, we need to know on a cellular level. Yes, it's trauma.

• 19:55Jonathan Cohen?

  Before we go into the solution set, I think there's still a really interesting exploration here about the biology. Talk to us about what it feels like for people who are breaking down on a biological level before they get into a chronic disease state.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  And this is what I would wish everyone would know, because if we can identify it at this stage, we can prevent so much of the chronic health conditions. People wouldn't need to wait, like me, to get autoimmunity, to get chronic fatigue. They'd be able to recognize the signs much earlier and say, oh, my body's needing some serious help. This is now an emergency. Let me take care of it now and not let it progress further. So this idea that there is biology happening underneath the surface, and what would they feel like? What does that feel like?

• 20:48Speaker 02

  These lasting effects of trauma start to now affect not just the cells, but our systems. So we now move from talking about mitochondria, DNA, proteins, to our metabolism, our immune system, our digestive system. We go to system level. And that's what's showing up. In our metabolism, the trauma response shuts down our metabolism. In the stress response, it up-regulates our metabolism.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  So there's a very big difference between the body holding on to trauma response and being in this functional freeze, if you want to use that terminology, because the impact on the systems is going to be in the background. But what I see happening is that people are so uncomfortable with that sensation of exhaustion, depression, hopelessness, that they are finding ways to not feel that, to avoid it, distract themselves. And a lot of times, this is coming down to some version of giving themselves adrenaline. That should not surprise us after our conversation about adrenaline,

• 22:11Speaker 02

  because adrenaline is what can pull someone out of that low trauma state and into the stress where I feel alive. I feel like I have energy, my cells are working for me.

• 22:24Mayim Bialik?

  Well, so examples of this would be addiction or codependency, workaholism, caffeine, right? All of these risky behaviors, right? Like, I'm okay, I just like to do a lot of cocaine and dance all night, right? You're seeking adrenaline.

• 22:43Jonathan Cohen?

  And to clarify, people are seeking this adrenaline because on a biological level, they are having a slowdown, a shutdown, that in the background is impacting them on a system level, meaning that the small points of their cell, they're no longer making energy the way they need to. And so they have to look to an external source to drive their adrenaline in order just for them to feel at a baseline. And if they slow down enough, what they're going to do is they're going to hit a bottom and they're going to say, there's something really wrong. The problem with hitting that bottom is that there aren't really available solutions for them, because you're going to go to your Western doctor, they're going to run a panel of tests and they're going to say, you are absolutely fine, there's nothing to look at here.

• 23:28Jonathan Cohen?

  But really what's going on is a huge warning sign. It's a red flag area.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  Yes, and one way that I describe it is it's like, our body is like a machine, so it's like a car. And if you took your car into the mechanic, because you're like, it's just, it's slow. It's slow to start in the mornings, it's slow. I have to put on so much gas to just get it down the road. I didn't have to use to do that. Tell me what's wrong. And he looks at the engine, he looks at the transmission, he looks at the tires and he's like, everything looks fine, must be in your head.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  And yet, the problem is actually, he didn't check that the emergency brake was on. The emergency brake is on. That's the equivalent of this trauma response. It's communicated through the nervous system and in the form of, it's changing our whole inner state. It's changing our whole operating system. So it's not that one thing is malfunctioned. It's just the message, the whole operating system is in shutdown mode. And so we're having to come in and give it extra gas to just be able to do what we used to do. One of the things that I hear my people say so often,

• 24:48Speaker 02

  and I even ask for it now, because it's such a telltale sign. When you first wake up in the morning, what is your very first thought?

• 25:00Speaker 02

  And often what they tell me is, my first thought, honestly,

• 25:06Speaker 02

  I don't want to get up.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  I don't like my life.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  I don't want it to be morning. I want to just be able to go back to sleep.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  Knowing our lives and our responsibilities, that is not an option. So if that is not an option, well then what is your other option? Your other option is, let me find the energy to keep going one more day. And so we start our day with coffee. We often are drinking coffee on an empty stomach. Do you know why? That actually creates more adrenaline than if we drink coffee with food.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  So all of these, I mean, it's just a way that our brain has learned how to help us live another day that we don't want to be living by understanding, oh, if I do this, I feel this way and that's what I want. I need more energy. So let me lay in bed so that now I'm stressed because I'm going to be late for work. There is some adrenaline. So people who procrastinate, they're often the ones who have this functional freeze in our story and trauma, because they need the adrenaline of having procrastinated to get them to take action and do something. Let's add on the caffeine, let's add on some sugar for our breakfast.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  Here's one that I'm going to be stepping on some toes. Let's add some form of bread or wheat or something that will, I know.

• 26:42Mayim Bialik?

  Oh no, I'm going to have a piece of toast, I'm perpetuating my own trauma.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  And the reason that we do that, again, we don't know why we're eating that. We think it's just like, well, that's just what I wanted to eat this morning. No, it's not. Your body knows that those proteins in gluten bind your opiate receptors so that you can help to numb yourself and not feel that exhaustion underneath, but be able to push yourself more than what is healthy to do. But you are not feeling and hearing the warning signs.

• 27:18Jonathan Cohen?

  It is so powerful. I want to get to the difference in the response, because as you said, trauma is not the objective thing that happened to you, but the response that your body has to it. And I think we need to clarify this, because what you're talking about is often a prolonged experience. When you go back into looking at people's childhoods and they say, everything seemed fine, and they start to identify it. There's a pushback, right? There's a pushback on social media that says, stop overusing this term and we're using it incorrectly. But I want to go back into the biology and to discuss, what are those events? What are the adaptations that people have and talk a little bit more about that? But before we do that, let's talk about coffee.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  Are you sure? I feel like I've already stepped on enough toes. I feel like I've already traumatized.

• 28:07Mayim Bialik?

  He already finished his first glass.

• 28:12Jonathan Cohen?

  There was a time in my life where I didn't drink coffee.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 28:16Jonathan Cohen?

  I was powered by the sun and the Lord. I was smug about it too, I was like, I don't need caffeine.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  You people always are smug about your solar power.

• 28:27Jonathan Cohen?

  But now, I definitely am addicted to coffee.

• 28:34Jonathan Cohen?

  And I want to also touch back on the first thought that people have when they wake up in the morning, because I think that is a wildly, both provocative and telling indicator. But before that, what is your perspective on coffee? Taking out the coffee that most people drink, which is laced with sugar, has a ton of milk, like, so let's break it down from the sweet drinks that are totally toxic to our systems and overloading our immune system and poisoning us with sugar. Sorry, everyone out there. But just coffee black, you know, there's a lot of different information online right now. Some people are like coffee. The adaptogens in coffee and the tannins in coffee can have a lot of health benefits.

• 29:19Jonathan Cohen?

  But talk to us from a nervous system level, the spike in adrenaline, or some people say, causes adrenaline, some people don't. There's like a lot of debate on this. What's your perspective? And both from a morning cup of coffee and then fed or not fed while having it?

• 29:37Speaker 02

  I love this topic, because now we're able to kind of come back and look at the nervous system and not just speaking about trauma, but just how does the nervous system work? How are we designed to operate as human beings? And every day, we are designed to be in rhythm. Our body has rhythms, we know the circadian rhythm. Even the circadian rhythm is also based on and related to our cortisol levels. We have our highest cortisol levels when we wake up. At least, we are supposed to. And cortisol is what helps give us energy. It helps us have motivation. And so when we look at the natural rhythms of the nervous system,

• 30:21Speaker 02

  there will be different times in the day when our stress response is exactly what we want to have. We want to have stress. I'm saying that stress is a good thing, because it gives us the focus, it gives us the energy. And as long as we are aligned with our life's purpose, here comes our stress response and ma, like magic happens. Especially when you can time it with caffeine. So caffeine can be a well timed tool to say, I need to get some great work done right now. I want to step into my creativity. I've got this big project, I want to get this across the finish line.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  And so it can be a strategic tool that when timed correctly with our natural body's rhythms, it makes magic happen.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  But here's how the majority of people are using caffeine. They're using it as a way to push through. They're using it as a way to sustain this high-energy response, rather than how the body was designed, which is in rhythms. I'm supposed to have a high-energy time, and I am supposed to have a letdown, and a rest, and a recovery. And many people are not giving themselves that. And so the body can only go for so long. And then it's like, well, you're not giving me the rest that I need. So guess what? I'm going to force you to take it. And people develop back pain. And guess what they're forced to do?

• 32:04Speaker 02

  Lay down and rest. They develop chronic fatigue. We look at, we see this in, in functional medicine. They can call this adrenal fatigue, where you've pushed your adrenal so far. Is it really the adrenal fatigue? No, it's the nervous system. It's the nervous system that has been misaligned, and it's been trying to be on all on, the sympathetic, all on, all the time. That is not how we were designed to live. We were designed to live aligned with our rhythms. And so that is where caffeine, I'm even gonna say another one that, now, now I'm really gonna be stepping on toes and saying something provocative. Nicotine, microdosing nicotine,

• 32:49Speaker 02

  is a powerful strategic tool when used in the right way. But here's what's happening. People are not using these tools in the right way. They're not using caffeine in the right time and in the right way. And as a result, they're burning their body out. They're pushing their body further into that trauma biology, where they're now in this chronic sense of depletion. And I am addicted to caffeine in order to try to rise above that every day. Same thing with the nicotine. People are not usually using that as a strategic tool. They may be using it if they're still smoking, or if they're vaping. These, these are not strategic tools.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  These have now become dependencies in order to help a nervous system push through and survive another day. But that comes back down to our trauma language. Surviving another day is trauma language. It's not the other language that we get to once we've been able to work with our nervous system and come out of that to where we are alive. We are in our aliveness, and we're using these things very strategically so that we're aligning with our body's rhythms. And we know when is our window of creativity, and we know how to access that at its most. But we're not trying to stay there the whole time, like so many people do.

• 34:18Mayim Bialik?

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• 34:34Jonathan Cohen?

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• 34:45Mayim Bialik?

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• 36:10Mayim Bialik?

  Where does alcohol fit into this? Because I think, because I think for a lot of people, it feels like, oh, it's the end of the day. I just need a break. And some people can do that, and it feels good. But what we also know is that alcohol is a depressant. And many people pretty easily can slip into a more habitual use. And then there are some people, depending on your perspective on alcoholism, there are some people then who become dependent on this depressant. Where does alcohol fit into that? And does it also lead to a conversation about what's the mechanism of depression?

• 36:52Speaker 02

  And this is where I wish that I did not know the science so that I could give you a different answer. The science has now come out, even a study earlier this year, showed that no amount of alcohol is now healthy for the nervous system.

• 37:10Jonathan Cohen?

  It's just really in this last little while that the tide has fully turned in the, in the popular conversation.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  Because the conversation used to be, a glass of wine a day was actually healthy for your heart, was healthy for you. And now the latest science says, no.

• 37:28Mayim Bialik?

  Sorry, wait, I need to, I need to just jump in and say that like, for about 10 or 15 years, every woman was told, like, have a glass of wine with your girlfriends. Here's your new pot holder with a glass of wine. And now what the tide has turned to is, guess what? You're in perimenopause. You've been drinking wine so you don't leave your husband. If we take away the wine, they're gonna leave their husbands.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  And it's not just the wine. I've heard women say that about chocolate. If you want me to stop eating chocolate, I'm gonna have to leave my husband. Chocolate is what helps me survive my husband.

• 38:04Jonathan Cohen?

  Is the science on alcohol being fueled by big divorce lawyers?

• 38:12Speaker 02

  What's the real?

• 38:13Jonathan Cohen?

  Who's really behind this?

• 38:16Speaker 02

  So here's, here's the science, the, the flat-out science.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  There is so much in the immune system in our brain that is connected with our trauma response, that this is the real danger of alcohol for those whose bodies are storing trauma. It's the impact on a certain immune cell called the microglia. Let me tell you about this amazing immune cell in the brain. Microglia are the cells that are the guardians of our neurons. Our neurons are the ones that are actually the nervous system. So they're the ones that process information, make decisions. And they have these guardians. These guardians keep them safe. These guardians are the ones that prune them. So when we're talking about neuroplasticity, we're not just talking about our neurons.

• 39:07Speaker 02

  We're talking about these microglia. So these microglia are one of the most important cells in our brain and our nervous system. And when we have had a trauma experience that overwhelmed us, part of the reason for the brain fog is this unleashing of inflammation by these microglia cells.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  This is called a priming event. The first time that we have any event that creates this inflammation cascade in our brain, it's called priming the microglia. And from here on to our death, these primed microglia now have a lower threshold to activate and unleash that inflammation again.

• 39:58Speaker 02

  And part of going into a trauma response is this activation of these microglial cells, creating that brain-dead feeling, that sensation of, I can't find my words, everything feels dissociated and disconnected, foggy, the brain fog. This is the microglia in our cells.

• 40:20Mayim Bialik?

  Well, first of all, you know, you had me at microglia. I want you to talk a little bit. Can you go, can you, can you elaborate a little bit more? What kind of functions are microglia subserving that would be A, primed by trauma, and B, stimulated then by a toxin like alcohol?

• 40:41Speaker 02

  So these microglia are cells that, I mean, our life depends on their function and their ability to protect our nervous system from danger, whether that be toxins, microbes, viruses. And so they're programmed to detect danger and unleash inflammation when that happens. So this is not a malfunction of our system at all. And when there are certain experiences that will exceed their ability to do their job, one of those experiences it actually happens quite often is birth trauma. So anyone who was born with their cord wrapped

• 41:23Speaker 02

  around their neck, they will have experienced a moment of hypoxia or low oxygen. That low oxygen will prime those microglia and they'll have a lower tolerance for stress that they will need to build up again in their lifetime. But drowning, if they had any kind of drowning, if they had any kind of head concussion or fall, or just a blow where it was a whiplash, they didn't lose consciousness, but any kind of physical trauma to the head as well, will activate or prime these microglia. And yet, when we look across the board at those who experience severe emotional and psychological trauma, that is causing the same effect on

• 42:05Speaker 02

  these microglia. And what happens is that since they now have this memory programmed in them, then when other stressors happen, they cave in easier. So now, someone might notice that they go develop the brain fog if they don't sleep well for a few nights, or they're traveling and all of the change and the radiation from the flights and maybe the bad food and just the combination of everything, and they're back in that place of brain fog. This is their primed microglia having been activated. So it's very important for someone who is working through their trauma and trying to change their trauma

• 42:49Speaker 02

  responses to recognize that their microglia will be responding to their environment, both emotional and external factors that are not emotional at all, but will still be having the possibility of triggering that inflammation and causing a shutdown in trauma response because it's the microglia. Alcohol is what does that as well. So that is why for some people, they may be able to get away with it. But again, the science is showing otherwise. But especially for people who are working on their trauma, they've got to know the impact on their microglia.

• 43:28Mayim Bialik?

  It's interesting because it's kind of like with certain aspects of understanding trauma, the more we know, the better. And the other side of it is that when I think of people who are going through this world, not acknowledging the trauma that they have experienced, they've been conditioned by their family, a culture, a society, and in many cases, a pharmaceutical industry that says, here's what's wrong with you and we'll fix it. When there is trauma that has not been processed, you then have a person who gets things piled onto them, whether it's medication, other coping mechanisms, diagnoses,

• 44:12Mayim Bialik?

  and what often happens is you lose your own sense of what's going on because you've been given this label. You've been told, well, you're depressed. Take this pill. Oh, that pill's not enough. We're going to add this other one. And I've seen the commercials for it, right? And then they're going to say, well, now I can't have sex because I can't achieve an orgasm because of this medic. Okay, well, take this, do this. So it's kind of like you get this, like this layering. I'm picturing like, you know, sedimentary rock, right? You're getting all these different layers of the things. But what's actually under it is this really intricate biochemical cascade that actually can be addressed, can

• 44:55Mayim Bialik?

  be, in some senses, repaired and cared for. But it takes a lot of effort. It takes a lot of time, and it takes the right practitioner and system that can support healing.

• 45:08Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm also struck by this idea that we could remove the word trauma, right? Like, because there is controversy around that word and how the word is used. You could just say, some childhood experiences increase your likelihood that your body is going to create inflammation, which is going to slow you down, make you feel groggy. And so where are you on this inflammation response on your cellular, on a cellular level? You talked about if you've ever had a knock on the head, how many, especially boys in sports, I've fallen off my bike?

• 45:44Mayim Bialik?

  Or girls in sports, anyone in sports, really.

• 45:46Jonathan Cohen?

  When I grew up, when I grew up, it was more likely that kids are going to get kicked in the head playing soccer. We were just rougher then. And I think that's changed now. And I will be gender neutral in it. But I'm just thinking about, you know, late 70s, early 80s, when I was growing up, my brother rough-housed with me, threw me off things, put me in headlocks. We were watching the WWF at the time. I guess it's WWE now, and we, or Claude Van Damme movies. All of a sudden, we had to play out those characters and I was the smallest kid. Like, all my friends who had older brothers were doing that similar thing. How many people have fallen off bikes? If you've ever snow skied, water skied, you're following and hitting

• 46:30Jonathan Cohen?

  something, you never consider that's going to prime you. And then you talk about birth trauma. If you really want to get crazy, what are your thoughts on C-sections? And what creates, does that also prime you?

• 46:47Speaker 02

  I love that you are bringing this into the conversation where it's no longer about the word trauma. It really is not. It's just about the human body, the nervous system that keeps the human body alive. And throughout my years as a physician, I have been so amazed at watching a body fight for life. I started my residency training in surgery. A lot of patients died. A lot of patients came in through the emergency room, just having had that kind of a trauma, car accident or some other accident. They had to be taken to surgery right then in order to try to keep them alive. Some of them made it, some of them did not.

• 47:30Speaker 02

  But watching their body fight to stay alive, it is just one of the most incredible experiences. So when we step back and see that this is not a conversation about trauma, this is a conversation about survival, this is a conversation about life, this is a conversation about all of the things that can happen to a person, birth trauma, getting hit in the head, all of these things that we have found a way to survive. We adapt, we adjust, and

• 48:07Speaker 02

  we keep going. And so we're really talking about the body's ability to adapt, and how does it continue to then go into overwhelm, and that be one of its primary responses? So that's a word for me that I exchange for trauma. It's just overwhelmed. Your body's going into overwhelm.

• 48:30Speaker 02

  And when we look at it through that lens, we can see that every person around the world has had overwhelm. This isn't a select group of people. It's not even healthy or helpful to sit around and compare the experiences that I've had into your experiences and who deserves the greater title of having had more trauma.

• 48:54Mayim Bialik?

  I do.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  That's the point.

• 48:55Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, sorry. Thought that was a question.

• 48:58Speaker 02

  You are in a class all to yourself.

• 49:00Mayim Bialik?

  Thank you.

• 49:00Jonathan Cohen?

  You're so inflamed at a cellular level, bro.

• 49:05Mayim Bialik?

  This is me in shutdown.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  And then being able to look at, you know, all of these things that we haven't accounted for as emotional trauma, but yet it's very much a part of the conversation, head injuries. And then we look at the long-term effects of that. We all know the stories. Maybe some of us know the people who had those experiences, maybe were the professional soccer players, the professional football players, and watched them fall apart in their older years as their brain just, I mean, talk about trauma. And yet, again, it's not, it's just a much larger conversation about this is what it means to be alive and to have things happen to us and see our body fight to stay alive.

• 49:54Jonathan Cohen?

  If I continue to play the devil's advocate, what people will say is, this is just being human. This is just what everyone goes through. If one, if we all have trauma and this is so many people's experience that almost no one has it. And what I would suggest is that we're presenting a different way to live and thrive, where the ailments that we experience as we get older, the fact that we lose our joy to get out of bed in the morning, the fact that we're so sluggish that we need all these stimulants. Actually, there's another way that we could be existing that we have just accepted isn't

• 50:37Jonathan Cohen?

  for everyone over 40, or is only for the elite few, or only the people who are taking, you know, getting hyperbaric every day and, you know, vitamin infusions and NAD drips. But actually, what's going on is that there are people of all walks of life and at all ages that could be living so much more empowered and enjoying life if only they weren't in this shutdown phase.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  And I love that that's how you're kind of summarizing where the decision point is for people, because that's how I see it. I see it as being able to return to choices, which, again, those who hold trauma in their body often feel that they don't have choices, that they've lost their ability to have power and make a difference or a change in their life. So this aspect is really important to me to come back to. You don't have to choose to do trauma work. You don't have to do any of this that will change your microglia or change your mitochondria. You don't have to.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  If what you're doing is working for you, then don't change. But if you want something different, if you want something better, if you want a different tomorrow, well, then there's so much that you can do, because there's so much that we understand about the nervous system. So it's not about how much trauma and then this kind of demoralizes those who've had serious trauma experiences for every single person in the world. It's, is your current life serving you? Or do you want something different?

• 52:23Mayim Bialik?

  You've mentioned brain fog. You've mentioned lethargy. You've mentioned sleep problems. And you, you kind of, you vaguely mentioned chronic pain. But I wonder, when you talk about these things and the other ones that, that you have spoken about, you know, surprising physical symptoms of unresolved trauma, right? Brain fog, lethargy, sleep problems, chronic pain. You also talk about migraines and you talk about irritable bowel syndrome. And I don't have irritable bowel syndrome. I have been given that diagnosis for a lot of fascinating reasons, which we don't need to get into. But for people who have IBS, for people who have migraines, for people who have chronic

• 53:05Mayim Bialik?

  pain, or sleep problems, or lethargy, or brain fog, we've already been told by the medical establishment, what's wrong with us? We have migraines. We have IBS. We have chronic pain. And here are the medications you take. And here, if you're lucky, are some of the lifestyle changes you should make, right? With migraines, like, oh, caffeine, chocolate, check out your hormones, maybe, if you've been a woman in the last five years. Before then, it was like, we don't know. But when people are given these diagnoses, what you're suggesting is that under these things is a long-running cascade of biological processes and a shutdown, a shutdown state

• 53:50Mayim Bialik?

  that has been induced because of increased and prolonged stress, which led at some point to trauma? How do we start to make an inroad into arenas of the medical field that we've been told are handled? Don't worry about it. We got you. Here's the medication. Maybe try and, you know, not drink caffeine in the three hours before you go to sleep. You're suggesting there's a completely different approach to some of literally the most common complaints that I would argue most Americans are experiencing. I don't mean to, you know, hold your feet to the fire, but please help us understand,

• 54:30Mayim Bialik?

  how do we reframe how we think about some of the most common things ailing people?

• 54:36Speaker 02

  The way that I've come to see it is that everything in the body is driven by the nervous system, because the nervous system decides our inner state. We have three different operating modes or inner states. We are in one or the other at all times. And knowing that the nervous system is changing that is what gave me the insight to realize that when I could help my patients learn to shift their inner state in the moment, I was doing them more good than writing the prescription for any medication, supplement, or diet.

• 55:14Mayim Bialik?

  Wow. Can you talk about those three states and talk about what are some of the ways that, that again, that we can frame some of these common ailments? Talk about IBS. That's one that I was like, I don't know. It seems like it's a genetic thing and it runs in families, right? And like, you get it. And, you know, people used to be told, like, it's all in your head. And then we finally started to understand, oh, well, I guess my stomach gets upset when I'm nervous. Maybe IBS is just a more exaggerated version of that. What do we know in particular about something like IBS?

• 55:46Speaker 02

  We actually know a lot about IBS and its relationship to the nervous system. And this information has been in the medical literature for decades now, and they're still not listening. Not that that's going to be a surprise to anyone here, but it's not that we don't have the science. I think that where we've run into is that we, we haven't known what to do about it. I remember talking with Dr. Vincent Paletti, and he's saying, look, just asking them, what happened to you? Improved patient outcomes. But yet, when he told his colleagues this, they looked at him and they were like, but what do I do with that information?

• 56:31Speaker 02

  And he was like, you don't have to do anything. That's the whole point. You just ask. It's the asking that changes the outcomes, not the doing something. But we as practitioners are so programmed to do something. We do something. We prescribe something. We solve problems. And so what do you mean, I, I don't, I don't do something? And a lot of times, honestly, it's, we don't want to, we don't want to hear. We, we don't want to hear because in some way, it's going to resonate with something we've been through and we haven't resolved it ourselves yet. So this idea then, that there is so much nervous system regulation behind every physical

• 57:13Speaker 02

  health symptom, condition, and diagnosis, and especially IBS, I get really excited about because we have some specific data that will blow your mind. Here's what we know. IBS is a result of early childhood experiences where our nervous system would have fluctuated very quickly between the two survival states. The two survival states being stress and the shutdown or trauma. And it's the fluctuation between those two that created the baseline for IBS to develop.

• 57:47Mayim Bialik?

  And not everyone who's fluctuating between those will develop IBS. Some people will develop other fun things. That will depend on what, what genetic imprint you are, are bringing that will depend on epigenetics. It'll depend on also environment, a variety of things that can pull all of these levers. It will also depend on diet. It will depend on, and this is not a political statement. It will depend on vaccine status. It will depend on access to healthcare. It'll depend on what kind of dairy you're eating and what hormones you're eating. Like, everything matters, right?

• 58:23Speaker 02

  And this is why, this is the, exactly the concept of the biology of trauma. All of those things, at the end of the day, create an internal biology that is either one of safety or one of fear.

• 58:37Speaker 02

  And those things, your diet, your environment, toxins, vaccines, they're all cues of safety or danger to your nervous system. And it's the cumulative effect.

• 58:49Mayim Bialik?

  Can you talk a little bit about depression? You know, depression and anxiety, I don't have the stats in front of me, but this is one of, I'd say, the most common complaints, you know, things that people present with. And what's becoming even more and more common is, you know, internal medicine doctors basically just writing prescriptions for antidepressants. Well, look, I mean, I get it. So many people are coming in with symptoms of depression and of anxiety. I mean, this is a, it is an epidemic in this country, right?

• 59:20Jonathan Cohen?

  And even before clinical depression, you have exhaustion, you have hopelessness, you have people who are considered the quote unquote languishing generation, who they just don't have a passion, they're feel lost, they're aimless, they don't know what they want.

• 59:33Mayim Bialik?

  In what ways is depression protective? You've talked about some sort of protective mechanisms potentially of depression and anxiety, but is there a way to get to the root of those besides antidepressants, besides talk therapy? Why are those things not necessarily going to work? And, you know, the evidence on SSRIs versus many other interesting modalities is actually not looking so good for SSRIs. What's going on with this epidemic of depression and anxiety? And where does an understanding of trauma inform the way we possibly start to try and actually get people help?

• 1:00:11Speaker 02

  Ah, I love this conversation because it really, again, kind of highlights the nature of the nervous system and what it does and what that looks like. When we are in a stress response biology, we are anxious. The sympathetic nervous system generates adrenaline. Adrenaline causes anxiety. It's supposed to, it's intended to. So the anxiety isn't bad, it's just, well, what are we doing with it? What we are designed to do with it is to take action, to move. We discharge all that adrenaline through the movement of our muscles. This is why even when we're completing a stress response, or maybe we're watching an animal complete a response,

• 1:00:54Speaker 02

  because they do a much better job at this than we as humans do, they will tremble. Trembling is these fine motor fasciculations, and the fine motor fasciculations are discharging adrenaline. It's so powerful because we got to get that adrenaline out of our system to get out of the anxiety. But as I mentioned before, we can get to the point where there's so much adrenaline, our panic reaches a high point that it just causes the paralysis. And we reach that point where we don't see how we could take action. We don't see how we could do anything to make this stop.

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  We don't see how we could make a difference by doing anything. And thus enters depression. Depression is just that. I don't see how anything that I could do could make a difference. So what's the point? What's the point of trying? What's the point of going out? What's the point? What's the point? And when we're in that trauma biology, because of the effect on our mitochondria, we don't have the energy. And so there's all this going at play. However, it's really important to bring in the neurochemistry into the equation. And the serotonin and the dopamine, the acetylcholine, the GABA,

• 1:02:18Speaker 02

  these are all neurochemicals intended to generate the different sensations and responses that we want to have in order to be in our best self, aligned with our body's rhythms. And inflammation is going to disrupt the levels of these neurochemicals.

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

  Eighty, more than 80% of our serotonin is made in our gut. Well, what if you have IBS? Oh, no. And this is where we get to this idea that trauma only begets more trauma. It's one of the saddest things in life. You didn't just get hit once. You're going to keep getting hit because now the inflammation that the trauma created is going to feed back and change your neurochemicals. They're going to create oxidative stress. They're going to do all of these other changes that further promote more and more trauma responses.

• 1:03:17Mayim Bialik?

  And in many cases, the emotional response will mirror that as we are seeking high-risk behaviors. We are seeking out partners that maybe cause some sort of turmoil, but don't really give us a sense of peace or safety. Or we feel alive in a state of crisis, right? We keep creating drama in relationships. We create breakups, we create fights. We have these kind of dramatic interactions even with friends. Those are ways that the emotional response is echoing the cellular response.

• 1:03:47Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And we look at this idea of, you know, the body is ultimately seeking safety. It's what we're seeking. We're seeking safety. And if we're always in danger, we're seeking relief from that danger. We're seeking safety. And what is it that actually makes a person feel safe? According to neuroscience, it is familiarity. Well, what if what is familiar to you is the drama? Is the chaos? Is the stress? Well, then that's where you will feel safe. You won't like it because you're always anxious and you're always stressed. But if you were to actually go to a yoga retreat where you just meditate

• 1:04:32Speaker 02

  and there's no drama, you would be so uncomfortable. You'd crawl out of your skin, you'd be so bored. Because that's not what's safe. What is safe to a person is what they know. It's the unknown that is unsafe. And so even a person who has felt depressed, they may actually have a part of them that doesn't feel safe to be more alive. Because what if I were actually more alive? What if I actually had more energy? Well, more might be expected from me. I might actually be expected to take that higher position in the office and manage other people, and I don't want that. I may be expected to be seen and be more on the stage or take on these other responsibilities.

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  Ah, it's safer for me to stay depressed. Safer for me to stay small, not be seen. Even though I will express that I don't like it, it's ultimately what feels safer than this other way of living where I'm actually more alive.

• 1:05:40Mayim Bialik?

  So all these visualizations that we're told to do, picture yourself happy, picture yourself romping in a field of daisies. And like people who go to Joe Dispenza conferences are like, I did it, I visualized it, I manifested it, and it happened. But for some people, it's like, oh, hell to the no. I don't want to picture myself in a place that feels so uncomfortable and scary. That's not going to work for everybody.

• 1:06:06Jonathan Cohen?

  Yes, and, correct me if you have a different perspective, but part of that visualization is slowly introducing yourself to these ideas to make them less foreign, less scary, and sort of start to integrate something other than what is in, what is only in your comfort zone.

• 1:06:25Speaker 02

  Yes, and many of these forms of meditation are really just a way of escaping our present reality. And escape is one of the forms of how trauma lives in our body. We continue to find ways to escape, whether that's the alcohol in the evenings, whether that's the meditation. Just get me out of my reality because I don't like my reality.

• 1:06:54Mayim Bialik?

  If we are diving into so many aspects of escapism, and that's masquerading as, I'm healing, I'm healing my trauma, or I'm okay, what actually is the way to process trauma, begin healing from trauma, and adjusting to a new normal, if not by escaping?

• 1:07:22Speaker 02

  Yes, this is the very question that I had to ask myself because I didn't know how to do this. And when I realized that I was carrying a lot of trauma, my first thought was, well, I guess I better go to therapy. And I did. And I went to therapy and got worse. So, and to your point, it's because I tried to do too much too fast. Right? It was like, okay, I know I need to do this, so let's do this. And my body was like, oh, hell no. Are you kidding me? You want me to open up all of that pain? No, I need to protect you because you clearly don't know what you're doing. So it would put me back into fatigue and autoimmune and rashes

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  and migraines and depression and all kinds of stuff in order to protect me from doing more in therapy. So I have then looked at, well, then what, what could I use as a measure for change? And it really is this idea of, how can I help myself or you be more present right here, right now? Because that's what needs to change. It's, it's our ability to be present, not to escape, not to distract, avoid, stuff, numb. All of those are ways to not be present.

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  And so I now started to teach my patients somatic exercises that would help them be present, just come back to being present. When they notice themselves in anxiety, okay, what can you do right now to just come back and be like, okay, right here, right now? I'm creating the sensation of safe enough. I actually called it, maybe you'll enjoy this, microdosing safety. Because too much safety, and they were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, this doesn't feel safe. And I'm like, you're telling me it doesn't feel safe to feel safe? And they said, yes, because feeling safe, relaxing means I'm vulnerable. I might get hurt.

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  So that's why I realized I needed to microdose safety. Allowing them one step at a time to start shifting their inner state to this idea of ventral vagal, parasympathetic, I call it calm, aliveness.

• 1:09:49Speaker 02

  Where we're just doing moments at a time. We're not trying to do a whole day at a time, or even a whole hour at a time. We're just taking one moment at a time throughout the day, one moment at a time. But it's starting to build those muscles, those neural pathways to be present because those pathways haven't been built. The only pathways that have been built are the ones to escape, not to be present. So it's a muscle that has to be built and then reinforced. And as we do that, now they're able to be more and more and more present. And here's what I saw was one of the best ways for me to tell anyone's healing journey, are they making progress?

• 1:10:30Speaker 02

  The real test came when something would happen in their life that was a change. Change is not something that a person who's carrying a lot of trauma is well-equipped to deal with. Change means a triggering of all kinds of memories, all kinds of previous losses that they've never processed. It's a triggering back into something uncertain. I don't know if this change is going to be good, if it's going to be bad. I don't know what to do. Am I okay? It's, it's, it's the whole shebang.

• 1:11:04Mayim Bialik?

  It's that I order the same meal at every restaurant that I go to. Like I have the meal that I order at this restaurant, and I have the meal that I order at that restaurant, and I don't try new things. I'm just trying to justify my existence right now.

• 1:11:20Speaker 02

  And what if one day both of those restaurants closed?

• 1:11:25Mayim Bialik?

  We don't eat ever again. That's what happens.

• 1:11:28Speaker 02

  So this would be my test of, well, let's put your somatic skills to the practice. Let's see how much you have changed. And for me, I look back at one of my patterns that had been one of the strongest since childhood, which was saying goodbye. I hated saying goodbye. I hated closures. I would avoid them and then fall apart later all by myself because I didn't like to be emotional on other people because I'd been made fun of. And so goodbyes and closures were something that I could never be present to. Certainly not emotionally. And then one day, a friend was dying, and I decided I don't want him to die alone.

• 1:12:11Speaker 02

  And I watched myself show up and not need to distract myself with chores, busy myself with work. I could just be with him in the discomfort, knowing that these were his last days. And that was for me when I said, Amy, this is working. You've been able to show such a dramatic change in your ability to be present and not use all those old coping mechanisms that you would have before. That is progress.

• 1:12:49Mayim Bialik?

  So what are some of the things that we can share with our audience that are even just a taste of some of the somatic tools that you use? Because also, I want to be clear, you're not saying, no one needs medication, or therapy, or doctors. Just put your hand on your heart and breathe deep. That's not what you're saying. You, when you treat patients, you're looking at, you're looking at functional components, you're looking at psychiatric components that might need addressing. You're addressing physiological things that are happening. I don't want people to feel like the biology of trauma is like, throw out everything and just breathe and be present. But can you give us an indication of some of the kinds of tools

• 1:13:32Mayim Bialik?

  that you're giving people so that if someone is interested in pursuing a different road, they know what they're even heading towards?

• 1:13:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. And to answer that question, let me start by saying the patterns that I see in people who have trauma are that when it comes to practitioners, they are either completely dependent on them, meaning like they see them as their hero and the one who's going to fix them, and they don't question anything. Or they're the opposite extreme. They question everything and they don't trust anybody.

• 1:14:09Speaker 02

  There's not many people in the middle. And, and so again, this is kind of the, right? Like the, the telltale signs of, of trauma is you're on the extremes. You're either on one extreme or the other. You're clinging on to other people as if they are the expert in your own body, and they know you better than you know yourself. Or you can't and won't trust anybody, won't do anything that they say.

• 1:14:35Speaker 02

  And when we look at how to bring this all together, then, I'm always looking at it at the three levels, and there's always something to do at each level. And the more that I can integrate and have a person be working at the mind level, at the body level, and at the biology level, all at the same time, we see so much faster progress than if we're just trying to do the mind piece, or just trying to do the biology piece. And yes, biology means all kinds of tools. And sometimes that tool means a medication because that's exactly what would be most helpful for their body at that time.

• 1:15:15Speaker 02

  But in working with my patients, and this was when I was now working only with addiction medicine patients, so patients that I was working with to help them detox off of alcohol, heroin, pain pills, anxiety pills, sleep pills. And talk about a nervous system being on edge, coming off of these dependencies. And they had all kinds of physical ailments because their nervous system was so on edge, right? All of their IBS, their anxiety, their eczema. Everything was coming out at this time because it's nervous system driven. So it's very expected, but it was a real time of fear for them. And that was when many people went back on their substances because they're like, if this is what life is like off of them,

• 1:16:00Speaker 02

  numb me back up. Let me go back to how things were. And so I realized that I needed very quickly to be able to help them shift their nervous system in order for not, for them to have less of all of these physical symptoms that were surfacing. And I looked at, well, what would be the fastest way? If I only have a week, and I need to give them and show them a way that, no, you don't have to go back to your substance. This other thing will work. If I only have one week, what could I use? What would make the fastest difference? And it was, it was incredible. As a physician, as a medical physician, I'm realizing

• 1:16:44Speaker 02

  that the fastest way to shift these physical health symptoms driven by a nervous system dysregulation is somatic work. It made me mad. I spent how many thousands of dollars going through medical school to learn what medication to prescribe? And actually, the fastest intervention is somatic exercises? Are you kidding? So let me show you one of the ones that I would teach them. Because these aren't your traditional somatic exercises. So let me teach you, you one of these. If you want to look around you and find a pillow, or a sweater, or a blanket, or anything that you could just grab and put on your lap. It really doesn't matter what it is. It could even be a book.

• 1:17:26Mayim Bialik?

  I have a pillow.

• 1:17:28Speaker 02

  You have a pillow. Okay. So I want you to put it over your belly.

• 1:17:31Mayim Bialik?

  I'm cured. I feel better. That's it. I put the pillow on my belly and I am cured.

• 1:17:35Speaker 02

  Is it on your belly or on your lap?

• 1:17:37Mayim Bialik?

  Well, it was on my lap. Now I'm going to shift it to my belly.

• 1:17:40Speaker 02

  Okay. Yeah.

• 1:17:43Speaker 02

  And as you put it there, I want you to notice, uh, what, what is, uh, how does your body like it best in terms of pressure? Do you like it pulling the pillow into you? Do you, does it like no pressure at all, or in the middle? What feels best?

• 1:18:00Mayim Bialik?

  I'm kind of holding it so I feel it against me.

• 1:18:03Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:18:03Mayim Bialik?

  I have my fingers interlaced in front of the pillow.

• 1:18:06Speaker 02

  Hmm. What do you notice different inside of you?

• 1:18:11Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I can feel like my belly against the pillow.

• 1:18:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. Is that a pleasant sensation or an unpleasant sensation?

• 1:18:18Mayim Bialik?

  I'd say it's neutral.

• 1:18:19Speaker 02

  Neutral?

• 1:18:20Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:23Speaker 02

  And how do you know that where you have your fingers? And the pressure that you have is what your body likes and enjoys right now?

• 1:18:35Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, there's like a sense of sort of feeling settled?

• 1:18:39Speaker 02

  That, right there.

• 1:18:40Mayim Bialik?

  Like, things are settled.

• 1:18:42Speaker 02

  Tell me about that. How do you know that it feels settled?

• 1:18:47Mayim Bialik?

  Well, thanks for asking. I don't feel like any muscle tension.

• 1:18:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:52Mayim Bialik?

  Um, and I guess there's like a vague feeling of coziness.

• 1:18:59Speaker 02

  Amazing. All by putting a pillow over your stomach. And look at how fast that happened.

• 1:19:06Mayim Bialik?

  Do I have to walk around with this pillow all the time?

• 1:19:09Speaker 02

  That, my dear, is now up to you. That is your choice. Now you know what it feels like. This is why I have a weighted, a weighted shawl at my desk at all times, because sometimes in the day when I'm working, something will feel like it triggers me, or my body just gets a little anxious, and I'll just be able to put that on my belly and be able to settle my system back down. And then I can focus again. Then I can come from a place of, everything's okay, I'm okay. And it's a very different response than if I'm like, I don't know if I'm gonna be okay. Is it, like, all of that amped up? So this was what I needed to be

• 1:19:50Speaker 02

  able to help my patients realize that they didn't need to reach for the bottle. They could reach for a pillow, put it over their stomach, and notice what does it feel like to feel that settling? And then I would see, do you still feel that drive for the bottle? Well, now it's reduced to just, well, it would be nice. I miss it. Yeah, I, yeah, I can understand that. But it's no longer that I have to have this to survive this because my inner world is getting amped up, and the only way I know to calm that down is with alcohol.

• 1:20:28Mayim Bialik?

  So can you explain now on a, on a sort of, um, on a sort of, like, psycho-clinical level, what is actually happening? Like, on a more practical level, when you ask me to do that, you're asking me to shift my focus, right?

• 1:20:47Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no. It works whether you focus it on it or not. And the reason is, is this is the anatomy of our body. So the anatomy tells us that our stomach, especially the upper stomach, not just, that's why I didn't want you to have it on your lap. I'm like, no, it needs to be up over your stomach, because our stomach is actually the most vulnerable area that we have. If you think about our heart being precious to our survival, absolutely. But look at it, like, it's encased with bones. You're not gonna access that heart very easily. Same with our lungs. It's got all of these ribs and bones to protect

• 1:21:26Speaker 02

  it. But our stomach, it doesn't have protection. And that's why a lot of people, when they are living with these trauma fears in the background, their stomach muscles are always bracing, trying to protect itself, trying to protect us. It's gonna happen unconsciously. And so I know that if I can bring in something that allows my stomach to say, oh, thank God, something else is protecting me right now, I can let down and relax a little bit.

• 1:21:59Mayim Bialik?

  Is this what many people would then call a gut feeling? And is this why people have intuitive abilities when they feel something in their gut? I don't feel much in my gut at all. We're sort of cut off at the gut, you know, over here. And then when you talk to people like Jonathan, who have intuitive abilities and, you know, have worked in energy realms, it's like, oh, I just feel it. I can sense it. And I'm like, what's that like? Can you talk about a gut feeling?

• 1:22:31Speaker 02

  A gut feeling, the scientific term for that is interoception. Interoception, seption meaning perception, intro meaning the, my insides, like, my internal organs. And this is true whether we're talking about that gut feeling, or whether we're talking about, I can sense when I'm thirsty, when I'm hungry, and not have to wait until it's so late that now I have to eat right now because I missed, I missed those messages. I'm not as connected to those signals from my body that it tries to give me. A gut feeling is the nervous system trying to give us a message. Ooh, this feels a little off, and

• 1:23:15Speaker 02

  we get that little twist. Or maybe the knot in our stomach. These are messages from our nervous system that tells us that they're getting messages of danger, and it wants us to do something about it. But again, so many of us, by default, are not doing something about it. We are avoiding it. We're numbing it. We're saying, no, no, no, I'm too busy. No, no, no, you don't understand. This person loves me. They would never hurt me. Like, we override those messages all the time. And eventually, it stops giving us those messages because we're not listening. And then it really is running on its own, operating on its own, and you end up in a situation like me, where the only way that I listened to

• 1:24:00Speaker 02

  my body was when it could not get out of bed one day, and it had developed such severe fatigue, the autoimmunity. I was on two mood medications for anxiety, depression, burnout, because I just, I wasn't connected. I was not connected with my interoception and the messages of danger coming from my nervous system. And at the same time, I want to balance that with this idea that we talked about earlier, where when we still have unresolved trauma, we see danger where there is no danger. So we can't always trust our gut intuition at the beginning, but trauma work actually makes our intuition better because we're

• 1:24:40Speaker 02

  able to take off those perceptive glasses and see reality.

• 1:24:47Mayim Bialik?

  I'm processing this, um, and thinking, thinking about all the opportunities we have to hear messages that in many cases, we're not tuned into hearing, right? And in, in many other cases, we've piled so many other things on top of that ability to hear that we just, like, can't hear anymore, you know? And it's funny, because our somatic example is, you know, the first time Jonathan, like, saw the sheets that I had, he's like, these are made of burlap. Like, you're sleeping on, like, like, literally like a wool pad,

• 1:25:29Mayim Bialik?

  you know? And I was like, I don't know, it's fine, you know? And like, it never, like, it didn't occur to me. The only time I ever thought about it is when I had kids. I was like, oh, this is really soft. I knew it would feel good to a newborn to wear X, Y, or Z. But I'm, Jonathan was like, you're sleeping on sandpaper. Like, what is happening? And it's funny, because I just, like, I don't think about it. The same way I don't think about the sensation of my clothing on my body right now, right? Like, my brain is like, my thalamus is working overtime. It's like, we will filter out any shit that's not relevant, including the sandpaper that we're sleeping on. Because are we gonna be attacked in the middle of the night by a bear? That's more important.

• 1:26:14Jonathan Cohen?

  No, the bear will be afraid of the sandpaper.

• 1:26:18Speaker 02

  Very logical. The bear will smell the burlap and want nothing to do with it.

• 1:26:23Jonathan Cohen?

  Bear will like, I will be more comfortable just laying in the street.

• 1:26:28Speaker 02

  I'm not sure that that's the kind of human being that I would want to eat.

• 1:26:34Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, you just made Jonathan laugh so hard.

• 1:26:36Jonathan Cohen?

  That's the best line so far.

• 1:26:40Mayim Bialik?

  And that's why she's single. Meaning me. I don't know about everybody else.

• 1:26:46Speaker 02

  No, because all of the men have these head traumas that they're, you know, they're, they're brain fogged.

• 1:26:53Mayim Bialik?

  All those athletic men. I better not date any athletic women.

• 1:26:56Speaker 02

  We can't find good, good men anymore.

• 1:26:58Mayim Bialik?

  Or women.

• 1:27:00Jonathan Cohen?

  There are so many other things I want to talk to you about, but, but a lot of them have been filtered through this conversation. Like, I'm gonna go back and re-listen to this conversation, and I'm gonna reserve the right to circle back with you, because we brought up so many topics that need expanding.

• 1:27:16Mayim Bialik?

  This is your bedtime story. You're gonna listen to this podcast every night before bed.

• 1:27:21Speaker 02

  Not on the burlap sheets, though. Please, not on the burlap sheets.

• 1:27:24Jonathan Cohen?

  You said something in the first part of this podcast that you don't hear many medical doctors talk about, which is, have you lost your passion for life?

• 1:27:35Mayim Bialik?

  Yes. Oh, you weren't asking me.

• 1:27:37Jonathan Cohen?

  I wasn't asking you. And you spoke about it, uh, when you were talking about the indicator that you use when people, what's the first thing that they think when they first wake up in the morning? And have they lost their passion for life?

• 1:27:53Jonathan Cohen?

  It makes a big assumption that people should have a passion for life.

• 1:27:59Jonathan Cohen?

  Right? Like, that's not a medical condition. We have a medical condition for depression and anxiety. Those are in the DSM.

• 1:28:08Jonathan Cohen?

  Talk to us about your belief if everyone should have a passion for life. I mean, I'm biased. I believe that we're all here and we all have some unique gift or ability to have, but...

• 1:28:18Mayim Bialik?

  Do you mean a passion for living? Or do you mean like, what's my passion in life?

• 1:28:23Jonathan Cohen?

  Open-ended question. I'm curious your medical perspective about that term and what you feel people either should be connected to or aren't.

• 1:28:33Speaker 02

  What I have come to understand about the nervous system and then its larger relationship with the world and others, spiritualism, all of that, is that we are intended to have the energy to find what makes us most happy. And that is having a purpose in life. My purpose in life is building these beautiful gardens that I can go and enjoy or invite other people to come and enjoy. It doesn't have to be a specific thing and it can be very different for different people. But there's this idea that we're designed to find and create meaning for our life,

• 1:29:18Speaker 02

  which is having purpose. I know why I get up every day. It energizes me. I know that I bring value to the world.

• 1:29:30Speaker 02

  But so many people don't have the energy to have the clarity to figure out their purpose, let alone live it out.

• 1:29:41Jonathan Cohen?

  And when you say energy, you're talking about the biological energy of their system to give them a mush enough emotional energy to have that.

• 1:29:50Speaker 02

  Exactly. And that is why then not having a purpose in life is a sign that your body's in that trauma biology state. It's in the depressed state. And by depressed, I mean your energy is depressed. Because if you had the energy, this is what your nervous system would do naturally. You wouldn't have to plan it out. You wouldn't have to make a decision about creating a beautiful, meaningful life for yourself. It just would happen. And so this is the silent impact of trauma on people's lives is that it drains their energy to a degree that they may not call it depression yet. They may not call it burnout yet.

• 1:30:34Speaker 02

  But they haven't even had the energy to have the clarity on what their purpose is. Having clarity takes energy. But even if you have that clarity of what your purpose would be, you don't have the energy to live it out. This is where we go back to this idea of our rhythms, our cortisol. We're intended to have time every day where that is what we do. We are working towards our purpose and then we rest. It's the combination of stress and rest that leads to growth. But we're not stressing the right way and we're definitely not resting the right way. And so there's the lack of growth and the lack of purpose.

• 1:31:18Jonathan Cohen?

  Having clarity takes energy.

• 1:31:21Speaker 02

  Yes. We know this from the science on entropy, that without the input of energy, systems fall apart.

• 1:31:33Speaker 02

  To maintain systems, to maintain order, to maintain order. This is from Einstein. This, I mean, these are, these are the science principles. To maintain order, cleanliness, clarity, it takes an investment of energy.

• 1:31:49Jonathan Cohen?

  The term that was introduced to me, I don't know, many, many years ago, was this idea of the brain needing white space, which is basically downtime in order to wander, to process, to solve all those problems that we can't figure out, that aren't immediately evident to us. You know, in, when I was running a startup, if I didn't have time to be like, for my brain basically to work out all those interactions and signals that I had throughout the day in back-to-back meetings, then there would be a backlog and like, it's like the interactions weren't drained out of the system to make room for the new ones. And I see people, you know, I think about my son, who will fill every moment of the day when he's not on the tennis court

• 1:32:33Jonathan Cohen?

  with social media or flipping and consuming and analyzing videos. And I'm like, if your brain doesn't ever slow down, how do you refill the energy so that you can then

• 1:32:47Jonathan Cohen?

  just take on the next day or have? And so I go back, like, I think about this idea of clarity.

• 1:32:55Jonathan Cohen?

  I love the concept that clarity will unfold naturally. Like, we don't have to take a 12-step class to figure out our life's purpose because we can move through the world and be shown signs. And this kind of brings me back to the other thing you talked about, which is the power of presence. And I loved your example of being with a friend who is passing away. But can you talk a little bit about the power of presence to also navigate our life on the small things every day that will lead us to being able to feel more clear about our presence, to find the things that we enjoy and then to be guided without sort of these massive crises that most people find themselves in, where they hit a wall and you're like, I don't know what to do.

• 1:33:40Jonathan Cohen?

  I don't know how to make a living. I don't know who to date. I don't know where to live. And then all of a sudden, it feels way too overwhelming to sort out.

• 1:33:47Speaker 02

  I didn't realize how not present I was in my life, in the daily things. I didn't realize how much I was doing on autopilot. And when I started doing these practices myself, I realized that I was never present. I was either ruminating about something that had happened in the past or worried about something in the future, but I was not actually present for what I was doing. Now, in all fairness, that had allowed me to do quite well in medical school and all of these other life responsibilities where you have to be able to multitask. You have to be able to be disconnected from your body, that you don't feel your body's needs because you gotta keep pushing on, you gotta keep learning more.

• 1:34:32Speaker 02

  But at this point, I realized I want something different. And so I started practicing, no, when I'm choosing my clothes, I'm going to choose my clothes. I'm not going to be on autopilot. When I go to make my morning tea or whatever it is I'm doing, I am now going to be fully present for that thing.

• 1:34:59Speaker 02

  It drove me crazy because I felt like I had gone from, you know, super fast to slowly doing everything. But slowly, I started to see these changes where I actually realized I was fully present. I was staying engaged in my body. I wasn't leaving my body and only living in my head like I was used to. And it allowed me to be a very different person with others because I was able to be present for myself.

• 1:35:32Mayim Bialik?

  Can you explain what your nervous system is experiencing when you are being present in this way? What's actually happening?

• 1:35:41Speaker 02

  What's actually happening in the nervous system is a true sense of safety. And the reason for that is when you think about the nervous system's job to keep you alive, it needs to know, is there danger right here or not? And when I am right here and I've been able to orient to my space and I'm fully present, I know and I feel that I am safe right here, right now.

• 1:36:07Mayim Bialik?

  Because a nervous system that's agitated would be constantly scanning, constantly doing, receiving input, adrenaline is going.

• 1:36:14Jonathan Cohen?

  Because if I do something, then I'm doing something great and I can feel good about myself. And I know that I'm taking care of myself because this thing is getting done and I'm getting a little hit of dopamine or adrenaline.

• 1:36:24Mayim Bialik?

  Or I'm substituting productivity for true safety.

• 1:36:28Speaker 02

  And I'm a perfectionist. And I don't feel that I will be loved if I don't get this thing perfect, so I will obsess over it. There's so much that goes on in our unconscious that we have been completely unaware of. That's what I mean by autopilot. And when I started to become more present, I realized like, why, why, why am I obsessing over this? What is this really about, Amy? Oh, it's really about this. And so it, I mean, it just opened the veil for me to see all of these subconscious reasons that would have been driving my stimulation and my hustle and bustle that I was doing before.

• 1:37:12Jonathan Cohen?

  Can people still be highly productive without moving through the world in a trauma response way?

• 1:37:21Speaker 02

  I want to say that people can be more productive. Because I see the busyness as being on the hamster wheel. You're doing a lot, but you're not getting very far. And what you're doing is sometimes making messes because you're not fully present and then you have to take the time to clean up those messes. What if you could get off the hamster wheel so that when you ran, you were actually running down the track and not just in a circle? And that's what happens when you make this shift. Your productivity is actually translated into real forward movement in your life.

• 1:38:05Speaker 02

  So I am way more productive now than I used to be. I'm less rushed, but I'm more productive.

• 1:38:14Jonathan Cohen?

  And I want to talk a little bit about the, how presence fuels into this. The more we're present, the more clear we are on the steps we need to take, which allow us to get off the hamster wheel.

• 1:38:28Jonathan Cohen?

  So your actions are more targeted towards where you want to go.

• 1:38:32Speaker 02

  Which is the beautiful thing for me, because this whole conversation has really been, how do we be more strategic? How do we be more deliberate and intentional? Not just throwing things and trying to solve the problem. Oh, I feel depressed. Well, take this medication. Go on this diet. Go talk to this person. I don't know, do something. But what if we actually understood what's happening? Where a person is stuck? And what would be the best deliberate leverage to pull? That would make the biggest difference. And so it really is not about doing more. It's about doing smarter.

• 1:39:13Speaker 02

  Because we have more of the science of what is actually driving this? That we can target our interventions to that? And sometimes it's a very small intervention, but small hinges move big doors.

• 1:39:30Jonathan Cohen?

  Something that was spoken about when we spoke to Gabor Maté, and I think really the conversation around it expanded when he released his book, was the idea of emotional patterns of disease.

• 1:39:46Jonathan Cohen?

  And he talked about people with, it's not just that trauma primes the system to have certain diseases, but he talked about the potential for a specific type of emotional pattern for autoimmune diseases, a certain type of pattern for MS, a certain type of pattern for cancer. Have you seen, well, I guess, one, do you believe in that? And two, have you seen emotional patterns in certain disease states?

• 1:40:18Speaker 02

  So I have seen these emotional patterns in certain disease conditions. And one of the most obvious is autoimmunity. It's very interesting to me to see that autoimmunity really targets the high functioning women.

• 1:40:35Speaker 02

  And we're talking about women who run businesses, who are in corporate, they have a lot of responsibility, they are showing up in a big way in the world, and then they have this autoimmunity.

• 1:40:48Mayim Bialik?

  Just kicks you right in the keister.

• 1:40:50Speaker 02

  Yes, I actually start my book in chapter one with the story of Elena. Elena had a car accident and one year later, she was diagnosed with autoimmunity, lupus. For her, it came out of the blue. And we were able to see that it actually didn't come out of the blue. And what were those things that had happened in her life 20 years earlier that had started this biology that then finally surfaced after a car accident? But so much goes back to our early years, and I want to emphasize one's early attachment.

• 1:41:26Speaker 02

  Many people will think, well, no, I don't have any attachment issues. And yet I look at it in terms of attachment pain.

• 1:41:35Speaker 02

  What was a pain that you experienced? Was it a pain of not being heard? A pain of not being seen? A pain of not being held enough? There are certain developmental sequences for what we need. And if we don't get what we need at that time, we will have one of these attachment pains. Autoimmunity is associated with not being held enough.

• 1:42:07Speaker 02

  It actually forms a pattern in the nervous system in somatic experiencing. We call that pattern the global high intensity activation. It can come from birth trauma. It can come from being in the NICU. It can come from these early experiences where you were not held enough because you had to have a life-saving measure. Or maybe you were a colic year, maybe your parents were busy and they had to go back to work and put you in daycare. And it just was a shock to your system because you didn't know these people and you were so young. So these attachment pains form so much of these emotional patterns that then develop, especially in autoimmunity, but I'm also seeing them in IBS and cancers, where it's

• 1:42:49Speaker 02

  this common theme of, I didn't know that I was going to be okay. And I had to adapt in order to get through. There are many people with autoimmunity who had an alcoholic parent or a parent with another substance use or a mental health condition where it made them unstable and the child became the parent.

• 1:43:15Speaker 02

  That is the formation of a biology of trauma that becomes autoimmunity later on. I think of Kelsey, who developed Hashimoto's thyroid in her early twenties. By the time she's going off to college, she already has this. And it's also not a coincidence, I think, that it really targets the thyroid, which is in your neck. And she never had the voice to be able to say something to her mother. She was the invisible one, the invisible, but the responsible one, having to actually save her and her brother from when her mother would get into car accidents because she was driving a little drunk.

• 1:43:51Mayim Bialik?

  Sorry, Graves' disease, 23 years old, right here. One thing that I do want to make sure that we let you speak to, where is resilience in your sort of model of treatment and understanding of trauma? Because over 50% of people, I think, is the current statistic, you know, use daycare, right? Infants are frequently put in daycare now. It's the way that most people can just survive to pay rent. You know, so many families are single income families. Many families have someone on disability or who can't work. And sometimes it's the only way, like, are we setting ourselves up, you know, to sort of frame an entire nation, right, of traumatized individuals?

• 1:44:31Mayim Bialik?

  Where is the room for resiliency, both on a cellular level and on, you know, a larger kind of emotional level?

• 1:44:40Speaker 02

  Resiliency is the gift that we give ourselves when we know how to work with our nervous system and our body. And when we see that we are misaligning with what we are naturally designed to do, we are disrupting our resiliency. One of the biggest lies that we have been told, our children are resilient.

• 1:45:04Speaker 02

  They are not. They develop the Graves' disease at age 23.

• 1:45:09Speaker 02

  How is that resilience? Yes, they survive their childhood. If that's how you're defining resilient, yes, our kids are resilient. But if you're defining resilience as they're not left with a mark? They're not still living with the impact? Well, then, no, kids are not resilient.

• 1:45:33Speaker 02

  And when we look at everything, again, we have to look at everything that's involved, the social systems, the healthcare system, the daycare system, everything, everything goes into that equation for how safe am I? Or how much danger am I in?

• 1:45:53Speaker 02

  And for a small child, it is not their natural design to be taken from their safe parent and put into daycare. But what if that is the best that a parent can do?

• 1:46:09Speaker 02

  Well, let's shame that parent. That is for sure the best solution and the best for that child. Absolutely not. I would rather have a parent put their child in the daycare and pick them up with a happy heart, with an open heart, with the biggest hug, because now we can spend the next several hours of the evening together. Then to pick up their child and feel ashamed, feel embarrassed, because that's what's going to be communicated with the child. And the child, always assuming that the world revolves around them, they're going to think, look at that, my parent doesn't even want to be picking me up from daycare. I'm not loved. I'm not wanted. I'm not seen. And it makes the situation worse.

• 1:46:54Speaker 02

  So we're working in a toxic world. We're working with a toxic environment. There's no way around it. So it's just being able to see then, where can I come in and can I, can I do my best? Can I do my best to be, have the calm inner state myself? And how can I help others around me have that as well, so that I can inspire that in them, so that we can do the best, given the toxic world that we live in?

• 1:47:24Jonathan Cohen?

  And I would just even adjust from toxic world to a world that is going to increase inflammation that we have to deal with. If we just bring it back to, for me, anyway, the biological level, I'm like, if I think that my body is going to have these responses, then how do I mitigate against that to decrease the inflammation? And we know it can be food, it can be exercise, obviously somatic work. Can you touch on why women are so much more likely to have autoimmune disease than men?

• 1:47:54Speaker 02

  Sorry, I'm laughing because if you were a woman, you would know. You would know what it's like.

• 1:48:03Speaker 02

  I think she does not feel understood.

• 1:48:05Mayim Bialik?

  Why do we have to explain it?

• 1:48:09Mayim Bialik?

  Just look at the world.

• 1:48:11Speaker 02

  I will go back and I will, I will first say that, you know, speaking of the inflammation, knowing the world that we live in, that, again, given the importance of the nervous system state, that is the most important work of anyone every single day of their life. Their nervous system state. Not did they exercise and go to the gym? Not did they do their visionary planning? It's the state of their nervous system that is the most important. So given inflammation, when that parent picks up their child from daycare, knowing the stress that it is on their child to be in daycare, I would love for them to have

• 1:48:54Speaker 02

  an evening dinner that consists of a lot of broccoli to reduce that oxidative stress and that inflammation, knowing the impact of trauma at the cellular level and how I want to help their body at the biology level, build their resilience and not build up all of this oxidative stress. But, but if they are going to serve that broccoli with a sour attitude?

• 1:49:20Jonathan Cohen?

  You better eat this.

• 1:49:21Speaker 02

  Exactly. I would rather them serve the most gluten-filled, sugar-filled cake.

• 1:49:30Speaker 02

  But with love.

• 1:49:33Speaker 02

  Then a plate full of broccoli with shame.

• 1:49:38Jonathan Cohen?

  Plate full of broccoli with shame. Good memoir title.

• 1:49:40Mayim Bialik?

  That's the only kind of broccoli I like. But I think also, I think it's important to point out that, you know, and Gabor Maté talks about this in The Myth of Normal. You know, a tremendous amount of emotional and physical labor does fall on women. And part of that, you know, is evolutionary complexity that stretches back long before we had tables, chairs, cars, horses, and things that go. You know, this is sort of the anatomy in many cases. You know, Freud was wrong about many things, but biology is a certain aspect of destiny in that if you are the one who has to get pregnant, if you are the one who keeps the baby alive as a mammal, right?

• 1:50:25Mayim Bialik?

  And that is the basis of your nutritive needs, you know, your caloric needs, your emotional needs. You typically, as a human primate, were surrounded by a group of females who were helping you share this labor. And I'll be honest, you didn't have to deal with men and trying to please them and think about what they need because they hung out with dudes. And they went out hunting. And you and the men with poor vision would, you know, make baskets and talk about feelings. And if you didn't feel well, someone else nursed your kid. And if you needed something emotionally, it was carried by a group of primates.

• 1:51:05Mayim Bialik?

  And the system that we live in has had men enter the birthing world, first of all. So women have been removed from providing support for other women, which historically is what we did. And there's been a medicalization of the female experience. And also, we've been given all these amazing advances. We can go to space, we can be doctors, we can do all these things. And yet, even when women are the primary breadwinners, they still, statistically speaking, bear the childbearing costs, the cooking costs, the cleaning costs emotionally. And on top of that, and I'm a, you know, a lover of equal rights, we're also told you should look like you did when you were 25, when you're 35, 45, 55, and 65.

• 1:51:50Mayim Bialik?

  And we're living in a society that's not really supporting the health of women and families, meaning we don't have a system that says, be home with your kid and we'll pay your salary. There are some countries that do it. But we're told, have a baby and then get back to work. And you need to be the CEO and don't act too much like a man. I mean, I'm sorry, now I'm just doing like the monologue from Barbie. But then we wonder why women get autoimmune conditions? It's because we're so tired. We don't want to know what you want for dinner. And we don't want to have sex unless we want to have sex. And then we have sex. And it's like, I don't want to have sex. And then you don't have an orgasm, you have to fake it. This is exhausting. And then we get diagnosed with an autoimmune condition.

• 1:52:34Mayim Bialik?

  And everybody's like, why did this happen to me? I don't know.

• 1:52:39Mayim Bialik?

  I don't want to put words in your mouth, Dr. Amy.

• 1:52:43Speaker 02

  It sounds like you kind of do, and that's okay. I, you know, kind of listening to you is like listening to all of my patients. No, like this is what they say. And so what I find so helpful is to look at the kinds of questions that we ask. Because the kinds of questions that we ask are not the kinds of questions that men ask. We ask, what's wrong with me that I can't do this all? And men ask, what's the problem with you that you're holding me back? Women ask, oh, am I going to be okay?

• 1:53:26Speaker 02

  Men are like, I don't care if I'm going to be okay. Let's go bowling and have a beer. It's just, it's a completely different process. It's a completely different questions. And the questions that women ask are much more internal around like, what's wrong with me that I can't look like I'm 25? What's wrong with me that I can't hold this all together? What's wrong with me that I can't juggle all of this and still have a smile on my face and put dinner on the table? What's wrong with me? And men don't ask those questions.

• 1:54:01Jonathan Cohen?

  No, we complain that the system is broken and that other people's expectations are wrong and F everyone else.

• 1:54:07Speaker 02

  There you go. And that's why they don't get autoimmunity as much. Because autoimmunity is an internal, an internal attack. Whereas when we can take that anger and we're like, no, what's wrong with the world? What's wrong with the system? What's wrong with you? And that anger goes outward, it doesn't create autoimmunity. It's the anger turned inward. Anger towards myself or even anger towards someone else, but I can't express it because I would compromise the relationship. So let me turn that anger towards myself. And I'll even hate myself for not being able to speak up for myself.

• 1:54:44Mayim Bialik?

  And to use another flashy word that we often try and break down more, codependency will kill you. What you just described, I care more about what you think and what you feel than what I'm experiencing? That's the definition of codependency. And that's the story that will kill you eventually. In one way or another, emotionally, psychically, spiritually, and in some cases, physically.

• 1:55:08Speaker 02

  So some women then think that the solution is to be more like men. And they practice it, right? Like they practice saying like, what's wrong with you? And they go around and they, and they start trying to lash out in anger, not realizing that, no, women are designed to be different. It's not turning that anger inwards, it's not turning that anger outwards. It's a completely different way of living. And that's what we want to find so that we can be in our authentic self. Because when we are living as our authentic self, there is no autoimmunity. And every person that I know who's reversed their autoimmunity got to that point where they were living their authentic life.

• 1:55:49Mayim Bialik?

  Reversing autoimmunity? For those of us who are given an autoimmune diagnosis or two, it's a weird flex. You know, we're told that our body just doesn't work and it's attacking itself. And here are the medications that you take to make it stop attacking itself. And if you stop taking these pills, it's going to go right back to doing what it's doing. What a radical notion that we could reverse autoimmunity, not just by thinking differently, but by training our cells to experience their cellular life differently.

• 1:56:18Jonathan Cohen?

  I want to hear more about people who have reversed autoimmune disease.

• 1:56:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, what do you want to know?

• 1:56:24Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, I just, I almost want you to just like start from that you've seen it. Because, you know, I think people need to hear the connection between aligning with yourself, aligning with your purpose. You know, it's, I believe in that, but I'm not a doctor. I don't have the biology. It's, and when it comes for me, it sounds, oh, super hippie. Or you've no experience in this, but you know, you can feel someone who is energetically off, who's trying to be someone they're not. And you can feel someone who shows up as exactly who they are. Can you talk more from your perspective in a non-hippie fashion?

• 1:57:04Speaker 02

  So if the essence of autoimmunity is I'm attacking myself because I don't even like myself, then that is going to be part of the process for reversing autoimmunity. Just like every other form of biology of trauma, it's going to need all three levels of repair. Mind, body, and biology. We can't cheat any of those. We have to address each of those and then it is possible. I remember sitting in the rheumatologist's office and I'm staring at this piece of paper with my test results. ANA, anti-nuclear antibody, 1 in 640 titers. And I was like, how, how did this happen? What's wrong with me? Why is this happening to me?

• 1:57:49Speaker 02

  Those are questions of autoimmunity, by the way. Why is this happening to me is a question of autoimmunity. And I asked the rheumatologist, what do I need to do to not develop a full-blown diagnosis? His answer, of course, nothing you can do. It's just, it's just going to happen, it's just a matter of time. So that's when I went and I found functional medicine. I started my trauma work. I was determined for that to not be my life. What I've been able to do is get off all thyroid support, all autoimmune support, and my numbers are completely healthy in the normal range now. I don't have any symptoms of autoimmunity. So for me, when I talk about reversing autoimmunity,

• 1:58:31Speaker 02

  that's what I need, where symptom-free and your levels are normal. And this has now happened in many people who've come to my program. Because this is what is possible. When we stop seeing ourselves as the problem, that's the mind level. When we stop seeing ourselves as the problem, then when we work with our body and the stored trauma that it holds and be able to complete those responses that are still being held by our body. And then we do the biology level where we're addressing the oxidative stress, the toxins, the leaky gut, all of these aspects that are involved with autoimmunity. It is very reversible, which gives me so much hope

• 1:59:15Speaker 02

  that even after a diagnosis, a person can reverse the impact of trauma on their body. It is not a life sentence.

• 1:59:23Mayim Bialik?

  Can you speak to what happens in perimenopause and in menopause to someone who has trauma, especially if they don't know it? What does that look like?

• 1:59:35Speaker 02

  Menopause is intended to be this amazingly beautiful period of life for a woman, where she can shed that phase of her life where her body's in reproduction mode, and really now just focus on making and living out her best purpose. That's what it's intended to be. What actually happens, though, is that because our body's been holding trauma, our hormones are already imbalanced. There's high cortisol often, not always, but often. The adrenaline is still driving that cortisol, and that cortisol is stealing the other hormones, that there's less estrogen, there's less progesterone, they're imbalanced.

• 2:00:20Speaker 02

  And so then we come into this phase of life where it's supposed to be, it's supposed to be something that is aligned with our body's rhythms, and it's smooth, and it's beautiful. It's a beautiful opening up into the best years of our life. But because we're coming into it already off balance,

• 2:00:43Speaker 02

  then these changes are not smooth. It's like being on a bumpy roller coaster where it's like constantly jolting you. And it is not the opening up into our purpose that it was intended to be. But the beautiful thing, though, is that because of these hormonal shifts that happen in perimenopause, it is actually the best time for a woman to do trauma work.

• 2:01:15Speaker 02

  Because it will surface traumas that have been stuffed pretty deep. It will open up things that we didn't realize that our body was storing. Now, one option is to stuff it right back down, or another option is to get curious and say, "If my body's bringing it up, it must be ready for me to look at it.

• 2:01:44Speaker 02

  Let me work with my body. Let me be friends with my body. Let me not ignore these messages from my body, but actually establish a friendship, a relationship."

• 2:01:55Mayim Bialik?

  The reason this feels so incredibly powerful to hear is I can't tell you the number of friends of mine who have either endometriosis or PCOS.

• 2:02:06Mayim Bialik?

  And I don't need to tell you about the adverse childhood events that those women experience. But when women show up to a doctor as a teenager with this kind of crippling pain and this kind of abnormal bleeding, what do they do? They put you on the pill. They put you on the pill, which leads to its own complexity in terms of emotional reactions and the things that happen to your body and your chemistry, which we were told doesn't make a difference, right? And then they throw whatever the current, you know, menopause medication is that's approved for teenagers. They throw that at you, and then they put you on an antidepressant. Like, this is the train that you go down, and no one ever... The only... The first time I ever heard about lady problems

• 2:02:50Mayim Bialik?

  being associated with anything adverse was when we first started talking about rape education when I was in college. And it was a dirty word to even talk about rape. It was like, "Take back the night," right? But that's the first time that I heard that women who have experienced rape may later develop other problems. And I was like, "Oh, wait," and I'm studying neuroscience, right? And we weren't even talking about this. But now that I look at the research, the research is there. So you're looking at PCOS, you're looking at endometriosis. And then, to me, menopause is, it's just a later extension, right, of a hormonal message that your body's trying to give you that's saying, "Guess what? Whatever you thought you could medicate,

• 2:03:33Mayim Bialik?

  distract from, fill the God-shaped hole of your pain with, it's gonna visit you again, and you're gonna get that opportunity again." So that's where we can look at that phase of life as a potential opening to say, "It's not just about what medication they're gonna put you on, or you need to leave him or her or whoever, but is this the time in your life when you're actually gonna show up?" And guess what? The answer is do less, get off your phone, learn to meditate, do some somatic work, and actually find a doctor who believes your symptoms, believes your experience, and also read the biology of trauma. And your podcast is fantastic. Every episode is like a different little sliver of this prism of the experience of trauma.

• 2:04:17Mayim Bialik?

  Thank you so much for being here, Dr. Amy. Where can people find out more about you and the incredible work you do?

• 2:04:24Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, thank you for the work that you do in the world.

• 2:04:26Mayim Bialik?

  Thank you.

• 2:04:27Speaker 02

  It is incredible to see how you have showed up and the impact that you're having on people's lives for the better. Thank you.

• 2:04:34Speaker 02

  My website is biologyoftrauma.com, so that is where they can find the book, the podcast, the programs, and more information about me.

• 2:04:41Mayim Bialik?

  Amazing. Thank you so much. We really cannot thank you enough.

• 2:04:45Speaker 02

  It's been a pleasure.

• 2:04:51Mayim Bialik?

  I agreed with like 99% of everything she's... I literally, I agreed with so many things. I feel like she... It's not that, I mean, I don't know the things she knows. I loved this conversation so much. The only thing I took issue with, and I didn't want to bother her about it, but I want to bother you about it. I... My favorite drug is distraction through work.

• 2:05:11Jonathan Cohen?

  You're so good at it.

• 2:05:12Mayim Bialik?

  I'm very... So productive when I'm stressed.

• 2:05:14Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:14Mayim Bialik?

  So productive. And she, she said, and what I believe when she said that you can be even more productive than you ever imagined, you know, if you're living your best life, being present, all these things. She's got a different idea for my life than I do. Meaning, I'm still limited by thinking I need to achieve all the things that I want to achieve and do all the things and cross them off the list. But I remember when I was, when I first started this YouTube channel, which you may be watching right now. I started it with my friend Emmanuel, Emmanuel Shalav. He works at Olive Beta right now. And Emu said, "Whenever I had a huge emotional relationship upset, he knew that we would get the best content because I was super focused. I just wanted to like work, write." He would be like, "Write these six scripts." I would have them done in like a day.

• 2:05:59Mayim Bialik?

  Because he said he knew that that... And what I realize now, it's not so much that the stress was powering me, it was what the work was doing for me, to distract me from the pain and stress that was leading to what I call productivity.

• 2:06:17Jonathan Cohen?

  I think it takes a really, really, really big change of perspective to go from being fueled by distraction to being fueled by inspiration or some larger connection to a consciousness system. And you could say, "Well, if I'm happy, I never want to sit down for the number of hours that I otherwise would when I'm distracted and write that many scripts." So you're like, "I'll never have the same output, but..."

• 2:06:45Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, every, every artist says that, right? Like, they do the best writing when they're in pain.

• 2:06:50Jonathan Cohen?

  The change of perception, change of perspective, could be that the one or two scripts that you write from inspiration may have a different frequency to them, a different resonance. They may go from getting a million views to getting eight million views. You, you don't know that, though.

• 2:07:11Mayim Bialik?

  Have you ever read Elizabeth Barrett Browning? Like, it's so beautiful because there's pain in it. And like, if you've read Edgar Allan Poe, like, he died alcoholic in the street with like a knock on his head. Like, he wrote "Beauty in Darkness." That's just, that's true. I'm not saying you have to be depressed or alcoholic to create good work, but there's a different quality of melancholy that you resonate at.

• 2:07:32Jonathan Cohen?

  100%. But there's also, there's also the inspiration.

• 2:07:35Mayim Bialik?

  But that's why people are like afraid to like... I mean, it used to be like, "I'm afraid to go on medication. I still want to be myself." Like, you know, I think it's a different conversation now. But I think a lot of that is like, "I don't know, who am I?" You know, "Am I this artistic, creative person? And like, I'm super productive, and I stay up late, and I smoke my cigarettes, and I drink my coffee. Like, that's my vibe, you know?"

• 2:07:54Jonathan Cohen?

  Rumi reached millions and millions of people. He was an inspirational poet.

• 2:07:58Mayim Bialik?

  If we're all Sufis, we could maybe like achieve... I mean, Rumi was an enlightened mystical being.

• 2:08:05Jonathan Cohen?

  And if we weren't also traumatized and, and inflamed on a cellular level...

• 2:08:09Mayim Bialik?

  With my bubby head balls, she'd be my Zayde.

• 2:08:13Mayim Bialik?

  But it's like, yes, you're right. If we were all living in this like state of spiritual grace, yeah.

• 2:08:21Jonathan Cohen?

  I don't even think it's spiritual grace. I think it's a level of...

• 2:08:23Mayim Bialik?

  You mentioned Rumi. We can't just be like, "Oh, Rumi."

• 2:08:26Jonathan Cohen?

  That's...

• 2:08:27Mayim Bialik?

  This is R U M I that we're talking about.

• 2:08:29Jonathan Cohen?

  That, he's just the one example that comes to mind. Most artists are fueled by depression and anxiety and, and, you know, working out their demons. I think that goes to the state of the world that we're in, but I don't think that is necessarily the only paradigm. And I think we are moving into a place, knowing more about our biology, knowing more about what makes us safe. And, you know, like I joke that I was fueled by sunlight and the Lord. Without coffee, I do think there is another fuel source for creativity. And, you know, I, I struggle too. I, I don't know that you can be a super productive and very high achieving person without putting the hours in, right? Like, when you're...

• 2:09:14Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, I'm just thinking about what you're like before coffee. No one's getting anything done.

• 2:09:20Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, I, I'm functioning differently, but I don't use coffee first thing in the morning. I don't wake up and be like, "I feel like junk. I need to caffeinate." I actually use it several hours after, and I usually use it when I'm sitting down to work and getting myself going. And I know that when I wake up first thing in the morning, I don't have to be moving a million miles an hour. I don't have to be on a podcast. I don't have to be writing and having a stream of ideas. So I liked what she said about using it strategically.

• 2:09:48Mayim Bialik?

  Well, and I think also, well, sometimes there, there... If you are in a state of addiction to caffeine, or really any substance, what will happen is that you experience symptoms that can only be satisfied by consuming that substance. That's the definition of addiction.

• 2:10:07Jonathan Cohen?

  You love a definition.

• 2:10:09Mayim Bialik?

  And withdrawal is the notion that you will experience these symptoms until you have that substance. So perhaps if you were in a state of not being, let's say, or feeling like you're addicted to it, then I could see using it topically, as it were, which, you know, you could say the same of alcohol. You could say the same of weed. You know, it's different if you are a person who has an addiction and like, "I can only be okay when I insert this substance into my body," versus, "I am inserting this substance." Why am I saying inserting? That's a weird thing to say. "I'm only, I'm only taking this substance."

• 2:10:45Jonathan Cohen?

  How are you taking the substance?

• 2:10:50Mayim Bialik?

  Coffee suppository. People do it, heard of it on Yum Kippur.

• 2:10:57Jonathan Cohen?

  Took a dark turn.

• 2:10:58Mayim Bialik?

  I'm only taking in this substance because I enjoy the effects in a way that is non, you know, dependent. And, you know, we could also entitle this as an episode, "We Take Away All Your Fun."

• 2:11:11Jonathan Cohen?

  Or, we're gonna microdose you some safety.

• 2:11:14Mayim Bialik?

  I like that.

• 2:11:15Jonathan Cohen?

  Increase your intuition and presence, and you're gonna be able to navigate your life more clearly, more easily, get to your destination faster, because you're not gonna go on these detours.

• 2:11:27Mayim Bialik?

  Emotionally.

• 2:11:27Jonathan Cohen?

  Emotionally. Think about how exhausted you were when you were on your emotional detours, using work as your coping mechanism.

• 2:11:34Mayim Bialik?

  This is my emotional detour. That's what we almost called the podcast. Welcome to My Ambi Alex's emotional detour.

• 2:11:41Jonathan Cohen?

  One thing Dr. Amy spoke about was the emotional response echoing our cellular response. We think, "Oh, I gotta fix my emotions," but what if our emotions are actually coming from our cellular biology? And I actually want to take one additional step in that circle.

• 2:12:03Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, that in and of itself deserves a little bit of love. That's like very Bruce Lipton-y of like, guess what? What's happening in your cell, it matters, it has an impact, you can shift it, and it's reflecting, like, and I don't know if it's necessarily, I don't want it to be like, "Oh, the cell is an analog of your behavior," or "Your behavior's an analog, you know, of the cell," but...

• 2:12:26Jonathan Cohen?

  But it's creating the condition by which the cell is functioning in.

• 2:12:29Mayim Bialik?

  The words that you, look, the English language only has so many words, and the words that you use to describe what a cell looks like when it's healthy are the same words that you would use to describe a person when they're healthy. And I'm speaking objectively. And the words that you would use to describe a cell that's under stress are the same words that you would use to describe a person that's under stress, and the same words you use to describe a cell that is experiencing trauma.

• 2:12:53Jonathan Cohen?

  And what we mean by that is prolonged stress that makes it not function the way it otherwise would.

• 2:12:59Mayim Bialik?

  Correct. Prolonged stress that leads the cell to start compensating for what is happening because of the prolonged stress. Those are the same words that you use to describe the behaviors that that person will exhibit. You are your cell. You are a macrocosm of the cell, and, you know, sorry, I'll stop there.

• 2:13:17Jonathan Cohen?

  So, I agree with everything, and I think this is

• 2:13:19Mayim Bialik?

  And I'm not sorry.

• 2:13:20Jonathan Cohen?

  such an important point. But, I mean, if you were not having an autoimmune condition, you would say, "Not only am I not sorry, but why isn't there more space for me to continue that conversation?" Emotional response echoing our cellular response. Now add the narratives that we make up based on our emotional responses. Meaning, when she said,

• 2:13:47Jonathan Cohen?

  "Nothing's gonna work out," and some of this more critical macro black and white thinking, or catastrophic thinking, it could be evidence of low-functioning or stressed cellular biology.

• 2:14:03Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, I mean, I think also the gut-brain connection, the serotonin receptors in your gut, and how much functional medicine is looking at, gosh, what does the profile of a person with issues with serotonin have to do with it? But there's also studies saying that serotonin has, quote, "Nothing to do with depression." Like, there's an interesting new kind of way to look at serotonin, which I don't want to, because it's so hard, because I'm just getting used to understanding this way. But, yes, the fact is, there's a profile. There's a chemical profile that we can look at that are contributing to what many of us assume are organizing principles. It's just the way that we're born. It's just the way that, like, we're made to work.

• 2:14:41Jonathan Cohen?

  "Nothing's gonna work out for me. No one likes me. I'm gonna do everything wrong."

• 2:14:45Mayim Bialik?

  It's an extension of depression. It's...

• 2:14:46Jonathan Cohen?

  But it's more than emotion. We could say, "Oh, we talk about our emotional profile. I feel depressed. I feel like there's lethargy. I feel anxious. I am languishing. I'm not sure what my purpose is." But if we actually look at the quality of our thinking, and the types of thoughts we're having could also be indicative of our biology.

• 2:15:06Mayim Bialik?

  Sure. Those rumination thoughts, you know, all that obsessing.

• 2:15:09Jonathan Cohen?

  And that when our biology is in a better, more active, more energetic, energy-producing state, then we may be geared towards more positive thinking, more optimism, more solution-focused.

• 2:15:22Mayim Bialik?

  Well, we didn't even get to sort of like, what are the diagnoses you get when you actually might just have trauma, you know, on a cellular level, right? Besides the diagnoses of IBS, or chronic pain, or all these things, you know, many people are, we've talked about this before, many people are labeled bipolar. "Oh, you're bipolar too," right? Because you're not having like that extreme mania of bipolar one, but your depression's really bad. "Oh, maybe you're just clinically depressed. You have generalized anxiety disorder. You're having panic attacks." I was talking about this with Dan Harris. When I went on Dan Harris's podcast years ago, as a journalist, he said, "Why do you have all these diagnoses? Why you got all these things? Like, what? What's wrong?"

• 2:16:01Jonathan Cohen?

  Maybe your cells aren't making enough energy.

• 2:16:03Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I didn't know to tell Dan that, but what I now see in this framework of what Dr. Amy is giving is like, "You're allowed to say, 'I had some adverse experiences in my childhood.'"

• 2:16:15Jonathan Cohen?

  And I no longer feel safe.

• 2:16:16Mayim Bialik?

  I no longer feel safe. I don't feel safe with you asking me that. Now I feel unsafe that we even had this conversation. But the notion is, many of us were like shifted around, and then you finally show up with an autoimmune disorder. "Oh, we got something we can treat them with. Oh, okay. Now we've got a name. I'm gonna write it in the insurance form. They're not gonna cover it, because no one's ever heard of it," you know? And then I'm paying out of pocket, and I can't afford it, and I'm more depressed, and the cheapest thing to do is for Big Pharma to be like, "Take an SSRI."

• 2:16:46Jonathan Cohen?

  Or a steroid.

• 2:16:47Mayim Bialik?

  Or a steroid.

• 2:16:48Jonathan Cohen?

  The treatment system is so far away from the problem. Like, by the time you get into the system and there's something that is clinically viable to treat, that has an insurance code that can be reimbursed for, it's so far away from the problem as to be unrecognizable from the actual thing that's going on. My, there's literally so many more questions that we are gonna talk about on Substack. If you have liked this conversation, we're gonna talk about the idea that someone might not feel safe to be more alive despite that they want to change, meaning that if you feel lethargic, if you are a procrastinator, that was a huge one, that procrastination can actually be a hit

• 2:17:33Jonathan Cohen?

  of adrenaline in order to get you going in the morning. The fact that people with autoimmune diseases tend to turn their criticism and attacks on themselves, I mean, I can go through a list here, but we're gonna talk all about this on Substack. My and I are gonna break this down. If you haven't already gone over to Substack, it is a website. And check it out. Google it. You can join us there. There's an amazing Breaker community. We want to hear your reactions to this episode on Substack.

• 2:18:03Mayim Bialik?

  Also, if you like this episode and want to have more personal interaction with us and other people about it, that's what Substack is for. Really trying to encourage people to learn about the Substack world, so that you can have a different kind of experience than you have just from listening. It's a deeper experience, and it's a more personal one. So we hope to see you over on Substack. Go to substack.com and just put in My Ambi Alex Breakdown, and there we are. And, yeah, make sure you're subscribed to this channel. Hit the bell icon if you're watching us on YouTube, so you can get notified. And from our breakdown, the one we hope you never have, we'll see you next time.